She took a left onto the boardwalk, fighting an inelegant battle between the wind and the trashbag before she managed to tear off the plastic and slam it into the nearest recycling bin. Her shoes thudded on the wooden planks. Hot rain drilled open her pores. She wasn’t wearing socks. A blister rubbed on her heel. Her shorts were bunched up. Her shirt was glued down. Her hair was like resin. She sucked in a great big gulp of wet air and coughed it back out.
The spray of blood coming from Betsy Barnard’s mouth.
Shelly already dead on the floor.
Laura with the knife in her hand.
Thwack.
Her mother’s face.
Her face.
Andy shook her head. Water flew like a dog sloughing off the sea. Her fingernails were cutting into her palms. She loosened her hands out of the tight fists they’d clawed into. She swiped hair away from her eyes. She imagined her thoughts receding like the low tide. She pulled air into her lungs. She ran harder, legs pumping, tendon and muscle working in tandem to keep her upright during what was nothing more than a series of controlled falls.
Something clicked inside of her head. Andy had never achieved a runner’s high, not even back when she kept to something like a schedule. She just got to a place where her body didn’t hurt so much that she wanted to stop, but her brain was occupied enough by that pain to keep her thoughts floating along the surface rather than diving down into the darkness.
Left foot. Right foot.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Left. Right. Left.
Breathe.
Tension slowly drained from her shoulders. Her jaw unclenched. The bear-teeth headache turned from a gnawing to a more manageable nibble. Andy’s thoughts started to wander. She listened to the rain, watched the drops fall in front of her face. What would it feel like to open her box of art supplies? To take out her pencil and sketchbook? To draw something like a puddle splattering up from her ruined sneakers? Andy visualized lines and light and shadows, the impact of her sneaker inside a puddle, the jerk of her shoestring caught mid-step.
Laura had almost died during her cancer treatments. It wasn’t just the toxic mixture of drugs, but the other problems that treatment brought with it. The infections. The C. difficile. Pneumonia. Double pneumonia. Staph infections. A collapsed lung.
And now they could add to the list: Jonah Helsinger. Detective Palazzolo. Needing Gordon to butt out of her life. Needing space from her only daughter.
They were going to survive Laura’s coldness the same way they had survived the cancer.
Gordon was right about time putting things in perspective. Andy knew all about waiting—for the surgeon to come out, for the films to be read for the biopsy to be cultured for the chemo and the antibiotics and the pain meds and the anti-nausea shot and the clean sheets and the fresh pillows and finally, blissfully, for the cautious smile on the doctor’s face when she had told Laura and Andy that the scan was clear.
All that Andy had to do now was wait for her mother to come back around. Laura would fight her way out of the dark place she was in until eventually, finally, in a month or six months or by Andy’s next birthday, she would be looking back at what had happened yesterday as if through a telescope rather than through a magnifying glass.
The boardwalk ran out sooner than Andy had expected. She jumped back onto the one-way road that skirted the beachfront mansions. The asphalt felt solid beneath her feet. The roar of the sea began to fade behind the giant houses. The shore along this stretch bent around the tip of the Isle. Her mother’s bungalow was another half mile away. Andy hadn’t meant to go back home. She started to turn around but then remembered—
Her bicycle.
Andy saw the bike hanging from the ceiling every time she went into the garage. The trip back to Gordon’s would be faster on two wheels. Considering the lightning, having a set of rubber tires between herself and the asphalt seemed like a good idea.
She slowed down to a jog, then a brisk walk. The intensity of the rain dialed back. Fat water drops slapped against the top of her head, made divots in her skin. Andy slowed her walk when she saw the faint glow of light from Laura’s office. The house was at least fifty yards away, but this time of year, all the McMansions in the vicinity were unoccupied. Belle Isle was mostly a snowbird town, a respite for Northerners during the harsh winter months. The other homeowners were chased away by the August heat.
Andy glanced into Laura’s office window as she walked down the driveway. Empty, at least as far as she could tell. She used the side entrance to the garage. The glass panes rattled in the door as she closed it. The shushing sound of the rain was amplified in the open space. Andy reached for the garage door opener to turn on the light, but caught herself at the last minute because the light only came on when the door rolled up and the rackety sound could wake the dead. Fortunately, the glow from Laura’s office reached through the glass in the side door. Andy had just enough light to squint by.
She walked to the back, leaving a Pig-Pen-like trail of rain puddles in her wake. Her bike hung upside down from two hooks Gordon had screwed into the ceiling. Andy’s shoulders screamed with pain as she tried to lift the Schwinn’s tires from the hooks. Once. Twice. Then the bike was falling and she almost toppled backward trying to turn it right side up before it hit the ground.
Which was why she hadn’t wanted to hang the fucking thing from the ceiling in the first place, Andy would never, ever say to her father.
One of the pedals had scraped her shin. Andy didn’t worry about the trickle of blood. She checked the tread, expecting dry rot, but found the tires were so new they still had the little alveoli poking out of the sides. Andy sensed her father’s handiwork. Over the summer, Gordon had repeatedly suggested they resume their weekend bike rides. It was just like him to make sure everything would be ready on the off-chance that Andy said yes.
She started to lift her leg, but stopped mid-air. There was a distinct, jangly noise from above. Andy cocked her head like a retriever. All she could make out was the white noise of the rain. She was trying to think of a Jacob Marley joke when the jangle happened again. She strained to listen, but there was nothing more than the constant shush of water falling.
Great. She was a proven coward. She literally did not know when to come in out of the rain, and now, apparently, she was paranoid.
Andy shook her head. She had to get moving again. She sat on the bike and wrapped her fingers around the handlebars.
Her heart jumped into her throat.
A man.
Standing outside the door. White. Beady eyes. Dark hoodie clinging to his face.
Andy froze.
He cupped his hands to the glass.
She should scream. She should be quiet. She should look for a weapon. She should walk the bike back. She should hide in the shadows.
The man leaned closer, peering into the garage. He looked left, then right, then straight ahead.
Andy flinched, drawing in her shoulders like she could fold herself into obscurity.
He was staring right at her.
She held her breath. Waited. Trembled. He could see her. She was certain that he could see her.
Slowly, his head turned away, scanning left, then right, again. He took one last look directly at Andy, then disappeared.
She opened her mouth. She drew in a thimbleful of air. She leaned over the handlebars and tried not to throw up.
The man at the hospital—the one in the Alabama hat. Had he followed them home? Had he been lying in wait until he thought the coast was clear?
No. Alabama had been tall and slim. The guy at the garage door, Hoodie, was stocky, muscle-bound, about Andy’s height but three times as wide.
The jangling noise had been Hoodie walking down the metal stairs.
He had checked to make sure the apartment was vacant.
He had checked to make sure the garage was empty.
And now he was probably going to break into her mother’s house.
Andy furiously patted her pockets, even as she realized that her phone was upstairs, dead where she had left it. Laura had gotten rid of the landline last year. The mansions on either side probably didn’t have phones, either. The bike ride back to Gordon’s would take ten minutes at least and by then her mother could be—
Andy’s heart jerked to a stop.
Her bladder wanted to release. Her stomach was filled with thumbtacks. She carefully stepped off the bike. She leaned it against the wall. The rain was a steady snare drum now. All that she could hear over the shush-shush-shush was her teeth chattering.
She made herself walk to the door. She reached out, wrapped her hand around the doorknob. Her fingers felt cold. Was Hoodie waiting on the other side of the door, back pressed to the garage, arms raised with a bat or a gun or just his giant hands that could strangle the life out of her?
Andy tasted vomit in her mouth. The water on her skin felt frozen. She told herself that the man was cutting through to the beach, but nobody cut through to the beach here. Especially in the rain. And lightning.
Andy opened the door. She bent her knees low, then peered out into the driveway. The light was still on in Laura’s office. Andy saw no one—no shadows, no tripped floodlights, no man in a hoodie waiting with a knife beside the garage or looking through the windows to the house.
Her mother could take care of herself. She had taken care of herself. But that was with both hands. Now, one arm was strapped to her waist and Laura could barely walk across the kitchen on her injured leg without grabbing onto the counter for support.
Andy gently closed the garage door. She cupped her hands to the glass, the same as Hoodie. She looked into the dark space. Again, she could see nothing—not her bike, not the shelves of emergency food and water.
Her relief was only slight, because Hoodie had not walked up the driveway when he’d left. He had turned toward the house.
Andy brushed her fingers across her forehead. She was sweating underneath all the rain. Maybe the guy hadn’t gone inside the bungalow. Why would a burglar choose the smallest house on the street, one of the smallest in the entire city? The surrounding mansions were filled with high-end electronics. Every Friday night, dispatch got at least one call from someone who had driven down from Atlanta expecting to enjoy a relaxing weekend and found instead that their TVs were gone.
Hoodie had been upstairs in the apartment. He had looked in the garage.
He hadn’t taken anything. He was looking for something.
Someone.
Andy walked along the side of the house. The motion detector was not working. The floodlights were supposed to trip. She felt glass crunch under her sneaker. Broken lightbulbs? Broken motion detector? She stood on tiptoe, peered through the kitchen window. To the right, the office door was ajar, but just slightly. The narrow opening cast a triangle of white light onto the kitchen floor.
Andy waited for movement, for shadows. There were none. She stepped back. The porch steps were to her left. She could enter the kitchen. She could turn on the lights. She could surprise Hoodie so that he turned around and shot her or stabbed her the same way that Jonah Helsinger had tried to do.
The two things had to be connected. That was the only thing that made sense. This was Belle Isle, not Atlantic City. Guys in hoodies didn’t case bungalows in the pouring rain.
Andy walked to the back of the house. She shivered in the stiff breeze coming off the ocean. She carefully opened the door to the screened porch. The squeak of the hinge was drowned out by the rain. She found the key inside the saucer under the pansies.
Two French doors opened onto her mother’s bedroom. Again, Andy cupped her hand to glass. Unlike the garage, she could see clear to the corners of the room. The nightlight was on in the bathroom. Laura’s bed was made. A book was on the nightstand. The room was empty.
Andy pressed her ear to the glass. She closed her eyes, tried to focus all of her senses on picking up sounds from inside—feet creaking across the floor, her mother’s voice calling for help, glass breaking, a struggle.
All she heard were the rocking chairs swaying in the wind.
Over the weekend, Andy had joined her mother on the porch to watch the sun rise.
“Andrea Eloise.” Laura had smiled over her cup of tea. “Did you know that when you were born, I wanted to name you Heloise, but the nurse misunderstood me and she wrote down ‘Eloise,’ and your father thought it was so beautiful that I didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d spelled it wrong?”
Yes, Andy knew. She had heard the story before. Every year, on or around her birthday, her mother contrived a reason to tell her that the H had been dropped.
Andy listened at the glass for another moment before forcing herself to move. Her fingers felt so thick she could barely slide the key into the lock. Tears filled her eyes. She was so scared. She had never been this terrified. Not even at the diner, because during the shooting spree, there was no time to think. Andy was reacting, not contemplating. Now, she had plenty of time to consider her actions and the scenarios reeling through her mind were all horrifying.
Hoodie could injure her mother—again. He could be inside, waiting for Andy. He could be killing Laura right now. He could rape Andy. He could kill her in front of her mother. He could rape them both and make one watch or he could kill them then rape them or—
Andy’s knees nearly buckled as she walked into the bedroom. She pulled the door closed, cringing when the latch clicked. Rainwater puddled onto the carpet. She slipped out of her sneakers. Pushed back her wet hair.
She listened.
There was a murmuring sound from the other side of the house.
Conversational. Not threatening, or screaming, or begging for help. More like Andy used to hear from her parents after she went to bed.
“Diana Krall’s going to be at the Fox next weekend.”
“Oh, Gordon, you know jazz makes me nervous.”
Andy felt her eyelids flutter like she was going to pass out. Everything was shaking. Inside her head, the sound of her heartbeat was like a gymnasium full of bouncing basketballs. She had to press her palm to the back of her leg to make herself walk.
The house was basically a square with a hallway that horseshoed around the interior. Laura’s office was where the dining room had been, off the front of the kitchen. Andy walked up the opposite side of the hallway. She passed her old bedroom, now a guest room, ignored all of the family photos and school drawings hanging on the walls.
“—do anything,” Laura said, her tone firm and clear.
Andy stood in the living room. Only the foyer separated her from Laura’s office. The pocket doors had been pulled wide open. The layout of the room was as familiar to Andy as her garage apartment. Couch, chair, glass coffee table with a bowl of potpourri, desk, desk chair, bookcase, filing cabinet, reproduction of the Birth of Venus on the wall beside two framed pages taken from a textbook called Physiology and Anatomy for Speech-Language Pathology.
A framed snapshot of Andy on the desk. A bright green leather blotter. A single pen. A laptop computer.
“Well?” Laura said.
Her mother was sitting on the couch. Andy could see part of her chin, the tip of her nose, her legs uncrossed, one hand resting on her thigh while the other was strapped to her waist. Laura’s face was tilted slightly upward, looking at the person sitting in the leather chair.
Hoodie.
His jeans were soaked. A puddle spread out on the rug at his feet.
He said, “Let’s think about our options here.” His voice was deep. Andy could feel his words rattle inside her chest. “I could talk to Paula Koontz.”
Laura was silent, then said, “I hear she’s in Seattle.”
“Austin.” He waited a moment. “But good try.”
There was silence, long and protracted.
Then Laura said, “Hurting me won’t get you what you need.”
“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to scare the shit out of you.”
Andy felt her eyelids start to flutter again. It was the way he said it—with conviction, almost with glee.
“Is that so?” Laura forced out a fake-sounding laugh. “You think I can be scared?”
“Depends on how much you love your daughter.”
Suddenly, Andy was standing in the middle of her old bedroom. Teeth chattering. Eyes weeping. She couldn’t remember how she had gotten there. Her breath was huffing out of her lungs. Her heart had stopped beating, or maybe it was beating so fast that she couldn’t feel it anymore.
Her mother’s phone would be in the kitchen. She always left it to charge overnight.
Leave the house. Run for help. Don’t put yourself in danger.
Andy’s legs were shaky as she walked down the hall toward the back of the house. Involuntarily, her hand reached out, grabbed onto the doorjamb to Laura’s bedroom, but Andy compelled herself to continue toward the kitchen.
Laura’s phone was at the end of the counter, the section that was closest to her office, the part that was catching a triangle of light from the partially open door.
They had stopped talking. Why had they stopped talking?
Depends on how much you love your daughter.
Andy swung around, expecting to see Hoodie, finding nothing but the open doorway to her mother’s bedroom.
She could run. She could justify leaving because her mother would want her to leave, to be safe, to get away. That’s all Laura had wanted in the diner. That’s all that she would want now.
Andy turned back toward the kitchen. She was inside of her body but somehow outside of it at the same time. She saw herself walking toward the phone at the end of the counter. The cold tile cupped her bare feet. Water was on the floor by the side entrance, probably from Hoodie. Andy’s vision tunneled on her mother’s cell phone. She gritted her teeth to keep them from clicking. If Hoodie was still sitting in the chair, all that separated him from Andy was three feet and a thin wooden door. She reached for the phone. Gently pulled out the charging cord. Slowly walked backward into the shadows.
“Tell me,” Hoodie said, his voice carrying into the kitchen. “Have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re being buried alive?” He waited. “Like you’re suffocating?”
Andy’s mouth was spitless. The pneumonia. The collapsed lung. The horrible wheezing sounds. The panicked attempts to breathe. Her mother had been terrified of suffocating. She was so obsessed with the fear of choking to death on the fluids from her lungs that the doctors had to give her Valium to make her sleep.
Hoodie said, “What I’m going to do is, I’m going to put this bag over your head for twenty seconds. You’re going to feel like you’re dying, but you’re not.” He added, “Yet.”
Andy’s finger trembled as she pressed the home button on her mother’s phone. Both of their fingerprints were stored. Touching the button was supposed to unlock the screen, but nothing happened.
Hoodie said, “It’s like dry waterboarding. Very effective.”
“Please …” Laura choked on the word. “You don’t have to do this.”
Andy wiped her finger on the wall, trying to dry it.
“Stop!” her mother shouted so loudly that Andy almost dropped the phone. “Just listen to me. Just for a moment. Just listen to me.”
Andy pressed home again.
Hoodie said, “I’m listening.”
The screen unlocked.
“You don’t have to do this. We can work something out. I have money.”
“Money’s not what I want from you.”
“You’ll never get it out of me. What you’re looking for. I’ll never—”
“We’ll see.”
Andy tapped the text icon. Belle Isle dispatch had adopted the Text-to-911 system six months ago. The alerts flashed at the top of their monitors.
“Twenty seconds,” the man said. “You want me to count them for you?”
Andy’s fingers worked furiously across the keyboard:
419 Seaborne Ave armed man imminent danger pls hurry
“The street’s deserted,” Hoodie said. “You can scream as loud as you need to.”
Andy tapped the arrow to send.
“Stop—” Laura’s voice rose in panic. “Please.” She had started to cry. Her sobs were muffled like she was holding something to her mouth. “Please,” she begged. “Oh, God, plea—”
Silence.
Andy strained to hear.
Nothing.
Not a cry or a gasp or even more pleading.
The quiet was deafening.
“One,” Hoodie counted. “Two.” He paused. “Three.”
Clank. The heavy glass on the coffee table. Her mother was obviously kicking. Something thumped onto the carpet. Laura only had one hand free. She could barely lift a shopping bag.
“Four,” Hoodie said. “Try not to wet yourself.”
Andy opened her mouth wide, as if she could breathe for her mother.
“Five.” Hoodie was clearly enjoying this. “Six. Almost halfway there.”
Andy heard a desperate, high-pitched wheezing, the exact same sound her mother had made in the hospital when the pneumonia had collapsed her lung.
She grabbed the first heavy object she could find. The cast iron frying pan made a loud screech as she lifted it off the stove. There was no chance of surprising Hoodie now, no going back. Andy kicked open the door. Hoodie was standing over Laura. His hands were wrapped around her neck. He wasn’t choking her. His fingers were sealing the clear plastic bag that encased her mother’s head.
Hoodie turned, startled.
Andy swung the frying pan like a bat.
In the cartoons, the flat bottom of the pan always hit the coyote’s head like the clapper on a bell, rendering him stunned.
In real life, Andy had the pan turned sideways. The cast iron edge wedged into the man’s skull with a nauseatingly loud crack.
Not a ringing, but like the sound a tree limb makes when it breaks off.
The reverberations were so strong that Andy couldn’t hold onto the handle.
The frying pan banged to the floor.
At first, Hoodie didn’t respond. He didn’t fall. He didn’t rage. He didn’t strike out. He just looked at Andy, seemingly confused.
She looked back.
Blood slowly flushed into the white of his left eye, moving through the capillaries like smoke, curling around the cornea. His lips moved wordlessly. His hand was steady as he reached up to touch his head. The temple was crushed at a sharp angle, a perfect match to the edge of the frying pan. He looked at his fingers.
No blood.
Andy’s hand went to her throat. She felt like she had swallowed glass.
Was he okay? Was he going to be okay? Enough to hurt her? Enough to suffocate her mother? To rape them? To kill them both? To—
A trilling noise came from his throat. His mouth fell open. His eyes started to roll up. He reached for the chair, knees bent, trying to sit down, but he missed and fell to the floor.
Andy jumped back like she might get scalded.
He had fallen on his side, legs twisted, hands clutching his stomach.
Andy could not stop staring, waiting, trembling, panicking.
Laura said, “Andrea.”
Andy’s heart flickered like a candle. Her muscles were stone. She was fixed in position, cast like a statue.
Laura screamed, “Andrea!”
Andy was jolted out of her trance. She blinked. She looked at her mother.
Laura was trying to lean up on the couch. The whites of her eyes were dotted with broken blood vessels. Her lips were blue. More broken blood vessels pinpricked her cheeks. The plastic bag was still tied around her neck. Deep gouge marks ringed her skin. She had clawed the bag open with her fingers the same way Andy had chewed through the poncho trashbag.
