and held them against her, drizzling milk into their pink gums. “I’m sorry,” she told each one as she lifted it out. “But you can’t stay here anymore.” The kittens fought to reach her, and she had to lift them by the hackles to keep from getting clawed, though they were small enough to fit within the palm of her hand. The whole milk from the grocery didn’t seem to be providing enough nutrition. She needed to find the Nelson family in the church directory. You weren’t supposed to take kittens from the mother until they were at least six weeks old, and Clara was sure Sorena would run away. And yet so far something had kept the cat here. As she fed the kittens she hummed a tuneless nursery rhyme to drown out their mewling.
Then the doorbell rang, silencing her song. The shock of the sound seemed to carry through the wires of the old parsonage because the bulb above her died with a fizzing pop.
She stood uncertainly as darkness washed over her. The blood throbbed in the ends of her missing fingers. That old ache come back again.
The dark was not complete. Sour gray light leaked in from the window. The bell rang again. She still hadn’t moved, waiting for her eyes to adjust. All she had to do was walk over to the window, but she was afraid of what she might see: those dirty shoes, the fraying edge of a coat. The figure she had seen at the edge of the corn. The bell rang and rang.
Silence. She felt her senses shutting down, narrowing, the way they had with Logan in the kitchen. This was the moment her body had been preparing her for. Down in the basement she had no weapon, no place to hide. Adrenaline pumped uselessly under her skin.
There was something down here with her. She sensed it standing right behind her. It had come inside. A tremor traveled from her bare feet to the top of her skull, and then she was shivering all over. Don’t turn around. Don’t move. This is how you survive.
Help me, Clara. Please.
The hair prickled on her neck.
That was it, a voice, her name, a cry, before the doorbell stopped and the sense went away.
She waited a minute, catching her breath. The kittens started mewling again, unsatisfied with the little milk she had carried down for them. Then the lightbulb fizzed to life. She turned around, half blinded, but all she made out was a shadow retreating into the watery darkness where she intended to set up a darkroom for her photography. The sound of her name echoed in her ears. She had known that voice, a boy’s voice, scared. Seth.
The doorbell rang again, breaking her chain of thought. She wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there. Then from above came the sound of the doorknob turning, the squeak of hinges. My God. Someone had come right inside the house; she heard footsteps in the kitchen.
“Clara?” A voice rattling in the empty room above. An old woman’s voice.
She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she let it out in a rush. Instead of fear the feeling that coursed through her this time was bright, hot anger. It was just an ordinary parishioner upstairs. If they couldn’t find Logan at the church, the first thing parishioners did was call or look in here. Because the parsonage belonged to the church, some walked right inside.
“Hello?” the voice called out once more. “Anyone home?” More footsteps, and then she must have spotted the dishes on the floor. “Goodness …”
When her breath came back, she shouted up the stairs. “You can’t just come in here. I don’t know who you think you are, but you can’t just barge into a person’s home.”
“Sorry,” said the voice. “I’ll just be leaving then.”
“You wait right there,” Clara called out. She needed to put an end to this nonsense, make sure these people understood how she needed space and privacy. There were boundaries that must be respected. That was the word Logan always used. Clara walked upstairs to find her neighbor, Nora Winters, in her kitchen, standing by the stove. Nora was a gnome-sized woman with a round face that scrunched up into a mass of wrinkles when she laughed; she had blue hair, a dye job gone wrong. She was breathing heavily just from carrying a heavy silver container across the lawn that separated the two houses.