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“Is that what you mean?” the boyish policeman asked her.
She nodded, head so heavy with its liquefied brain.
“Where is it?”
“By the entry door. The left side.”
“Oh-kay, ma’am,” said the sergeant.
“There are too many doors,” she muttered. “Every room has so many doors, and he didn’t like it.”
The sergeant wandered away into the brightness of the house, talking to whoever was on the other end of his radio.
“No tire tracks, huh?” said the neighbor to the boyish policeman. “No footprints but hers? What d’you think that’s about?”
The boyish policeman ignored him.
“Is the intruder the one who hurt you?” the boyish officer asked her.
She shook her head.
“How did you get hurt?”
“The snow, the ice.” She gingerly licked her lips. “I think I ate blood.”
Three sets of eyes stared at her. Every time she blinked her unhurt eye, the hurt one tried to blink, too, and pain shot across her face so deep she was sure she was irreparably broken.
The sergeant reappeared, stood next to the boyish policeman.
“Ma’am, my guys are in your house. They’ve done a sweep. There doesn’t appear to be any intruder.”
“Fire?”
“No fire.”
“My children?”
“They haven’t found them yet. But you said they were hiding. Where are they?”
“Behind the wall,” she said.
“You…put your kids behind a wall?”
“Yes. In the hidden place.”
The entry hushed. It had echoed like a canyon, and now everyone was so still and silent it made her ears ring.
“I don’t understand,” the sergeant said.
“Behind the fireplace. In the office. I left them there.”
“Are they all right?” asked the sergeant.
She felt herself start to cry and tried to stop it, but the tears burned through her bloodied, swollen eyelid, seeping into her cracked skull. She swiped at them with the hand that wasn’t wrapped in gauze.
“They’re so little,” she blubbered.
“Were they all right when you left them?”
