Beyond Suspicion

22

•

Cindy’s brain was throbbing. She lifted her head from the pillow, and it weighed a ton. She’d had even more wine after Jack left, putting herself way over her limit. She closed her eyes and let her head sink back into goose down, but it felt like a vise grip pressing at either ear.

She had to move, or, she was certain, she would die.

Her hand slid across the sheet and found the edge of the mattress. She pulled herself up onto her side and checked the digital alarm clock on the nightstand. The numbers were a blur without her contact lenses, and she couldn’t reach to pull it closer. There was no telling what time it was.

Just like in her dream. That awful dream.

She didn’t think she was dreaming. But she didn’t feel awake, either. Never in her life had she been hungover like this, not even from those prom-night slush drinks spiked with Southern Comfort. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. The blinds were shut, but the faint outline of dawn brightened the thin openings between slats. She took a moment, then sat up in bed.

The sound of footsteps thumped in the hallway.

“Mom?”

No one answered, but her voice was weak, stolen by the effects of too much alcohol. Cindy looked around the room. The empty wine bottle was on the bureau, and the mere sight of it was enough to make her sick. She felt a need to run for the bathroom, but, mercifully, the nausea quickly passed. How ironic, she thought, all the school mornings she’d lain in this very room just pretending to be sick. She’d hated school as a kid, and, for the longest time, she’d hated this house. She didn’t think of it as the house she’d grown up in, at least not entirely. Only after her father was dead had the rest of the surviving family moved there, the widow, two daughters, and three very young boys. Yet it seemed full of memories. Or, at least, at the moment, it was filling her head with memories. Through her mind’s eye, she was looking at herself again, the way she could in her dream, except this wasn’t a dream-or it least it wasn’t the dream. The Cindy she saw was nine years old, in their old house, the one before this one, the house in New Hampshire.

•

The leaves rustled outside her bedroom window. As she lay awake staring at the ceiling, the wind plucked the brown and crispy ones from the branches and sent them flying through the night sky. Some were caught in the updraft and swirled high. The others fell to the ground, weaving the endless carpet of dead leaves across their lawn. Tourists came from all over the country to see autumn like this. Cindy loathed it. For a brief two weeks, the green leaves of summer turned themselves into something that no living thing could become without courting disaster, blazing flickers of flame at the end of twisted branches. And then, one by one, the flames were extinguished. It was as if the leaves were being fooled. Tricked into death.

A gust of wind howled outside, and a flock of dead leaves pecked at her window. Cindy pulled the covers over her head. Stupid fools.

She heard a noise, a slamming sound. It was as if something had fallen or been knocked over. It had come from downstairs.

“Daddy?”

She was alone with her father in the house for the weekend. Her mother and older sister had traveled to Manchester for a high school soccer tournament. The boys, more than her father could handle, were with their grandmother.

Cindy waited for a response but heard nothing. Only the wind outside her window, the sound of leaves moving. She listened harder, as if with added concentration she could improve her own hearing. Swirling leaves were scary enough, all that pecking on the glass. But it was the crunching sound that really frightened her-the sound of leaves moving outside her bedroom window, one footstep at a time.

“Is that you, Daddy?”

Her body went rigid. There it was. The crunching sound!

Someone was walking outside her house, she was sure of it, their feet dragging through the leaves. Just the thought frightened her to the core, brought tears to her eyes. She jumped out of her bed and ran down the hall.

“Daddy, where are you?”

The hallway was black, but Cindy could have found her way blindfolded. She’d run there many nights screaming from nightmares. She pushed open the door to the master bedroom and rushed inside. “Daddy, there’s a noise!”

She stood frozen at the foot of the bed. Her eyes had adjusted well enough to the darkness to see that it was empty. In fact, it was still made. No one had slept in it, even though it was long past her bedtime, long past her father’s. At least it felt late. The digital clock on the nightstand was stuck on midnight, the green numbers pulsating the way they always did with the power surges on windy nights.

Am I by myself?

Cindy ran from the bedroom. Fear propelled her down the stairs faster than she’d ever covered them. Her father had fallen asleep on the couch many times before, and maybe that was where he was. She hurried into the family room. Immediately, her heart sank with despair. He wasn’t there.

“Daddy!”

She ran from the family room to the kitchen, then to the living room. She checked the bathrooms and even the large closet in the foyer, doors flying open like so many astonished mouths. He was nowhere. Tears streamed down her face as she returned to the kitchen, and then something caught her eye.

Through the window and across the yard, she could see a light glowing inside the garage. Her father’s car was parked in the driveway, so she knew he was home, perhaps busy in the garage with his woodworking. That could have been the noise she’d heard, his scuffling through their leaf-covered yard, the sound of her father carrying things back and forth from the garage.

After bedtime?

Part of her wanted to stay put, but the thought of being alone in the big house was too much for a nine-year-old. She let out a shrill scream and exploded out the back door, into a cold autumn night that felt more like winter’s first blast. She kept screaming, kept right on running until she passed her father’s car and reached the garage at the end of the driveway. With both fists, she pounded on the garage door.

“Daddy, are you in there?” Her little voice was even more fragile against the cold, north wind.

She tried the latch, but it was locked, and she was too small to raise the main door anyway. She ran to the side door and turned the knob. It, too, was locked. On her tiptoes she peered through the window. The light inside was on, but she didn’t see any sign of her father. The angle gave her a view only of the front half of the garage.

“Daddy, are you-”

Her words halted as her eyes fixed on the dark patch on the floor. It wasn’t really a patch. It moved ever so slightly, back and forth. A spot with a gentle sway. Not a spot. A ghostlike image with arms at its side. Feet that hovered above the ground. A rope around its neck.

And a hunter’s cap just like her father’s.

She fell backward to the ground, pushed herself away from the garage door, and ran back toward the house. Except she didn’t want to go back inside, didn’t know where to run. She ran in circles around the big elm tree, crying and screaming, the sound of fallen leaves crunching beneath her feet.

•

A pounding noise jostled her from her memories. She blinked hard, trying to focus. It sounded like the footsteps in the hall she thought she’d heard earlier, but it was louder, like galloping horses. Another round of pounding, and she realized it wasn’t footsteps at all.

Someone was knocking at the front door.

Her heart raced. She couldn’t even begin to guess who would come calling at this hour, and she didn’t want to think about it. She had yet to clear her mind of the memories she’d stirred up. That unforgettable image on the garage floor. The one that looked so much like the dark spot in her photograph of that little girl and her dog. The shadow that had never existed.

Or that had disappeared.

With the third round of knocking, Cindy’s feet were on the floor. A voice inside her told her not to answer the door, exactly like her dream. And just like the dream, she found herself ignoring the warning, putting one foot in front of the other as she slowly crossed the bedroom.

A light switched on at the end of the hall. Her mother peeked out of her room and said, “Cindy, what the heck is going on?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll get it.”