The man’s gaze whips to mine. “No offense, but when it comes to your kids, you’re not the most reliable witness. I prefer to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” He scratches a gloved finger over Baxter’s knee. “Hello, horsey.”
It isn’t really a question, and Baxter doesn’t answer. I clutch his body tighter to mine.
“Come on, little guy, I thought you and I were friends.” A slight edge has snuck into the man’s voice, a not-so-subtle warning. “Friends don’t keep secrets. Now tell me where your big sister’s hiding.”
But this time Bax isn’t falling for it. By now he’s seen too much—the awful words this man has been slinging around, the gun in his fist and the switchblade in his pocket. Baxter knows the masked man is not his friend. He shrugs against my shoulder and mumbles, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
Baxter shakes his head.
“But you just said she wasn’t downstairs.”
He nods.
The man’s eyes go a little wide, a universal gesture for WTF. “Then how do you know?”
“’Cause the scary man who bangs on the pipes lives down there. How come you wear a mask? Do you have superpowers?”
Just then, a familiar sound sticks the breath to my lungs. A key, rattling in the front door.
All heads whip in the direction of the noise, even though we can’t see the door from where we’re standing. Not with the four-foot stretch of wall, a solid boundary between the base of the stairs and the front door, blocking the view. I stare at the alabaster plaster, breathless.
The man’s whisper laps at the side of my neck. “Who’s that?”
I shake my head, the burning in my arm muscles bleeding away into a panicky tingle. Is it Cam, returning home already with the money? I hold my breath and wait, clutching Baxter to my chest, straining to hear. Five full seconds of frozen terror.
There’s a sharp sound of metal on wood, followed by a whoosh of outside air.
And then two things happen all at once. A long steady beeping erupts from the alarm pad bolted onto the bedroom wall, and a familiar voice sings out a hello.
Tanya Lloyd, the neighbor from across the street.
“Jade, are you here?”
With impressive speed, the man tugs me down the hall and into the bedroom. “Tell her not to move,” he hisses, flipping open the cover on the alarm panel and ticking in the code. “Do it.” Just in case, he raises the gun six inches from my face—as if I need convincing.
“Hang on, Tanya,” I shout, pointing my face into the hallway. “Stay where you are. I’ll be right there.”
My words don’t stop her footsteps from moving deeper into the house. Tanya is our nosiest neighbor, the kind who parks herself in her bay window when the kids are at school so she can keep an eye on the street. She knows every neighbor within a five-mile radius. She knows their kids’ names and their dogs’ names and what day their lawn and pool service comes. She knows who’s pregnant and who’s getting married or on the verge of divorce, and which houses are about to go on the market weeks before the broker hammers a For Sale sign in the grass. If one of our neighbors forgets to pick up their dog’s shit from our front yard, Tanya calls to tell me who it was, and exactly which bush it’s under. She is a one-woman security patrol, and she drives Cam and me up a tree.
And now she’s here, in our house. Standing in the foyer. If she comes in any farther, and she will, which way will she go? Left, into the kitchen and the television room beyond? Or right for the stairs—in full view of us, standing just inside the bedroom doorway.
And speaking of bedrooms, it feels strange to be standing shoulder to shoulder with a masked man in mine. The space is too personal and far too intimate. Everywhere I look are pieces of me and Cam. The framed photos of the kids, naked but for their diapers, on the wall. The romance novels piled up on a nightstand strewn with discarded earrings and Chapstick and lotion bottles. The neat pile of freshly laundered sports bras on the bed, which I wish to God were tucked in a drawer. I don’t want to be here with him. It’s too disturbing, like some kind of BDSM nightmare.
On the other side of the wall, Tanya’s footsteps go dull and blunted, which means she’s moved from the foyer marble onto the living room hardwood.
Please go left please go left.
Turning right would get us killed. Me, Baxter, Tanya. Three unarmed innocents. Turning right would involve her in this nightmare, too.
And then something else occurs to me. What if she’s here because she saw Beatrix make her escape? What if she saw her…I don’t know, shimmy down a drainpipe, race down the hill, sneak through the bushes to the neighbors’？ If anybody saw Beatrix make a run for it, it would have been Tanya. What if that’s what she’s coming here to tell me?