I didn’t have time or desire to hear any of his old war stories. “No—”
“Where are you? Can I come get you? Believe me, you’ll thank me in the morning.”
I hung up and I covered my mouth with my hand and screamed until my throat ached. My heart was hammering at the base of my skull. The irony of it was, I felt like I was thinking clearly for the first time in months. I watched as Derrow went back into the garage. A second later, his driveway was illuminated by the truck’s taillights. Then he backed out.
I got the car in gear but I didn’t follow. Instead, I waited until he’d turned off his street and then I parked in front of his house.
*
The doors to Derrow’s house were all newish and secure. I wouldn’t be kicking these in, not unless I wanted to break an ankle. The basement had four subterranean windows, the kind set in a half-moon-shaped egress well. The windows in the front of the house were glass-block and would be difficult to break without making a hell of a racket. The ones in the back were made of single glass panes, though. I lay on the cold, wet grass and shone my flashlight into each, trying to gauge what might be down there. But the windows were old and caked with grime and I couldn’t see much. Finally, I just picked one.
I punched the handle of my flashlight through the glass and used it to clear away the jagged shards left clinging to the frame. Then I waited for a second, to see if neighbors came outside or porch lights turned on.
Nothing.
No one cared.
There was really no turning back now.
It was nine o’clock. I figured I had at least an hour before Derrow made it back from his new home in the woods. That would have to be enough time.
I looped the flashlight to my belt and lowered myself into the hollowed-out space in front of the window, hands bracing against the concrete lip of the foundation, my legs hanging down into the house. Then I slid forward and let go.
It went better in my head than it did in practice. The basement floor was farther down than I expected and I came down sideways, my left hip crunching against the concrete. I immediately wanted to throw up, flattened by a wave of pain. I lay there for a second on the cold, dusty floor. I was in over my head already. I reached into my pocket for my phone. Tom could get here in thirty minutes, maybe less. He probably wouldn’t even make me explain myself—if I said I needed him to come, he would. But my phone was toast: a spiderweb of broken glass and bleeding colors was all that remained of the touch screen.
“Have you been drinking,” I muttered to myself.
I struggled to my feet. Once I was up, I was okay. There would be a hell of a bruise in the morning, but at least I wasn’t paralyzed in Jack Derrow’s basement. And at least I hadn’t landed on my other hip, where my gun was holstered. I flipped the flashlight on and bounced the beam around the room. There wasn’t much to look at—boxes, neatly sealed up with packing tape; a weight machine that looked like it actually saw some use, unlike the ones in most people’s basements; a long white deep freezer, an ironing board stacked high with folded uniforms. I crept to the bottom of the steps and listened.
Nothing.
The house was dead silent.
I went up the creaky wooden steps, my hip protesting. I stopped every few feet to listen but still heard nothing, just my own anxious breathing. At the top of the staircase, I opened the door slowly, holding my breath and half expecting someone to stop me, but no one did. I closed the basement door behind me.
The house was neat and orderly, a small eat-in kitchen with speckled blue countertops and plaid wallpaper, a living room with sculpted blue carpet and fake wood paneling on the walls. Leather recliner, big entertainment stand with a tube television, the kind so heavy you needed three people to lift it. The only light on was the one I’d seen from the street, a lamp beside the recliner.
The house was outdated, but not out of the ordinary.
It looked like a boring, lonely person lived here.
I bounced the beam of the flashlight around, hoping to find a landline phone. But there wasn’t one, just an exposed jack mounted on the wall between the kitchen and living room.
If I was keeping someone hostage in my house, I probably wouldn’t have a working phone line either.
I still heard nothing, not even a breath.
But then it began to get weird.
The front door of the house had a metal bar across it, secured with a padlock. The floor creaked as I walked over to it and tugged on the padlock.
Ordinary houses didn’t have a door like this.
I stared at it for a long time, almost disbelieving my own eyes. Half expecting, after all of this, that there was nothing to find in the house, that I was wrong again.
But I knew better now. I might have been a lot of things, but wrong wasn’t one of them.
The sight of the door made me feel like a caged animal, panicky. I checked out the other doors: the one leading out to the deck at the rear of the house was secured with a similar lock. But the door off the kitchen that led to the garage, the one that Derrow used to come and go from his house, was just a regular door. I opened it and shined my flashlight around the garage. There was nothing to see, just typical garage fare: lawn mower, snow shovel, an oily, dirty smell. A peg board where tools had once hung from individual nails. Before he moved them to the new house, maybe. More boxes here too, stacked neatly against the wall.
Derrow was nothing if not orderly. I went back into the house, and that was when I heard the sound.
A gentle keening, an urgent whisper. I spun around with the flashlight, hitting all the walls. But it wasn’t coming from in here. I entered the foyer and stood by the barred front door, listening as I turned for the first time to the carpeted staircase that went the second floor.
At the top of the steps: another door, grey metal.
I crept up the steps and shone my flashlight on the door, taking in the knob of a dead bolt installed at eye level. Installed backward, so that you’d need a key to get down the steps but not up. I turned the knob and pulled open the door, taking care to disable the dead bolt so it didn’t lock behind me. Then I stopped and observed. There was a strange smell up here, musty and sour. The sound was getting louder.
“Veronica?” I said. “Sarah?”
The noise stopped and silence filled up the darkness again. But this time it was the soundless tension of listening. I swept the flashlight around the upstairs hallway. Four doors. Two of them had the backward dead bolts at eye level, again to keep something in the rooms rather than out.
“Veronica?” I said again, louder this time.
The wind blew outside, bare tree branches scraping against the house.
That was the only sound.
And then it wasn’t.
“In here, in here, in here,” a scratchy voice pleaded. There was a clang of metal on metal, the muffled thump of pounding on a wall.