The Night Visitors

Chapter Twenty Mattie

WHOEVER IS COMING in must be startled by the lights going out because he freezes. His hesitation gives me the advantage: I’m in the dark, but there’s still a little light left in the sky so I can see him—or at least the shape of him. A man, definitely, with a baseball cap under a hood. His face is in shadow. I can make out the gun in his hand perfectly well and an inch of bare skin between coat cuff and gloved hand. Although I’m flattened against the wall I’ve angled myself, with my dominant foot back, in exactly the right defensive posture we learned in self-defense class, so when I swing my right arm forward I bring my leg with it, adding force to the blow I aim at his wrist.

The knife sinks deep into flesh. The man screams and drops the gun to the floor. I kick it behind me and wrench open the door. The door opening knocks him off-balance and he falls backward into the snow. I take a step forward but then I hear Doreen’s voice in my head. Close it, idiot! Or at least get the gun first!

I step back, slam the door, and lock it. Then I turn to look for the gun, but it’s too dark. I sink to my knees and feel around on the floor, groping in Dulcie’s bed and through the piles of lint and old socks and half-chewed dog bones under the dryer. Finally, my hand closes on cold steel. I feel along the barrel gingerly for the safety and find that it’s off.

The bastard was ready to shoot.

Leaving it off, I get to my feet but stay half crouched below the window. He could have another gun. I peer out the window.

He’s gone.

Which means he could be trying the front door. Did I lock it? Doreen’s always after me to, but living out here at the end of the road, surrounded by woods, I hardly ever bother. What’s to steal? I’d ask Doreen.

Your life, she’d say.

Who’d want that? I’d quip back.

But now there are two more lives in this house. I head for the front door—and trip over Dulcie. I reach out to brace myself but the gun’s in my hand and I end up banging poor Dulcie’s head. She whimpers and I feel terrible. I could have shot us both. I thumb on the safety and keep going more cautiously, left hand out, feet feeling for obstacles. I know the way well enough, but there are piles of donation bags in the hall and boots lying by the door.

This is what comes of bad housekeeping, my mother’s voice says in my head.

“Fuck off!” I shout out loud as I throw the bolt on the front door.

“Who are you talking to?”

The voice right behind me nearly makes me jump out of my skin. I wheel around, right arm extended, left hand bracing my grip, dominant foot back, body angled to protect my own vital organs (who knew I even still cared about them!). I’m aiming into the dark, though, and for a moment I wonder if I really heard anything at all. Haven’t I been listening to the voices in my head for years? Didn’t I just hear Caleb’s voice in a tin can?

But then the voice comes again. “What the fuck? Are you trying to kill me?”

Of course she can see me. Now I’m the one standing in the dying gray light. “Alice,” I say.

“Who the hell else would it be? What happened? I heard someone scream. It sounded like—”

“A man,” I say. “A man was coming through the kitchen door. I stabbed him and took his gun but he’s still out there.”

“A man? What did he look like?”

“I didn’t get a good look at him . . . why? Were you expecting someone?”

“What? No! I just thought it might be someone you knew.”

I’m about to snap back that I don’t know any housebreakers but then I realize that I probably do. Instead I ask where Oren is.

“Hiding,” she says. “Upstairs, I think.”

“Shit. We have to find him. I need to get my phone from the kitchen and then we’ll go upstairs and . . .” And then what? We tell victims of domestic abuse who are in their houses with their abusers that if they can’t get out they should lock and barricade themselves into a safe room with their children. The only room that locks is down here. But I don’t tell Alice that. “Stay right here. Watch the door and listen for breaking glass. If you hear glass breaking run upstairs and hide under one of the beds.”

I walk past her toward the kitchen but she grabs my arm. “I’m coming with you,” she says. Her hand is clammy and trembling. Her breathing sounds shallow. Like a person having a panic attack.

“Fine. Just try not to trip me up. This is no time for me to break a hip.”

She hangs on to me like a barnacle all the way to the kitchen. I feel my way to the kitchen table and retrieve the flashlights I pulled out earlier. I pocket one and hand the other to Alice. “Don’t turn it on yet,” I say as I feel around on the counter for the phone. “I don’t want him to know where we are.”

“You couldn’t see his face at all?”

“Not really. He had a baseball cap on under a hood.” The baseball hat jogs a memory: Camo from the Stewart’s handing Atefeh a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat. The asshole whose groin I doused with hot coffee. Who was driving a jacked-up plow truck with fake antlers on the hood, just like the plow truck that nearly ran me over as I was going into Sanctuary earlier today. I’d been too busy looking for Oren to notice, but now I’m sure it was the same truck. He might have waited for us to come out of Sanctuary and followed us back to the house.

“How tall was he?” Alice asks.

“Why?” I ask. The phone’s not on the kitchen counter and I remember it was still in my hand when I reached for the knife on top of the dryer. I must have dropped it there. I approach the back door warily, checking the window to see if the intruder is out there, but it’s too dark to tell. It’s full night now.

“Did he have a goatee?” Alice asks.

“A goatee? Honestly, I have no—” My hand closes on the phone. I thumb the home button and the screen lights up. “Thank God!” I say, and then realize that the lit screen might be visible from the outside. I turn my back to the door and bump into Alice. She’s so close that I can smell her coppery fear-soaked breath. In the light of the phone screen her face looks gaunt and haggard. Why did I ever think she was in her twenties? She must be thirty-five at least, and those years have not been kind to her.

I touch the phone icon and tap in 911. As it’s ringing the low battery alert comes on. Shit. It was plugged in only long enough to get a tiny charge before the power went off. But maybe it will be enough. The police operator answers on the third ring.

“911. What’s your emer—”

The screen goes black. “Fuck!” I swear, shaking the phone as if that will bring it to life.

“Mattie,” Alice says. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

“Not now, Alice,” I snap, years of reflective listening training going out the window. “We have to get upstairs. Find Oren. Block ourselves in my bedroom. We’ve got two guns and the police will trace that call. The chief of police is my—” I’d been about to say my friend, but that really isn’t true anymore. Frank Barnes hasn’t so much as smiled at me since the night Caleb and my parents died. Still, Frank’s too upstanding a guy to let personal feelings come between him and his duty. “He’ll head out here when he sees I tried to call. We just have to stay safe until he gets here. This asshole—I think I know who he is—is just a redneck blowhard. I pissed him off at the Stewart’s last night and he came out here to teach me a lesson. He’s probably nursing his injured paw and crawling back to the nearest bar, where he’ll tell the regulars that he put the fear of God into a couple of pussy-hat-wearing feminists.”

I’m not sure I believe any of what I’m saying. Secretly I am hoping that dumbass Jason has crawled off to freeze to death in the barn, but as soon as that thought appears in my head I picture Caleb in the barn and I have to brace myself against the dryer.

Alice grabs my arm to hold me up. She lowers her face so it’s inches from mine. “It’s not some dumbass redneck you pissed off at the Stewart’s,” she spits out. “It’s Davis. He’s alive and he’s come to get me and Oren. And he won’t stop until we’re all dead.”