Red 1-2-3

33

Back door. Flowerpot. Spare key.

Karen had parked a block from Sarah’s empty house, waited for night to drop around her, and then walked two additional blocks in the wrong direction, frequently looking over her shoulder. She realized that merely by her being in Red Two’s neighborhood, her destination was patently obvious. Her feelings were typical of the crazy-making behavior that the Wolf had installed in all of them: Walk the wrong direction. Imagine a killer outside your window. Hear things. See things. Don’t trust anything, because if you let your guard down you are going to die. And you might just get killed anyway.

Karen stopped on the street and breathed in slowly. She had a small backpack on her shoulder. The scientific part of her considered the depth of fear and disruption in the lives of each of the three Reds. I can’t be a doctor or a comic. Sarah can’t be a widow. Jordan can’t be a normal teenager, if there is such a thing. She was almost overcome by the notion that everyone faces some end someday, but it is the uncertainty of how it’ll arrive that keeps people chugging along. Change that equation-inject a fatal disease or a sudden accident or a faceless murderer into the algorithm of dying-and nothing is exactly the same again.

She turned sharply and headed down the street that ran behind Sarah’s house.

“The neighbors in back have navy-blue shutters on their front windows and a door painted bright red. The house is shiny white. It’s all very patriotic and they light it up at night. There’s no fence in front-you can just walk into the backyard. In the rear, over in the northeast corner, there’s a kid’s wooden jungle gym. You climb halfway up the ladder and from there you’ll be able to jump the chain-link barrier that separates my place from theirs. There’s a tree at the edge of the property. Hide there for a minute and then head to the back stoop. No one will see you.”

Sarah’s instructions were explicit, a schoolteacher’s organized, well-thought-out plan: Do this. Do that. Class, pay attention! Karen kept her head down, sneaking glances at the houses on the street, looking for the red, white, and blue. When she spotted it, she stuck close to the side of the house and ducked into the backyard.

She was moving as fast as she could. She saw the jungle gym and sprinted toward it. In the distance she could hear a dog bark-At least it’s not a wolf’s howl, she thought-and just as Sarah had told her, she climbed midway up the ladder. The structure swayed a little as she reached out with her right foot for the top of the chain-link fence, and then, with a push, launched herself over.

Karen landed, pitching forward awkwardly onto the damp grass behind Red Two’s dark home. She scrambled over to the base of the tree where Sarah had told her to hide and waited until her breathing slowed. The adrenaline rushing through her ears sounded like a waterfall, and it took a few minutes for her to be quiet enough to pick out night noises: A car several blocks away. A far distant siren. More dogs, but not enough sound to make anyone imagine they were truly alarmed.

Wait.

She listened for muffled footsteps. She craned her ears toward any noise that might be a man following in her path.

Nothing.

What she needed from Red Two’s house was not complicated. If she had been thinking correctly, she would have told Sarah to bring some with her when she faked her suicide. But Karen hadn’t been that wise, and now she had to get them herself.

She had considered simply walking up to the front and letting herself in, not caring whether the Wolf saw her or not. But this bit of bravado had seemed wrong. Secrecy is better, she told herself, although why eluded her.

Back door. Flowerpot. Spare key. Karen scrambled to her feet, hunched over, and ran forward.

At the steps leading into the house, she dug her hands into the cold dirt of the flowerpot. It took seconds to find the key, wipe it clean, and get to the door. In the darkness, she fumbled a bit thrusting it into the lock. She heard the dead bolt click open, and slipped inside.

Shadows filled the house. There was ambient light from a streetlamp outside, but this did little to make the scene anything less than minor variations on black. Karen had sensibly bought a small flashlight with her-she wasn’t turning on any lights-and like a burglar, she crept through the hallways, her small lamp making pinpricks of light when she swept it back and forth.

The house seemed stuffy with death. She could see the limp light from her flashlight quiver in her hand. Sarah had told her where to look, but she still felt like she was walking across some alien landscape and that if she made any noise at all, it would awaken the sleeping ghosts surrounding her.

Tugging the backpack from her shoulder, Karen began to collect the few items she needed. She moved from room to room, avoiding the dead husband’s study and the dead daughter’s bedroom, just as Sarah had instructed her. A framed portrait from a hallway, a photograph stuck to a refrigerator door with a magnet-Karen gathered pictures for a montage. She has to seem dead. The pictures have to underscore a different time, when Sarah was vibrant with hope. The contrast is important.

She was nearly finished, just looking for a final family photograph that Sarah had told her was on the wall in her bedroom, when she suddenly thought she heard a noise coming from the front.

She could not have said what the noise was. It might have been a scraping sound, perhaps a rustle of papers. Maybe the wind, but she couldn’t recall feeling any when she had approached the back. Her first, terrifying impression was that someone was now in the house with her.

Not someone. Him.

He will kill me here.

This didn’t make sense to Karen. Sarah should die here. It’s her home. This also didn’t make sense.

Karen froze as she clicked off her flashlight. She thought every short breath she stole from the night was loud, blaring. She listened. Nothing.

Your ears are playing tricks on you.

Still, she seized the last portrait from the wall and stuffed it into the backpack as quickly as possible. She thought just the sound of the zipper closing the pack was loud and raucous.

She pivoted back to the door. No, he’s out there. Waiting for me. She tried to tell herself she was completely crazy: So this is what insanity feels like.

It took an immense amount of strength for Karen to hurl herself through the door. She nearly stumbled and fell on the stairs. She raced for the back fence, expecting to fall at any point, and surprised herself that she was able to grab the top and scramble over. The chain link seemed to snatch at her, like so many desperate fingers clinging to her clothes.

A light went on in the red, white, and blue house.

She ignored it and ran into the welcoming night, heading toward her car.

For the second time that night, Karen’s hands shook. She fumbled the car keys to the floor and cursed loudly as she reached down and groped around before finding them.

It was several minutes, and several miles, before she could feel her racing heart slow down. She imagined herself to be like a deer that has outrun a pack of wild dogs. She wanted to huddle in some safe, dark spot until she regained her composure.

A car zipped past her. She fought off the impulse to swerve crazily, as if the other car had come too close. She shook her head, trying to dislodge every fear that choked her.

She was letting thoughts just roll around wildly within her, when suddenly her cell phone rang. Again, she nearly swerved. The ringing clawed at her, and she reached out, almost losing her grip on the steering wheel. It was not the special cell with the number only Jordan and Sarah had. It was her regular phone. She seized it from the passenger seat.

A medical emergency, was her first and only thought.

“Doctor Jayson?” A crisp, authoritative voice.

“Speaking.”

‘This is Alpha Security. Are you at home?”

Karen was confused. Then she remembered the alarm system that she’d installed in her house after the Big Bad Wolf’s first letter, and the expensive monitoring plan she’d purchased. “No. I’m on the road. What seems to be the problem?”

“Your system shows an intrusion. You are not at home currently?”

“No, damn it, I told you. What sort of intrusion?”

“Protocol requires me to tell you not to return to the home before I am able to contact the local police, so that they can meet you at your house. If there is a burglary in progress, we do not want you surprising some criminal. That’s the police’s job.”

Karen tried to respond, but choked on each word.

A police car was waiting at the turn into her driveway. A young cop was standing beside the driver’s-side door, waiting for her. He was slouched against his vehicle, and didn’t give off any appearance of urgency.

“This is my home,” Karen said, rolling down the window. “What’s happening?”

“Do you have some identification, please,” the cop responded.

She produced her driver’s license. He took it from her, seemingly not noticing her quivering hand, looked at it, measured her face against the picture on the card before handing it back.

“We’ve already checked the house,” he said. “There’s another cruiser up there. Will you follow me, please?” This question was spoken like a command.

Karen did as she was told. The police car in front of her garage was occupied by two officers, one of whom was an edgy young woman who kept her hand on the butt of her holstered 9 mm pistol. The other was a substantially older man, slightly potbellied, with gray tufts of hair that protruded beneath his cap.

Karen felt her knees go weak as she exited her car. She was afraid she was going to stumble and fall on her face, or that her voice was going to crack with fear.

“Hello, Doctor,” the old cop said, cheerily. “You were lucky you didn’t come home early.”

“Lucky?” Karen asked. It was all she could do to squeeze out the single word.

“Let me show you.”

He led Karen past the front door-which was wide open-to an adjacent window. It was broken, with glass shards fanned out on the floor inside.

‘That’s where he got in,” the cop said. “Then when the phone rang-that’s what the security company does: They call your house, and if you answer they ask for a code, and if there’s no response within six rings, they call us-anyway, phone rings, burglar sees the caller ID, panics, maybe grabs something, sprints out the front door, and heads off into the woods, or off to wherever he’s parked his car. It took us a few minutes to get here, but he was long gone, and-”

“How many minutes?” Karen interrupted. Her voice seemed pale, as if her words had somehow lost their color.

“Maybe five. Ten at the very most. We were fast. One of our guys was just a couple of miles up the main road, looking for speeders. He got turned around, hit his lights and siren, and got up here quick.”

Karen nodded.

“I already called a window guy. Hope you don’t mind. We keep some names on file at headquarters of guys who will come straight out, day and night…”

“No that’s fine.”

“He’ll be here any minute. Fix up the broken glass. Get your alarm system back online. But while we’re waiting, we’d like you to just check out the house, see what was taken before the bad guy ran. The insurance people, you know. They want as much in the police report as possible when you make your claim.”

Again Karen nodded. She couldn’t think of anything to say. Her imagination was crowded with too many possibilities:

It was the Wolf.

No, it was too clumsy. He would be sophisticated. Clever.

Why would someone else break in? It can’t be a coincidence.

Did he come to kill me?

She didn’t know what to say to the policeman. Instead, she just walked slowly through her house, searching for some sign that something was missing. But other than the glass spread about beneath the broken window, she could see nothing. It was almost as if whoever it was had broken the window, jackknifed into her house, and made an immediate turn and exited. That can’t be the Wolf, she told herself. He would want something. And the Wolf would have known I wasn’t here.

With the cop hovering over her shoulder, she went into every room, checked every closet, opened every door, and switched on every light. Nothing was missing. This merely confused her more.

Midway through her survey, a middle-aged man from Smith 24-Hour Glass Repair showed up and rapidly began work on her window. The repairman had greeted the cops as if they were relatives, which Karen guessed might be the case.

“Anything?” the gray-haired cop asked.

“No. Everything still seems to be in place.”

“Keep looking,” the cop said. “Sometimes it’s not so obvious, like a wide-screen TV ripped from the wall mount. Do you keep cash or jewelry around?”

Karen searched through drawers in her bedroom bureau. Her meager collection of earrings and necklaces was where she had left it that morning.

“Nothing missing,” she said. She knew she should feel reassured, but instead she felt queasy, nauseous.

“Lucky. I guess that alarm system did its job. We’ve had a number of break-ins in this part of town. Snatch and grab mainly.”

Karen did not feel lucky. She continued to survey her house. Something still seemed wrong, and it took her a second to realize that Martin and Lewis were nowhere to be seen. “I have two cats…” she started.

The cop glanced around. “Live alone, ought to have a big, mean dog.”

“I know that. But they’re not here,” she replied. “They’re inside cats-you know, don’t really go out.”

The cop shrugged. “They probably took off fast as hell out the front door right behind the bad guy, just as scared as he was. My guess is they’re hiding in some bush someplace close by. Put out a bowl of food on the rear deck after we leave; they’ll be back soon enough. Cats, you know, they can take care of themselves pretty good. I wouldn’t worry. They’ll show up when they get hungry or it gets too cold. But I’ll put it in my report anyways.”

Karen thought she should call for Martin and Lewis. But she knew they wouldn’t come. Not because they wouldn’t obey her summons. Because she was absolutely, 100 percent completely certain they were dead.