Page 26 of The Midnight Knock

Before this could sink in, a faint noise came from outside: a thin, high whine, sharp and abrupt, like the sound of a hinge straining past its breaking point.

Except that wasn’t right. The sound was human. Subtle as it was, the sound made everyone in the cafe freeze. Stanley let go of Penelope’s arm. Ethan crouched down a little, like he might need to take off at a run. Hunter sat up in his booth.

Fernanda tightened her grip on the gun in her lap. Kyla strained her ears.

The sound came again, louder, and this time there was no mistaking it.

Tabitha was out there, screaming and screaming and screaming in the night.

ETHAN

They found her in room 4. Hunter was the first to arrive, barreling through the open back door and down the short hall. Ethan was right behind him. Tabitha stood near the end of the hall, a plate of food fallen at her feet. She was staring at the bed. She was screaming like the world had come to an end.

Ethan couldn’t blame her.

A jumble of papers and junk rested on the room’s corner table. A backpack and a suitcase were on the floor: both open, their contents tossed everywhere. The drawers of the nightstands stood open. Cash was tossed across the long dresser, at least a few hundred bucks in twenties and tens.

The room had a solitary queen bed, like the room Ethan shared with Hunter. Unlike the bed in the boys’ room, this one was burdened by a corpse.

Sarah Powers was sprawled over the coverlet, face down. Her boots were still on, same as her shirt, but her pants and underwear had been pulled to her knees, revealing the pale flesh of her backside and a glimpse of the private hair between her legs.

As Ethan’s eyes moved up the bed, from Sarah’s boots to her backside to her neck, he found two bright red pillows resting where her head should be.

The pillows covered Sarah’s head and neck. They were soaked with blood.

Tabitha finally stopped screaming, only to lapse into a silence that somehow felt worse. Her brother, Thomas, made his way into the room and stopped at her side. He stared at the room, at the bed, at his sister. He put a hand on Tabitha’s arm. The twins began to tremble.

Staring at the corpse on the bed, Thomas said, “She was our cousin.”

Ethan breathed, very slowly, behind Hunter. Kyla and Fernanda had come in behind him. They stood near the wardrobe, both womenstudying the scene with revulsion, but maybe not as much revulsion as might be expected.

Ethan knew, in the way he could sometimes intuit things, that this wasn’t the first corpse the girls had seen today.

Stan Holiday blundered into the room. He came down the hall, pushed past Ethan and Hunter, and sank to his knees right beside the bed. His every movement was slow and bewildered, like a man in a nightmare. He shook Sarah’s shoulder as if he could wake her.

“No,” he said. “Not after all this.”

Ethan looked back, expecting Penelope to follow her grandfather inside, but there was no sign of the girl. Instead, at the end of the room’s hall, Ethan suffered some sort of hallucination. For a moment—just for an instant—he saw a man’s face watching him from the back door. A man he’d never met before. A man who looked like trouble.

A blink, and the man was gone.

Kyla and Fernanda had clearly had enough. The two girls headed for the back hallway, no doubt on the way to their room. Ethan touched Hunter’s shoulder. The man nodded, turned away.

Whatever was going on here, they wanted nothing to do with it.

Not that any of them made it far.

“No,” Thomas said.

“We will not let this stand,” Tabitha said.

The girls paused on their way down the back hall, Ethan right behind them. Kyla turned back. “Excuse me?”

“Come to the office,” Thomas said.

“All of you,” Tabitha said.

Fernanda said, “Why should we do that?”