“I’m going to boost you,” Jesse whispers.
He does, and I peer through at a better angle. There’s enough moonlight for me to make out furnishings. An old sofa. An armchair with books substituting for one leg. As my gaze travels to the dining room doorway, I notice a large dark stain on the carpet. The moonlight catches it, and it glistens, still wet.
“I think I see blood,” I whisper, and I try to get a better look. Jesse adjusts his grip and boosts me higher while Chris grabs the windowsill and hoists himself up to peer inside.
“Damn,” Chris whispers. “That does seem like blood. A lot of it.”
I’m about to tell Jesse to take a look when I notice something to the side of the wet patch. Just past the dining room doorway. Moonlight glints off an object on the floor.
A knife? I squint. It’s an odd shape. And there’s a second one like it a few inches away. Smaller pieces litter the linoleum and the carpet at the border between the rooms.
“Glass,” I murmur.
“What?” Chris says.
“It’s a broken tumbler,” I say. “The pieces are there. That’s what the stain’s from.”
“Oh, right. Now I see. It’s not blood, then. Just Coke or something.” Chris sounds disappointed.
Jesse lowers me to the ground. “So someone dropped a glass of liquid and left the whole mess – including the broken glass? I don’t care how bad a housekeeper – no one does that. It’s not safe, for one thing.”
“And it doesn’t seem like Owen is a bad housekeeper. The place is tidy otherwise.”
“Maybe some of it is blood,” Chris says. “Owen dropped a glass. Got cut. Took off to the hospital.”
Jesse says nothing. He climbs onto the back deck and creeps toward the door. As he peers through the window, I resist the urge to join him. Someone should stand guard, and Chris is already slipping off to the next window.
Jesse comes back off the deck and whispers, “Just a mudroom and a couple of closed doors.”
We follow Chris. He’s boosted himself up to check through the other rear window. When Jesse lifts me, I see an empty room. Through it is the kitchen.
We tackle the basement windows next, but they’re boarded up. There’s no way of getting up to the second floor. Even the trees are too far to climb.
“So we’ve got a broken tumbler,” I say. “That’s it.”
“But the house is empty,” Chris says. “If we can get in, we should look around. That broken glass means something.”
I say nothing. I agree, but I don’t want to make Jesse be the grown-up here. When I glance at Jesse, he’s eyeing the house, considering.
“You two go,” Chris says. “I’ve got guard duty.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Text us if you hear anything.”
Skye
We break in the back door. That sounds far more badass than it is. While Chris and I hunt for a window to go through, Jesse demonstrates the advantage of being the levelheaded one. We’re getting ready to smash through glass… and he’s looking for a spare key. He finds one under a rock. It opens the back door.
The door leads into a mudroom. One pair of work boots sits on the mat. Above them hang the overalls Owen wears at school.
“So he came home today.” I check the overall pockets and find a key ring. Jesse compares the keys to the spare and says, “No match. They don’t look like car keys, either.”
This set must be Owen’s school keys. He keeps his car and house keys on another ring. I’m also guessing he has another pair of shoes for going out. Those aren’t here either. More evidence that we won’t find Owen inside.
Two doors lead off the mudroom. The first one opens into the living room. The other goes to a dark basement. When I take a step down, Jesse catches my arm and whispers, “There’s a lock.”
He points at a keyhole.
“Right,” I say. “And it’s open.”
“Exactly.”
He’s leaning in to explain when I whisper, “Oh,” and he nods. If Owen was keeping Tiffany behind a locking basement door, he’d have secured it before he left.
“But —” I begin.
“She could still be down there,” he whispers. “I know. She’s not going anywhere, though. That sounds cruel…”
He trails off, and I understand. We’re reasonably certain Owen isn’t here. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should head straight into the basement when it’ll only take a few minutes to confirm that the house really is empty.
We creep into the living room. As we approach the broken glass, I can see that the stain is still wet, but the liquid has soaked into the carpet. Spilled a while ago. I bend to inhale the caramel sweetness of cola.
Jesse’s examining the broken glass. His gaze catches on one piece. Then he looks to the floor, his gaze skimming over the linoleum before rising to the wall. I move into the dining room and see what he sees.
There’s blood on that one big piece of glass. None on the linoleum that I can see, but when I follow Jesse’s gaze, I spot blood spatter on the wall. Not much, though.
“Dropped the glass, picked up a piece, cut his finger and shook it?” I say. “Spattering blood on the wall?”
“Maybe.”
A board creaks overhead. Jesse grips my arm, as if I’m about to race for the stairs. I give him a look, and he eases off with a mouthed apology. We both strain to listen, but no other sounds come. Jesse takes a careful step toward the front of the house. One more step and —
A scrabbling noise sounds over our heads, and we both jump. As I turn, I can still hear it, seemingly coming from the wall beside us. The exterior wall.
I’m creeping toward the window when a high-pitched squeak has me falling back. A dark shape swoops past the window, and I startle-jump again. We both do. Then another shape follows and Jesse says, “Bats.”
I move to the window. A third bat swoops down from the eaves and takes off into the night. The scrabbling in the walls has stopped.
I grumble under my breath, and we stand there, looking around, as if forgetting what we’ve been doing.
Jesse whispers, “All clear down here.”
It does seem to be – if anyone was around, we’d have given ourselves away, jumping at the bats.
Jesse checks his watch. A hint that Owen won’t be gone forever. I glance at the back door, thinking of the basement, but Jesse motions overhead. I nod.
We slip to the front hall. Through the kitchen doorway, I see dishes piled in the sink. Quite a few dishes, considering Owen seems a tidy homeowner. A sign that he’s feeding a captive, too?
The smell of fried chicken hangs in the air, but I don’t see takeout containers. There’s a cast-iron pan in the sink.
Jesse taps my arm. Nothing to see here. Time to get upstairs.
We’re almost to the second floor when a noise sounds from the attic. We both stop and look up.
No other sounds come.
I mouth, “Bats?”
Jesse shrugs. We continue on, slower now. Above us, on the second floor, we see four doors. Two are closed. We can see through the other two – a bedroom in one and a bath in the other.
Jesse’s looking between the two closed doors. That’s when something moves over his head, and I’m grabbing his shoulder to yank him back, and then I realize it’s a dangling cord.
The cord hangs from a trapdoor in the ceiling. And it’s swaying.
“Attic?” I mouth.
He nods.
I pantomime a bat and point at the cord, asking if he thought a bat might have set it swinging. He studies that cord for another moment. Then he motions for us to approach the trapdoor.
If it’s not a bat, then something in the attic set the cord swaying, something moving about. Something that could be a girl bound and gagged, held prisoner right over our heads.
I’m right behind him. He’s passing the railing at the top of the stairs. A thump sounds behind me, and I turn and —
A stifled cry of rage. A blur of motion. I’m spinning toward it, and I see an open door. An open door where there’d been a closed one.