Page 103 of Take Your Breath Away

Call me ASAP.

Cam was probably in class, but he’d feel the vibration in his pocket even if his phone was muted. He’d sneak a look, then tell the teacher he had to go to the bathroom.

Sure enough, three minutes later Tyler’s phone rang.

“What’s up?” Cam asked.

As quickly as he could, Tyler laid it out for him. That he’d seen this woman who might be Andrew’s wife. That he followed her home, but she refused to talk to him.

“What should I do?” Tyler said.

“That’s easy,” Cam said. “You go back and bang on that door until she answers and you find out what’s going on. You’ve got a right to know. Don’t be a pussy.”

Well, there you had it.

He ended the call, took another moment to prepare himself mentally for what might be an unpleasant conversation, then hopped on his bike and started pedaling back to that woman’s house. He was worried she might not even be there. She could have put away her groceries and gone out to run another errand or gone to work. Almost forty minutes had passed since he’d left her house.

But as he rounded the corner on Rosemont and headed down her street, he saw that her car was still there. Tyler set his bike on the lawn and went to the side door. There wasn’t a doorbell, so he rapped on it, hard.

“Hey!” he said. “I still want to talk to you!”

No response.

There were two small windows set high on the door and he peered into them, using his left hand as a visor. If he spotted her, he’d bang on the glass. He wasn’t leaving here until he got some answers.

As he was pressed up against the door, his right hand resting on the handle, he decided to give it a try, see if she’d unlocked it after he’d left.

It opened.

Fuck it, he thought. I’m going in.

Gifford Hunt, who lived in the house next door to the woman with the black Volvo, was coming out his front door at twenty-one minutes after one when he heard the shouting.

He’d just hit the remote to pop the trunk of his Buick because he was going to head to the driving range and hit a bucket of balls. Hunt, in his late sixties and retired from his traffic-light maintenance job with the city, kept his golf clubs in the trunk and liked to practice his swing when he wasn’t actually heading out to the course.

The shouting—it sounded like a male, repeating, “Shit! Shit! Oh shit!” several times—was followed seconds later by the sight of a young man, his hands bloodied, running from the house and hopping onto a bicycle.

Hunt watched, briefly stupefied, but then quickly thought to reach for his phone. He managed to capture several images of the man before he reached the end of the street and disappeared.

Now Hunt looked at his neighbor’s house. He crossed the lawn and walked down the side of the house to the door. He opened it and called inside.

“Candace?” he said. “You okay in there?”

Hunt, his hand shaking, pushed the door open farther and stepped tentatively into the house. He went up two steps and into the kitchen.

“Oh, sweet mother of God,” he said.

Forty-Three

Andrew

We’d trekked far enough into the woods that when I looked back, I could no longer see my Explorer or Matt’s Suburban. It wasn’t that they were specks in the distance. We had walked down into a small valley, then up again to the other side, and by that point had lost sight of the road we’d driven in on.

I stayed in the lead, as per Matt’s instructions. He was my guide, from behind.

“That way,” he’d say, and point. “Okay, over a little to the right. That’s it.”

After we’d been walking about five minutes, I spotted a large boulder ahead of us. A huge rock, about the size of a refrigerator, was sitting there amid the trees, as though it had been dropped from space.