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Baxter lays a clammy hand on my cheek and turns my face to his. “Mommy, Beatrix is not in the basement.” His voice is a shout-whisper, the kind he uses to tell his deepest, darkest secrets—like what I’m getting for Mother’s Day weeks before he and Beatrix present me with a package. Baxter thinks if he whispers something, he’s not spoiling the surprise.
But I wish he’d keep quiet, especially if he happens to know where his sister is hiding.
And even if he doesn’t, every word Baxter utters, every move he makes, puts him square in the spotlight, when it’s so much safer for him to fade into the background. I need him to keep quiet because I want this man to deal withme, not my children.
He stares at Baxter like he’s stuffed with gold. “Do you know where your big sister is?”
The screwdriver is like plutonium, tingling against my skin. If I slid it out of my sleeve right now, I could hold him off of Baxter for a second or two, but I only get one chance. The worst thing would be to waste it.
He steps closer, and Baxter and I lean back, knocking one of the frames from the wall. Great-Great-Grandpa Wally, who played shortstop in the army baseball league. His picture crashes to the floor with a sickening crunch, scattering glass shards across the hallway.
“No.” I shake my head. “Of course Baxter doesn’t know.”
Baxtermightknow. The kids play hide-and-seek often enough, and he knows all the best spots, places our captor didn’t think to look. Squeezed into the dead space between the laundry hamper and the long dresses in my closet, for example, or curled up inside the covered ottoman in the study. Bax can probably even rattle off a couple I don’t know about.
The man’s gaze whips to mine. “No offense, but when it comes to your kids, you’re not the most reliable witness. I prefer to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” He scratches a gloved finger over Baxter’s knee. “Hello, horsey.”
It isn’t really a question, and Baxter doesn’t answer. I clutch his body tighter to mine.
“Come on, little guy, I thought you and I were friends.” A slight edge has snuck into the man’s voice, a not-so-subtle warning. “Friends don’t keep secrets. Now tell me where your big sister’s hiding.”
But this time Bax isn’t falling for it. By now he’s seen too much—the awful words this man has been slinging around, the gun in his fist and the switchblade in his pocket. Baxter knows the masked man is not his friend. He shrugs against my shoulder and mumbles, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
Baxter shakes his head.
“But you just said she wasn’t downstairs.”
He nods.
The man’s eyes go a little wide, a universal gesture for WTF. “Then how do you know?”
“’Cause the scary man who bangs on the pipes lives down there. How come you wear a mask? Do you have superpowers?”
Just then, a familiar sound sticks the breath to my lungs. A key, rattling in the front door.
All heads whip in the direction of the noise, even though we can’t see the door from where we’re standing. Not with the four-foot stretch of wall, a solid boundary between the base of the stairs and the front door, blocking the view. I stare at the alabaster plaster, breathless.
The man’s whisper laps at the side of my neck. “Who’s that?”
I shake my head, the burning in my arm muscles bleeding away into a panicky tingle. Is it Cam, returning home already with the money? I hold my breath and wait, clutching Baxter to my chest, straining to hear. Five full seconds of frozen terror.
There’s a sharp sound of metal on wood, followed by a whoosh of outside air.
And then two things happen all at once. A long steady beeping erupts from the alarm pad bolted onto the bedroom wall, and a familiar voice sings out a hello.
Tanya Lloyd, the neighbor from across the street.
“Jade, are you here?”
With impressive speed, the man tugs me down the hall and into the bedroom. “Tell her not to move,” he hisses, flipping open the cover on the alarm panel and ticking in the code.“Do it.”Just in case, he raises the gun six inches from my face—as if I need convincing.
“Hang on, Tanya,” I shout, pointing my face into the hallway. “Stay where you are. I’ll be right there.”
My words don’t stop her footsteps from moving deeper into the house. Tanya is our nosiest neighbor, the kind who parks herself in her bay window when the kids are at school so she can keep an eye on the street. She knows every neighbor within a five-mile radius. She knows their kids’ names and their dogs’ names and what day their lawn and pool service comes. She knows who’s pregnant and who’s getting married or on the verge of divorce, and which houses are about to go on the market weeks before the broker hammers a For Sale sign in the grass. If one of our neighbors forgets to pick up their dog’s shit from our front yard, Tanya calls to tell me who it was, and exactly which bush it’s under. She is a one-woman security patrol, and she drives Cam and me up a tree.
And now she’s here, in our house. Standing in the foyer. If she comes in any farther, and she will, which way will she go? Left, into the kitchen and the television room beyond? Or right for the stairs—in full view of us, standing just inside the bedroom doorway.