Page 21 of Dread

The clubhouse porch, visible in fragments through the branches, its hanging lights still unlit, the rockers empty. No engine sound cut through the cicada drone. Just the compound in its evening rhythm -- a door closing somewhere near the member homes, a child’s laugh carrying from the direction of the pool, the distant murmur of voices from the clubhouse where the men were gathering for whatever passed for a normal night in a place I’d almost let myself believe was safe, right up until thirty seconds ago.

I pushed off the SUV. Turned. Pressed my back against the rear bumper and leaned into it. My phone was in my pocket. I pulled it out. The screen lit my face from below, casting my features in a blue-white glow that made me look like someone else -- someone haunted, someone caught in the stillness of a person who has run out of road.

Dread’s name was in my contacts. I’d entered it the day he gave me his card, punching the numbers into my phone with the reflexive caution of someone who catalogues exits on principle. His number sat between “Dentist -- Cedar Rapids” and “Electric -- Previous,” two entries I would never use again and hadn’t deleted because deleting them felt like admitting something.

I breathed. Once. Twice. The cicadas didn’t care.

Then I pressed call.

The line connected on the second ring. I heard the click, the brief silence of an open channel, and then his voice -- low, even, the particular cadence of a man who answers his phone like he does everything else, without preamble or performance.

“Katy.”

He said my name. Just my name. Nothing else. No question, no concern layered into the syllables, just the flat acknowledgment of my presence on the other end of a line he’d been expecting, maybe, or maybe not, but was ready for regardless.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“Someone was here.” I looked back at the open hatch. “Someone went through the bags. In the SUV. While I was inside.”

A pause. Brief. I could hear noise behind him -- the particular acoustics of a room with tile floors, the faint echo of his breath bouncing off surfaces I couldn’t see.

“I’m coming,” he said. “Stay where you are. Don’t move the bags.”

The line went dead. Not a goodbye. Just done.

I lowered the phone. Held it against my thigh. The screen dimmed, then went dark, and the compound settled around me in all its ordinary, terrible safety, and Ellie watched from the front step with her bandaged knee and her silent eyes, and I did not move.

* * *

He came on foot. I heard his boots on the gravel before I saw him -- that cadence, unhurried but covering ground, each step placed with the economy of a man who had no interest in wasting motion. He rounded the corner of prospect row still in his clinic shirt, the sleeves rolled to just below the elbows, the collar darkened at the edges with what might have been sweat or might have been anxiety. His clinic bag hung from one shoulder. He hadn’t stopped to leave it behind.

Ellie straightened on the step. Her bandaged knee pulled closer to her chest, her arms locking around her shins, but her gaze followed him with the focus she reserved for adults who hadn’t given her a reason to look away.

Dread went straight to the SUV, set his bag on the gravel, and crouched beside the rear wheel well. He ran a hand along the undercarriage, then moved to the front and checked there too. I didn’t know what he was looking for, and he didn’t explain.

He returned to the open hatch and turned his attention to the bags. Rather than digging through them, he lifted things carefully, checking beneath clothes and along the sides and bottoms before putting everything back.

At my bag, he stopped. The laptop sleeve gaped open, the charging cable lying loose beside it.

“That’s not how you left it?” he asked.

“No.”

He looked into the bag again, then at the others.

He straightened. Turned to me. His voice, when it came, was low enough that Ellie wouldn’t catch it from the step.

“Anything missing?”

I shook my head.

He nodded once. Sharp. Decisive. Then he reached up, gripped the edge of the hatch, and pulled it closed. The hydraulics sighed. Metal met metal with a solid thunk that seemed to settle the air between us, though I couldn’t have said what.

He turned to Ellie. Crouched again, bringing himself level with her sitting height on the step, and his voice shifted -- not softer, exactly. Adjusted. The register he used when speaking to children, stripped of medical terminology but not of precision.

“Hey, kid. I need to borrow your mom for a minute. That okay?”

Ellie studied him. Her jaw had that set to it again, the one I’d seen in the bedroom doorway, but something in her eyes had changed -- a calculation running behind the blue-gray, weighing trust against whatever hurt was still living in her bandaged knee. She nodded. Once. Tight.