Chapter Seven #2
The first bag -- Ellie’s -- had been unzipped.
Not fully. The zipper pulled back about eight inches, the teeth separated, the contents visible through the gap in a disorder that wasn’t mine.
A folded shirt -- the blue one with the butterflies, the one I’d placed on top -- was draped half-out of the side pocket, one sleeve hanging free, the collar crumpled.
Ellie’s drawings, which I’d stacked carefully beside her clothes, had been shoved to the far corner of the bag, the edges bent, the top sheet -- the caterpillar for Harlow -- creased along one fold as if someone had rifled through them quickly, searching for something specific or simply ensuring that nothing remained undisturbed.
I set the third bag down on the gravel and stopped. Leaving suddenly wasn’t the most important thing on my mind.
The second bag was worse. My laptop sleeve -- the neoprene case I kept zipped at all times, the case that held nothing but the laptop and the charging cable coiled in its specific pattern, plug facing left, cord wound clockwise -- was open.
The zipper pulled back to its full length.
The cable inside had been moved. I could see it without touching -- the coil looser, the plug facing right, the cord arranged in a haphazard loop that bore no resemblance to the methodical spiral I’d created this morning when I packed it.
Nothing appeared to be missing. The laptop. Charging cable. Ellie’s drawings. Everything I remembered leaving in the SUV was still there.
Whoever had gone through our things hadn’t been looking for something to steal.
Everything touched. Everything searched. Everything confirming that someone had been here, in the compound, in the five minutes it took me to walk from the SUV to the townhome and back, and had gone through our belongings with a thoroughness that left no doubt about what kind of man he was.
The smell hit me then. Not strong -- faint, stale, clinging to the interior carpet of the hatch like smoke clinging to fabric long after the cigarette is gone.
That chemical note. Not the sweet, almost vanilla undertone of American Spirits or the sharp acridity of Camels.
A cheaper blend. Something with a synthetic edge that caught in the back of the throat and stayed there, recognizable because I’d spent three years breathing it across a kitchen table while a man I loved told me what was wrong with the way I folded towels.
My hands pressed harder against the SUV. The metal was warm from the day’s heat, almost hot against my palms, and I leaned into it until my forehead touched the edge of the hatch and the cicadas filled my ears and the compound continued around me like nothing had happened.
I scanned the gravel. The narrow gap between our townhome and the next unit, twenty feet of shadow where the porch lights didn’t quite reach. The tree line beyond the east fence, where the maples threw deep pools of darkness onto the ground beneath them.
Something was standing in it.
Just past the fence, where the shadow ran deepest, a shape held still long enough for my eyes to catch it and lose it in the same second -- the outline of a man, upright, facing the compound rather than the road, gone before I could be certain I hadn’t built him out of branches and wanting to be wrong.
I didn’t move. Didn’t call out. Stood at the rear bumper with my heart slamming against my ribs and stared at the exact spot until my eyes ached from not blinking, and the shape didn’t come back, and the maples went on being maples.
Half of me had already decided I’d imagined it by the time headlights swept the lane behind me. The other half never quite let go of it.
The clubhouse porch, visible in fragments through the branches, its hanging lights still unlit, the rockers empty.
No engine sound cut through the cicada drone.
Just the compound in its evening rhythm -- a door closing somewhere near the member homes, a child’s laugh carrying from the direction of the pool, the distant murmur of voices from the clubhouse where the men were gathering for whatever passed for a normal night in a place I’d almost let myself believe was safe, right up until thirty seconds ago.
I pushed off the SUV. Turned. Pressed my back against the rear bumper and leaned into it.
My phone was in my pocket. I pulled it out.
The screen lit my face from below, casting my features in a blue-white glow that made me look like someone else -- someone haunted, someone caught in the stillness of a person who has run out of road.
Dread’s name was in my contacts. I’d entered it the day he gave me his card, punching the numbers into my phone with the reflexive caution of someone who catalogues exits on principle.
His number sat between “Dentist -- Cedar Rapids” and “Electric -- Previous,” two entries I would never use again and hadn’t deleted because deleting them felt like admitting something.
I breathed. Once. Twice. The cicadas didn’t care.
Then I pressed call.
The line connected on the second ring. I heard the click, the brief silence of an open channel, and then his voice -- low, even, the particular cadence of a man who answers his phone like he does everything else, without preamble or performance.
“Katy.”
He said my name. Just my name. Nothing else. No question, no concern layered into the syllables, just the flat acknowledgment of my presence on the other end of a line he’d been expecting, maybe, or maybe not, but was ready for regardless.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“Someone was here.” I looked back at the open hatch. “Someone went through the bags. In the SUV. While I was inside.”
A pause. Brief. I could hear noise behind him -- the particular acoustics of a room with tile floors, the faint echo of his breath bouncing off surfaces I couldn’t see.
“I’m coming,” he said. “Stay where you are. Don’t move the bags.”
The line went dead. Not a goodbye. Just done.
I lowered the phone. Held it against my thigh. The screen dimmed, then went dark, and the compound settled around me in all its ordinary, terrible safety, and Ellie watched from the front step with her bandaged knee and her silent eyes, and I did not move.
* * *
He came on foot. I heard his boots on the gravel before I saw him -- that cadence, unhurried but covering ground, each step placed with the economy of a man who had no interest in wasting motion.
He rounded the corner of prospect row still in his clinic shirt, the sleeves rolled to just below the elbows, the collar darkened at the edges with what might have been sweat or might have been anxiety.
His clinic bag hung from one shoulder. He hadn’t stopped to leave it behind.
Ellie straightened on the step. Her bandaged knee pulled closer to her chest, her arms locking around her shins, but her gaze followed him with the focus she reserved for adults who hadn’t given her a reason to look away.
Dread went straight to the SUV, set his bag on the gravel, and crouched beside the rear wheel well. He ran a hand along the undercarriage, then moved to the front and checked there too. I didn’t know what he was looking for, and he didn’t explain.
He returned to the open hatch and turned his attention to the bags. Rather than digging through them, he lifted things carefully, checking beneath clothes and along the sides and bottoms before putting everything back.
At my bag, he stopped. The laptop sleeve gaped open, the charging cable lying loose beside it.
“That’s not how you left it?” he asked.
“No.”
He looked into the bag again, then at the others.
He straightened. Turned to me. His voice, when it came, was low enough that Ellie wouldn’t catch it from the step.
“Anything missing?”
I shook my head.