Page 59 of The Intruder

I do it. This girl is extremely frightened, and people do stupid things when they’re scared. Like flinch and pull the trigger on a gun. I have to stay calm, because that’s the only way to calm her down.

I walk slowly out the bedroom door, and Eleanor follows closely behind. I can’t see her, but I can feel the gun pointed at my back. As I walk past the living room sofa, I notice the cushions are slightly off-center from the last time I stashed the notebook under there. I pray Eleanor doesn’t notice. Because if she does…

Well, I don’t want to think about that.

I take the lead, walking to the front door. Neither of us are wearing coats, and I don’t even have anything on my feet. I left my slippers in the living room, and my boots are stacked neatly at the bottom of the closet next to my other shoes. Rain is still pelting the windows, so we won’t get far without some sort of protective gear.

“Can I get my boots?” I ask her.

Eleanor thinks for a moment. “No.”

It occurs to me that she wouldn’t even necessarily have to shoot me. If she shut me out of the house in the storm, wearing only a sweatshirt and jeans without shoes or a coat, I may very well not make it through the night. And it would be a terrible night.

If that happened, I would have to try to make it to Lee’s house. He would welcome me in, and it’s only half a mile. But even that short distance in a serious storm like this could be deadly.

Eleanor pokes me in the small of my back with the gun just as a crack of thunder shakes the foundations of the house. “Open the door.”

It’s hard to even get the door open with the wind pounding against it, and my hands are shaking. I throw my weight, shoving it to try to get it open. Finally, the wind dies down for long enough to allow me to crack it open enough to go outside. I raise my eyes to the sky, which is heavy with ominous black clouds. Lightning splits the clouds, and that’s when I see what caused that terrifying crash.

The giant tree in front of my house has fallen.

I worried that it might fall during the night and that there was a chance it might crush my house and everyone inside, which is why I refused to infinity promise it wouldn’t fall. Despite what Eleanor thinks, I really do keep my promises. But that isn’t what happened. It didn’t fall on my house.

It fell on the toolshed.

Eleanor stands beside me, blinking away rainwater, staring into the storm at the muddy pile below the tree that crushed my toolshed. I can’t tell if there are tears in her eyes or just rain. She does seem shaken by what she’s looking at: an alternate universe in which she is lying dead beneath that giant tree.

“You saved my life,” she breathes.

I nod. “I told you it wasn’t safe.”

She doesn’t seem to know what to say to that. She just keeps staring at the toolshed, blinking furiously. She’s still holding the gun, but her grip seems to waver. I can’t tell if her hands are shaking from the cold or something else.

“Let’s go back in the house,” she finally croaks.

Ever since I found that notebook filled with drawings of my own demise, I have been sorry that I allowed this girl into my house. But right now, I’m not sorry. She would have died in that toolshed. Whatever happens to me next, I don’t regret keeping that from happening. She was a kid who needed help, and I helped.

Although I might feel very differently in an hour or two.

43

I want you to go to your pantry,” Eleanor says to me, “and get out the roll of duct tape.”

At the mention of duct tape, my legs turn to liquid. Nothing good can come of giving this girl a roll of duct tape. If she had asked me if I had it, I would’ve lied and said no. She must’ve seen it.

I wish I had never bought that stupid duct tape. Of course, what kind of person doesn’t keep a roll of it in their pantry? I’m not a housewife from Beverly Hills.

In any case, I do what she tells me to do. I grab the tape, then I turn around to hand it to her.

Eleanor is at least a head shorter than me, and I’m not exactly tall. She has to tilt her head up to look at me, and her blue eyes seem gigantic on her face, which is very pale except for the freckles on her nose. She has a slightly pointed chin and a delicate nose, all of which make her look more like a pixie than a killer. If I hadn’t seen the telltale blood, I’d never believe she was capable of hurting a fly.

“Sit on that chair in the kitchen,” she instructs me.

Oh no. She’s going to bind me to the chair.

I flash back to one of the drawings in her notebook. It was this exact scene. Me—duct-taped to a chair. But that wasn’t all.

In the drawing, I was bound to the chair and bleeding from the side of my head, where my ear had been sliced clear off. There was also blood running down my lips and a bloody hole where my right eye should have been.