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They don’t believe you.
She hit the red button and drifted, heard herself mumble, “He stepped over.”
When she woke to an empty room, she instinctively reached toward the bedside table for her phone. With a confused swell of realization, she sat up. The sergeant had said her phone was in evidence, had asked if she was sure she’d seen it in the Corner’s pocket. And her phone had been on that list of valuables, with a notation that the police had found it on her bedroom nightstand. Which meant—what? That the Corner had put it back?
Why would he do that? Or…were you wrong? Did you actually see it? Did he take it at all?
She stayed awake for hours, rearranging the puzzle pieces of her memory again to try to fit this new fact, wondering and worrying over what else might have escaped her.
26
The haunting began two weeks after her husband died.
Walking past the living room windows, she felt the pull of the mountain lion eyes, the slow stretch of its double mouth. The wrinkled glass showed a flicker of movement, a figure sliding behind the trunk of her husband’s favorite tree, the massive old pine that sat at the pasture’s edge. She hurried outside, arms crossed against the cold, to get another angle.
But there was only empty pasture, the sway of grass and trees.
After that, she slowly grew aware of a steady drip of inexplicabilities.
The children played on the swing set behind her as she looked down the forest path. Something seemed different. She squatted down, examined the dirt, soft after snowmelt. Had the sense a great number of feet had traveled over it. She quickly stood up, feeling ridiculous, recognizing the way she was pantomiming trackers she’d seen in movies.
The hide-a-key rock wasn’t in its usual place by the door. She spotted it next to the woodpile five feet away. Returned it to where it was more camouflaged among the other rocks of similar size.
“Don’t move the key rock,” she told the children.
“I didn’t.”
“Me either.”
“Fine. Just—don’t move it.”
“Okay, Mommy.”
As she watched the children eat breakfast, her daughter eyed her, hesitant.
“What is it?”
“I think I saw—I saw a man again. Watching me, from over there.”
She gestured out the window, toward the old pine.
“Again? When?”
“Last night. When you were sleeping.”
“Love, why were you walking around in the middle of the night?”
“I just woke up. I was at the stairs. I saw him out the window.”
“You were sleepwalking?”
Why didn’t the monitor wake you up to help her? You must have slept through it. What’s wrong with you?
“I guess. But, maybe it was Daddy? Daddy always liked that tree.”
Her heart swelled, understanding that hope.
“Angel, it wasn’t Daddy. Daddy isn’t here anymore. You know that, love.”
