The wind groaned in the eaves. The handprint faded. The figure moved back into the darkness. And the house was still once more.
CHAPTER TWO
September 2017
SHEA
The day before I met Beth Greer was a Tuesday, with a gray sky overhead and a thin drizzle that wet my face and beaded in my hair as I waited at the bus stop. It was unseasonably warm, and the concrete gave off that rainy scent it sometimes has, rising up from beneath my ballet flats. There was a man standing next to me, wearing an overcoat and scrolling through his phone with an exhausted look on his face. On my other side was a worried-looking woman who was frantically texting. I closed my eyes, inhaling the scent of the rain laced with a thread of cologne from the man next to me, overlaid with gasoline and diesel fumes from the street. This was my life.
It wasn’t a bad one. I was twenty-nine and divorced. I lived in a small complex of low-rise condos on a tangle of curved streets with the aspirational name of Saddle Estates. In my mind I called it Singles Estates, because it was almost exclusively populated with romantic failures like me, people who needed somewhere to live when they sold off their married house and took their half of the money. The man in the overcoat was divorced, guaranteed, and I’d bet money the woman was texting a kid who was in school while spending a court-designated week with his father.
My divorce was still new. I had no kids. My place was small, smelled of paint, and only contained the bare necessities of furniture. But it wasn’t the worst life I could have. I’d known since I was nine that I was lucky to have any life at all.
On the bus, I pulled out my phone, put my earbuds in my ears, and played the audiobook I was in the middle of listening to. A thriller: a woman in danger, most of the characters possibly lying, everything not quite as it seemed. A twist somewhere near the end that would either shock me or wouldn’t. There were dozens of books just like it, hundreds maybe, and they were the soundtrack of my life. The woman’s voice in my earbuds told me about death, murder, deep family secrets, people who shouldn’t be trusted, lies that cost lives. But a novel always ends, the lies come to the surface, and the deaths are explained. Maybe one of the bad characters gets away with something—that’s fashionable right now—but you are still left with a sense that things are balanced, that dark things come to light, and that the bad person will, at least, most likely be miserable.
It was dark comfort, but it was still comfort. I knew my own tally by heart: My would-be killer had been in prison for nineteen years, seven months, and twenty-six days. His parole hearing was in six months.
Work was a doctor’s office in downtown Claire Lake. I was a receptionist, taking calls, filing charts, making appointments. As I came through the door, I pulled the earbuds from my ears and gave my coworkers a smile, shaking off all of the darkness and death.
“Busy day,” Karen, the other receptionist, said, glancing at me, then away again. “We open in twenty.”
We weren’t bosom friends, my coworkers and I, even though I had worked here for five years. The other women here were married with kids, which meant we had nothing much in common since my divorce. I hadn’t talked to any of them about the divorce, except to say it had happened. And I couldn’t add to the conversations about daycares and swimming programs. The doctors didn’t socialize with any of us—they came and went, expecting the mechanism of the office to work without much of their input.
I took off my jacket and put on my navy blue scrub top, shoving my phone and purse under the desk. I could probably make friends here if I tried. I was attractive enough, with long dark hair that I kept tied back, an oval face, and dark eyes. At the same time, I didn’t have the kind of good looks that threaten other women. I was standoffish—I knew that. It was an inescapable part of my personality, a tendency I couldn’t turn off no matter how much therapy I did. I didn’t like people too close, and I was terrible at small talk. My therapists called it a defense mechanism; I only knew it was me, like my height or the shape of my chin.
But my lack of gregariousness wasn’t the only reason my coworkers gave me a wide berth. Though they didn’t say anything to me, a rumor had gotten out in my first week; they all knew who I was, what I had escaped. And they all knew what I did in the evenings, the side project that consumed all of my off-hours. My obsession, really.