it was padlocked! There’s no valet key for the car! It’s okay!”
“What do you mean, it’s okay?” I felt more exposed than ever. “My God, Brian! Tony’s got a copy of our keys!”
“Right, but he only had time enough to grab a couple, rearrange them so we wouldn’t notice right away, and maybe that’s when he grabbed the mail with Sophia’s picture on the way out. Because we’ve used the alarm every other time, we know he hasn’t been into the house since then. So if Alfie—”
“Artie.”
“—whatever—wasn’t gone for too long, that was the only time he could have gotten into the house!”
I slumped forward in the chair. “I guess I don’t see why that makes it okay.”
“It means that it wasn’t magic, how Tony or whoever got in here. And I’m happy to move one more step toward demystifying all of this. It’s logical, and we can contain it. We also know that it isn’t any worse than changing the locks, getting someone to check out the car.”
I wasn’t so sure. If nothing else, I knew I’d be cleaning the whole house as soon as I could, just to wipe away the taint of someone having been in there.
The locksmith came, and didn’t overcharge us too badly, considering. The police came, and took a statement, took the key chain, and I gave them a copy of the rest of the file I’d been compiling about what had been going on.
I didn’t sleep a wink that night and every noise seemed to be cause for fear. Sometime around dawn, I drifted off, only to wake up to the alarm clock a few minutes later. “I’m sleeping in,” I mumbled. “I’ll go in later.”
“I’m calling in sick,” Brian announced from the other side of the bed.
“Why?” I sat up. “What’s wrong? Do you have a fever?”
“Nope. I’m fine. I’m going to stay home and we’re going to fart around today and pretend we’re normal. It’ll be the best thing for you.”
“Your deadline—”
“Can wait a day. I’ll work late or bring something home with me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Why, don’t you want me here?”
“Let me get another three hours of sleep and I’ll show you how much.”
We did virtually nothing that day. Well, to be fair, we cleaned, did laundry, went food shopping, and went out for lunch and breakfast—I had pancakes at both and not only did I eat most of it, I started picking at Brian’s french fries as well. For some reason, pretending to be normal helped a lot. Fake it until you make it.
The next day, Brian left for work, and I sat in my home office because it went against every fiber in my being to leave the Funny Farm. Now it was Brian who pointed out that there was no way we should let anyone get in the way of our lives more than they already were. We’d done all we could to remove access to the house, and we’d probably even done it in time.
I might as well go to work, I reasoned, at last: It didn’t help much that I still felt haunted, even at home. And it felt like everywhere I went there was some reminder that I was being harrowed. Work, home, the coffee shop…I realized that I was avoiding places I usually went, trying to stay holed up, out of danger, always on the alert. At home, every time the phone rang, I jumped; the doorbell, when the letter carrier showed up with a package for me, almost sent me to the moon. I caught Minnie staring at the closet and it took me a good five minutes of listening for noises before getting the poker and opening the door. Quasi came shooting out, howling indignantly about having been shut in. Nothing could just be what it was, it was all freighted with the promise of doom.
But when I got to school, I found I stumbled through my new lectures and moved through the familiar ones like a zombie. It seemed as though my arduous workouts with Temple were the only thing that gave me an hour’s precious respite.
It was a crappy way to live. I knew that I’d been avoiding a lot of things lately, deliberately not going to my favorite places, lest they be next on the chopping block. Brian was right, I was avoiding life. So I gave myself a goal, that afternoon, after work, to go to the liquor store to get some beer, then drop off the