What would it hurt to call? To say, “We’re all right, and we love you, Mom.” To hear her mother’s voice? But Mr. Rawlins had said Swann was there, in their home, and she couldn’t bear to think of him answering the telephone.
She hoped that when Mr. Rawlins returned he would have a plan of some kind to get them home where they belonged. He seemed to be on their side, but with his own doubts. Would he turn on them, like Mr. Swann had? It was possible, but she didn’t think so. He seemed to believe them, in his slow way. And he seemed to like her. Annie had caught him looking at her with a soft, sad expression, as if he were seeing her but thinking of someone else. She felt Mr. Rawlins was someone she and William could trust. Besides, they had no other place to run.
“Hey, Annie, come look at this!” William called again from the living room.
“What now?” she said as she found him poised in front of an opened dark wood cabinet.
“This is awesome,” he said, stepping aside so she could look inside.
Rifles and shotguns, seven of them altogether, stood in a rack. Boxes of bullets and shells were stacked near their butts. William reached for one of the rifles, and Annie stopped him.
“Leave them alone,” she said, pushing his hand down.
“But they’re cool,” he said. “I wonder why he has so many?”
“He’s a rancher. Ranchers have lots of guns.”
“Yeah, for bears and stuff,” he said, his eyes wide. “I wonder if he’ll show me how they work?”
She shrugged. “I guess you can ask him.” She wished Mr. Rawlins had a lock of some kind on the guns. It was obvious William was fascinated with them, and she didn’t trust her brother not to take them out and play with them if he thought he could get away with it.
“I could help protect us,” William said soberly. “So if he needs to go to town again, we’ll be safe.”
She reached across him to shut the cabinet door.
“No,” he said, stopping her. “Look at this one.”
Before she could intervene, he reached in and snatched a rifle with a lever action. The rifle was obviously old, with the barrel rubbed silver and scratches in the wood of the stock.
“This looks like something a cowboy would use,” he said, pulling it out. “It’s heavier than I thought.” There was writing on the barrel. “What does it say?”
Annie read the stamping. “Manufactured by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. New Haven, Conn.”
“Con?”
“Connecticut. Patented August 21, 1884. Nickel Steel Barrel. Twenty-five-35 WCF. I don’t know what that means.”
“Wow, I wonder if it’s too old to shoot.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Put it away.”
“Annie…”
“Put it away, now.”
He did, taking his time to fit it into the rack. “You have to admit it’s a cool old gun,” he said.
She closed the gun cabinet.
“There’s something else,” William said, walking across the living room to an old rolltop desk. “Wait until you see this.”
“You shouldn’t be snooping,” she said as she followed.
“Oh, like you didn’t snoop at Mr. Swann’s, right?”
He pulled open one of the drawers of the desk. In it was a framed photo of a much younger Mr. Rawlins, very much younger, wearing an Army uniform and a peaked cap. Mr. Rawlins stared right through the camera, as if he wanted to show how serious he was. Inside the drawer were hinged boxes containing war medals.
William opened them. “He was an Army sharpshooter,” he said, showing her the medal. “He also got this silver star thing here. There are a couple of other ones, but I don’t know what they mean.”
She touched the silver star medal with her fingertips.
“Maybe he’s cooler than we thought,” William said.
“I wonder where he got these?”
“We need to ask him,” William said. “I bet he’s got some stories.”
When they heard the sound of a motor, they looked at each other, then furiously shut the hinged boxes, returned the medals, and shut the drawer.
William went to the window and inched the curtain aside before she could tell him not to.
“Someone’s coming down the road,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s Mr. Rawlins.”
THEY HID under the desk with their arms wrapped around their shins, looking out.
“I wonder who it is,” William whispered.
“Could you see anything?”
“Just a black truck.”
“How many people were in it?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“I wish you hadn’t pulled the curtain back like that.”
“They couldn’t see me.”
“How do you know that? Next time, just look through the slit between the curtains, okay?”
William started to argue, then stopped himself. “Okay,” he said.
The motor grew louder, then stopped. A car door slammed shut.
“They’re right outside,” Annie said. Then she realized: “The TV! You left it on!”
William scrambled out from beneath the desk and found the remote on the coffee table. He pointed it at the screen and started pushing buttons. Before he found the power button, he inadvertently hit the volume, and the sound of a cartoon roared through the empty house, then went silent. Annie sucked in her breath as she watched William drop the remote and rapidly crawl on his hands and knees to rejoin her.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
She glared at him.
They heard a heavy knock on the front door that rattled dishes in the kitchen.
“Hello, hello!”
They looked at each other. A man with a deep voice.
“Hellooooo. Open up. It’s the Kootenai Bay police.”
What should we do? William asked with his eyes.
Annie put a finger to her lips.
“Hey, I heard the TV. Please open up. I need to ask you some questions.”
She recognized the slight Mexican accent as belonging to the man who had spoken to Mr. Swann while they cowered on the floor of his truck.
William dropped his face into his hands. Annie patted his back to reassure him.
“Helloooo in there.” The pounding on the door was brutal.
Next, she heard the doorknob rattle. He was trying to get in. Then silence.
She felt William trying to burrow backward farther into the shadows beneath the desk. She heard him sniff; he was holding back tears.
A form passed by one of the curtained windows in the living room, and she could see his silhouette clearly. It was him. She recognized him as one of the killers, the dark one. He was a stocky man, with a big head and mustache. She didn’t want to tell William.
The man passed by a second window, then came back, filling it. Through the curtain, the points of his elbows stuck out like wings. He had pressed his face against the glass and was trying to look into the house through the slit in the curtain, using his hands to frame his eyes. Since she couldn’t see him, she assumed he couldn’t see her. But it took a few seconds of terror to realize it.
At last, he moved on. His heavy shoes clumped on the porch, then went silent. A few seconds later gravel crunched on the side of the house.
He was going to try the back door.
She tried to remember if it was locked. Mr. Rawlins had said something about locking the doors, but she hadn’t seen him go to the back of the house.
“William,” she whispered. “Get ready to run.”
The back door rattled but didn’t open. It was locked after all. Then, again, a heavy pounding. “Wake up in there,” the man shouted. “It’s the police!”
She wondered how easy it would be for the man to break down the door. Pretty easy, she thought. He was a big man, and the door didn’t seem to be very thick.
Then he was gone. There was no sound.
Had he left?