Tanuja Shukla was standing in the deep front yard, in the rain and the dark, soaked and chilled and lonely and wildly happy, when the assassins arrived, although of course she didn’t at once realize they were assassins.
Twenty-five and obsessively creative from early childhood, Tanuja had been writing a novelette in which a rain-drenched night provided atmosphere but also served as a metaphor for loneliness and spiritual malaise. After watching the downpour from a window of her second-floor study, she seized the opportunity to immerse herself in the elements, the better to know what her lead character felt during a long journey on foot in a storm. Other writers of literary fiction with elements of fantasy found most research unnecessary, but Tanuja believed that a skeleton of truth needed to provide the structure underlying an author’s muscular invention—the fantasy—and that the two must be bound together by tendons of accurate facts and well-observed details.
Her twin brother, Sanjay, who was two minutes younger than Tanuja and considerably more acerbic, had said, “Don’t worry. When you die of pneumonia, I’ll finish writing your story, and the last pages will be the best of it.”
Tanuja’s jeans and black T-shirt were saturated, at first clinging like one of those weighted blankets meant to alleviate anxiety, but then seeming to dissolve so that she felt as if she were unclothed except for her blue sneakers, naked in the storm, vulnerable and alone, exactly how the character in her novelette felt. As she mentally catalogued the physical details of this experience for later use in fiction, she was more content than she had been all day.
The house stood at the end of a two-lane road, on three acres in the eastern hills of Orange County horse country, though there were no longer horses on this acreage. White-painted wire-infilled board fencing encircled the property. Sixty or seventy yards west of the house, a gate of the same materials barred entrance to the long driveway.
The stormfall drummed the earth and chattered like an infinite number of tumbling dice against the blacktop, and on a nearby hundred-year-old live oak, each of the thousands of stiff oval-shaped leaves was a tongue that gave voice to the rain, raising a chorus of whispers that together were like the roar of a distant crowd, all serving to mask the sound of an approaching engine.
Because the Shukla place was the last residence before the blacktop dead-ended in a turnaround, the light approaching from the south tweaked Tanuja’s curiosity. No visitor was expected. In the murk, the seemingly soundless conveyance appeared to be borne on a tide of mist that roiled off the pavement, headlights chasing before them flocks of shadows that winged across eucalyptus trees on the farther side of the two-lane road.
The vehicle halted at the gate, not facing inward but athwart the driveway, as though to block that exit from the property.
When doors were thrown open, interior lights came on, defining the proportions of a large SUV. The driver doused the headlights, and when the last door closed, the vehicle as good as vanished.
Tanuja had stood so long in the deluge that her eyes were fully dark adapted. Because the plank gate was painted white, she could see it even at that distance, less as a gate than as some pale and cryptic symbol, a mysterious hieroglyph floating portentously on the night. She also discerned three half-visible figures clambering over that barrier.
Outside of the gate stood a call box on a post. Visitors were meant to press a button and announce themselves, whereupon the gate could be opened from the house. That these new arrivals eschewed the call box and instead climbed the planking suggested they were not visitors, but intruders bent on mischief or worse.
In her dark clothes, with her black hair and maiden-of-Mumbai complexion, Tanuja would be difficult to spot as long as she avoided the outspill of light from the house. She turned and dashed to the massive oak, which gathered rain and channeled it along leafways, from which it drizzled in a hundred thick streams.
She paused and glanced back and saw three big men hurrying up the driveway, their hooded jackets and determined stride suggesting satanic monks abroad on some infernal task.
Hers was not a life of high drama, other than the scenarios that arose in her mind and found expression in her writing. She had not before experienced such hard pounding of the heart as shook her now, as if contained within her breast were both hammer and anvil.
She sprinted from the oak and around the south side of the house, staying clear of the light from the windows. Onto the back porch. Two doors. The first opened into the kitchen, the second into the mudroom, but of course both were locked.
She fumbled a key from a pocket, dropped it, snatched it from the porch floor, and let herself into the mudroom, where she had left her smartphone before venturing into the storm. Slender and athletic, Tanuja was usually as graceful as a dancer. But now, shedding rainwater, she slipped on the vinyl-tile flooring and fell.
A door on the left connected the mudroom to the kitchen, and one directly ahead accessed the downstairs hallway. She thrust to her feet, sodden shoes slipping as if she were a skater on ice, and opened the door and saw Sanjay. He had stepped out of his study and gone into the foyer at the farther end of the hallway, where he just now opened the front door.
Too late to call out a warning, Tanuja hoped that she had misread the situation, that her overactive imagination had invoked menace where none existed.
The first man at the door was known to her: Lincoln Crossley, who lived two houses south of them, a deputy with the sheriff’s department. Linc was married to Kendra, who worked as a bailiff at the county courthouse. They had a sixteen-year-old son, Jeff, and a Labrador retriever named Gustav. They were good people, and for a moment Tanuja was relieved.
Rather than wait for an invitation, however, Crossley and the two men behind him crossed the threshold the moment the door opened, crowding Sanjay backward, their boldness disturbing. None of them wore a uniform, and whoever the two strangers might be, Crossley’s behavior was not protocol for an officer of the law.
Tanuja couldn’t discern what Linc Crossley said or what Sanjay answered, though she heard the deputy speak her name. She eased the mudroom door almost shut, watching through a narrow gap, feeling like a child, a small uncomprehending girl who by accident stood witness to a mysterious and disquieting adult encounter.
Crossley put one arm around Sanjay’s shoulders, but in that move Tanuja read some quality darker than neighborly affection. He was much bigger than Sanjay.
One of Crossley’s associates drew a pistol, quickly crossed the foyer, and ascended the stairs, apparently with no concern that his boots and jacket streamed water on the carpet and the hardwood floor.
When the third man closed the front door, stepped out of the foyer, and disappeared into the parlor as though on a search, Tanuja opened a drawer in a mudroom cabinet, retrieved a flashlight, grabbed her phone from a countertop, and fled. She crossed the porch, vaulted the railing, and hurried across the backyard, into the wind and rain, not daring yet to switch on the light, her fertile imagination spawning terrors of extreme violence and rape and intolerable humiliation even as it also crafted desperate scenes in which she might by various means save herself and her brother.