It was completely dark outside, except for a moon that was just past full. Michael was asleep, so the house was quiet. Joe had no idea where his wife was, nor his father. He was alone.
Faye had been gone for hours, but Joe couldn’t go after her now. Well, he could, but it would require waking up Michael and walking through the dark woods with him in his arms.
Alone, armed with only moonlight and instinct, he could have found Faye’s hiding place. But carrying a squalling two-year-old? He would only find her if she wanted to be found. If he’d known that his father would be so late coming home, he would have tried to find Faye while the sun was up and their toddler was awake and happy.
Maybe it was just as well that he hadn’t gone after Faye. Before he went looking for her, he needed to decide what he was going to say.
***
The gentle knock at Emma’s front door surprised her. She had been tired from being out on the water, so she’d bathed and dressed for bed before the sun was gone. It embarrassed her to think that someone might see her in her nightgown so early. She might be an old woman, but she didn’t like to act like one.
Emma didn’t recognize the knock and she had no notion of who might be at her door. Her heart fluttered a moment, reminding her that Douglass had died at the hands of intruders in their home, but she told it to settle down. Her husband’s murderers had not knocked politely and waited for him to answer the door.
A stout replacement stood in place of the door destroyed by those killers. It had a deadbolt that shot deeply into the doorframe to hold it shut, because Sheriff Mike had made sure of it. There were little wires on her front door jamb, attached to a security system that was monitored by people who wouldn’t hesitate to come when called. A heavy-linked chain hung above her head, and there was a peephole right at her eye level that she never remembered to check before she opened the door. Tonight, she checked it.
She couldn’t see her visitor’s full face, but she could see enough to know that it was Oscar Croft. What to do?
On the one hand, the man had asked her out, and she had already decided that she would say yes if there was a second invitation. There was no more danger in opening the door now than there would be when she got in a car with him to go to dinner.
On the other hand, though her bathrobe covered her from chin to toes, she wasn’t comfortable letting a man see her in clothes that in any way suggested a bedroom. Also, she had the sick feeling that always came when something wasn’t right. She’d felt it, hard, on the night when she came home to a busted-down door, before she went downstairs and found her dying husband.
Tonight, she just felt a twisting inside her chest that asked why this man couldn’t wait until she returned his call before he showed up on her doorstep. There was eager and there was too eager.
She waited, just on the other side of the door, as he tapped gently again. After a third knock, he went away, but Emma was no longer sure that she would accept any invitation that Oscar made in the future.
***
It was late. Faye doubted Joe was asleep yet, but she had to go home sometime. Maybe she would get lucky and find her husband snoring. She pulled a small flashlight out of her satchel and started heading to the house. After twenty minutes of picking her way, keeping each step within the circle of light cast by the flashlight, she could sense open space ahead. In the center of that open space was her home.
Just before she came into the open, she smelled smoke and saw a faint glow through the underbrush. Sly had built yet another fire at yet another random place in the woods. Before she could back up and find another route home, she heard a deep, quiet “Hey,” in a voice that wasn’t quite Joe’s. She stopped in her tracks. Out of reflex, she thumbed the flashlight off to make herself harder to see, but the effort was futile. If she stepped off the path to flee, he would be able to follow the sound of her crashing through the underbrush. If she stayed on the path, he would be able to follow it straight to her. But why did she care whether or not her father-in-law could find her?
“I been looking for you since I got off the boat,” Sly said, “but I stopped when I saw your little light way across the island. I knew if I stayed right here, sooner or later, you’d have to come to me on your way home. I’m sitting out here by this fire, ’cause I can’t go in that house and look at my son when he’s this tore up.”
“Did he tell you where he was going when he went ashore today?”
Sly used a long stick to poke the fire. Sparks flew. “Didn’t ask him. I think he’d answer his wife if she asked him.”
Faye didn’t say anything.
Sly used the silence to pull out a cigarette. He reached his hand toward the fire and lit the cigarette on a hot coal. “I don’t know why you won’t just ask him, but I know you two ain’t happy. I never seen you happy together, but I never seen you before that baby died, either. Something tells me you was happy before, so I’m guessing you can be happy again, but it won’t be the same. Might be better, might be worse, but it won’t be the same. When you love somebody that dies, you ain’t never the same after that. You and Joe both lost somebody, so you’re both different now. That’s just how it is.”
If this was supposed to be comforting, Faye’s tears suggested that Sly had failed.
He tapped his ash onto the dirt, grinding it into the ground to make sure every last spark was dead. Then he kicked sand onto his campfire, scattered its coals, and doused them with a bucket of water sitting by his foot. “Go on in there. Even in the dark, I can tell you need some sleep. My son wouldn’t ever make you talk until you wanted to talk. I’m gonna stay out here and make sure this fire’s out. While I’m at it, I’m gonna smoke half a pack of these, so you two can have a little time alone. I think you need some.”
***
The whooping alarm of Emma’s security system woke her. In her drowsy confusion, she couldn’t remember the code that would shut it up.
She shook her head to clear it. A few seconds passed as she remembered that shutting up the alarm was not her problem. Her problem was figuring out how to spend the time until the security company sent someone to help her.
Should she go out the window and risk showing herself to the intruder who had forced open a window or door? Or should she go trap herself in the closet or under the bed and begin counting the seconds until help came?
She crept to her closed bedroom door, not sure whether she wanted to hear the intruder or not. Hearing footsteps would tell her how far away she was from danger, but the answer was already obvious. It was “pretty damn close.”
Not hearing footsteps might mean that the intruder was far away, which was good, but it would leave her with no information whatsoever. Or it might mean that this was a false alarm. Emma decided to hope for no sound other than the screaming alarm. She rested an ear against the door.
This was how Douglass had felt during those moments after his killers broke into their home and before the attack began. Lost in the dark, weightless, helpless, she was near a breakdown, but she had to fight back. If she sobbed, she would give away her location and, what is more, she would be giving power to someone who might want to hurt her. She breathed in calm, then she breathed it out.
She kept a rope ladder designed for emergency escape under her bed in case of fire. It tempted her, but she didn’t know who might be waiting at the bottom of it and she wasn’t even sure how long it would take her to unreel it and hook it to her windowsill. Using it seemed like a foolhardy plan. So did rushing blindly out the bedroom door without knowing what was on the other side.
After a moment’s thought, she decided that her reading alcove was the place to be. She would be near the door and shielded from view. If someone came through the door and moved to the right toward the bed, thinking she might be hiding underneath it, she had a shot at darting behind the intruder and getting out of the room. If the intruder came through the door and moved to the left, she would be pinned in place, hoping they didn’t see her lurking behind the curtains. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it only had to work until help came.
Again, she breathed in calm, and she breathed it out.