“Maybe,” Phoebe said. “He just seems awfully slick to me, and worth keeping an eye on.” Glenda was silent.
“So you think there’ll be a full-scale panic tomorrow?” Phoebe asked.
“Not so much from the kids,” Glenda said. “But the parents are going to go nuts. Trust me—some will be showing up with U-Hauls to whisk their kids away.”
When they reached Glenda’s house, Phoebe put the car in park and leaned over to hug her friend.
“Hang in there, okay?” Phoebe said. “There’s nothing you can’t handle.”
Alone in the car, Phoebe headed home. As she drove down the dark, empty streets of Lyle, she could feel her unease rising. About Trevor Harris being found, about everything. Plus, she hadn’t had time to go home earlier to turn the lights on, and she couldn’t bear the idea of walking into a pitch-black house.
As she pulled into the driveway, her eyes raced quickly over the front of the house. The glowing porch light, controlled by a sensor, seemed to accentuate how absolutely dark the inside of the house was. Phoebe stepped out of the car, locked it, and scanned all around her. There wasn’t a soul anywhere.
Phoebe unlocked the front door, pushed it open a few inches, and listened. The only sound was the low purr of the furnace. Patting her fingers along the living room wall, she located the switch for the overhead light, which she rarely used. When she flicked it on, the room exploded with light. At first glance, everything looked exactly as she’d left it.
After locking the door behind her, Phoebe made her way to the kitchen and quickly flipped on the light. Her eyes roamed the room—the back door, the windows, the fridge. Everything seemed okay.
As she shrugged off her coat, Phoebe felt her stomach growl from hunger. She hadn’t eaten a thing since the morning. She dumped a can of New England clam chowder into a pan. While the soup heated, she dug her phone from her purse to check e-mails. There was one from Duncan, sent a short while ago.
“Looking forward to tomorrow night,” he’d written.
“Me, too,” she typed back, smiling. “What time? And where?”
She almost jumped when another e-mail appeared from Duncan almost instantly. So he was online right now.
“Why don’t you come by my office in the science building at six,” he replied. “I’ll show you around the lab and then we can head to my place.”
“Great,” she wrote, though the idea of seeing the lab made her squirm. “Btw, have you heard the news about Trevor Harris?”
She watched the screen, waiting, but nothing else appeared. Their brief exchange had lifted her mood, but now she felt her unease return, weighing down on her.
She took her soup to her office and typed up notes from her conversations that day with both Alexis and Wesley. When she was done, she printed out a set for Glenda and one for Hutch as well, which she would drop off tomorrow. It would be good to get his input, though she wondered if he’d feel he’d been wrong not to take Wesley seriously.
Next she went online and searched date-rape drugs like GHB and roofies. She quickly learned that victims often appeared normal after they’d been slipped the drugs, and people around them might have no idea they were under the influence. And just as Wesley had told her, they might later experience total amnesia about what had transpired.
When she’d finished reading, she closed her eyes and massaged the area between her eyes. Her brain hurt, and so did her body, from so many hours in the car. She shut off her laptop and, leaving several lights downstairs blazing, mounted the stairs to her bedroom.
As her head sank into the pillow a few minutes later, she picked up a faint musky scent, and she realized it was Duncan’s cologne, still lingering in the fabric from the other night. Until she’d received his e-mails, she had kept thoughts of him mostly at bay since the morning, but now, as sleep began to overwhelm her, she allowed a few to roam her brain. I can’t help it, she realized. I’m dying to see the man again tomorrow. Sure, it’s just a fling, she told herself, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t relish it. In fact, maybe that’s why the sex had been so intense and exhilarating the other night—because they both knew it was destined to end before long.
She woke with a start after three, cold all over. Searching the bed with her hand, she found that the duvet had slipped off onto the floor. She slid out of bed and began to drag the duvet back onto the mattress. As she stood barefoot on the cold floor, adjusting the duvet, she froze. There was a noise, like a machine running. Her heart seemed to ram into her rib cage.
Phoebe flicked on the bedside light and listened. There was definitely a noise, the low, steady hum of a motor of some kind. She grabbed her phone and forced herself to tiptoe into the hallway. Whatever the noise was, it was coming from downstairs. With her heart still pounding hard, she made her way to the top of the stairs. It’s the dishwasher, she realized after a moment. She could now hear the rush and swirl of water.
But she hadn’t run the machine after dinner, and even if she had, it wouldn’t still be running now. The dishwasher in her city apartment had a delay feature so it could run hours later. Did this one have the same feature, and had she set it accidentally? She didn’t think so; it was an old model.
Damn, I’ve got to go down there, she told herself. She flicked on the stairwell light and edged down the stairs. As soon as she reached the third step from the bottom, her eyes flew to the front door, to the chain lock. From the light she left on, she could see the lock was still in place.
She’d left the kitchen light burning, too, and as soon as she approached the room, she could see that the chain was still in place on the back door, too.
She relaxed a little. This has got to be a mechanical fluke, she told herself. She entered the kitchen and ran her eyes rapidly over all the fixtures. Nothing was amiss. The only sound in the room was the swish and swirl of water.
Phoebe approached, set her phone on the counter, and rested her hand on top of the dishwasher door. Open it, she told herself. You have to open it.
***
IF SHE’D BEEN smart, she would have just backed off, concentrated on her work and on things that couldn’t be taken away. But she hated the fact that she’d been shut out of doing any writing and editing. So she bided her time for a bit, mulling over her options, and then went to an English teacher who seemed to like her. She had an idea, she said, for a quarterly poetry magazine with a twist. There’d be no selection or rejection process. Everyone would have the chance to have one poem published in it. “That’s a lovely idea,” the teacher had said.
There was hardly anything special about it, and some of the poems that were submitted were like the stuff you found in greeting cards. But it was a success in terms of volume and participation. The first issue debuted at thirty-one pages long.
Four days later the note arrived in her mailbox. “You think you’re hot shit, don’t you? But you’re not. You’ll see.”
Below the words, the writer had drawn a tiny wheel.
17
PHOEBE TOOK A breath and slid over the rusted lever on the dishwasher door. The rushing-water sound ceased instantly, and the house was now utterly quiet. She paused for a moment, steeling herself. Then she slowly opened the door. A spray of water splashed onto her, and she glanced down instinctively. But it wasn’t just water. The wet mark the water had left on her white pajama bottoms was tinged pink.