“We do keep that boy busy.”
Nora wasn’t listening. Instead she was imagining all the waysPhil could sabotage her car. If he could expose some wires in the oven and set the kitchen on fire, cutting the brakes on a Honda Civic would be a breeze. Or maybe he’d do something to start a fire there too. Maybe that was his thing. Not that that would explain the knife situation, but a man could have range.
“Nora?”
Nora blinked at the sound of her name.
“Sorry,” she said. “What was that?”
“I said he seems keen to have you both here. Phil’s not usually quite so lively,” said Richard. “Must be nice for him to finally have some folks in town closer to his age. He always used to joke about how much he’d hate having newcomers around, but I guess he’s changed his tune.”
* * *
Nora held Charlie’s case file open and propped against her raised knees. Across the bedroom, Charlie was already asleep, Jessica perched on the pillow beside his head. Nora furrowed her brows at the dancing smudge of smoky black that held Charlie’s cause of death somewhere inside, trying to decipher the indecipherable once again. Jessica abandoned her post on Charlie’s pillow and made her way to Nora, seeking attention wherever she could get it. She climbed the wooden bedpost and hopped onto Nora’s knee, peering down at her expectantly.
“What do you want?” Nora said without looking up from the file.
Jessica just stared at her intently.
Nora sighed. “We really need to have a chat about boundaries,” she said as the parrot bopped her little head up and down. “Unless you think you can make sense of this?”
The bird made no attempt to make sense of anything. In fact, her rapt attention only made the whole thing seem harder to unravel. Nora closed the file and lowered her knees, letting Jessica hop her way over her torso so they were face-to-face.
“Phil,” she said, thinking out loud. “Richard says he doesn’t like outsiders for some reason. If he’s the one who lives in the woods, maybe he’s hiding something there. Something so terrible he doesn’t want anyone finding out about it. The townspeople might know not to go into the forest, but outsiders wouldn’t, right? So maybe he…maybe he wants to kill Charlie so we don’t discover whatever’s out there in the forest. And maybe he’s not trying to kill me because…because….”
“Forest,” Jessica squawked. “Let’s go play in forest house.”
“Well, that was creepy,” said Nora. “Do you ever say anything that isn’t swearing or weird?”
“Let’s go play in forest house,” Jessica repeated.
“Okay. Tomorrow I’m teaching you boundariesanddecent conversational skills.” Nora chanced a look down the foot of her bed to the locked bedroom door. The knob had remained still, no sound of footsteps on the other side for as long as they’d been in bed. There were no windows down there by which someone could break in, and nothing appeared to be booby-trapped. Nora’s eyelids each weighed roughly as much as a full-grown Great Dane. She gave Jessica a groggy glance.
“I need to sleep,” she announced. “Sleep deprivation increases the risk of heart attacks and stroke. I need to sleep. Jessica, this shift is on you. If anything dangerous happens, scream. Blink twice if you understand me.”
Jessica stared at her a beat, then blinked once, more from the right eye than the left.
“That’s going to have to do,” said Nora. She left the lights on just in case, rolled onto her side, and drifted into a restless sleep.
* * *
The next morning, Nora awoke to find the room unchanged from the night before. Charlie was still asleep, the steady rise and fall of his chest confirming his status as not dead. Jessica was back on his pillow, and the bedroom door was as firmly closed and locked as it was possible for a door to be. Nora checked her watch. It was just after seven thirty a.m. If yesterday was anything to go by, her grandparents would likely not yet have left for their morning walk. Good. She needed to talk to Richard. He was on a rapidly shrinking list of people who hadn’t actively done something to make Nora suspect them of wanting to kill Charlie, which was the best she had to work with right now.
She went upstairs to find Richard tidying the stack of magazines on the living room coffee table, his broad form hunched over the low surface.
“Morning,” Nora greeted as cheerily as she could manage.
Richard turned around. “Oh, good morning, Nora. I figured you kids would still be asleep at this hour.”
“Well, Charlie is,” said Nora. “And will be for a good while. He’s really good at sleeping.” She rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand, still drowsy. Sleep was just one of the many ways the twins were different. “Actually, I had a question for you.”
“Go for it,” said Richard.
Nora glanced around. “Where’s Ruby?”
“Oh, she’s just in the shower. She should be down in a sec.”
Nora nodded as casually as possible. The old woman had secrets, big ones, and until Nora knew them she couldn’t trust her.“Charlie and I took a little walk into the woods yesterday,” she began. Richard seemed to subtly, almost imperceptibly stiffen at this. Or did Nora imagine that? She continued, “We came across an old house out there. I was just wondering about it. Seems like a weird place for a house when there’s so much cleared land around.”
