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Gathering her courage, she poked her head around the corner to the living room. Empty. Same with the attached dining area, so she stepped into the kitchen.
Something was off here.
Something didn’t feel right.
Throat tight, she slid a butcher knife from the magnetic strip over the stove and peered out the window to the backyard.
Layers of darkness, only broken by the patches of light from the windows, a branch moving with the wind, leaves dancing. But no dark shadow creeping at the fence line, no whites of eyes visible.
You’re imagining things.
But then she noticed the door to the garage. Unlatched. Moving slowly inward. Damn! She raised her knife, but as the door swung open, yawning into the blackness that was the inside of the garage, no one appeared.
She moved closer.
Heard a rustling.
Felt the cold as she reached through the door and, with the butcher knife raised in her right hand, snapped on the light with the left.
A dark shadow flitted near the rear of her Subaru.
She bit back a scream.
Not a person, though.
Way too tiny.
Unblinking eyes stared out from beneath the rear axle.
A cat?
No—a kitten?
Fuzzy and black, scrawny and, it seemed, as scared of her as she was of it. “Oh, Geez,” she whispered, letting out her breath. “What’re you doing in here?” She bent down and tried to grab it, but it scooted away, hiding in between the tires near a puddle of oil that had stained the cement floor. “Come on,” she said, but the scared cat wouldn’t move. “So how did you get in?” she asked, and rocked back on her heels, eyeing the unfinished walls where some of the plywood had started to gray, and she noticed the door next to the garbage cans, the one she used to haul them outside.
Always closed.
And now ajar.
Obviously how the kitten gained access.
But why was it open?
She straightened, walked around her Outback, and pulled the side door shut, the way she always did after taking out the trash bins on the day her garbage was hauled away, the only time she used the door.
So why wasn’t it locked?
The dead bolt turned as it always was?
Had she been careless?
That was possible, she supposed, as she’d been distracted ever since the night Jay was killed.
Her fingers tightened over the hilt of her knife again.
So who had been through here?
Obviously the person who left the card in her underwear drawer.
