Michael tried the back door and found it locked. He studied the glass, which was divided into twelve smaller panes. He tugged the knob harder, but it still didn’t budge.
No surprise.
Michael scanned the area. His heart sank because he saw nothing he could use. Then his eye settled just off the patio where a fist-size rock sat in the grass. Michael bent over and picked it up, felt the sun’s warmth against his palm. He brought it back over to the door and studied the glass pane nearest the knob.
Michael looked to the left and then to the right. He couldn’t see the neighbors’ houses, couldn’t see any people in their yards. With the heat of the day rising and the air conditioners going, Michael doubted anyone would hear the glass breaking. But he also knew if he broke the glass, he was crossing a line.
What if Lynn wasn’t inside? What if all of it was for nothing?
Michael refused to turn back. He’d risk an unpleasant interaction with the police or a pissed-off homeowner. He brought the rock back and then forward, smacking it against the glass.
Nothing.
He swung back again, farther, and hit the glass again.
It gave way, his hand going through as well. Michael felt the small shards cutting into the skin of his wrist and hand, tiny stings. He slowly withdrew his hand from the jagged opening, taking care not to cut his hand any more. He shifted the rock from his palm to his fingertips and used it to clear the rest of the glass out of the pane. When he was finished, he tossed the rock back into the grass.
He checked his hand. A few cuts bled, and Michael gently picked some small shards out of his skin. But the damage didn’t look too great, nothing that would require stitches, nothing that would stop him from going ahead.
He stepped forward and reached through the broken-out pane. He hoped the house wasn’t so secure that they had a double-sided dead bolt, one that required a key to open the door from the inside as well as the outside. It hadn’t been like that when they were kids, but that didn’t mean a later owner hadn’t changed it.
Michael fumbled around and felt relief when his fingers took hold of a small knob. He easily turned it and heard the lock click open. He straightened up again and tried the knob. The door swung wide.
Michael felt a cool rush from the air-conditioning. He stepped inside, his shoes sinking into the soft carpet. He paused for a moment after closing the door behind him, taking care not to tread on the broken glass. He listened and heard nothing.
He’d stepped into the family room, which was also empty of furniture or pictures or art. Something else struck Michael as he stood there—the smell. He couldn’t say what it was—some combination of years of human habitation—and he must have been experiencing an olfactory hallucination, but he would have sworn it was the same smell he remembered from his childhood. And it took him back. To the days and nights spent around the kitchen table, to the many evenings watching TV in the family room.
To the deadly somber day after Robyn’s funeral when the house filled up with friends and relatives, almost all of them in dark clothes. And Michael sat in a corner, trying not to cry, ignoring his cousins and their insistence that he come outside and play baseball. Even Lynn came by and tried to draw him out, but he refused.
Michael shook his head, releasing himself from the memories. He started forward, heading back toward the front of the house, to the stairs to the second floor. When he reached the bottom of the steps, something caught his eye. He looked down, trying to make it out. Then he saw it was a bandage, a piece of gauze marked by a quarter-size bloodstain.
He left it on the floor and looked up to the top of the stairs. He reached for his phone and was drawing it out of his pants pocket in preparation to call the police when he heard the floor squeak above him, the sound of someone moving around.
Michael tensed. He took an involuntary step back. What if someone up there had done harm to Lynn and Felicity? And he’d put himself in danger’s way by breaking into the house?
He pressed the nine on his phone, ready to summon the police.
But someone emerged from the bedroom at the top of the stairs to the right. The bedroom Robyn slept in when they were little. Michael saw a blond head, a child’s body.
A cry caught in his throat. He tried to process what he was seeing. The girl looked so much like Robyn, except . . .
She was there. Alive. And wearing a bandage on her forehead. Michael recognized her from the photos.
“Felicity?” he said.
The girl nodded, looking shy. Then she waved her hand at him, summoning him up the stairs.