locked the door. She stared at the gleaming brass thumb-turn,
wondering if her imagination had seized on a few perfectly natural
noises to conjure a threat that had even less substance than a ghost.
The rotten smell lingered. Yes, well, perhaps the ammonia water had
not been able to banish the odor for more than a day or two. A rat or
another small animal might be dead and decomposing inside the wall. As
she turned toward the stairs, she stepped in something. She lifted her
left foot and studied the floor. A clod of dry earth about as large as
a plum had partially crumbled under her bare heel. Climbing to the
second floor, she noticed dry crumbs of earth scattered on a few of the
treads, which she'd failed to notice in her swift descent. The dirt
hadn't been there when she finished cleaning the stairwell on
Wednesday. She wanted to believe it was proof the intruder existed.
More likely, Toby had tracked a little mud in from the backyard. He
was usually a considerate kid, and he was neat by nature, but he was,
after all, only eight years old.
Heather returned to Toby's room, locked the door, and snapped off the
stairwell light. Her son was sound asleep. Feeling no less foolish
than confused, she went down the front stairs, directly to the
kitchen.
If the repulsive smell was a sign of the intruder's recent presence,
and if the slightest trace of that stink hung in the kitchen, it would
mean he had a key with which he'd entered from the back stairs. In
that case she intended to wake Jack and insist they search the house
top to bottom--with loaded guns.
The kitchen smelled fresh and clean. No crumbles of dry soil on the
floor, either. She was almost disappointed. She was loath to think
that she'd imagined everything, but the facts justified no other
interpretation. Imagination or not, she couldn't rid herself of the
feeling that she was under observation. She closed the blinds over the
kitchen windows. Get a grip, Heather thought. You're fifteen years
away from the change of life, lady, no excuse for these weird mood
swings. She had intended to spend the rest of the night reading, but
she was too agitated to concentrate on a book. She needed to keep
busy. While she brewed a pot of coffee, she inventoried the contents
of the freezer compartment in the side-by-side refrigerator.
There were half a dozen frozen dinners, a package of frankfurters, two
boxes of Green Giant white corn, one box of green beans, two of
carrots, and a package of Oregon blueberries, none of which Eduardo
Fernandez had opened and all of which they could use. On a lower
shelf, under a box of Eggo waffles and a pound of bacon, she found a
Ziploc bag that appeared to contain a legal-size tablet of yellow
paper. The plastic was opaque with frost, but she could vaguely see
that lines of handwriting filled the first page. She popped the
pressure seal on the bag--but then hesitated.
Storing the tablet in such a peculiar place was tantamount to hiding
it.
Fernandez must have considered the contents to be important and
extremely personal, and Heather was reluctant to invade his privacy.
Though dead and gone, he was the benefactor who had radically changed
