Bzzzt!
The sound startled her out of the moment, maybe even pulled her back from a precipice. She stared ahead. The Shape was gone. Never there.
Always with her…
She exhaled forcefully, turning her gaze to the four black-and-white security camera monitors. A rental car carrying two uninvited guests. A man and a woman, late thirties, maybe forty, the former behind the wheel, left arm dangling out the open window.
After pulling up to the mounted intercom, Aaron pressed the button once, and had been about to press it a second time when he heard the hiss of the speaker coming to life.
“Yes?” a female voice inquired.
Laurie Strode. He was sure of it.
Aaron reached out to the “press to speak” button, found it slightly out of reach, forcing him to open the car door and to shift himself with one foot on the ground. If the mounted security camera was live and not a prop, he wasn’t making the best first impression of professional competence.
“Hello,” he said abruptly. “We’re looking for Laurie Strode.”
On the off-chance he might be talking to a house-sitter.
Silence.
Aaron cleared his throat. “My name is Aaron Joseph-Korey and—um… We’re working on a… um… on a podcast.”
Dear God, he thought, am I really this nervous? What’s next, a pratfall?
Fortunately, he hadn’t come alone.
Dana leaned toward the driver’s side of the car so she could be heard over the speaker. “We’re investigative journalists.”
“If you have a moment,” Aaron added. “We’ve traveled a long way to speak with you.”
Crossed continents. Traversed oceans. Well, one ocean, but…
Okay, now I’m babbling mentally.
More silence.
Terrific, he thought. We’re failing miserably. Well, mostly me. Dana’s quite on point. Not that it matters. Not if Laurie won’t even speak with us.
Desperate, Aaron cleared his throat again and thought, Journalistic ethics be damned. “We’ll pay you for your time.”
He glanced at Dana, who arched an eyebrow at him.
“Desperate times, desperate measures and all that,” he said, after temporarily lifting his finger off the press-to-speak button.
Still not a peep from Laurie.
He reached across the car, wiggled his fingers. Dana counted the money in the envelope then placed it in his hand. Aaron held it out the window in full view of the camera.
Dana leaned toward him again, raised her voice, “How does three thousand dollars sound?”
Aaron waited, about to signal a retreat and return to their motel to consider their options, when the gate buzzed and slowly trundled open. As he eased the car forward, relief flooded through him. He glanced at Dana, anticipation rising again now that they’d cleared a significant hurdle and been granted an audience. Dana gave him a look of satisfaction, her insistence on trusting the file validated.
They were a team, one step closer to their goal.
He parked the Ford in front of the farmhouse, and they crossed the front yard together. Had Laurie not answered the intercom, Aaron might have assumed the farmhouse abandoned. Beyond a black pickup truck, overgrown dead bushes and weeds had climbed high enough to reach the white railing of the wraparound porch. The blue siding had held up, but the pale blue paint on the porch steps and landing showed significant wear, exposing bare and rotting wood. Grime streaked the aged, black-shingled roof, currently littered with clumps of dead leaves. At either end of the long roof, Laurie had mounted a pair of large spotlights in wooden frames. Four parallel beams of light would expose anyone attempting to approach the front of the house at night.
A row of bell-shaped wind chimes clinked as they climbed the porch stairs. Noting steel-mesh guards on all the windows, Aaron thought that the house resembled a prison, though this “prison” was designed to keep people out. Or, at least, one specific person.
Laurie walked to her heavy wooden front door to get a better look at her uninvited guests. Peering through the right narrow vertical panel of decorative obscure glass, she took their measure. They were close to her daughter’s age, though the woman looked several years younger than the man—Aaron something. Even through the distortion of the glass, she could tell they were pleased with themselves. Aaron seemed a bit impatient, fidgeting a bit where he stood. Otherwise, they seemed harmless.
She unlocked the padlock at the top of the door, opened the slide lock below it, turned the lock on the door knob, and finally lifted the horizontal bar securing the middle of the door. Steel-mesh barriers on the windows wouldn’t matter if someone could kick in the door. She opened the door just far enough to confirm they were alone and apparently unarmed, before letting them in.
5
Dana paused before the entrance to Laurie Strode’s house, listening to the woman engage several locks on the door. She nudged Aaron, who was casually assessing the interior of the home through the window, and nodded toward the door. He nodded back, his earlier recorded assessment of her proven correct. She’d holed herself up here, behind a gate, secured windows, and a door reinforced with enough locks to withstand a battering ram.
Even after all her research on Laurie Strode, sole survivor of Michael Myers’ babysitter killing spree of 1978, Dana wasn’t sure what she’d expected upon finally meeting the woman, but she never would have imagined she’d appear so… normal. Naturally, Laurie had aged, gracefully, considering forty years had passed since that fateful night, and she seemed physically fit. She’d been scarred physically and emotionally—perhaps even mentally, though Dana saw no evidence of that.
She saw a woman in advanced middle age with neatly brushed shoulder-length blond hair, wearing wireframe glasses, dressed practically in a long-sleeved blue denim shirt, the cuffs rolled up to reveal an analog wristwatch with a brown leather band, green denim trousers and ankle-high boots. True, she had isolated herself, living alone in the backwoods farmhouse, fortified for extra security, but she displayed no apparent signs of raving lunacy or gibbering paranoia. So far she’d come across as an intensely private but rational woman. Dana noted one potential red flag—the sheathed hunting knife strapped to Laurie’s belt. Not as disconcerting as a holstered handgun or if she’d greeted them at the door with a loaded shotgun, but something to consider nonetheless.
Laurie directed them to a rustic living room, mostly wood-paneled with one red-brick wall behind a raised brick landing, which held a wood-burning stove with a stack of firewood beside it. Dana wondered if the house had originally featured a fireplace that Laurie sealed for security, replacing it with the stove. The left side of the brick wall featured a built-in bookcase, while the right had a high shelf where she’d placed a flat-screen TV next to a VCR and a small stack of VHS tapes.
A sofa and loveseat in a matching floral print formed an L around a glass-and-bamboo coffee table. While Aaron sat on the sofa, Dana took the near corner of the loveseat. Ignoring the rust-colored wing chair beside the loveseat, Laurie sat opposite them in relative discomfort on a wooden chair she brought in from the kitchen. She set a glass of strawberry milk on the coffee table that separated them. Pointedly, she hadn’t offered them anything to drink. For the promise of three thousand dollars, she’d invited them inside her home—fortified bunker might be a more accurate description—but she had no intention of entertaining them. Dana had no doubt they were on a short leash.
Dana set her recorder on the table, mic upright to catch both sides of the conversation. “You’ve lived here since 1985?”