he thought of that day in the cemetery with Henry, digging a grave. He ran home, showered, then checked his e-mails again.
Still nothing from Kate, but someone named Roberta James from the Boston Police Department had written to inform him that his neighbor Audrey Marshall had been found dead under suspicious circumstances, and would he get in touch with them as soon as possible.
Chapter 18
Kate sat up so fast that Sanders, startled, bolted from the room.
How did he get back in? She’d let him out, hadn’t she? Her mind scrambled to remember. She’d opened the door for him after he’d meowed at her. She’d watched him leave, hadn’t she? But then she remembered that she’d looked for him through the peephole and she hadn’t seen him in the hallway. She thought it had been strange at the time, but had just assumed that Sanders had raced down the hallway and out of sight before she’d had time to see him. But maybe he’d never left at all. Maybe that was it. That possibility allowed her to breathe, pulling in several lung-filling intakes of breath.
She stood, walked on tingling legs to the den door, and switched on the recessed lighting that ran along the shelves and cabinets. “Hello, there!” she shouted, trying to make her voice sound rational. She’d still look around the place, make sure no one had opened a door, make sure that no one was inside the apartment. Just in case. She told herself that Sanders must have not actually left.
No, he left. You saw him. It was George’s voice in her head. He giggled. It was something the George inside of her sometimes did, even though the real George, the dead George, had never giggled.
I didn’t see him, she told George’s voice. I just opened the door and thought that he brushed past my leg on the way out. I was wrong.
She stepped from the den into the hallway and walked toward the living room, turning on lights as she went. Sanders stood at the front door again, staring at it, as though it might magically open of its own volition.
“Sneaky kitty,” Kate said to Sanders as she walked toward him. “I thought you’d left.”
He meowed back at her, and Kate cracked the door open, watching as he left this time, his tail twitching. She locked the door behind her and pressed her back to it, looking at the living room, trying to sense whether someone was in the apartment. No, she told herself. I’m alone. Sanders must have been here all along. Still, she walked across the living room to the fireplace, its grate stacked with real wood, and picked up the fire iron that leaned against its brick exterior. She immediately felt better with its weight in her hand. Moving swiftly, she searched the apartment, turning on every light she could find and peering into every room. The place was empty, as far as she could tell. The front door was locked, and so was the door in the kitchen that led to the back stairwell.
She returned the fire iron to its place. Her hand was sweaty where she’d gripped it, and there was a faint line of soot across her palm.
Leaving all the lights on, she returned to the den, telling herself that she was alone in the apartment, that Sanders had not been let back in by some mysterious stalker, that he’d never left. She was overtired. She needed to sleep. She bent and picked up the comforter from the floor in front of the couch. Her copy of I Capture the Castle flopped out and banged onto the floor, a photograph sliding out of its pages. She picked it up and looked at it; it was a picture from a holiday she’d taken with her parents and some family friends to Torquay many years ago. The picture was of Kate and her mother, sitting next to their luggage on the steps of the guesthouse they’d stayed in. She couldn’t remember if they were coming or going. The sliver of sky that had been captured in the photograph was dark and ominous. Kate remembered it had rained all week. She also remembered that it was during that holiday—Kate was thirteen—that she’d gotten her first period. Her mother had announced this fact over a full English breakfast in the crowded dining room of the guesthouse, and her father had beamed at her like she’d won some kind of prize. It had been a mortifying