As Night Falls (8 page)

I
vy got down off her bed, setting both feet on the floor with a stealth that almost made her laugh out loud.
Stealth
had been a vocabulary word last week. She was like a character in a video game, or in one of the old movies she and Melissa liked to stream. If Darcy could see her now, Ivy would never live it down. It'd be all,
Who do you think you are, that dumb girl from
Scream
?
for the rest of time.

Mac was standing, blue eye and brown eye both narrowed and alert. He didn't make a sound—Mac wasn't a barker—but Ivy knew what her dog was telling her. No way would he stay behind while she went to scope things out. From the time Mackie had come to them, the one thing he could never stand was being alone. The guy at the shelter told her parents it was a reaction to trauma, but Ivy had never wanted to know too much about that. Anyway, she could see the effects. Being without one of them nearby was impossible for Mac.

Solitude was his Kryptonite.

Ivy liked superhero movies more than horror flicks. The old ones, not the glitzed-up new versions. How wrong the
Green Lantern
was had been the first conversation she and Cory ever had.

Maybe Cory had come over. Could he be the one who'd made those loud noises downstairs? But Cory hadn't had enough time to get here since Ivy sent her last text. He would've had to have just been sitting at the bottom of Long Hill Road or something, trusting that she would say
yes
. Which, Ivy realized, wasn't as far-fetched as all that. Cory was one of the guys at school she and Melissa called sleek. They had sleek cars. Sleek, muscled bodies. Sleek lives. Cory was probably one hundred percent convinced that Ivy would invite him over when he asked. Who turned Cory Gresham down?

He might also have banged the front door that carelessly, and then, oh, would he be off to a bad start with her father.

Ivy entered the hall, speeding up to run interference with her dad. He and Cory should get along well; they were a lot alike. Athletic—no, outdoorsy—and both so easy and confident, as if they were certain that everything was always going to go their way in life.

Ivy herself had never believed anything like that.

Mac treaded along at her side, his flank pressed to her thigh as if held there by a magnet. His tail pointed straight down at the floor. Another sign of age—losing his jaunty wagging—or an indication that Mac was disturbed about something? For a second, Ivy wished he would growl. She and her dad used to joke about getting a kitten so that they would have a better watchdog. It was sad, though, really. Part of Mac had been buried during the first year of his life.

Ivy squinted straight ahead. The hall to the stairway seemed endless when she wanted to fix herself a snack late at night, or had the idea to sneak out, even if she hadn't done it yet.

Mac sort of sniffed and jumped forward—a momentary leap back to puppyhood—before retreating and sticking himself to Ivy again.

Ivy found herself whispering, even though she knew they wouldn't be heard.

“Something's weird down there, right?” She felt it, too. She hadn't just been watching too many movies, and it didn't even matter if Darcy laughed.

She and Mac reached the staircase, which seemed to float in place, no wall on either side, only a slender branch of railing to hold on to. When you were on the steps, it felt as if you were suspended high up in the air. A masterpiece, the builder had called it, after finally succeeding in bringing her father's design to life. Ivy herself hated the staircase, hated this whole enormous house, in fact. She missed their old one, a cozy Victorian back in town, painted the prettiest shades of pale green and lilac. Ivy and her mom had labored over those colors, going outside again and again, holding up sheet after sheet of tiny colorful squares. They'd been accompanied by some woman with a black Lab who was in charge of the whole fixing-up process—the woman, not the dog—and who swore that she loved this stuff, Ivy and her mom could take as long as they liked choosing.

But then her dad had decided that their house—Ivy's childhood home—was too small for them, not to mention too old-fashioned, and began creating this one from scratch. It was big enough that it couldn't be in town, and the new school bus driver complained every single day about making the trip out here. Felt like a long haul trucker, he said. Her old school bus driver never would've complained. But Earl had retired, just one more piece of Ivy's childhood gone.

She stepped onto the top stair, Mac squeezing himself down beside her. She peered over the side, perplexed.

Through the empty air to her right, Ivy could see that it wasn't only the front door that had been treated with careless abandon. A chair was also overturned. And no way, even if Cory had gone and done something bizarre like that, would her father have just left it there. He liked his furniture—made by some master craftsman in Ohio and shipped all the way out here—almost as much as he liked this precious house.

Ivy stopped her foot from reaching for the next step. She paused in place, motionless on the level plank of wood. Then, soundlessly, she began to back up.

She needed a few moments to think. Mac padded along toward Ivy's bedroom in his own position of consideration, or relief.

Another thing about this house, it was virtually soundproof. Ivy hated that, too. Someone could be practically on top of her before she heard them. Her mother, she'd always been able to feel somehow, at least know when she was around. It was like the two of them were connected by a sheer, invisible thread, something spun by an insect. Although lately that thread seemed to have gotten snipped. But with her father, Ivy might be lost in a homework assignment, or a conversation with Melissa, only to look up and see him looming in her doorway.

Point was, she had no way of telling what might be going on downstairs, not by overhearing anything anyway. She couldn't imagine any scenario that would result in a chair being overturned, but whatever it was, it must entail some degree of confrontation, right? Like, a scuffle or something?

The idea of her family scuffling made Ivy almost laugh out loud. But there was a deeper place inside her, pinprick-sized, and that place wasn't laughing. It felt cold and hollow and scared.

If Cory had gotten here, her mother would've come up and told her. She didn't stay mad at Ivy for long, never really got mad at her at all, in fact. And she would know what a big thing it was for Ivy to invite a boy over. Something that had never happened before actually.

There was no use calling out; she wouldn't be heard. And if she went downstairs, then that would rule out any other option or plan. She'd be a part of whatever was going on down there, and something told Ivy that might not be such a good idea.

Was the fight between her parents? The idea was almost laughable. Ivy's mom and dad didn't even snipe at each other much, let alone throw chairs.

Outside, the wind was blowing hard enough that a faint whistle made its way into her room. The last leaves were being sheared off the trees. Ivy could see them; brown, jagged flying things, propelled through the air. She retrieved her cell phone—maybe Cory had texted—and wasn't surprised to see two words in the status bar.
N
O SIGNAL
. Her phone was basically as useless to her now as a lump of rock. Happened all the time up here. The signal went out in town too, just not as much. Another thing to hate about this place.

Ivy heaved a sigh and tossed the phone onto her bed.

Only what had she been thinking to do? Call 911? Say that a chair had fallen over?

She glanced at her laptop, humming contentedly away in hibernation on her desk. She realized she didn't have to call 911—which was like a crime if there wasn't a really good reason; the chief of police had come to their class last year and explained it. But the Wi-Fi always worked even if their phones didn't. Ivy could message Melissa, say that something weird was going on. They could decide together what to do about it.

She was just about to cross to her desk when it hit her. Who must be here.

It wasn't Cory, and Ivy heaved a sigh of relief. She looked at Mac, who hadn't lain back down, but was standing in place, claws digging into the rug as he watched her.

“It's okay, Mackie. I figured it out. You know who's come over? To stir up trouble again?”

Her dog gazed up at her, all the trust in the world in his eyes, so that for a second, Ivy had the crazy impulse to cry.

“You're right,” she said, stroking the silky fur on Mac's ears. “It's those icky Nelsons.”

Ivy started for the bathroom, shaking her head at the positively bizarre level of paranoia she'd reached tonight, and untangling wisps of hair with her fingers. She wanted to change her shirt, just quickly, then check the mirror, make sure she looked okay before she went down. Cory would be here any minute.

The Nelsons were their only neighbors, if
neighbor
was the right word for people who lived a workout-length jog away. There was a house a little closer, but it was falling down and no one lived there anymore, especially not in the wintertime.

There was another reason not to think of the Nelsons as neighborly, and that was because they hated her parents. Probably Ivy too, for all she knew.

It had gotten ugly as soon as this house started to go up. At first Ivy had been neutral when her parents traded stories—all wide-eyed shock at how some people could act—but even though she basically agreed with the Nelsons, if their point was
go back where you came from,
she had to admit to being kind of shocked at how they behaved. The Nelsons had dammed a part of the creek so that the banks flooded onto Ivy's parents' new land. They blocked the road from being extended with a whole bunch of logs. And when none of that worked, and construction went on ahead anyway, the Nelsons had thrown a bucket of paint across the boards her dad had made a big deal of
not
painting, only staining, an application he said would allow for almost no maintenance in years to come. Something like that anyway.

Just after the outside walls had gone up, her dad and mom had forced Ivy to make the trip out here, believing she'd feel better—start to
adjust
—once she saw how the place was coming along. Well, fat chance of that, but even Ivy had to feel sorry for her parents when they got there. Red splotches all over their velvety new boards, like the house was one huge Jackson Pollock canvas or whatever.

The Nelsons. Their name came to be uttered like Lord Voldemort's around here.

They thought the new house was outsized—
true
—that they'd lost their precious privacy—
ick, privacy for what
—and that their view would be cut off. Ivy had no clue what they were talking about with that one. There were views everywhere you looked around here. This whole place was a view.

After the paint incident, the police had been called, and Ivy's mom floated the idea that maybe they shouldn't move out to the middle of absolutely nowhere. Ivy had wanted to sing with relief. She'd hugged her mom unasked for the first time in months.

But her dad had gotten really mad. It'd been the only time Ivy could remember her parents having a real life, honest-to-God argument, with yelling, and awkward silences that lasted days instead of immediately being dusted up and cleared away by Ivy's mom.

“What do you want to do, just slink off with our tails between our legs?” her dad had demanded. “You don't back down at the first sign of a fight.”

Which was pretty hypocritical on her dad's part, since of course that was exactly what he wanted Ivy's mom to do at the first sign of any fight with
him
.

Okay, honey, you're right, we'll move,
her mom had finally said. Something like that.

And they had. Construction had continued, and maybe it was the police, maybe something else, but the Nelsons had pretty much left them alone after that.

Until tonight.

Ivy wondered what had caused things to fire up again.

She took a last look in the mirror, running a wand of pink gloss over her lips. Maybe her parents would be so distracted, they wouldn't even notice she was wearing makeup.

Ivy raced down the stairs, her feet pounding. Mac huffed as he fought to keep up.

She was most of the way to the kitchen, skidding round the bend that divided the living and dining rooms from it, when she suddenly reared back. Mac halted too, his body thrumming like a guitar string against her. He didn't make a sound, none of his little yelps or whimpers, but Ivy knew her dog was scared.

Whoever had come, it wasn't the Nelsons.

S
andy's gaze slid away from the man who stood with his back to her, close enough to make her gag. At one point he reached behind him, feeling to make sure she remained in the chair, and there was an intimacy, a familiarity to the blindly delivered touch that sent ripples of disgust throughout her whole body.

The skin on her hands was itching again in a way that couldn't be scratched.

The kitchen clock caught her eye. The last time she'd looked at this clock, back when Ben had declared the night early yet, the slashes of numbers had read 7:04.

Which meant the intruders had been inside her house for less than three minutes.

How long ago had it been when Ivy accused Sandy of lying, her tone like a toxin? Even the sulkiest version of Ivy had never dripped contempt like that before. Now this man had come to flay their lives. He couldn't. Not before Sandy and Ivy had a chance to make it through the bombed-out years of adolescence, cross over to the peacetime eras mothers and daughters inhabited on the other side.

“Where's your medicine cabinet?” the man demanded.

“What?” Sandy asked.

He started to twist around, and Sandy responded before he could turn fully. “In the powder room. There.” She pointed.

“Harlan,” the man ordered. “Get me some aspirin.”

The goliath returned with a bottle of Advil.

The man stood with his leg thrust into the space between Sandy's knees, one arm barricading her body in the chair.

“Empty the drawers,” he ordered the big man. He fumbled with the cap on the bottle, shaking out a handful of pills onto his palm, then crunching them up.

Sandy wondered what kind of damage Ben had inflicted on his foot.

Ben.

A sob rose up, blocking her airway.

“Empty them into what?” The big man had a voice to match his body: its rumble so deep that it was hard to parse into distinct words.

“Look underneath the sink for some trash bags. And Harlan?”

The big man lifted his head.

“Clear this rack.” The man with the cold eyes pointed.

Harlan swept the pots off the rack in a jingling clatter, hardly having to reach over his head to do it. Then he pounded over to the rows of drawers, huge mitts of hands yanking each one out, graceless fingers combining the contents into the gaping maw of a black garbage bag. Sandy's brand-new drawers, which slid so smoothly on their tracks, now rattled like a drum kit.

She was thinking about cabinetry.

When she needed to fight, to check on Ben, to rouse him.

No, she had to go after Ivy, somehow defying detection.

Thoughts circled around in her mind, like water going down a drain.

Sandy opened her mouth and let air into her lungs, her bruised chest cramping.

The man blocking her looked down, sensing something. The minute, almost imperceptible way she drew back, readying herself to spring forward.

He gave her a knowing glance before something puckered between his brows.

Sandy switched her gaze so fast her head cramped. Her hands bore down on the arms of the chair. She was starting to rise without having any idea she'd meant to do so.

In an instant the man's hand was around her throat, five splayed fingers bracing it till her breath was reduced to a thin whistling stream.

His coat gapped, revealing a dark stenciling of tattoos around the stem of his neck. He was small compared to the other man, but thickly muscled. His wrist felt like it was made out of cast iron.

“Don't even think about it,” he said.

His voice made her want to puncture her own eardrums. Sandy fought to get away from his touch, the branding of her flesh with his eyes. Time slowed to a syrupy swirl. Finally Sandy stopped struggling, her body curling over. Her back was a carapace, the only protection she had.

The man's fingers slowly loosened, granting air.

“You have no idea what I'm thinking,” she said as soon as she could speak.

Across the room, the big man was still raking out cabinets. He'd just discovered an old pencil case of Ivy's. Sandy hadn't seen the thing in years—she couldn't believe it had survived the move—but at her captor's behest, Harlan began emptying its contents. Pens whose potential as daggers Sandy only now realized; a small blade contained in the blue plastic housing of a crayon sharpener.

She was going to be left without so much as a toothpick for a weapon.

Sandy looked across the room to Ben, still lying on the floor, and her heart twisted. She could see the rise and fall of her husband's back. He was alive.

The pyramid of wood he'd stacked earlier had been taken apart.

The big man dragged a fistful of logs and his sack full of kitchen contraband across the floor. The load was cumbersome even for him; all the bits and pieces, the many objects that made up their lives.

The big man headed to the sliding glass doors. He elbowed them open as if they'd been greased, doors weighty enough that Sandy and Ivy always fought with them. Harlan heaved everything out into the yard, far enough away that the pieces couldn't be heard when they came down. Sandy tried to envision their distant destination. She had loved all the space upon moving up here; now she feared and loathed it.

“Does your husband have a gun?” the man with the lightless eyes asked. He was breathing easier now, color returning to his face.

She'd actually forgotten him for a moment, so focused had she been on the dismantling of the kitchen. It used to be an ability Sandy was grateful for: the laser pinpoint she could apply with her mind, while other parts broke and splintered off, never to be looked at again. Now that tendency had nearly made her miss something essential.

“What?” she said.

“Sure he does.” The man looked down and Sandy twisted away from him in the chair. “Where is it?”

A belch of bile rose, burning, in Sandy's throat as options skittered through her mind. Could she come up with something to throw the man off, preserving the guns for later use? Simple refutation maybe, the ostrich-like denial of a five-year-old? No, sorry, we don't own a gun. But it wasn't as if things would stop there, her word for it simply taken. Perhaps she could send the man on a wild goose chase, someplace far away from Ivy. Give Ben a chance to come to—and come up with something.

She looked up, daring the dark pits of the man's eyes, and saw in them patience, and just the slightest shading of mirth. As if he was utterly certain that she would tell him whatever he wanted to know.

The prospect of defying him suffused her with a never-before-felt warmth.

And suddenly it occurred to Sandy how she could accomplish two things. Create a needed delay and save her husband by placing a value on his life.

“The guns are in a safe down in the basement,” Sandy said. “But it's kept locked. And I don't know the combination.”

“Guns,” the man said. “Plural. Well, well. You country folk are well armed.”

Sandy didn't respond.

“In a safe in the basement,” the man went on, gazing down at her. “And unfortunately you can't open it.” He paused. “So near and yet so far.”

Sandy held his stare. It took all the strength she had to do it.

“I'm surprised,” the man added, “that it wouldn't have occurred to you that one day you might need to shoot someone.”

Sandy's gaze trembled and finally fell. She stared off at the stripped-bare kitchen, cabinet doors opening onto empty shelves, drawers lolling out like tongues. Taunting her with everything she'd had, and lost. Or everything she'd never really had at all.

“It's your husband who knows how to get at them,” the man said, in that musing tone.

Sandy forced a nod.

The man crouched before her, so close she could see bits of beard growing underneath the pale skin on his jaw. They matched the stubble across his scalp. “Was that a
yes
?”

Sandy nodded again. When the man didn't move away, she said it out loud. “Yes.”

He duplicated her nod. “Well, that only leaves me a couple of options.” He twisted behind him to where the big man stood, absolutely still, casting a shadow across the floor. “I could ask Harlan to do me the honor of making sure you really can't get at that combination.” He aimed a smile at her, empty as a sunny sky. “Harlan has a way of helping people remember things they think they forgot.”

Sandy pressed her lips together.

“Harlan.”

Harlan took a few halting steps forward.

The man nodded sagely at the other's slow progress. “This will be easier than the alternative…”

Instantly, Sandy knew which alternative he meant. It was carried by the dark gleam in his eyes, a tilt of his lips that said he had a taste for destruction. And so Sandy also knew that she couldn't allow this idea—which was going to involve searching the house for the combination to the safe—to be fully formulated. Because somehow, through intuition or smarts or sheer blind luck, Ivy had so far kept her presence unknown. These men didn't know about her. Ivy must have Mac with her, too; their dog would never have remained on his own. Which meant there was a chance that both Sandy's daughter and their dog would find something in the house to help them. Maybe they'd even get out.

Any bravery she had felt receded in a wave.

Sandy had no problem looking terrified as Harlan covered the distance to her, even though it wasn't the prospect of his information extraction skills that scared her.

She hardly felt her hands wrapping around the legs of the chair; sensation had been blocked as if by a trivet or thick gloves. Her fingers dug into the wood and she calmly registered the split of a splinter.

At any second Ivy would realize she was hungry or bored or, God help her, sorry about before. And then she would bound downstairs and—

The ceiling over Sandy's head, the floor that lay between her and her daughter, felt like it contained fathoms of water, its pressure unbearable.

“Zero-zero, seventy-six, seventy-four,” she burst out.

The man raised one hand, and Harlan stopped walking. The floorboards vibrated, accepting his weight.

The other man leaned close.

He was going to make sense of those numbers, Sandy thought with a lightning strike of fear. The combination was their birth years—it occurred to her only now how startlingly, appallingly unoriginal that was of them—and so this man would realize there must be another member of the family. Sandy's whole world, everything she loved, contained in a measly handful of digits.

But the man merely rose from his crouch. “I'll get the guns,” he said. “Harlan will never be able to remember the combination.”

Sandy sat back, her breath coming in a ragged hitch.

The man added something as he reached the basement door, and it made the big man start forward again. “Harlan can decide what to do about your lying.”