Chapter 5 - THE PHANTOM IN THE DRIVEWAY
Three days later, I brought the children home to my house.
My small, two-bedroom craftsman bungalow on Maple Street had never felt so quiet, or so fragile. I had spent the intervening seventy-two hours transforming the spare room: two twin beds with clean, cheerful blue sheets; soft nightlights that cast warm, amber crescents against the ceiling; and every lock on every interior door completely removed. I had taken a screwdriver and unscrewed the privacy locks from the bedroom, the bathroom, and the hallway closets, leaving only open brass latches that could never click shut.
Drew walked through the front door using pediatric crutches, his green cast swinging heavily with each step. Lily walked beside him, her tiny fingers clamped onto the belt loop of his jeans like a lifeline.
Neither of them spoke. They moved through my living room with the slow, terrifying wariness of feral animals placed inside an unfamiliar enclosure. Drew tested every floorboard with his crutch tip before committing his weight, his eyes cataloging every door, every window, every shadow behind the sofa.
"This is your room," I said gently, pushing the bedroom door wide open.
Drew stood in the doorway. He didn't look at the toys I had bought—the wooden train set, the coloring books, the stuffed animals. His eyes went straight to the closet door, which hung half-ajar.
"Can you take it off?" he asked quietly.
"The door?"
He nodded, his small shoulders hitched up to his ears. "Please."
Without a word, I walked out to my garage, grabbed my drill and a pry bar, and came back. In front of him, I unscrewed the brass hinges, lifted the wooden closet door completely off its frame, and carried it out to the garage. When I came back inside, Drew was sitting on the edge of the mattress, running his fingers across the open drywall where the door had been.
"No dark corners," I promised him. "Ever again."
Lily climbed onto the bed beside him, pulling Aaron’s old red flannel work shirt—which I had retrieved from my closet—up to her nose. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.
"Daddy," she whispered.
Drew wrapped his uninjured arm around her shoulders. "Uncle Paul smells like Daddy," he told her. "It's okay, Lil. He doesn't have the black keys."
The first two weeks were an exercise in patience and terror. Drew woke up every night at 2:14 AM—the exact time, I later learned, when the automated cellar timer would shut off the faint utility bulb in their former prison. He wouldn't scream. He would simply sit bolt upright, rigid as a stone pillar, staring at the hallway light until I walked into the room, sat on the rug beside his bed, and spoke to him in low, steady murmurs about carpentry, about his father’s workshop, about how to build a treehouse with mortise-and-tenon joints.
Lily would only eat food that was completely cold. If I gave her warm soup or toasted bread, she pushed the plate away with wide, panicked eyes. At Reena's house, warmth had meant food that had been left sitting out until it spoiled; they had learned to fear hot meals because hot meals were used as rewards that were almost always rescinded before they could swallow.
By the third week of November, winter arrived in earnest, dusting the sidewalks with premature sleet.
The police had raided Vance's mountain retreat in the Poconos, but they were forty-eight hours too late. They found burned hard drives in an outdoor fire pit and a pantry stocked with survival rations, but no sign of Reena Calder. The silver sedan had been discovered abandoned in a commuter rail lot in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The trail had gone cold.
On a Tuesday evening, while the children were eating dinner at the kitchen table, the wind picked up, rattling the storm windows.
Drew suddenly froze, his spoon hovering inches from his bowl.
"What is it, Drew?" I asked, setting down the kettle.
"The car," he whispered.
"Just the wind on the eaves, buddy."
"No," Drew said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, flat register of survival. "The car with the squeaky fan belt. She parked it at the end of the alley."
My blood turned to pure ice.
I stood up slowly, walked to the hallway, and switched off the kitchen chandelier, plunging the room into the soft amber glow of the living room lamp. "Drew, take Lily into the pantry behind the stove. Stay down."
He didn't hesitate. He slid off the wooden bench, seized his sister's hand, and ushered her into the deep storage closet behind the refrigerator, pulling the curtain shut.
I walked to the front bay window, keeping behind the heavy velvet drapes.
Outside, under the flickering municipal streetlight fifty yards away, sat a dark, unwashed subcompact hatchback. Its headlights were off, but exhaust plumed in thick, pale clouds from its tailpipe in the sub-freezing air.
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Through the salt-encrusted windshield, I could make out the silhouette of a woman sitting behind the steering wheel. Her posture was unmistakable: straight-backed, head tilted slightly to the side, wearing an oversized knit beanie pulled low over her brow.
In her hands, she held a long, silver telephoto lens resting against the open crack of the driver’s side window, aimed directly at my front porch.
