Page 77 of Fifty-Fifty

thing. She was in Hawaii now, presumably with her tennis coach.

‘It was just a dream, boy,’ said Harry, stroking Clarence.

But it had been real once. Many years ago. And it would never leave him. No matter how long he lived, there was always a part of Harry Ford that never left that foxhole.

Clarence’s head turned around, sharply, toward the bedroom door. A low growl came from him and then he leapt from the bed and barked at the door.

Harry turned on the lamp on the nightstand, found his glasses next to it and put them on.

‘What is it, Clarence?’

The dog turned to Harry, barked once, then returned his watchful gaze to the door.

Throwing back the bed covers, Harry felt the chill air on his legs. He swung his feet out of the bed and stood up.

‘Well, it ain’t the Viet Cong, that’s for damn sure,’ he muttered, under his breath.

Thunder cracked.

Almost immediately Harry heard a deluge of rain hitting the roof. Clarence didn’t flinch, his gaze unwavering from the door.

He felt the need for the bathroom. Old age. He used the en suite, and listened while Clarence continued to growl and bark at the door. Harry told him to be quiet, but now he was sure the dog had heard or sensed something other than the thunder, and that he should check it out. He flushed the toilet, then washed his hands and splashed water on his face for good measure. Already the images from

the dream had faded from his mind, for another night at least.

Harry came out of the bathroom and saw Clarence scratching at the door with his paws. Something was wrong. For a second he thought about his old army service weapon, safely secured in a lock box in his closet. The key was in a pot on the bureau, buried beneath a layer of coins.

He shook his head, opened the bedroom door. Clarence twisted and jammed his nose into the open door space and wriggled through it as fast as he could then ran down the stairs.

Harry was about to follow when he heard something. He stopped. Listened again.

There it was. A faint knocking sound.

As Harry descended the stairs he couldn’t tell if the groaning sound was coming from the old staircase or his knees. It didn’t matter. Neither was about to get fixed anytime soon. He got to the bottom of the steps, expecting to see Clarence standing guard at the front door.

Only Clarence wasn’t there.

He looked around and saw him, cowering in the corner of the hallway. His little head was down, his tail between his legs. His body was quivering. He didn’t growl, or pant. He was silent. Frozen in what Harry thought was fear at whatever lay on the other side of the door. Clarence was a street dog, and God

only knows what he’d been through, or who might have harmed him in the past,

but Harry now saw fear in his little dog’s face for the first time. It was clear he was afraid of whatever was outside, because as terrified as the animal was, he never took his eyes from the front door.

Harry moved forward, toward the door. His mouth felt dry. The hallway felt cold, and the gold chain around his neck seemed to amplify the chill, hanging around his body like an icy noose.

He turned the deadlock bolt, took hold of the door handle and began to turn it.

BLOCH

Sleep never came easily to Bloch. Even when she was little, she would lie awake in bed for hours on end, staring at the light fitting on the ceiling and the shadows it threw across the room from the glint of streetlights outside.

Now she lay in what had been her parents’ bedroom. She had moved in months ago, but she’d yet to unpack or properly furnish the place. A futon, some bedroom furniture and a couch made up the sole items of furnishing for the entire house. She’d driven past three home and garden stores, but the thought of putting new furniture in her childhood home was still a little weird. Somehow, her mom and dad wouldn’t approve. She knew this didn’t make sense, but it was

enough for now to keep the place sparse. What if she bought something and it didn’t quite fit with her sense of the place? That worried her. She wanted everything to be perfect.

The mattress was unforgiving, but comfortable in a strange way. She had an old desk lamp that lay on the floor, the cable too short for it to sit on her new nightstand. It would take some time to get the house into shape, so she would have to put up with some imperfections until then. She bent over, clicked on the lamp and cracked open an Elmore Leonard novel she had read years ago but could not now remember.

Her jaw began to ache, and she reminded herself to stop grinding her teeth.