Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(15)

If she had ever found out . . .

Roger shudders to think of her reaction.

But she never did, and now that he’s all alone, he sometimes feels like those old magazines are his only pleasure in life. Yes, and if he breaks a leg, God only knows when he’d be able to get to them again.

Grumbling to himself, he goes out into the hall, leaving the door propped open, and hits the light switch.

Nothing happens.

The damned overhead bulb is burned out again. It’s bright as a Havana beach outside, but you’d never know it if you were stuck in the hallway of this dark old building.

Depressing, that’s what it is. But Roger has lived here for years, and though he can afford to move, at his age, he doesn’t like change. Hell, he’s never liked change.

The neighborhood has gone downhill over the past decade or two, and the house has changed ownership a few times. The latest landlord doesn’t keep up with things the way the others have, but at least he hasn’t raised the rent.

Clinging to the banister, Roger clumps slowly down the steep, creaky flight of stairs, making sure his shoes land good and hard on every tread.

On the first floor, he crosses the small, shadowy vestibule and knocks on the apartment door marked 1.

No answer.

He knocks again.

“Coming,” a faint, muffled voice calls.

Footsteps inside. Odd—they sound like heels tapping on hardwoods, reminding him, with a familiar pang, of Alice.

The door opens.

Roger is taken aback—and pleasantly surprised—to see a woman standing there in the dimly lit entry hall. She’s tall, taller than Roger, who’s almost six foot, and she’s stacked, too—he can see that in the tight sweater she’s wearing.

“Yes?” she asks, in a low, husky voice.

Roger seems to have forgotten why he’s here. He seems to have forgotten how to speak, too.

“I—you—where—ah—”

“Do you want to come in?” she asks.

Roger does. He can’t seem to find his tongue to tell her, but words don’t seem necessary, because she opens the door wide.

He crosses the threshold, and she closes it behind him. Hearing her slide the dead bolt, he feels a tightening in his groin, realizing what’s about to happen. It’s been so long since he’s been intimate with a woman—for the last few years of Alice’s life she was so sick, wasting away . . .

It isn’t until he’s followed her into the next room—a room with windows, and light, where he can see her—that he realizes he was wrong about what’s going to happen.

He was wrong about a lot of things.

She’s not a woman after all.

She’s a man, and she—he—is holding a butcher knife.

With the baby down for his nap, two more loads of laundry spinning in the washer and dryer, and Madison settled at the kitchen table with a peanut butter sandwich and a Berenstain Bears book, Allison heads for the sunroom at last.

She’s been meaning to check in on Mack all morning, but one thing led to another and she never got the chance.

Now she finds him standing on a ladder pressing a length of blue tape along the bottom edge of the crown molding. There’s a splotch of yellowish paint on one wall, but that’s it.

“How’s it going?” she asks him, and he jumps, startled. “Sorry . . . don’t fall.”

“It’s going,” he says with a shrug.

“Want some lunch? I can make you a sandwich.”

“Nah . . . I’ve got to get this finished. The taping is taking forever.”

“I can help.” She wouldn’t mind doing something constructive to take her mind off the news of Jerry Thompson’s suicide. She’s been troubled by it all morning.

“I don’t need help.”

“Mack . . .” Allison stands at the foot of the ladder. “Come on down. You can paint and I’ll finish taping.”

“I’ve got it.”

“But I have some time, and—”

“I said I’ve got it!”

Uh-oh. Major bad mood alert.

“Okay, fine.” Allison turns to go.

“Allie—”

She turns back.

Mack climbs down the ladder and rubs the spot between his shoulders. Once again, he didn’t bother to shave, and his green eyes are underscored with black circles.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I didn’t get much sleep again last night, and . . .”

“I figured.” She takes the roll of blue tape he hands her. “You need to go see Dr. Cuthbert again.”

“Not until November. I have an appointment on the twenty-fifth, remember?”

She remembers. That’s the Friday after Thanksgiving, and she’s the one who scheduled it for him, well in advance. Mack’s office is closed that day, and since the doctor only sees patients on weekdays, there aren’t many dates that work.

She’d suggested that he simply call in sick one day, and his response, predictably, was “I’m not going to lie and say I’m sick when I’m not.”

No, lying—even the kind of white lie that everyone tells—just doesn’t mesh with his moral code. Usually, that’s a quality she admires in Mack, so different from her own father, whose whole life was a lie. But sometimes, her husband’s sense of honor makes things a lot more challenging than they have to be.