have been stores or might have been homes, or in Garner’s case, both. He wasn’t the only one who did business where he also slept, judging by the painted wooden signs swinging from chains above the porches. Her light passed over handmade furniture, with model pieces lined up on each side of someone’s door. One yard was home to a flock of swans made of old splayed tires that had been painted white. A plaque for Becky’s Quilts advertised “Affordable Tools of the Trade.”
It seemed everyone slept well under the security of moonbeams, with no need for streetlights or porch lights or any kind of illumination that would deter an intruder like Beth. Or Mercy. Garner’s Garden was the fourth house on the right, its front door overlooking the heart of town at the bottom of the hill. It was a gingerbread house with a tidy picket fence closed by a short gate. She could see no garden to speak of, only an attractive arrangement of white and pink granite rocks, a few evergreen shrubs that lay close to the earth, several of the white-tire swans, and a single spruce tree.
The windows were dark. In that moment, Nova’s claims about Dr. Ransom seemed both horrific and absurd. Who would rush to kill an old man because his granddaughter had come to visit him? And yet Beth had no trouble imagining that she might find the front door ajar and an old man dead on the floor of the living room, or the same old man not quite yet dead coming after her with an ax raised over his head because the doctor had told him Beth was coming to steal his soul.
Beth turned off the flashlight and let her eyes adjust to the night before letting herself in through the gate. The hinges were smoothly oiled and made no sound when she pushed it open, but the panel sprang out of her perspiring hands and closed with a rattling clack before she was ready. Mercy was already mounting the wood-plank steps at the end of the short pea-stone path. Beth followed quickly.
She didn’t know why she expected the wolf to go to the front door. Instead he followed the wraparound porch to the rear of the house and sat down to wait for her at what appeared to be an entrance into the kitchen. A window overlooking the porch had no curtains or coverings, and the stove light illuminated a small galley. The knob turned easily in Beth’s hands, and the door swung open.
Mercy rushed in and passed silently through the room and into a dark hall.
Beth left the door open. She was undecided on whether to call out for Garner or sneak up on Dr. Ransom, so she made the most easily reversed choice to stay silent. She stayed close to the kitchen counter, hoping that Mercy might return to her quickly. She wasn’t prepared to follow him into the house just yet.
She stood in an eat-in kitchen with the galley and walk-in pantry to her left, the dining table in front of her, and a refrigerator behind the open door to her right. There was an exit into a room on the other side of the fridge, opposite the way Mercy had gone. It seemed she could go to the right and pass through what was probably a living area and make a full circle back. If she went this way, she could keep a wall at her back at all times. She started past the fridge.
The utility carpet silenced her boots but not the old floorboards underneath it. On her third step the entire house seemed to squeal and then burst into a primal scream, and the force of its energy knocked her to the ground.
Someone had come at her, his head to her rib cage like a linebacker. He took her backward a few feet before his gangly legs tangled with hers and they both tumbled down. Her head nicked the refrigerator handle as she tipped, and her back hit the floor before her hands could escape the tackle and brace her fall. Her rattled brain seemed to push against her eyes, and her mouth gaped for long seconds. By the stove’s hood light, she made out a long arm coming down on her face like a hammer, the head of which was a spider-like fist clutching . . . a glass jar?
Mercy caught the hammer-arm in his teeth before it reached Beth and wrenched it