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“His mistake,” the boyish officer said, and she thought she heard pride in his voice.
“I was wondering? The sergeant said when he was in the hidden room, he couldn’t hear anything. Couldn’t hear people moving around. That that’s why he thought I was lying. Partly, anyway. I don’t understand how that could be. It was all—all the sounds were so clear to me, at the time.”
The boyish officer scratched behind his ear, as though what he was about to say made him itchy. “Yeah, well. After we saw your video, after…what happened? I tried it. Some of the other guys tried it. We got in there, made noises out in the house, and we could hear all right. Not as good as you, but you know the house better.” He paused, saddened. “I think it was the sergeant’s hearing. I think maybe he was losing his hearing and didn’t realize. How else could that man’ve snuck up on him?”
Unless the sergeant could hear just fine, and lied about it to pressure you.
“I didn’t hear him sneak up on us that night, either. He was…silent. It’s just that he happened to be closer to the sergeant than he was to me. That made the difference.”
They were quiet for a minute, listening to the children play upstairs.
In a small voice, the boyish officer said, “Maybe he’s crazy? And that’s why he did these things?”
She drank a slow sip of coffee and sighed. “When it was happening, I remember thinking, ‘Doesn’t anyone who would do something like this have to be insane in some way?’ But he wasn’t irrational. He chose us, way back when he saw my daughter at the café and pretended to work there. He took our receipt, probably got our name from it. Then he watched us. Stole the hidden key and copied it. Planned ahead. And apparently he even broke in before.” She took a moment, rubbed her temple to soothe the internal painthat acknowledging this new information caused. “But what I keep thinking about is that when he realized I’d escaped, gone to get help, what did he do? He must have calculated the probability of catching up to me. He must’ve figured out the likelihood that he’d leave evidence behind if he ran. He sat right in this house and did all the math. So he put my phone back. He put everything, or nearly everything, back to normal. He hid. So well that you searched the whole house and didn’t find him. He waited for hours with all of you looking for him. Waited half a day after you left. Then finally he followed your tracks out through the snow. Left so few signs you didn’t believe he existed. You see? He thought it all out, all the contingencies, right there on the spot.”
The boyish policeman nodded.
“It’s just. Imagine. Imagine the presence of mind. To do all that. How can you be crazy, and still do all that? And that’s just this once. He’s gotten away with this, hurt others, for a long time. He might be sick. He probably is. But he chose to do what he did. Not just on the spur of the moment. He thought he was entitled to things that don’t belong to him. That can’t belong to anyone. And he went after them.”
The boyish officer wrapped his hands around his warm cup. With surprise she heard a quaver in his voice.
“I want to believe he’s crazy, you know? Rather than that someone would do, would want to do, those things.”
It reminded her again of how young he was. Reminded her that despite his uniform, despite the way her own naivete had been ripped from her by her mother’s death, experience strips away innocence at different paces for different people.
“Those things happen every day,” she said. “Just to other people. In other places. And mostly the danger is from people they know better. Evil doesn’t have to mean deranged.”
He nodded again. Took a moment to collect himself before asking, “You think you’ll sell this place? Move?”
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“It’s our home. It protected us.”
“But all the memories? Don’t you think it will be hard? For the kids?”
She felt the flat bitterness of her smile.
“No matter where I took them, they’d have to deal with all they went through.”
“Yeah,” he said without conviction. “I guess so.”
—
She let the children share a bedroom that night. Remembering that the next morning was trash pickup, she put on her coat and rolled the bin down the plowed driveway. Even in her boots her feet prickled painfully; permanently sensitive to the cold where the frostbite had cut deep.
The physical injuries were easiest to face. It was unlikely all her toenails would grow back. Her eye, the doctor had warned, might never regain its former clarity.
But the Corner had left deeper damage. Panic would unexpectedly seize her heart, leaving her breathless. The children had the nervous watchfulness of rabbits, worried no place was truly safe.
Maybe other people were right. Maybe she and the childrenshouldfind a new home. Somewhere unviolated, where reminders of their ordeals wouldn’t hover nearby.
She left the trash bin at the road. Walking up the driveway, the house came into view between the trees. She paused, her memories superimposing over one another like film stuck in a camera, exposurepiled on exposure. Her husband mowing the lawn. Her children chasing each other through the yard. Meals, cozy fires, glasses of wine. The quiet comforts of daily life. Profound happiness.
That was the problem, wasn’t it? Leaving might distance them from bad memories, but it would also take them away from the good. And there was so much good. She squinted up at her home, recalling the way the chimney sweep had seemed so disturbed by the place, insisting that it had to be haunted.
Yes, she could see it now. A kind of blackened aura, old wisdom, pulsed from the place in the white light of the moon. Through different eyes, it might seem menacing. But for her that ancient riddle echoed—how much of a thing has to be replaced before it’s no longer what it was?
Because certainly the house was not the thing it had been when first built. So much had been damaged, repaired, restored. Whole rooms culled, joists sistered, wood consumed to dust by insects and replaced.
But her home was more striking, more alive than others because her human eye saw how it was haunted by those thousand human touches; evidence of how many had gone before, had tended to and loved the place. It vibrated with those traces. And she understood that just like the house, she and the children would be transformed not just by damage, but by mending.
She balled her hurt hand into a fist around the scar on its palm, resolved.
Tomorrow she’d introduce the children to the neighbors who had helped her. Even better, they’d make the effort to meet all the neighbors. Then, just as she’d promised, she’d take the children to get a Christmas tree. They’d pick out one of the unbought, unchosen things she’d seen stacked behind a nearby garden center. They’d bring home any wreaths and garlands still there all this time afterthe holiday, filling the house with smells of life strong enough to stay green in midwinter. Together they’d draw comfort from the lights they’d string, from the memory of the husband and father they’d lost. Together they’d watch the days grow longer.
And tonight she’d go inside the home that had protected them. Tonight she’d fall asleep in a place that had stood for centuries, proof of the beauty born ofsurvival.
