Over Her Dead Body(6)

The floodlights had clicked off by the time I wound my way through the house to the pantry. The cameras had night vision, so I could still see my yard. I’m sure the technology was top of the line twenty years ago when my husband had installed it, but by today’s standards the thick black monitor was clunky, and the grainy green images resembled a video game my grown children used to play when they were still innocent and lovable.

I toggled from the interior cameras—foyer, dining room, living room, kitchen; my husband had installed them just about everywhere, because God forbid we had to get out of bed in the night—to the ones in the backyard. There were two of them mounted under the eaves, and their sight lines overlapped. One looked out into the dense thicket beyond the library. The other looked toward the driveway.

At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me when I saw the human figure crouched in the copse of willows in my side yard. The image on-screen was shaky and strobed intermittently—it was easy to imagine shapes that weren’t really there.

But then the figure moved. The silhouette was slight: A teenage boy? A woman? I watched in stunned silence as he, or she, crept along the tree line. It took me a moment to orient myself to the image, but I promptly determined there was someone in my driveway, and that he or she was staking out my house.

In the thirty-some-odd years I had lived in my sprawling storybook, I had never had a prowler. I didn’t know what to do. I loathed the idea of summoning the police. By the time they got here, my trespasser would likely be long gone, and then I’d have to endure a half hour of chitchat with one of them while the other trampled over my geraniums. I didn’t think the pesky intruder could get in. All my doors and windows were locked, or at least I thought they were? I had become so forgetful these days: an inevitable consequence of my advanced age and mundane existence.

I decided to call Nathan; he had only just left, he’d come back if I asked him to. I crossed to the foyer table and plucked my phone out of my purse. But as the phone rang on Nathan’s end, the battery died. I had forgotten to charge it. Even if I plugged it in, it would be several minutes until it came back to life. Plus the charger was all the way up in my bedroom, and I needed to address this problem now.

I glanced back at the monitor. The figure had jumped from the driveway camera to the one in the side yard: getting closer. I still couldn’t make out the gender of the person, only that he, or she, was wearing a sports cap of a team whose logo I didn’t recognize. Not just an intruder, but a foreigner, too.

The figure turned, and I saw the C-curve of a bustline silhouetted against the green-gray sky: definitely a woman. There was something in her hand. A rope? Yes, it’s a rope! Perhaps I’d seen one too many Hitchcock movies, because the sight of that rope turned my annoyance to alarm. If the perfect crime had come to claim me, I had no intention of succumbing.

I cursed my carelessness in letting my phone battery die. I didn’t have a landline—my children had convinced me to get rid of that years ago—or a security alarm that I could pull. But I did have a gun. It was, in fact, right there in the pantry. I had learned to shoot when I was just a girl, and I was still a damn fine shot.

I extracted my antique Smith & Wesson from its hiding place behind a sack of flour in the pantry.

And went to confront my intruder.





CHAPTER 5




* * *



ASHLEY


“Brando, come!” I called out in my best stage whisper as I crept through the trees that hugged the uneven gravel drive. I tried to keep my voice low but urgent, but it came out sounding like something between a bark and the hiss of a tire deflating.

I was seven lampposts in when the asymmetrical silhouette of the house came into view. It was utterly medieval looking with its jagged shingles and a roof so steep it seemed almost concave. Moonlight glinted off haphazardly arranged windows—some rectangular, some round or oval—and a pair of mismatched turrets shot up into the sky like rockets ready to take flight. There was a Romeo and Juliet–inspired balcony over an enormous dome-like front door made of knotty, dark wood and framed by swirls of ivy. The double-wide chimney was a collage of bumpy, jumbled river rocks and was capped by what looked like a giant mushroom.

“Brando, come here,” I begged as I waded through the thick underbrush. This was not the first time Brando had wandered off to investigate a noise or befriend a fellow canine or rodent of some sort, but it was the first time he’d disappeared out of sight. I knew it was irresponsible to let him off his leash on our nightly walks, but it made me happy to watch his fluffy tail swishing back and forth as he trotted wherever his ears and nose steered him. And he usually came when I called. Even when he didn’t, nothing bad ever happened. I would just go and collect him from whatever new friend or smelly trash can had enticed him away, then wag an admonishing finger at him not to do it again.

Of course there was another reason I let my dog run free. It was the same reason I left my family and a great group of friends to move out west: I liked taking risks. I loved how stepping out of my comfort zone sharpened my senses and made my heart pound all the way up to my ears. I wasn’t reckless—I just had faith that if I followed my instincts, things would work out. Like that time my friends from acting class and I got all dressed up and rode the train downtown to see a concert we didn’t have tickets to. We trusted that if we were meant to get in, we would. Was it our confidence that compelled the event promoter to approach us with free front-row seats? Or something else? I know it’s childish to believe in guardian angels, but at the same time, isn’t it presumptuous to think we humans control everything? I didn’t know if my guardian angels were watching that night, but if they were, I hoped they had my back.