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Except for several outdoor security lights set to a timer, the house is pitch-black when Emma pulls into the driveway, and it looks forlorn against the dusky, indigo-colored sky. After coming inside through the garage, Emma turns on a fewlights and then forages through the fridge, putting together a plate of leftovers. She decides to take it out to the screened room at the back of the house.
Dusk has fully dissolved by now, and it’s completely dark beyond the screened windows. A breeze rustles the trees and bushes, dispatching the pleasurable scent of honeysuckle into the room, and though Emma knows she should be savoring the moment—sitting in this lovely house that she and Tom were lucky enough to find, a beautiful summer ahead of her—Webster’s face is lodged in her brain again. Dunne thinks the detective has a card up her sleeve, but what could it possibly be?
She hears the muffled rumble of a car coming down the street and nearing the property.Tom and Brittany, Emma thinks, waiting for the sound of footsteps and voices, but the house is soon still again. It’s after nine thirty, so surely they’ll be home any minute now. She’s about to gather her plate and glass when her attention is snagged by something odd: a light glowing through one of the windows in her studio. She’s nearly positive she turned them all off when she left for the library, and she also could swear the glow wasn’t there ten minutes ago.
There’s no way it could be a break-in, she reassures herself, because the alarm company would have alerted her. Yet she can’t imagine Dario coming by this late, and Eric is at home. So maybe she did leave the light burning. She’s got a ton on her mind after all.
Returning to the kitchen, Emma grabs her keys from her purse and a flashlight from a drawer and lets herself out the back door. It might be anal, but she won’t be able to relax ifshe doesn’t check to make sure everything is okay. The lights from the house illuminate the first half of the path, but after that only the beam of flashlight guides her.
Outside the studio, she squints at its small driveway, which is separate from the one for the house. It’s empty, which means Dario’s not inside. Should she wait for Tom? she wonders for a moment, until her curiosity overtakes the thought.
Reaching the door, she runs the beam of the flashlight along the edges and is relieved to see no sign of a break-in. But then she freezes, hearing a noise that seems to come from the other side of the door, before deciding that it’s only the tree leaves rustling behind and above her. Emma takes another breath, turns the key in the lock, and shoves the door open. The alarm is still activated and chirps steadily until she taps in the code and presses off.
The high, open space is mostly dark, except for a single desk lamp burning. With a start she realizes it’s the one at her own workstation. She quickly sweeps the beam of the flashlight across the room and simultaneously fumbles for the light switch to pop on the overheads.
With the room now ablaze in light, she roams through the space, poking her head into the bathroom, the meeting room, the walk-in storage closet. Nothing appears disturbed.
Maybe she’s remembered wrong. In her rush to get out the door, she must have neglected to switch off her desk lamp and then simply not noticed it at first from the house. After all, it was still dusky, not totally dark, when she was in the kitchen.
She turns the light off, along with the overheads, and locks up to head back to the house. There’s no movementin any of the windows, which means that Tom and Brittany must still be out.
As Emma walks, a sound punctures the silence. Footsteps, she thinks, followed by the snap of a twig, coming from behind a row of evergreens on her right. She jerks in that direction, but the noise seems to recede, moving away toward the street. She swings the flashlight toward the trees and flicks the beam back and forth, but all it connects with are dark, featherlike branches shivering in the breeze.
This time her curiosity loses. She breaks into a jog, and after reaching the house, quickly enters through the kitchen. But after a moment’s thought, she hurries to the front hall and peers out one of the windows. Though some of the neighboring homes are brightly lit, there’s not a person in sight and no cars on the road. She eases open the door and steps onto the stoop, looking both right and left. Still nothing. But suddenly from the right, around a bend in the road, she hears the faint rev of a car engine.
Then comes the sound of another vehicle, but this one turns out to be Tom’s Tesla. As he slows and turns into the driveway, she lifts her hand in a wave, grateful he’s home. She steps back into the house, locks the door, and greets Tom as he enters from the passageway that leads to the garage.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he says. “What were you doing outside?”
“Something kind of strange happened. Where’s Brittany?”
“She dashed up the back stairs to call her dad. What’s going on?”
Emma explains about the light in the studio, the footsteps by the trees, and the sound of a car starting.
Tom looks serious but not panicked. “Could your mind have been playing tricks on you?”
Isthatall it was? Has stress made her imagination go rogue?
“Uh, I don’t think so. I mean, I definitely heard something moving around.”
“It might have been a skunk or a racoon—I’ve heard about some coyotes in the area, too. And I’m sure the car was just a neighbor heading out.”
She shakes her head. “I still feel weird about the light being on.”
Tom scrunches his mouth, thinking. “Maybe Eric or Dario was working late and left right before you arrived?”
“Nope, Eric went home and actually slept through the library event. And Dario doesn’t have enough work to bring him back here at night.”
“Huh. Had you set the alarm when you left for the day?”
“Yes, and it was still on, which means that if someone was there, they had an access code. Wait, I’ve been so rattled, I forgot I could check my ADT app to see whose code was used.”
Emma grabs her phone from the screened room and checks the most recent history for the studio alarm.
“Okay, this is weird,” she says as she walks back into the kitchen. “Somebody was definitely in there. It shows I deactivated the alarm around twenty-five minutes ago, but it was also deactivated around thirty minutes beforethat—and then reset a few minutes before I went in.”
“So whose code was used?”
