hammer, the one his ex-wife called "The Singing Sword" back when they still liked each other. Massive, long, it would make a formidable weapon. Against anything but a gun.
Armed now, Don decided to give the intruder a chance to get away. Who needed confrontation? As long as his tools were undisturbed, there was no harm done, except for whatever they did to a window or his new deadbolts in order to get into the house. He turned on the flashlight and walked over to the foot of the stairs. As he suspected, it wasn't this main front stairway creaking. Whoever it was must be on the stairs up to the attic.
As Don started up the stairs, he called out loudly, "Whoever's in here, I'm unarmed and I'm not going to hurt you." Surely it was all right to lie to intruders in the night. And a hammer wasn't a real weapon, was it? "I just want you out of my house."
In the upstairs hall, he opened each of the doors and shone his light into every room. There were places to hide. He stepped in and looked into closets, behind beds and dressers. Nobody. Room after room.
"If you leave quietly, no harm done. I won't call the cops or anything."
The sounds had stopped. Wherever the intruder was, he wasn't moving now. Lying in wait? Or just lying low? Who should be more scared?
The sound of metal scraping on metal. It took a moment for Don to realize what it was. A shower curtain with metal hangers being drawn across a rod.
He headed straight for the bathroom at the end of the hall. The door was almost closed. If the intruder had a gun, Don didn't want to make an easy target. He stood up against the wall on the hinge side of the door and reached around to push the door open. No sound, no reaction from inside.
"Look, don't be scared, nobody's going to get hurt." He wasn't sure if he was talking to the intruder or to himself. He stepped away from the wall and, from a few paces off, shone the flashlight into the bathroom. Nobody was standing there, but the shower curtain was drawn, and when Don and Cindy were in there that evening, when they kissed in there, Don was quite sure the shower curtain had been open, bunched up against the wall. The curtain wasn't even hanging inside the old clawfoot tub. If water had been running it would have made a mess on the floor. He thought of the movie Psycho and wondered which part he was playing.
As he stood there, his feelings changed. The fear faded. Anger took its place. How dare somebody break into his house while he was sleeping there? And then hide in an obvious, stupid place like this? It was outrageous. He didn't have to put up with it.
This is how guys get themselves killed, he thought. Losing their fear and getting mad enough to act.
But he couldn't stand there all night waiting for the shower curtain to open by itself. So he finally took action. In four quick strides he was at the tub, reaching up, flinging aside the curtain, all the time holding the hammer at the ready in case he needed it to defend himself.
The intruder was there, all right, a woman in a scruffy dress, huddled in the far corner of the tub, staring up at him with wide, terrified eyes as she screamed, thus answering the question of who was more frightened. She screamed again, and Don stepped back, letting the hammer drop to his side.
"For Pete's sake, shut up. Nobody's going to hurt you," he said.
Her eyes followed the hammer as he lowered it. Her screaming subsided to a whimper, then to heavy breathing. But she still stared at him in wide-eyed fear. Immediately, male guilt settled in: I made a woman scream in fear of me, I've done something wrong. He tried to stifle the feeling - after all, she was the intruder here. Or was she? From the look of her she was a street person, homeless. Maybe she'd found some way in through a window somewhere, and had been using this house as a safe place to hide out. She wouldn't know that someone was finally buying the place. His voice must have come as more of a shock to her than her creaking footsteps on the attic stairs had been to him. And then he appears, throwing back the