Chapter 7 - The Old House On County Road
I told Alexander I needed groceries.
It was just after nine. He was in the living room with Sofia on his lap, her head against his chest, a cartoon playing low that neither of them was watching. The plates from last night were gone. The housekeeper had come early and cleared the dining room while we stayed upstairs and pretended we did not hear the clink of the gold rims stacking.
"I'll take her to the store with me," he said, without looking up.
I kept my keys tight in my hand so they would not jingle. "She's half asleep. Let her stay. I'll be quick. Milk and bread."
He looked at me then. Just a second too long. I could see him weighing it, the control against the exhaustion. Sofia shifted and grabbed a fold of his shirt.
"Thirty minutes," he said.
I nodded. "Thirty."
That was the first time I had lied to him about where I was going since Elena.
The county road out past Miller's Creek was narrower than I remembered. I had only been there once with Elena, in daylight, and she had driven. Now the pavement gave way to patched blacktop and then gravel on the shoulder. Corn stubble on both sides, cut low and brown. A gas station with plywood over the windows. A church with a small parking lot empty except for leaves blowing across the painted lines.
My GPS lost the address twice. I slowed near the mile marker Elena had mentioned and checked the mailbox numbers nailed to posts. Most were faded. Then I saw it, set back behind a line of bare maples. Number 17, half hanging off.
I turned in.
The driveway was two ruts with grass growing high between them. My tires crunched over fallen branches. The house sat at the end, two stories, paint peeled down to gray wood, shutters hanging crooked on the upper windows. A porch ran across the front, its roof sagging in the middle. I parked short of it and killed the engine.
For a moment I just sat. The quiet out there was different from the mansion. No wall sconces, no room tone, no ticking clock. Just wind through the trees and the tick of my cooling engine.
I had told myself this would prove Alexander wrong. That it was empty, a past rumor, nothing to fight over at dinner. Seeing it should have made me feel better.
It did not.
I got out and locked the door behind me out of habit, though there was no one for a mile. The air smelled like wet leaves and old smoke. The front steps groaned when I put my weight on the first one. I did not go up all the way. I told myself I would just look from the yard.
Up close the disrepair was worse. The bottom pane of the front window was broken, taped over from the inside with yellowing packing tape. The front door was shut, but the deadbolt was new. Bright brass against weathered wood. Someone had installed it recently. The screws still shone.
That stopped me cold.
An abandoned house does not get a new deadbolt.
I stepped off the porch and walked around the side, staying on the patchy grass. The side window curtains were drawn, but one gaped open an inch. Behind the house, the back yard was overgrown with brush. A rusted swing set leaned to one side.
Then I saw the tracks.
The ground was soft from last week's rain. Fresh tire tracks cut through the mud behind the house, narrow, not mine, leading to a lean-to shed with its door ajar. And beside them, footprints. Small boots, then larger shoes overlapping. Someone had walked from a car to the back door recently enough that the edges had not washed out.
My throat went dry. I moved closer, careful where I stepped. The back door had a new padlock too, and scratch marks on the frame where the old lock had been pried. On the concrete step below it sat a crushed soda can, still silver on the crushed edge, not rusted. A cigarette butt beside it, filter clean and white.
Someone was coming here. Not years ago. Now.
I backed away and circled to the front again, breathing faster. I told myself not to touch anything. I was only here to verify, not to go inside. I kept that promise.
It was on the porch railing that I found the link.
A thin strip of dark red fabric was caught on a nail where the railing had splintered. Wool, frayed at the end. I knew that color. I had seen Elena wear a scarf that exact shade the afternoon she pressed the key into my palm in the diner parking lot and said do not let him keep you from the old house.
I did not need to pull it free to be sure. The knot where it had snagged was fresh, the fibers still soft, not sun-bleached. And tucked under the railing post, half hidden by a fallen shutter, was a grocery receipt. I bent and picked it up with two fingers.
It was dated three days ago. A convenience store on Highway 9. Bottled water, crackers, batteries.
On the back, in blue ink, in handwriting I recognized from the note she had left with the key, two words: stay ready.
My hands started shaking so hard I had to press the receipt flat against my leg to read it again. This was not a story Elena had told to scare me. She had been here. Someone else had been here with her, or after her. The new locks, the tracks, the fresh trash.
Alexander was not protecting us from a memory. He was protecting Sofia from a place that was still being used.
I heard a branch snap in the trees beyond the driveway and jerked my head up. Nothing moved. Just the maples and the wind. But I suddenly felt how alone I was, thirty minutes from home, with my daughter napping on her father's lap and no one knowing where I was.
May you like
I dropped the receipt into my coat pocket and walked fast back to my car. I did not look at the house again until I was behind the wheel with the doors locked. In the rearview mirror it sat there, gray and quiet, the new deadbolt glinting when the sun broke through.
I pulled out onto the county road with gravel spitting under my tires. My thirty minutes were almost up.
