long, thick handle of the flashlight made a comforting weight when Dena’s fingers gathered it in. She didn’t turn it on yet, though. Her mind shrieked for a look down the hall but she didn’t want to be holding the flash when it lit. That would only shout out her own location. She stepped into the closet and knelt, laying the Maglite on the hall floor. Then she switched it on and quickly stood up amid the clutter. One glimpse down the hallway made her wish she’d left things in the dark. The drip she’d heard didn’t come from the rain.
Where the hall intersected the living room there hung a cheap, brass chandelier, and a body in black clothes and black knitted cap dangled from it. Blood dripped from the leg to the floor, but the person had not been killed at that spot. Someone had dragged them across the linoleum, leaving red smears behind. Those swirled patterns started outside the closet and Dena looked down to see her feet stained and sticky with crimson. The sight made her gag and she fought to swallow the acid lifting in her throat. Then it hit her. The killer had hid in this closet too!
Dena stiffened, started to suck in air that seemed too weak to feed her. In the reflected light of the flash she could see shoes sitting next to her reddened feet, and she could imagine them full of legs. She could imagine the empty clothes behind her gradually swelling with human shapes. She could hear breathing, ragged. You’re hyperventilating, her mind yelled, but the adrenaline was shouting too loud for anything else to be heard. Something brushed her cheek and she whooped in fear as she leaped out of the closet. Her feet slipped in blood and she fell.
The chimes whipped into sound as Dena’s fingers scrabbled for the Maglite. They found it, closed around the handle. The closet was empty; she could see that now. But the sliding glass door at the back of the house had just grated open. Dena pushed to her knees, both the gun and the light stabbed down the hall. A gust of hurricane struck her in the face. Shadows spattered before the light, made grotesque by the gale-stirred movements of the dangling corpse. The plywood that had covered the sliding door at the rear of the house was peeled back and the glass was open, letting rain into the living room, letting in wind that sent the chimes into a mad skittering dance.
Dena jumped to her feet and ran across to the back door, trying not to glance at the dead body hanging from her chandelier. The killer must have fled, she figured, and through the left-open doorway the gale came roaring into Dena’s living room. She pushed the glass closed and locked it, the chimes falling silent as their wind supply dried up. The house still thrummed in the big wind outside, and Dena could see trees in the yard bending down like old men. She also saw something else, an odd design scrawled on the glass door. It was a heart with a cobra inside it, drawn in shiny lipstick. When she realized what it was she stepped back, her stomach suddenly churning with bile.
The symbol represented a tattoo, the one Troy’s rapist had worn on his chest. Troy’s attacker had hidden behind a mask and a long blonde wig, and the tattoo had been the only identifying characteristic Dena’s husband could remember. Dena had sat in horror as Troy described it to the police sketch artist in a voice that held an emotionless void. And later, she had accidentally surprised her husband while he was drawing the symbol in a cold hand in the notebook where he kept his private thoughts.
“The bastard came back,” Dena muttered, staring at the image of the tattoo and lashing herself with words. But who had been in the house with him? A friend? A burglar? And who had killed who? Was it the rapist hanging in the hall? She hoped it was.
A single set of chimes rang.
Dena spun away from the sliding door, flashing her light over the walls and ceiling. The chimes hung still and stiff as cocoons. And there were no others in the house. Except! When Jeremy was born she had put a set of porcelain teddy bears over his crib, and though the crib was long gone the chimes were still there above the place where he slept. Jeremy wasn’t tall enough to reach them.
Dena started to run, heading down the hallway on the fastest route to the stairs. She didn’t even glance at the hanging corpse; she was too busy swallowing the terrified shouts her throat wanted to let out. They would only warn the invader that she was coming.
The teddy bear chimes rang again, louder than before, as if someone had picked up Jeremy and brushed him against the wires. And Dena heard her son’s voice, murmurous with sleep as he asked a question.
“Mommy?”
Dena was on the stairs, taking them three at a time, making noise now that she couldn’t control. She heard Jeremy’s bed creak as something was dropped on it, and by that time she was to the doorway of her son’s room and stepping inside. The night light had gone dark—the hurricane had finally killed the electricity—but the glow of Dena’s flash was enough to still the scene, enough to see her little boy fallen on the bed, screaming of a sudden as he saw his mommy at the door and not in the shadow looming over him.
That shadow moved toward her, its hand gleaming with a knife. Without thinking, Dena pushed the gun out from her body and pulled the trigger twice, aiming for the torso. She saw the figure stagger as it was hit, saw its hand still moving, reaching out. She fired again, the slug punching into the face. As the shape went back and down, the reaching hand closed over the porcelain bears and ripped them shrieking from the ceiling. A knitted cap spun away and long blonde hair poured out to frame a sharp-featured face that shown waxy and bloodless in the Maglite’s glow.
A woman!, Dena thought, as she saw the cloud of hair and the crimson lips. Then her mind translated what her eyes had registered. No. A mask and wig.
She looked down at Jeremy. He was staring at the body where it lay pinned to the floor by the stabbing beam of the flashlight, and she stepped forward and scooped him up, tucking his head into her shoulder where he couldn’t see anything but her T-shirt. He wasn’t crying, but his arms went around Dena’s neck so hard that she thought she would choke, in more ways than one. She put her hand to her son’s back, holding him tight, and she was crying for him as she started out of the room and out of the house. She wanted him away from here, though she had an idea that it would take more than just walking out the door.
* * * * * * *
Twenty minutes later Dena walked back into her house without Jeremy. It had taken a while to wake Morgan Keller next door, and by the time he had answered the bell both mother and son were soaked by the slanting rain. Keller had brought towels and blankets for Jeremy, and Dena had explained the night’s events while she rocked her son back to sleep. As soon as the little boy’s eyes closed, the man carried him upstairs to bed. Morgan had asked Dena to stay while he woke his wife, but she had decided against waiting to see Marge. Jeremy trusted the woman. Keller had said he was going to call the police, too, but it might be hours before they could get here and Dena wasn’t going to wait to see them either. She had to put faces on the dead.
Down her hall was the chandelier with its cargo of the dead, and Dena went toward it with the Maglite in one hand and the pistol in the other. She wanted to know which of the two corpses belonged to Troy’s rapist. This one had been strangled with a set of wind chimes but Dena didn’t think it was the rapist. She looked up at a face that had turned all purple from lack of air, and she realized that Marge Keller was not next door with Jeremy. She was here, with her shirt torn away and a lipstick tattoo of a heart and a cobra scrawled between her breasts.
As if to accompany the sudden insane thud of Dena’s heart, a music box started to play. The tune was familiar. Dena had already heard it once this night, and many times before when she owned the box from which it tinkled. With fear daggering her spine, she turned to see a figure in the doorway of her house; a light in its hand was strong enough to brighten the whole hall. Morgan Keller stood behind that light, a shotgun leveled at Dena’s chest. The music box sat on the floor, its lid open.
“Marge always liked that tune,”
