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“It’s possible. I mean, it couldn’t’ve been for long, I guess? That they were all hidden in the fireplace? But he certainly would’ve heard us find the kids. Would’ve heard us searching for him. Must’vescared the shit out of him, given he stayed in the house for so long after we left.”
“Didn’t scare him enough to not come back,” she said.
The boyish officer shook his head, chastened. “It didn’t. But, best we can tell, he didn’t mess with that bathroom door while you were in there.” The boyish officer shrugged. “Who knows what he was thinking? Who knows why he came back?”
She rubbed the painful spot between her eyebrows. “He came back because he wanted to see if my daughter was here. Probably planned to hide and wait for her. Hurting me—it would have proved he existed. He wouldn’t have wanted to ruin his chance to get to her. And that night…he told me I was incidental. You understand? He wasn’t here for me.”
The boyish officer nodded, then cleared his throat. “So. The bigger thing I wanted to talk to you about.” He slid his eyes to the side in clear discomfort. “How much of the video did you see? From your wildlife camera?”
“Not much. I called 9-1-1 when I saw he’d been hiding behind that pine tree that day.”
“Well. There’s…other videos. Videos on your camera go back until September or so. It still had space after so long because when it ran out of room it wiped the card, then started filling it up again. So we don’t know about anything before September? But he does show up on your video back in mid-October. He was heading toward your house. Which means he was watching you. And that he might have broken in. Before that night.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
But she did. She remembered the boyish officer saying someone watching a house before a break-in wasn’t unusual, the instant cold creep of her realization that it hadn’t been her husband haunting them, but the Corner. She’d understood it again when she read inthe papers that other targets had told people they felt watched, that things had gone missing. She’d thought of the baby monitor, inexplicably turned off. Of the way her daughter had recognized the voice and shape of the Corner.
But speculating that he had stalked them and, worse, that he had broken in before, was a shadow of knowing there was photographic proof.
She pictured the Corner hovering over her, watching, a sleep paralysis specter made manifest. She heard her daughter say, “But I know him. I know that voice. The man in the corner. From my dreams.” Saw her little girl point toward the pine tree, say, “I saw a man again. Watching me, from over there.”
It was real. You were right. It was him all along.
“We have him, on the video, coming and going. He did it with the others, too. Breaking in. Poking around a house. Sometimes he did that kind of thing a long time, going in and out of houses. Stalking people. From what he says? He got off on it. I…wanted you to hear it from us. Before you hear it…somewhere else.”
“How many—did he say, how many times he broke in? Before?”
“He’s on the video once in October. Once again in November. Then last month, one time—three nights before everything happened.”
She took a moment to steady herself.
“But…he hit his head on the stairs? And he didn’t know about the attic. Wouldn’t he have known, if he’d been inside before? And I just—I normally wake up so easily, and the noises of the house, he would have woken me…everything’s so loud.”
The boyish officer shrugged. “Maybe that night he was louder. And maybe you’re a deeper sleeper than you think.”
Maybe, maybe, maybe. You use earplugs to help you sleep, after all. But your daughter saw him. Remembered him. Watching from the corner. Maybe hewasn’t wandering the house at all. Maybe he was just watching her. Maybe if you hadn’t been awake, he would only have watched that night, too.
“I don’t like thinking about that,” she said. “I don’t like that at all.”
You should’ve believed her. You should’ve believed your little girl.
The boyish officer nodded heavily. “Yeah. But you’re safe now.”
Safe.
“There’s…one more thing. It’s probably nothing.”
Her stomach cratered. “What?”
“Well, some of the guys are wondering if it might be possible? If he might’ve pushed your husband down the stairs. The feds did ask him. He denied it. But…he shows up on the video back then. Not on the day you found your husband, but in October, like I said. He could’ve come onto your property from another direction, though. Could’ve come to the house more times than the video shows.”
“But the sergeant said my husband couldn’t have been pushed?”
The boyish officer tilted his hand back and forth in a so-so gesture. “More like concluded you couldn’t’ve pushed him. But a bigger guy? They’re talking about reopening it. Even though like I say he denies it.”
She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup, thinking.
“He did say something about how he’d let my son go if we showed ourselves, otherwise I’d have ‘more’ blood on my hands. What ‘more,’ though, you know? Could he have meant my husband? Blamed me for some reason?” She shook her head. “But…what does it matter? He’s…incapacitated. My husband’s gone. It’s done. We might not ever know for sure. Life’s unsatisfying when it comes to knowing the truth.” She sighed, thinking of the unknowns, the questions the Corner might never answer, the ones no one even knew to ask. “Either way, without my husband, he thought we were vulnerable.”
