Page 43

With Baxter on my hip, we search every inch of the ground floor.
We start in the rooms where a man in a mask can move around freely without fear of being seen from the street: the master bedroom; the attached bathroom, after I’ve lowered the shades on the window looking out onto a neighbor’s guesthouse; the closet beyond with a long sheet of glass high up on a wall, a rectangular slice of trees and birds and sky. We check closets and peer under furniture, open chests and dump out drawers, shove clothing aside to poke a gun into the darkest corners. The whole time, I hold my breath and pray I won’t find my daughter.
But everywhere we look, there’s no Beatrix.
Which is more than a little surprising, since she’s never been the most original kid when it comes to hide-and-seek. The giggling lump behind a curtain or a half-closed door, or the body attached to the feet sticking out from under the bed. Wherever she is, she’s well hidden. I just pray to God she stays that way.
“Baby, I can’t hold you much longer,” I whisper to Baxter as we’re moving through the front rooms—the study and the dining room, the galley butler’s pantry lined on one side with windows. “I’m going to have to put you down, just for a minute.”
“Nooo.” Baxter clings tighter, wrapping his legs around me and clamping on with extraordinary strength. The kid’s always been an acrobat. He’s had a six-pack since he was two.
We’re both all too aware of the man. He sticks close, never letting us wander more than ten feet away, jabbing the air between us with the butt of his gun, urging me from room to room.
I jostle Baxter higher on my hip and keep moving.
We come around to the back of the house, where I jiggle the last door handle and tug on the last window, even though the red light on the alarm pad said the system was still armed. That means Beatrix is still in the house somewhere.
“These are locked, too,” I say. “Everything’s locked.”
He stands at the edge of the room, on the far side of the wall separating the living space from the kitchen. Anyone on the front doorstep right now might see the toes of his shoes, the muzzle of his gun, but the rest of him is well out of sight. Everything about the way he’s standing is intentional. It’s chilling how familiar he is with our home.
“Any other way out?”
I shake my head. “Not without tripping the alarm, no.”
“Does she know the code?”
This gives me pause, even though my headshake is immediate. I don’t think Beatrix knows the code, but she pays attention. She hears things even when I think she’s not listening. It’s possible she knows the code, and it’s possible that in all the commotion upstairs we didn’t hear her disarm, then rearm the system and leave, but the doors are all locked. She couldn’t have done that, not without a key. I think about the spare in the kitchen drawer, or the one on a key chain in the bottom of my purse, but I don’t say a word.
“What about the basement?”
There’s no way Beatrix would have chosen the basement for a hiding spot, not without me or her father at her side. For the kids, the basement is a dark and hostile place, filled with spiderwebs and skeleton walls and dusty shapes looming in the darkness. They’re terrified of the place—which is a good part of why Cam and I have never considered finishing it.
He juts his chin at the bookshelves behind me and beyond, the hallway that leads to the basement door. “Let’s go take a look.”
Baxter wriggles deeper into my chest, clutching me tighter. “Mommy, I don’t wanna go downstairs.” My sweatshirt pulls on a shoulder from where it’s bunched in one of his tight fists.
“It’s okay, sweetie. We won’t be down there long.”
The man orders me to do a quick check of the street, then hustles us across the living room and down the hall, where I flip the dead bolt and pull open the door. A chilly draft rushes up from the darkness, and I shiver—not from the cold but with the beginning wisp of a plan.
The basement is where Cam keeps his tools.
I feel around the wall for the light switch, and a bare, dusty bulb flicks on, shining light on the steep wooden stairs, rickety and builder-assembled to pass code, but just barely. I follow them down, down, down into the darkness.
The stairs dump us onto a concrete slab, and I blink into the pitch-black basement. The air is a good ten degrees cooler down here, and it smells of underground, of dirt and dust and creatures living and dying.
I flip another switch, and it lights up the first room, an unfinished square tomb piled high with plastic boxes and furniture. A high chair, a crib, our old queen mattress and box springs, the plate rack that came with the antique buffet in the dining room but I found too fussy. Everything is neatly stacked, one on top of the other like giant blocks, then arranged against vertical studs waiting for drywall. Beyond it, the space that runs the length of the house is cloaked in blackness.
The man calls out into the shadows, “Beatrix, if you’re down here, sweetie, now would be the time to make yourself known. Come out now and I promise not to hurt you.”
No answer. Only the sound of Baxter’s shallow breaths against my shoulder. I cover my son’s head with a hand, his fine hair tangling in my fingers.
“Are there any doors or windows?”
I turn, gesturing to where dim light trickles like water from somewhere deep in the darkness, a window well concealed behind thick hedges. Even on sunny days, very little light makes it through.
“Stay here while I check,” he says. “Move and both of you get a bullet.”