Seven times.
For the seventh time Rain counted backward from one hundred to zero. Nearly ten minutes had passed since her parents walked past her door, their steps slowing outside her room before continuing down to their own. When she had finished the counting, she opened her door and listened to the hush of the house. She knew her parents would fall asleep quickly, lulled by the dinner her mother had served—a totally disgusting meal, total carb city; she’d barely been able to manage two forkfuls—followed by an evening of mind-rot TV, one of those stupid reality shows with the pathetic contestants and a panel of has-been judges, the kind of show that asked the viewers to call in their votes. Totally lame. And fixed of course—any idiot knew that—but still her parents continued to watch, sitting there in the den as dull and patient as a pair of shoes. Seriously. She didn’t know how they tolerated their lives. Just shoot her now.
Carefully, allowing herself to step only on the lurid peonies woven into the pattern of the worn runner, she crept down the hall away from her parents’ room. She was meticulous in this, as she was in everything. If she stepped off a blossom, as she occasionally did, she would return to her room and start over. Tonight there was no misstep, and she proceeded quietly to the end of the hall, then in darkness descended. She felt the pressure beneath her breastbone, the stretch of too-tight skin on her body, but she would not allow herself release until she had finished what she had to do. Once downstairs, she crossed to the front door. “Button lock,” she whispered and fingered the little brass bar in the knob to ensure it was set in the horizontal position, not the vertical. Check. Next she tested the deadbolt, made sure it had been shot home. Check. Finally she tested the chain. Check. Six more times. Button lock, deadbolt, chain. Button lock, deadbolt, chain. She intoned the order softly to herself. Buttonlockdeadboltchainbuttonlockdeadboltchain. Deep breath. Still the fist in her chest was clenched. The control box for the security system was affixed to the wall to the right of the doorframe. The alarm button glowed red, signaling that it had been armed. Earlier she had watched as her father triggered the sensors on the doors and windows, the exterior motion detectors but not the interior ones. Rearming it would cause it to beep, and that might rouse her mother, who had the hearing of a doe, so she had to content herself with tapping the box with her index finger. Seven taps.
Finished in the front hall, she went to the dining room, finding her way in the dark. When she’d first begun her rounds, she’d carried a small Maglite until it occurred to her that someone watching from outside could follow her progress through the house, and so now she moved in darkness unless there was a full moon throwing its glow through the windows to light her way. He could be watching and waiting. He. The person who had killed Lucy. Tonight there was cloud cover blocking celestial light, and she crept through the dark room as she checked the two windows on the southern wall. Seven times she checked the locks. She repeated her ritual in the living room and the den, the kitchen. Finally she reached the back hall and the door that led into the garage. It too had three locks. Button knob, deadbolt, chain. Seven times she checked them.
Recently she’d overheard her mother complain to her father, “How much longer must we keep this up? We’ve got this place locked up tighter than Fort Knox.” As if that could keep anyone from trying to break in. And what did they know about security anyway, about how robbers and kidnappers, rapists and murderers, thought? Seriously. The extent of their knowledge they got from TV shows. CSI. Law & Order reruns. Pathetic. Her parents were epically stupid. As she passed the basement door, she saw a line of light seeping beneath the bottom crack. Duane was down there glued to his computer, another mind-rot machine. Duane the Lame. She had no idea what her brother did down there. For all any of them knew, he could be clicking on porn sites. Maybe he was smoking dope. Or doing something hugely illegal. Or researching how to build bombs, like that kid in Oklahoma. Or those brothers in Boston. She imagined SWAT teams in full riot gear smashing down their front door, leading him off in chains, the disbelief on her parents’ faces. She imagined the town overrun with reporters—like right after Lucy had disappeared—platoons of them, interviewing neighbors and teachers and the other kids, all as clueless as her parents. “What will people think?” was one of her mother’s favorite cautions. Well, this would certainly give them something to talk about. She could almost feel sorry for her parents—raising two complete losers. Two noobs. Although, of course, her mother thought Duane was perfect. But maybe he was down there sleeping. Or cramming for final exams. She knew nothing about her brother these days. She thought he might slip out at night, because more than once she had heard their mother tell their father that he’d forgotten to set the alarm the night before when Rain knew it had been set. The only explanation was that Duane punched the code in and escaped the house. But where would he go?
When she had finished her rounds, she returned to the second floor, again stepping only on the runner’s faded blossoms. The pressure in her chest was painful now, burning. In her room, she wedged a chair under the door handle. She’d asked for a lock, for some privacy, but her mother had said there was no need—privacy was a foreign concept to her mother—and that was the end of that, so she was reduced to this half-ass measure. She pulled the curtains tight across the window (always aware he—the murderer—could be watching) and then turned on the small bedside lamp. The light glared flatly, revealing the slippery-looking chintz on the spread and curtains, the god-awful furniture—fake French provincial. Her mother’s idea of sophistication. Rain’s idea of ugly. Ugly. Ugly. Ugly. The fist in her chest shifted to her belly, clenched so tight it was like a menstrual cramp.
She opened the second drawer of her bureau and took out her pajamas, then stripped, turning away from the mirror so she wouldn’t have to look at herself. She didn’t need a reflection to know how she looked. Her thin body, her badly shorn hair that she’d cut with a pair of her mother’s sewing shears. A pixie cut, her mother had called it, in the way she always tried to transform a disaster into something else. Are you eating lunch at school? I can pack something if you don’t like cafeteria food. Her mother would rather eat fingernails than mention her worst fear. Anorexia.