She turned the car around and started heading back. To the house. She’d play dumb. Let herself in, find Grace, ask her where her father was.
As she rounded the corner, she noticed there was a car parked on the street, just down from their place, that had not been there when she’d gone by minutes earlier. A man was crossing the street, right out front of their house.
Cynthia slowed, steered over to the side of the road.
The man walked up their driveway, approached the front door.
Rang the bell.
“Who the hell is that, this bloody early?” Cynthia said to herself. “Don’t answer it, Grace. Do not answer that door.”
She reached into her bag for her cell phone. She’d call Grace, tell her not to go to the door. But before she could place the call, she saw the man knocking. Hard enough that she could almost hear it through the windshield.
“Just go away,” Cynthia said. “Go now. Get.”
What she saw next — well, she almost couldn’t believe her eyes. The man reached into his pocket and took out... It was a key.
Before he inserted it, he looked over his shoulder to check whether anyone was watching him. He failed to spot Cynthia sitting in her car, so he turned back to the door, slid the key into the lock.
Cynthia hit the gas.
The car leapt forward, the tires squealing. She didn’t even wait until she reached the driveway before turning hard right. The car bounced up over the curb and charged right across the yard, the spinning tires digging up sod and dirt as Cynthia aimed the car for the front door, her hand pressing so hard on the horn it felt like it would go through the steering column.
The man whirled around, saw the car heading straight for him, and dived out of the way. Cynthia hit the brakes, the bumper coming to a stop about six feet from the door.
The man was running flat out now, heading for that blue car. Cynthia threw open her door and shouted, “Hey! Hey you!”
She debated running after him, but then she heard the familiar whoop of a house alarm. Cynthia spun around to see Grace, dressed in one of her oversized sleeping shirts, standing in the open doorway of the house.
Grace screamed, “Mom! Mom!”
Grace shot forward, arms outstretched. She fell into her mother’s arms, weeping, and Cynthia clutched her tight, holding her like she’d never ever let her go.
Thirty-eight
Terry
I wasn’t expecting to see what I saw when I got to the house.
Tire tracks across the lawn, Cynthia’s car, door wide-open, nosed up to the house, Grace and her mother locked in an embrace on the front step.
Grace sobbing. The security alarm whooping.
I slammed on the brakes, left the car in the street, and ran to them. Grace saw me through watery eyes. “Dad!”
“Grace! Grace! Are you okay?” I asked her once, then at least five more times.
Cynthia used my arrival to pry herself free of Grace — not, I suspected, because she didn’t want to comfort her, but because she wanted to see where the man who’d been trying to get into the house had gone.
She ran halfway down the driveway, looking up the street into the distance.
“Shit,” she said.
“He didn’t hurt you, did he?” I said to Grace, hugging her, trying to be heard above the alarm.
“He didn’t get in,” she said. “Mom came. Almost ran him down.”
A woman who lived across the street, still in her housecoat, had stepped out of her house with a mug of coffee in her hand. She called over, “You okay?”
I shouted back, “We’re okay, thanks.”
“Should I call the police?”
Cynthia started to shout yes, but I stopped her with a firm shake of the head. “No, it’s okay!” I yelled. “We’ve got this.”
Cynthia shot me a look. “Are you kidding?” she said. She started walking toward me at full tilt. “Someone tries to break in and attack our daughter and you don’t want to call the police?”
“Let’s get inside,” I said. First thing I had to do was enter the code to stop the alarm from screeching. I didn’t know whether the alarm had been activated by the man getting the door open or Grace opening it herself when she saw her mother.
“What the hell is going on?” Cynthia asked.
She went to her car — the engine was still running — and reached in to shut it off and grab her purse. She had her cell phone in her hand.
“If you’re not calling the police, I will.”
“No, Mom, wait,” Grace said.
That got Cynthia’s attention. “What?”
“Please,” I said. “Let’s go inside. You may be right — we may have to call the police. But first I want to make sure Grace is okay.”
Her sobs had turned to sniffs. “I’m okay. I am. I told you.”
Cynthia took that as permission to make the call, but again I stopped her. “Please, not yet.”
We went into the house and closed the door, at which point the alarm, only annoying up to this point, became deafening. I went to the security panel, entered our four-digit code to cancel it. Once it was silenced, we could hear the phone was ringing. That’d be the security monitoring service. I ran to the extension in the living room and snatched the receiver off the cradle.
“Hello!” I said. “Alarm, right?”
“Is this Mr. Archer?” A man enunciating very carefully.
“It is.”
“Are you having an emergency?”
“Everything’s okay.”
“We need your password, Mr. Archer. Otherwise we will be dispatching the police.”
I was so flustered it took me a second to remember it. “Telescope,” I said. “Our password is telescope.”
“Okay,” he said. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“We — we forgot the alarm was on and opened the door,” I said. “We’re very sorry.”
“Not to worry, Mr. Archer. The good news, your system’s working. You have a great day now.”
I put down the receiver and saw that Cynthia was back to holding Grace. My wife was looking at me fiercely.
“Why weren’t you here?” she asked.
“I was out for a few minutes,” I said.
“Doing what?”
I shrugged. “An errand.”
“To an appliance repair place?” she asked. “At seven in the morning?”
I looked at Grace. “Did you tell your mother where I was going?”
She shook her head.
I looked back at Cynthia. “Were you following me?”
She broke away from Grace and took a step toward me and pointed a finger. “You said you’d look after her. But something’s going on and I want to know what it is.”
“How about answering my question? Were you following me? Have you been spying on us?”
When Cynthia hesitated, Grace said, “Jeez, is that true, Mom? You’ve, like, got us under surveillance?”
Cynthia must have decided a good defense was a good offense. She bristled and said, “Good thing, too! If I hadn’t been, that man — he’d have gotten into the house!” Back to me. “And who was he? If you don’t want me calling the police, does that mean you know who he was?”
“I don’t,” I said. “Grace, you sure you’ve never seen him before?”
She shook her head.
“Could he have been the man in the house?” I asked.
“There was a man in our house?” Cynthia asked.
“Not our house,” I said.
“He might have been the guy,” Grace said, “but I don’t know. Even if it was him, how could he have a key, Dad?” she asked.
“Maybe he didn’t,” I said. “Maybe he had one of those, whaddya call ’em, lock-picking sets.”