The Messenger

5

Nine days later, Amanda Clarke lay in her bed in the darkness, thinking about Tyler Hawthorne and wondering if he was avoiding her. She believed she owed him another apology and being unable to deliver it irritated her. It was hard enough to admit to herself that she had been wrong to speak to him the way she had, and now it looked as if she was going to have to march up the hill to his house to say so.

Nine days since she had met him in Ron’s room. Nine days since Ron had started to regain his strength.

“Let’s see what happens,” Ron’s doctor had said today, but she was smiling. No one wanted to jump to conclusions, to be overly optimistic. At the same time, no one could deny that he was doing better. The doctor had looked at his most recent blood work and said, “Amazing. Let’s hope this trend continues.”

He was still very weak. He still tired out easily. But his color was better, his appetite was returning.

And he had hope. She had struggled not to hope as well. She had failed. Lying here alone, she admitted that she was nearly convinced that Ron would live, and prayed she wasn’t wrong.

She heard the sound of a creaking floorboard. Not quite alone, was she?

One of her cousins, no doubt, was also still awake at-she glanced at the clock by her bed-just after midnight. Brad and Rebecca had arrived a week ago, unannounced as usual. They owned a huge house in the desert, and their trustees would have gladly approved the use of funds to buy their own place here in L.A., but when they were in town they stayed here, or on a whim, they took rooms in one of the city’s luxury hotels. Amanda often told herself that she should change the locks and refuse to admit them. Telling herself what she “should” do was as far as she ever got with that plan.

Instead she avoided them as much as possible, even kept her own small bedroom on the ground floor of the house, apart from the more spacious rooms she reserved for them on the second floor. The house had a large master suite on the third floor, but so far, even her nervy cousins hadn’t tried to take over that room.

She listened, but there were no further stirrings from the second floor. The only sound reaching her through the bedroom door was the mesmerizing tick-tock-tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the living room.

Rebecca and Brad had met Tyler. She was annoyed that they had managed to encounter him when she had not. “TDH,” Rebecca had declared him. Tall, dark, and handsome. Well, she was right about that.

Rebecca already had one of her mad crushes on him. She had invited him to her upcoming party out in the desert, and said he had accepted.

Although the desert house was several hours from here, she couldn’t blame Tyler for accepting. Rebecca was as beautiful as he was handsome, and together, they’d make a disgustingly good-looking couple. Or would for four weeks, which had proved to be the maximum amount of time any man in his right mind could handle putting up with Rebecca.

The thought of them being a couple even for a month made her frown. She told herself she was concerned because she didn’t want problems with a neighbor. Maybe Ron would warn him about her cousin, whom Ron referred to as “Rudebecca the Train Wrecka.”

Today, when Rebecca had taken a breath during her “Let me tell you in excruciating detail why Tyler is so hot” marathon, Brad spoke up and invited Amanda to the party, too.

Amanda had been sure he was just trying to spite his older sister, so she was noncommittal.

“He asked if you’d be there,” Brad added. Definitely spiteful.

“You should come,” Rebecca said, surprising her.

“You never come out to visit us, we always have to come here to visit you,” Brad said.

She didn’t point out that they never really came to visit her, that they never took her along to the parties they went to in L.A., that even if she just wrote about the last few years, she could put together a really thick book entitled Signs That Rebecca and Brad Hate Me.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t be boring,” Rebecca said, and went back to boring Amanda.

She apparently bored Brad, too. “Shit, Rebecca, you talked to him for about twenty minutes max,” he complained. “You’ve talked about him for about twenty hours now. We get the picture. If you don’t want Amanda to know how desperate you are these days, shut your piehole for a minute or two.”

So Rebecca fired up for an attack on Brad, which freed Amanda to escape from the house. By the time she came home from the hospice, her cousins were up in their rooms.

She dozed off and came awake with a start. She listened and heard the grandfather clock strike one.

No sound of someone prowling just outside the house.

Just a dream, she told herself. Her fears were surfacing in her dreams, not surprising on a stressful day. She had dreamed the noise.

She held her breath, not moving. Listening. Long moments passed.

No one, she tried to reassure herself, was moving stealthily just outside. No creature was stalking its prey just beyond her bedroom window. A dream.

She couldn’t convince herself.

She had heard something.

Perhaps the house had creaked in the way old houses do, or leaves had scratched against one of the upstairs windowpanes, or the refrigerator’s motor had hummed. Whatever the sound was that had awakened her, it was gone now. She exhaled softly through her mouth, drew another breath. Listened.

And heard a noise.

This time she knew it had not been her imagination. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light in the room, she saw the heavy curtains softly billow and realized she had left the window open. The afternoon had been warm, and she had wanted to air out the room. She had fallen into bed after a long day without thinking about the window-without shutting it. Now…

Now she was vulnerable. Now someone or something was moving around out there, just on the other side of a flimsy screen. She could hear the soft rustle of leaves disturbed by a step, the snapping of small twigs beneath the weight of a foot. Slow, stalking steps, not random movements caused by the wind.

Step. A pause. Step. A pause. More steps, slow and creeping.

She clutched the covers, tried to track the direction of the sounds. Maybe it was only a cat or a skunk. No, too heavy to be a cat, and skunks didn’t move with that stalking step.

It could be a dog. She shivered, and reached up to trace the old scar on the ridge of her eyebrow.

She feared dogs. Had been terrified of dogs for years now. Not without reason.

Or-was it a person out there?

The curtains moved again. Was it her fear, or had the breeze suddenly turned chilly?

She slid out of bed and crept toward her closet. She banged one of her shins on a dresser drawer she hadn’t fully closed, but managed to keep her reaction to the pain to a quiet hiss. She reached the closet, quickly put on her robe, and hurried toward her bedroom door. She opened it and stepped into the hallway, then softly pulled the door shut.

“What-?” a voice behind her said.