What We Saw at Night - By Jacquelyn Mitchard Page 0,35
hated to give him a pacifier, I found the one attached by a shoestring to his carrier and stuck it in his mouth.
His lips bobbed angrily, but soon he surrendered and his eyes fluttered closed.
What was down there? Boating equipment? A bundle of sailcloth? Something else? Suddenly, it seemed urgent to get the hell back into the apartment. Maybe I was paranoid. I didn’t really care. If someone wasn’t actually watching me, it felt as though someone should be. I thought of that old line from sophomore AP English, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” Standing up, I hurried back toward the apartment building. My phone vibrated in my pocket.
Rob? I wondered, or hoped. I grabbed my sandal from the lobby door and took the elevator up. The phone stopped buzzing. I froze in the hallway on the fourth floor.
The apartment door was closed.
My sandal hung from the doorknob.
Maybe Tessa’s mom was here. Or maybe her husband had come back early. It would be nice, as I’d finally get to meet him.…
This was all fine. I was tired. If Rob had called, I wanted to use this as an excuse to reconnect. I wanted to tell him about what I’d discovered out there on the grass. Reaching back to pat Tavish’s sleeping head, I knocked him with my cast. No one answered. I rang the buzzer. Still no response. I fished in my pocket for the keys, but when I put the key in the lock, the knob turned easily.
The door was open.
Someone had closed the door but not locked it.
“Tessa?” I shouted, my pulse racing again. “Teresa? James?”
I’d left the living room lights on; now they were off.
I stopped breathing. With both hands, I reached back to Tavish. He squeaked in his sleep. No one, not even a monster, would hurt a baby.
My legs turned to jelly as I hurried back into the elevator and pushed the button to make sure the door stayed closed. The elevator alarm blared. Everyone in the county would wake up. Good. Fingers trembling, I dialed 911.
A COUPLE OF minutes later, I heard the lonely sound of a single cop car’s siren. I could finally breathe when it screeched into the parking lot. Juliet’s dad was on a fishing trip; the next in charge, Mike Beaufort, was a man I barely knew. He was young and slim and built, kind of like a younger version of Will Smith, Northwoods style. He completely understood my panic after all that business a few weeks before. Better to take no chances, especially with the sleeping baby still on my back.
There was no one in the apartment.
I followed Officer Mike from room to room as he searched everything, even dresser drawers. He asked me some casual questions; they blended into yes, yes, yes. I agreed that there had been vestiges of light in the sky when I’d gone out with Tavish. I agreed that I might easily have turned the lights off. I agreed, lying through my teeth, that discussing all that freaky stuff about the murderer must have scared me—and I agreed that it made me curious about the hole in the ground. I agreed that it was stupid to investigate in the first place, but thought it was a boathouse. Yes, yes, yes.
Officer Mike called Tessa at the hospital and asked her to come home. I wasn’t sure if I was ashamed or relieved. Probably both.
After that, Officer Mike escorted Tavish and me back down to the door in the lawn. He said he had no idea what the door was—an old boathouse seemed about right, as far as he could tell—and he called his boss on his cell. I could hear Juliet’s dad laugh on the other end. Yes, yes, yes: the door opened to a boathouse no longer in use. Just like we’d all suspected. A derelict stairwell down to the lakeshore was all that remained of the structure, and Dr. Stephen would get rid of it when he built the fence next week.
That was that.
I had to hand it to Officer Mike: the whole time, he didn’t once treat me as if I’d done the wrong thing or overreacted. Back in the safety of the Cryer apartment, I finally summoned the courage to ask: “So, who hung my sandal on the door? I left it wedged in the door in case I dropped my keys.”
“That wasn’t very wise, to leave a door open,” he replied.