“This is a solid house, Jane,” Ruth said, laughing. “They built them right back then.”
“We’ll have to explore the upstairs tomorrow; I haven’t even seen your old room yet.”
Ruth smiled. “Up the stairs, take a left, second door on the left. Although my mother turned it back into a guest room when I left home. You won’t find many childhood trinkets.”
“How come she did that?”
Her smile faded. “I told her I wouldn’t need it again.”
“You never wanted to come back for a holiday or anything? To visit?”
“Oh, gosh. Life just sort of got in the way, Jane. I met your father, and then you came along, and it was so much easier for Emilia to come west to visit than for Greer and me to lug you all that way. And it was cheaper, too, one ticket versus three. It wasn’t on purpose,” she added—although her words felt too much like a careful afterthought to carry much water. “It’s just the way it happened.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Jane said, although it didn’t make sense to her, not at all.
In fact the longer they spent in this house, the less sense everything seemed to make. Why did it feel like her mother was hiding something? Why did it feel like she had another reason for never wanting to return to North Manor?
Ruth played the word secret for sixteen points.
Jane thought that felt fairly accurate.
Ruth fell asleep early, and Jane covered her up in her makeshift bed and put the leftovers away, then settled back in front of the fire and took a sip of her wine. She didn’t usually drink, and as a result it was going right to her head, making her sleepy and warm. The fire was still going strong, and she stretched out her legs, letting the heat warm the soles of her feet.
She must have fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes the room was darker and the fire had died down to just a few barely burning embers. She had a crick in her back from the way she’d been sitting, so she slowly stretched her arms over her head and then froze as she heard it—the sound that must have woken her up.
It was a muffled crack, a brief pop with a long silence after it.
Jane didn’t immediately feel afraid; rather she felt a sort of prickling of her senses, like how in a darkened room you might move to avoid hitting something you couldn’t even see, because you just felt it was there. She got to her feet quietly, trying to pinpoint where the sound was coming from, straining her ears in the darkness of the house. Her first thought was the tree that had tapped against the window last night—but this was different from that, louder and farther away.
She was used to living in perpetual noise. Their house in California had been adjacent to a main road, and there were always cars rushing by and parents pushing baby strollers and kids zipping around on bikes. Enough noise and it all eventually fades into the background, becoming something other than noise, a distant lull to sing you off to sleep.
She had never experienced quiet as profound as nighttime in New England, where even the sound of your own breathing became deafeningly loud.
And there was another noise.
A steady thump-thump-thump.
The sound of her own heart, she realized.
A sound that quickened when she heard the cracking noise again.
It came from the back of the house.
She pulled out her phone, turned on the flashlight, then dimmed the beam with her hand, letting out just a splinter of light to see by.
The house was still a mostly unknown thing to her. Furniture crept up on her, the piano seemed to move by a few inches in any given direction, floor lamps erupted out of the dark like people dressed in bronze.
And now the sound—like a sharp scream. And another sound, following it. The shattering of glass.
And suddenly Jane wasn’t scared anymore; suddenly she knew exactly what the sound was, and it didn’t frighten her; instead it filled her with a sharp kind of anger.
She took off at a run, making her way to the mudroom at the back of the house, not bothering to shield her flashlight anymore.
She stopped just in time. One of the panes of glass in the mudroom door—one that had been replaced that day—was shattered. The floor was littered with glass, and there was a rock in the middle of all the pieces. She bent down and picked it up.
Someone had thrown a rock through the window.
That was why all the windows had been broken; someone was using them as target practice.
Angrier now, she knew she shouldn’t risk it, but she picked her way carefully through the mess of glass, standing on barefoot tiptoes as she made her way to the door. She fumbled with the lock and pulled the door open hard, almost throwing herself back with the effort.
The cold hit her like a slap, and she pushed her body out into the night and strained to see anything in the immaculate darkness of the night.
Nothing, nothing—
Wait!
Movement, the sound of laughter, an exclamation of surprise—“Oh shit!”—more laughter and feet running away, two or three or four shadowy figures darting across the backyard.
“I’ll call the police!” Jane screamed into the dark. “If you come back, I’ll call the police!”
Silence.
Anger coursed through her body like a thing with weight, with substance, fiery hot and burning underneath her skin. She took a step out into the backyard, knowing she should go back inside, knowing she couldn’t catch whoever it was, couldn’t even see where they had gone—
Another step and the wind whipped her long hair around her face so violently that it tangled and knotted.
Another step, even though she couldn’t see anything, even though the darkness was so complete out here she could barely register her own hand held in front of her face.
She couldn’t think, she couldn’t concentrate on anything other than her anger, the sharp cut of it, the way adrenaline made her fingertips tingle.
But then—a light?
She turned back to the house, expecting to see Ruth in the mudroom, about to yell at her to come inside, but no.
The mudroom light was still off.
But upstairs—
Upstairs there was a light on.
And as she watched, a hand pressed itself against the glass of the window.
And then the light went off.
And everything was dark again.
Someone was in the house.
Who had a little curl
Someone was in the house.
Jane’s entire body was on fire; her heart was beating so rapidly in her chest that she thought it might burst. It seemed to pulse in time to one panicked thought that kept running through her mind:
They’re inside they’re inside they’re inside.
Whoever had thrown the rock through the window was just distracting her so someone else could slip past her into the house.
Her body felt frozen in place, unable to move.
But not frozen in fear…
Frozen in anger.
Motionless in rage.
She was going to go upstairs. She was going to hurt them.
But then the mudroom light had turned on and there was Ruth, looking sleep-rumpled and confused, blinking to wake herself up.
“Honey? What happened to the window?”
Jane couldn’t reply. She couldn’t speak. She still couldn’t move. How had she gotten back in the mudroom? Wasn’t she still outside?