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.
6
She screamed before her cousin Brad finished saying, “-are you doing?”
“Brad! You scared me to death!”
“Apparently not,” he said.
Lights came on in the upper hallway. Rebecca came out of her room and peered over the railing. Rebecca, even suddenly roused from sleep, looked perfect-as always. Rebecca and Brad were both tall, slender, blond, and blue eyed. Both favored their late mother. The look worked a little better on Rebecca than Brad, Amanda thought, but that might have been because Brad tended to sulk.
“Amanda? What is it?” Rebecca said. “Are you all right?” She saw Brad standing next to Amanda and frowned at him.
“Not my fault, I swear,” Brad said, holding up his hands in mock surrender.
“That’s a first,” Rebecca said dryly.
“I heard someone prowling around outside,” Amanda said. “It scared me. I had just come out of my room when Brad said something and I’m afraid I-I overreacted. Sorry.”
“Someone prowling around outside?” Brad said, looking nervous.
“Yes. I left my window open, and just now I thought I heard someone moving around out there.” She paused. “It might have been an animal, but I don’t think so.”
“Brad,” Rebecca ordered, “go outside and look around.”
“Me? Oh no. If it’s her imagination, I might catch a chill, and if it’s not, I don’t want to think about it.” He shuddered dramatically.
“Is it your imagination?” Rebecca asked, starting down the stairs.
Amanda blushed. “Don’t trouble yourself.”
“Come on,” Rebecca said, “I’ll look with you.”
Amanda turned on the outside lights, grabbed a baseball bat from the hall closet, and, looking down at her bare feet, hurriedly stepped into a pair of rain boots she found in the same hall closet.
“Charming outfit, as usual,” Rebecca said, and opened the front door.
The galoshes were loose on Amanda’s feet, and it took a bit of effort to keep from tripping or stepping out of them, but she followed Rebecca as quickly as she could.
“I’m sure whoever it was is long gone by now,” Amanda said. “My scream probably scared him off. If not, then the sounds of everyone getting up out of bed and my turning the lights on-”
“Probably. But let’s look around outside your window to see what we can see.”