Page 76 of One of Us Is Guilty

This time, it was different.

He could still hear the headless woman wailing.

A terrible fear filled his chest, and chilled every inch of his flesh until he felt as if it was being pulled off his bones.

Then he realized it wasn’t the headless Teresa Chase haunting his dreams. The security alarm on his phone was shrieking.

He grabbed the handset.

The alert told him someone had breached the motion detectors in his backyard, and out front.

He’d heard this siren before. Raccoons, mostly. Especially out back.

But never had they triggered alarms at the frontandback of his home.

Raccoons don’t attack in a pincer movement, covering all exits.

Only people do that.

Paul drew the Colt from the quick-release holster bolted on the side of his nightstand. He stood in his vest and boxers, barefoot, still panting, but a different kind of panic now washing his system.

This was real. This was actually happening.

He shouldn’t have spoken to those private investigators. He knew it then, and he knew it now.

But he did the right thing. He had told them everything that he had known, everything that he had believed, and everything that he couldn’t prove. They were professionals, Bloch and Lake. Both had fearsome reputations. They wouldn’t stop until the truth finally came out, and then, maybe then, he would stop hearing Teresa Chase’s corpse crying in his dreams.

He opened his bedroom door quietly, held the pistol out in front as he padded to the top of the stairs. The floor below sat in a heavy, pregnant darkness. He held his breath, listened to his heart thumping, the blood coursing through his veins and resounding in his ears, the sound almost deafening.

What were his options?

He could wait until they tried to get upstairs.

Bad choice.

He would be cornered up here. No way out.

He had to go down.

Cautiously, the pistol shaking in his hands, he stepped lightlyand slowly down the stairs, his bare feet feeling the ribbed pattern of the carpet, his eyes wide, his every sense on high alert.

He froze.

The second to last step. The board was loose. It would groan as soon as he put weight on it.

In this dense quiet, it would be as good as sending up a flare to mark his exact position.

Fear took hold of Paul. He had known terrible fear before, when that tall policeman came to his front door all those years ago. He knew it was because something awful had happened to his parents. And still now, years later, that fear visited him often. It was a paralyzing cold, as if he had fallen into a freezing black lake.

That’s what downstairs looked like to him. Pitch black. Cold.

And filled with fear.

His teeth began to rattle, and he clamped his jaw shut. He took the pistol in his right hand, reached out and took the rail with his left. He would need to step over that loose board. Stretching out his right foot, he put it carefully onto the last step and was able to see a little way into the hall. As he picked up his left foot to bring it down, he overbalanced and pulled on the rail to stop himself falling.

The railcreaked.

His right hand shook so violently that he almost dropped the gun. And he couldn’t suppress a whimper escaping his lips. It wasn’t the fifty-five-year-old Paul on those stairs – he was now that frightened boy again.