Megan woke with a start, her breathing ragged.
She reached over and ran
her thumb over the smooth green stone on the bedside table. “I am here,” she
whispered. “I am safe.”
Her heart rate slowly
returning to normal, she took a sip of water from the cup next to the stone. Outside
a dog was barking—probably the Hoovers’ Irish Setter, and probably what had
woken her. With her aunt and uncle out of town, Megan would be alive to every
sound in and around the empty house. As always at this time of night, she yearned
for her tiny apartment, free of dark corners and spooky sounds. Her friends
called it a shoebox, but they would never understand why Megan needed to see
the front door from every corner of her home.
Now, though, she needed to
sleep.
Megan lay back down and,
closing her eyes, started reciting the alphabet backwards. The soft click of a
door—or what she thought was the soft click of a door—made her fly up again.
You’re being ridiculous, she scolded herself. Her
aunt and uncle’s house sat in a quiet, middle-class Minnesota suburb where
nothing ever happened, except the occasional bike theft. The only burglary she
knew of was the time Jim Clendenny broke into his grandma’s house to steal $10
for weed. He’d said he was sorry, and that was the end of it. The next-door
neighbor was even a cop, for god’s sake.
Andy.
He was definitely home—she’d
seen him a few hours ago, sitting on his mother’s back porch with his sister,
the two of them chatting in low voices. She’d nearly gone out to say hello, but
afraid to intrude, had decided against it. She and Andy already had plans to
take an ice tea break tomorrow morning, while he painted the garage and she
weeded her aunt’s flower beds. Megan had even made her aunt’s special ice tea
recipe in anticipation of it.
She was trying to remember
if there were any lemons in the refrigerator when she the sound of footsteps in
the hallway shocked her into stillness. She hadn’t imagined it, or dreamt it,
or simply feared it. Someone was in the house.
Whimpering to herself, Megan started to scramble out of bed, but she’d left it too late. A silhouette stood in the doorway of her bedroom.
“Megan Cooper,” a male voice said. “How nice to meet you.”
