They raced to the bathroom and found the window broken, glass and melting snow covering the tile floor. There were drops of blood splattered here and there. Fawn grabbed Ruthie’s hand, held it in a bone-crushing grip, her own small hand hot and surprisingly strong. Her other arm was wrapped tightly around Mimi—still swaddled in the blanket, gun tucked inside.
“Stay behind me,” Candace hissed. Slowly, she followed the puddles and drips of blood down the hall and into the living room. Ruthie kept Fawn behind her, listening hard for sounds, but only hearing her own heart pounding. As irrational as it was, one thought kept bubbling its way to the top of her frazzled brain: It’s the monster. The monster is real, and it’s here, in the house.
“Hold it right there,” Candace said, raising her gun.
A woman stood, bent over the coffee table, holding in her hands the Nikon the girls had found in the backpack earlier. She was tall, thin, and very pale, dressed in paint-splattered jeans and an expensive-looking coat. Blood leaked from the thin black glove on her right hand.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, holding out the camera. Her voice was cracked and broken, and her eyes were full of tears. “Where did you get this?”
Katherine
“Put the camera down,” the blond woman said, her gun aimed right at Katherine. The two girls stood behind her, looking just as frightened as they had when she’d seen them through the window with the woman who was holding the gun.
As soon as she spotted the familiar bag and contents on the coffee table, she’d forgotten everything else—the gun, the girls in danger she was supposed to be saving.
“Is this someone you know?” the blond woman asked the girls.
“No!” said the older girl. “I’ve never seen her before.”
“Maybe she’s a sleeper,” the smaller girl said, clutching a beat-up rag doll tight.
What was Katherine supposed to say? How could she begin to explain her presence here?
But no. They were the ones with the explaining to do. They had Gary’s backpack.
Ask them, Gary whispered in her ear. Ask them how they got it.
She clenched the Nikon tighter and waved it in front of them. “This was my husband’s. This is all his.”
“Put the camera down and step away from the bag,” ordered the blond woman, gesturing with her gun. “I’m not going to tell you again.”
“My husband’s name was Gary,” Katherine said to the girls as she set the camera back down on the coffee table, her voice cracking and desperate. “Did you know him? Did he come to your house, maybe?” Both girls shook their heads.
“He’s dead,” Katherine said, voice shaking. “He was here, in West Hall. Then, on his way home, there was an accident, the roads were icy and …” She was unable to go on, her thoughts jumbled, the pain and loss fresh and raw all over again as she looked down at Gary’s things.
“I’m sorry,” the older girl said.
The woman with the gun looked over at the older girl. “What’s the story with the camera stuff, Ruthie?”
“Seriously, I don’t know,” she said. “We just found it.”
“Found it?” Katherine asked.
The woman with the gun made a tsk-tsk sound, tongue against teeth, and shook her head. “These girls seem to have a talent for finding stuff that used to be owned by the dead and the missing,” she said. “So where’d you find the bag, girls—was it in the hall closet? Where you just told me there was nothing but the wallets?”
Ruthie shook her head. “It was in my mom’s closet. Upstairs. We just found it tonight. I don’t know why my mom had it. I tried turning the camera on, but couldn’t make it work.”
Katherine nodded. “The battery’s probably dead.”
“Will it still have photos stored?” the blond woman asked. “Could we put new batteries in it to check?”
“We can plug in the charger, get it going, and take a look,” Katherine said. “If no one’s erased them, it should have the last photos he took on it.”
The last photos Gary took. Katherine’s hands were trembling.
The woman nodded. “Let’s do that. I think we’re all a little curious.” She kept the gun pointed at Katherine. “I’ll take the bag and camera into the kitchen, and we’ll get the battery charging. While we’re waiting, you can tell us just who you are and how the hell you figured out your dead husband’s camera stuff would be in this house.”
“I’m not sure where to start,” Katherine confessed once they were all at the table. The blond woman had ordered the older girl to get them coffee and now sat with her gun pointed at Katherine. It was all very bizarre, being held at gunpoint while coffee was being served—“Cream or sugar?” the teenaged girl asked politely. It felt like she’d stepped into a scene from some art house film, the kind she and Gary might have gone to see back in college.
“At the beginning,” the woman ordered.
“Okay,” Katherine said, taking in a breath and trying not to think about the gun pointed at her chest. She began by telling how Gary was killed in a car accident, how she got the last credit-card bill, how that led her to West Hall.