The Anatomy of Fear.
Chapter 4
TRICIA
Present Day
I don’t have much hope for the kitchen. If this house hasn’t been lived in during the three years Adrienne Hale has been missing, how can there be any food in the refrigerator? The best we can hope for is some stuff in cans that we can heat up.
The refrigerator is at least twice the size of the tiny one we have stuffed into our kitchen at home. Everything here seems to be orders of magnitude larger than what we have back in the city. About ten copies of our kitchen could fit into this one kitchen. I wonder if Dr. Adrienne Hale was a skilled chef. She seems like the sort of woman who could whip up a gourmet meal.
Ethan throws open the refrigerator and peers inside. “Well, we can make ourselves sandwiches.”
“Really?” I look over his shoulder into the fridge. There’s a loaf of bread in there and a bunch of cold cuts. There’s even a jar of mayonnaise. My stomach turns and I almost gag, thinking about how long that food has been sitting in there. “I’m not eating that. It probably expired years ago.”
He picks up a packet of bologna. “Nope. It doesn’t expire for another week. Judy must have bought it.”
I try to imagine Judy purchasing a packet of bologna for one of the houses she is showing. I can’t seem to do it. She’s more of a caviar-and-smoked-salmon type of person. “Are you sure? Are you looking at the year?”
“Yes. Here, look.”
He hands me the bologna. Sure enough, the date on it is from the current year, one week in the future. I open it up and sniff it, and it doesn’t smell rancid. The color looks okay.
“I’ll make us sandwiches,” he says.
Ethan lines up a loaf of bread, the bologna, and a jar of mayonnaise on the counter, and he gets to work making us sandwiches. He likes to cook for me. It’s sweet. Not that I can’t make a simple sandwich on my own, but it’s romantic the way he enjoys pampering me. Yet another thing I’ve quickly learned to love about him.
I just hope he feels the same way about me after he finds out about my revelation. I feel ill every time I think about it. But I can’t keep it from him much longer.
“Is there anything I can do?” I ask.
“Why don’t you grab us something to drink?”
I can handle that. I walk to the other side of the kitchen to find a couple of glasses. I’ll just fill them up with tap water—I’m sure it’s fine. But when I get close to the sink, something makes me stop in my tracks.
It’s a cup right by the sink. Half filled with water. The outside dripping with condensation.
“Ethan?” My voice sounds shaky.
“Yeah?”
“I…” I swallow as my eyes stay on the glass. “I think there’s somebody else in this house.”
His head snaps up from the sandwich preparation. He’s got a slice of bologna clutched in his right hand. “What are you talking about?”
“There’s a cup here.” I back away for a minute, like the cup might reach out and strangle me. “Somebody filled it recently and was drinking from it.”
“Probably Judy.”
If he mentions Judy again, I’m going to punch him in the face. “It’s not Judy’s, okay? Judy would never leave half a glass of water on the kitchen counter like this. And if she did, there’d be lipstick all over the rim.”
He can’t argue with that. Judy’s trademark is her bright red lipstick. She would never be able to drink from a glass without a little bit of it wiping off.
“And I saw that footprint on the floor,” I remind him.
“That was probably Judy’s,” he says, even though it’s preposterous. “Or mine.”
“Also,” I add, “we saw that light on upstairs when we were walking over here. Somebody is upstairs.”
Ethan purses his lips. He looks over at the water glass across the kitchen, then up at the spiral staircase leading to the second floor. “I don’t know, Tricia. If someone else were here, wouldn’t they have come down and told us to get the hell out of their house?”
He has a good point. “Maybe they’re not supposed to be here.”
He doesn’t disregard the possibility. Now his eyes are trained on the stairwell. “Okay. Suppose that’s true. What should we do?”
I’ve still got my purse slung over my shoulder. I reach inside and pull out my phone. Still no signal. “I think we should check upstairs.” Ethan looks like he’s about to protest, so I quickly add, “we’re stuck here for the night. Are you going to be able to sleep if you know a stranger is lurking around the house?”