Page 34 of The Intruder

NOW

CASEY

I wait until I’m sure Eleanor is asleep to look at the notebook.

Even though I’m still tired from being up with nightmares last night, it’s not difficult to stay awake.

First of all, I’ve still got all my clothes on from the day, having left them on in case I needed to get out of here in a hurry.

If I actually wanted to fall asleep, that would have been a challenge.

I can’t get my thoughts to stop racing. I invited a strange girl into my house, trying to help her, but now I’m the one who might need help.

There’s something about having Eleanor here that makes me think of the day I got fired from my teaching job. I’ve been trying not to think about it since I’ve been out here, but there’s something about lying awake on my lumpy sofa that brings back the painful memories.

It all started with Karisa Harrel. She didn’t deserve any of it. I walked that little girl out of the school building, and the next thing I knew…

I close my eyes for a moment. I can still feel the heavy wood of the baseball bat in my hands. Hear the glass shattering everywhere. The screams.

I’ll never forget that day. No chance.

After an hour of lying on the lumpy sofa, wallowing in my own thoughts, I pull myself into a sitting position.

I don’t know for sure that Eleanor has fallen asleep.

For all I know, she is lying awake in her bed the same way I am lying awake on the couch.

But her room is quiet, and when I creep over to the door, I imagine that I can hear her deep breathing.

I return to the sofa and take the green notebook out from under the cushions.

The glow provided by the candles is relatively dim, but the fireplace gives me enough light to see what I’m looking at.

The cover is the same color as a Christmas tree, except for the smear of crimson that my fingers must have left behind.

The first thing I look for is a name or address written on the cover. Isn’t that what kids do at that age? They label their property?

But there’s nothing.

Just as I am about to open the notebook to the first page, there’s a rustling sound from behind the closed bedroom door. I quickly shove the notebook back under the cushion, just in time for the bedroom door to swing open.

“Casey?”

Eleanor is standing in the doorway, rubbing her eyes. She has put my sweater on over the oversize shirt, and she’s wearing the fresh pair of pants I gave her—also too big. I don’t blame her for bundling up, because the room is too cold to just be wearing a T-shirt.

“Hey.” I smile up at her, trying not to look guilty as hell. “What’s wrong?”

“I…I can’t sleep.”

Even though I have now pegged her to be about twelve or thirteen, there is something very childlike about her declaration.

After all, only children think to fetch an adult to help them sleep.

As an adult, you just lie in bed, struggling with your insomnia and trying to stave off your own dark thoughts alone.

I feel a stab of guilt that she trusts me enough to elicit my help after I went through her stuff.

I stand up from the couch. “What’s wrong? Is it too cold?”

She shrugs.

I follow her into the bedroom. It is fairly cold, but it can’t be freezing, or else the rain would have turned to snow.

A gust of wind rattles the window frame, and I wonder if the sound of the wind is what’s keeping her awake.

Or maybe it’s just being in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar cabin in the middle of nowhere.

“Can I get you anything?” I ask. “Another blanket?”

She shakes her head. “I’ve got, like, five blankets on top of me. If I had another one, it would crush me!”

“Some milk?”

“Why would that help me sleep?”

I have no idea. I have plenty of experience with reassuring children during the daytime, but never in the middle of the night. I don’t have any children of my own and I never will, but isn’t warm milk what you are supposed to offer people who can’t sleep? Except I have no way to heat it.

“Can you just…?” She chews on her lip. “Can you sit with me?”

Her request tugs at my heartstrings. I remember being at that tender intermediate age where you’re almost an older kid yet still sometimes feel like a little kid. “Sure. Of course.”

Eleanor climbs back into bed and gets under her five covers.

It’s definitely a little chilly in the room, and I shiver in my sweatshirt, but I’m afraid that if I get up to grab something warmer, she might change her mind about me staying.

So I perch at the edge of her bed, even though goose bumps are popping up on my arms and legs.

She pulls the covers up all the way to her chin. In the dim glow of the few candles in the room, her face looks so tiny. I can still make out the freckles on her nose.

“Casey?” she says.

“Yes?”

“Can you tell me a story?”

I have read many stories to my class over the course of my career. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m pretty good at it. “Sure. I’ve got a bunch of books I can read to you.”

“No,” she says stubbornly. “I want you to make up the story.”

Seriously? I have to make up a story? That’s going to be more challenging. I don’t consider myself a creative type. Whatever I make up will likely be a conglomeration of stories I have read over the years.

“Sure,” I say.

And now she’s staring at me, waiting for me to tell her a bedtime story. Great.

“Okay then…” I clear my throat. “So, um…once upon a time, in the kingdom far away, there was a princess named—”

“No.” Eleanor crinkles her nose. “No princess stories.”

“No?”

“I’m not five years old, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “What sort of story would you like me to tell you?”

She thinks for a minute. “A scary story.”

“I don’t think that is going to help you fall asleep.”

“Yes, it will,” she insists. “I love scary stories.”

Okay then. I rack my brain, trying to think of all the scary stories I have heard in the past. I’ll have to do my best.

“Once upon a time,” I begin.

“Scary stories don’t begin with ‘once upon a time,’” she interrupts me.

“Well, this one does.” I pick at a loose thread on my sleeve.

“Okay, once upon a time, this girl and her boyfriend were riding in his car together. Unfortunately, the car breaks down, and he has to pull over on the side of the road. He tells her he’s going to go walk to the nearest service station, and she should stay in the car.

” I pause, making sure she’s paying attention.

Her blue eyes are wide, and unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like this story is making her tired.

“Anyway, while she is waiting in the car, she hears this scraping sound on top of the car, like somebody is trying to get inside. It starts really freaking her out, so she moves to the driver’s seat and drives away. ”

“Wait,” Eleanor says. “I thought the car was broken down?”

“It started working again, I guess,” I say after a pause. “Maybe the engine overheated and just needed to cool down a bit.”

“It feels like you don’t know very much about cars.”

I know plenty about cars. My father taught me to change my own oil when I was seventeen, and I can swap out a flat tire with my eyes closed. But I also know enough about kids that age that I realize it’s pointless to defend myself.

“Anyway.” I give her a look. “She is driving this car to get away from the scraping sound, and that’s when she notices there’s a truck behind her.

It’s basically tailgating her, and it keeps flashing its lights and freaking her out.

She drives as fast as she can to get home, but when she gets there, the truck is right behind her.

She gets out of the car, and the truck driver gets out too, and he fires a shot at her.

Except the shot doesn’t hit her, and instead this other man behind her falls to the ground dead.

” I pause. “Apparently, there was a man in the back of her car with a hook hand, and he was going to bludgeon her with the hook, but every time he tried, the truck driver flashed his high beams.”

“What happened to the boyfriend?”

“Well.” I think quickly. “When the girl went back to the place where the car broke down, she saw that her boyfriend was murdered and hanging from a tree, and the scraping sound was his sneakers scraping against the top of her car. Also,” I add, “he was wearing a tie, and when she took it off, his head fell off.”

“His head fell off?”

“Yes, the tie was the only thing holding it in place.”

Eleanor looks at me thoughtfully. “That was a terrible story, Casey.”

I bark out a laugh. “What? I thought it was pretty good!”

“No, you just mashed a bunch of campfire stories together, and it didn’t even really make sense.”

I can’t say she’s wrong. “Well, can you tell a better scary story?”

“Definitely.”

“Then by all means, go ahead.”

Eleanor licks her lips, deep in thought. I’m curious to see what sort of story this girl is going to come up with. With my students, the stories they write for class are always a great window into what’s going on in their lives. Children write what they know.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” she begins. “This old woman named Cassie was at her cabin in the woods when she heard a noise coming from outside…”

Old woman? Okay, whatever. I lean in, eager to see where this particular story is going. “Okay, good beginning.”

“It turned out,” she continues, “there was a girl hidden in her toolshed.”

“Was there?”

Eleanor shoots me another of her withering looks. “Can you please stop interrupting me every two seconds? I’m trying to tell the story.”

“Right, sorry,” I say, hands up defensively, thinking about how I miss my third graders.

“Anyway,” she continues. “Cassie didn’t know how she got there, but because there was a big storm, she invited the girl into her house.

” She pauses dramatically. “Once the girl was in the house, Cassie tried to be nice to her. Cassie gave her dinner and cookies, which were a gift from some man that she didn’t want to go out with for some reason. ”

Ouch. I’m beginning to suspect this whole story is a blatant dig on my personal life. Is it really so awful that I don’t want to start something up with Lee? This story seems very judgmental.

“Cassie tried to be nice,” Eleanor says.

“She made the girl something called an infinity promise, saying that she would never betray her. But Cassie was also very nosy. She kept asking the girl a lot of questions, and the girl did not like that.” She pauses.

“And then, when she thought the girl wasn’t paying attention, she went through her backpack. ”

Oh crap.

“After that,” she goes on, “the girl couldn’t trust Cassie. The infinity promise was just a lie Cassie made up to trick the girl into trusting her. As soon as the storm ended, Cassie planned to tell other people that the girl was staying with her. She planned to betray her.”

My mouth is suddenly very dry. “That…that isn’t true…”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Did I interrupt you this much during your story?”

Actually, she did. Multiple times. But it wouldn’t help to point that out.

“Cassie gave the girl her bed to sleep in,” she says, “and then she drifted off in the living room. But when she woke up, the girl was standing over her.” A candle in the room flickers, casting an eerie glow on Eleanor’s face.

“The girl didn’t want Cassie to tell anyone about her, so she had cut off her arms and legs, and she used them to feed the fire, which had started to die down. ”

I feel like I’m about to choke. This is the worst bedtime story ever.

“But the arms and legs made the fire too powerful,” she says, “and it jumped out of the fireplace. The girl made a run for it, but Cassie couldn’t, because she was stuck bleeding on the couch.

So she burned to death in her own cabin just as the sun was coming up.

” She pauses meaningfully. “And of course, she was never able to tell a soul about the girl staying with her, so I guess she did kind of keep her promise.”

My jaw feels like it’s going to become unhinged. As if I wasn’t already afraid of burning to death.

On the plus side, at least the story didn’t end with me dying of dysentery.

“Did you like the story?” Eleanor asks me.

I can only stare at her. I’ve got to keep a close eye on this one.

“What’s good about that story,” she patiently explains, “is that what’s happening in the story is similar to what’s happening here—right now. And it makes you worried that maybe those things could happen to you. Do you understand?”

Oh, I understand. I definitely understand.

She lets out a loud yawn. “I’m feeling tired now. I think maybe I’ll try to go to sleep again.”

Eleanor pulls the covers up so that they are nearly covering her head. I can’t help but wonder if she was ever really having trouble sleeping to begin with or if she just wanted me to hear her horror story about what would happen to me if I told anyone she was staying with me.

Suffice it to say, that story is not going to make it easier for me to fall asleep tonight.