Page 47

Moscow, Idaho

E mily Alandt is at her apartment in the building next door having breakfast with Hunter Johnson, Josie, and Linden when she answers Dylan’s call.

“Can you come over?” Dylan asks her big sister. “I don’t really know if I was dreaming or not, but I think there was a man here, and I’m really scared. Can you come check out the house?”

Emily is amused. It’s not the first time Dylan has said crazy stuff after she’s had a few drinks.

“Ha-ha. Should I bring my pepper spray?” she teases.

Emily takes the time to find a sweatshirt before trotting toward the King Road house.

But Hunter, driven perhaps by some sixth sense, is ahead of her.

He enters the house and passes Dylan and Bethany, who are barefoot, hands over their mouths, crying. They wait while he goes up the stairs and heads to the passage that will take him to Xana’s room.

The first sign that something is very wrong is that Xana’s door is cracked open a few inches.

Xana never sleeps with her door open.

But Hunter soon sees that Xana isn’t in bed asleep.

She’s lying on the floor as if she’d fallen backward into the room. Ethan is motionless in the bed behind her.

There are rivers of blood.

Adrenaline takes over. As does a strong protective instinct. He goes back down to Dylan and Bethany. “Call 911,” he says. “And stay outside,” he says as calmly as he can.

He turns and heads back upstairs, where he goes into the kitchen and gets a kitchen knife. Is the person who did this still here?

He heads across the hall back to Xana’s bedroom. When he’s at her doorway, he hears someone coming up the stairs.

He turns around and sees Emily coming toward him.

He stops her, putting a hand on her shoulders and talking as softly as he can: “You cannot go in there,” he tells her.

Emily doesn’t understand.

He tries again. “Emily, I don’t think Xana’s going to wake up,” he says firmly.

And Emily stops moving; she stops speaking; she’s rooted in shock.

“I’m going in to take their pulses,” he says.

Eventually she turns and heads back down the stairs.

Hunter goes into Xana’s bedroom.

He takes Xana’s pulse, knowing that he won’t feel a beat.

He doesn’t.

And then Hunter goes over to the bed, to his best friend, Ethan, lying there, facing the wall, peacefully but lifelessly. Again, there’s no pulse.

He now walks around the room, checking the closets. There’s no one there. In a trance, he walks out of the bedroom, knife in hand, and stands in the living room.

Meanwhile, the others are outside on the phone with the emergency responder. The operator is asking them to stop passing the phone around but in their panic that’s all they can think to do.

Bethany and Dylan are too upset to be intelligible so Josie tries to give the address as clearly as she can, explaining that one of the roommates is unconscious.

“One of the roommates is passed out and she was drunk last night and she’s not waking up…

oh and they saw a man in their house last night. ”

Dylan takes the phone back and tries to start in about what she saw at four a.m., but the operator cuts her off.

She wants to know what is happening right now. Is someone passed out right now ?

There’s a pause as they call for Hunter inside the house, who hollers back to them.

“She’s not waking up,” Dylan tells the operator.

Hunter comes out and takes the phone from Dylan.

“Is she breathing?” the operator asks.

“No,” Hunter says, with all the calm he can muster. Then he hands the phone back to Dylan and goes to wait inside.

The operator tells Dylan that she’s summoned help, and to stay on the line. She asks Dylan if she can find a defibrillator.

Dylan asks the others. None of them knows where a defibrillator is.

None of them, other than Hunter, knows anything.

But wordlessly they are each screaming the same questions:

Why is Xana not waking up?

Where is Ethan?

Why is Hunter Johnson telling them to say outside?

And what about Kaylee and Maddie?

Huddled on the sidewalk, dressed in their nightwear, the friends have no idea whether Kaylee and Maddie are inside the house. They do know from their location-sharing apps that the girls’ phones are there.

But they also know that neither is answering.