used around the house.
The hand was on the doorknob. Darby swung the hammer and hit him on the arm.
The man from the woods screamed – an ungodly howl of pain Darby had never heard another human being make. She went to hit him again and missed. He yanked his hand back through the hole.
The doorbell rang.
She dropped the hammer and opened the window. The storm window was still down. As she worked on opening it, she remembered her mother’s words about what to do when you were in trouble: Never yell for help. Nobody comes running when someone yells for help, but everyone comes when someone yells fire.
Screaming coming from inside the house. The song ended and Darby heard a woman crying hysterically.
‘DARBY!’
Melanie’s voice, coming from the foyer.
Darby stared at the hole in the door, sweat running into her eyes as Frank Sinatra sang ‘Luck Be a Lady Tonight.’
‘He just wants to talk,’ Melanie said. ‘If you come downstairs, he promised to let me go.’
Darby didn’t move.
‘I want to go home,’ Melanie said. ‘I want to see my mother.’
Darby couldn’t turn the doorknob.
Mel was sobbing. ‘Please. He has a knife.’
Slowly, Darby opened the door and, crouching low, looked through the banister and into the foyer.
A knife was pressed against Melanie’s cheek. Darby couldn’t see the man from the woods; he was hiding around the corner, against the wall. She saw Mel’s terrified face and the way her body shook as she sobbed and struggled to breathe around the arm clutched tightly around her throat.
The man from the woods moved Mel closer to the bottom steps. He whispered something in her ear.
‘He just wants to talk.’ Black tears from Melanie’s mascara ran down her cheeks. ‘Come down here and talk to him and he won’t hurt me.’
Darby didn’t move, couldn’t move.
The man from the woods cut Mel’s cheek. She screamed. Darby moved down the steps.
Drops of blood, bright and red, ran down the wall near the kitchen. Darby froze.
Melanie screamed, ‘He’s cutting me!’
Darby took another step, her eyes on the wall, and saw Stacey Stephens lying on the kitchen floor, blood spurting between the fingers clutched against her throat.
Darby ran back up the stairs. Melanie screamed again as the man from the woods cut her.
Darby slammed the bedroom door shut and opened the window facing the driveway. The branches from the hedges tore up her bare legs and the soles of her feet something awful. She limped her way to her next-door neighbor’s house. When Mrs Oberman finally answered the door, she took one look at Darby and immediately ran to her kitchen to call the police.
Darby had overheard two things: the phone lines to the house had been cut, and the spare key her mother kept under the rock in the garden was missing. The key had been there a little over two weeks ago. She had last used it after locking herself out of the house and definitely remembered putting it back.
To know about the hidden key, the man from the woods must have been casing the house for some time. Nobody would come right out and say it, but Darby knew it was true.
She sat in the back of the ambulance parked in Mrs Oberman’s driveway. The back doors were open, and she could see the shocked and curious faces of her neighbors in the revolving blue and white lights from the police cruisers. Policemen armed with flashlights were searching her backyard and the wooded area separating Richardson Road from the nicer homes on Boynton Avenue.
All the lights in her house were on. Through the downstairs windows Darby could see part of the foyer, the blood on the pale yellow walls. Stacey’s blood. Stacey was still lying inside the house because she was dead. Police were taking pictures of her body. Stacey Stephens was dead and Melanie was missing.
‘Don’t worry, Darbs, your mom will be here any minute.’ The deep but calming voice belonged to the patrolman standing next to the ambulance door. This huge intimidating bear of a man was a close friend of her father’s named George Dazkevich. Everyone called him Buster. Buster had helped out around the house after her father died, taking her to movies and to the mall. His presence helped calm her.
‘Have you found Mel yet?’
‘We’re working on it, kiddo. Now try to relax, okay? Can I bring you something? Some water? A Coke?’
Darby shook her head and looked at the car parked against the curb, a beat-up Plymouth Valiant. Melanie’s car.
Melanie’s