Chapter 5
Mylie lay in bed and stared up at the fading glow of the little plastic stars she tacked to her ceiling in junior high. She
didn’t understand how they could have any glow left after being stuck up there for so many years. Sometimes they fell off
in the middle of the night and hit her in the head with their pointy ends. Still, she refused to remove them. They helped
her fall asleep.
Most nights.
She remembered the day she put those stars up. Ben had helped her. She hadn’t been able to find the stepstool that Granny
kept in the kitchen, and even standing on her bed, Mylie had been too short to reach the ceiling. Ben, however, tall and lanky
as he was, had no trouble reaching up and sticking the stars.
Later that night, they’d laid down on her bed, pressed together, and stared up at the stars. One had fallen down and nicked
Ben’s forehead.
The memory made Mylie smile.
She willed the gin and the stars to lull her to sleep, but all the gin had done was make her have to pee. When she stripped
the cover off her bed and sat up, Stanley began to growl.
“Hush,” Mylie said to him. “I told you to go sleep with Cassie.”
Stanley didn’t hush. Instead, his growling got louder. Mylie was just about to scold him again when she heard a noise outside. It sounded like scraping against the door. Not a knock exactly but something brushing up against the door over and over.
“Shhh,” she said to Stanley.
Mylie walked over to her window. She looked down and saw nothing but darkness. She’d turned the light on the front porch off
before bed—she didn’t want to be able to look out her window and see Ben’s house—even though they usually left it on.
She wished she hadn’t been so dramatic, because now the scraping sound, or rather whoever or whatever was doing the scraping, sounded like they wanted into the house.
“Mylie?”
Mylie turned to see a sleepy Cassie standing in her doorway.
“Why is Stanley growling?
As if in response, Stanley growled, hopping off the bed and trotting to the window before beginning his alert bark usually
reserved for squirrels and mailmen.
Mylie squinted, trying to see what was causing Stanley to freak. It was too dark for squirrels or mailmen.
“Is somebody here?” Cassie asked, getting up to stand with Mylie.
“I don’t know,” Mylie whispered.
“Who would be here now?” Cassie continued. “It’s after midnight.”
“ I don’t know .”
“Think we ought to call the sheriff?”
Mylie leaned closer to the window. She thought she could see the outline of a figure pacing the porch steps. Were they trying
to get inside? She couldn’t tell.
“Should we call the sheriff?” Cassie asked again, her voice more urgent.
“If someone is trying to break in,” Mylie replied. “Sheriff Oakes won’t make it in time. He’s on the other side of town.”
“Good point,” Cassie said, nodding.
Mylie tiptoed away from the window and to the doorway where Cassie was standing. “Go to Granny’s room,” she said. “Wake her
up and tell her to go ahead and call the sheriff. I’m going downstairs.”
“You’re going to get murdered!” Cassie said, her voice rising with each word. “Don’t go down there!”
“I’m not going to get murdered,” Mylie replied, although she wasn’t entirely sure of that herself. Getting murdered in her
own home wasn’t on her bingo card for this year.
“Be careful,” Cassie said.
“Stay with Granny,” Mylie instructed her sister. “Do not come downstairs.”
Unlike most people in Clay Creek, the Mason women were not big hunters. They had approximately one gun, an old shotgun that
was a leftover relic of her grandfather’s, a man who’d died before she was born and whose pictures lined the nightstand of
Granny’s room. As far as Mylie knew, the gun didn’t even work.
But it might scare someone.
She slipped downstairs without turning on any of the lights and felt her way through the hallway closet, where she’d last
seen the gun laid up against an old coatrack. She felt its cool weight in her hands, tried to remember how to hold it. She
doubted very much that she would be able to intimidate anyone into leaving if she didn’t even know how to hold a stupid shotgun.
Granny could shoot with the best of them. Mylie, as it turned out, was terrible with guns. She could hold her own with a fishing
pole, but that wasn’t going to scare anyone off, and this late at night, all the way outside city limits, nobody messed around
on your front porch without letting you know first.
Maybe this was a bad idea. Through the window, she could see a figure hovering, although it was too dark to tell who it was. At first, it sounded like they were jiggling the handle, but now it looked, and sounded, as if they were putting their full weight on the door to try and force it open.
Mylie moved closer to the front door, and she could hear what was for sure a human and not an animal. She heard distinct footsteps,
what sounded like a key being forced into the lock, and then mumbling that she couldn’t make out. Stanley continued his barking
and growling, pawing at the door.
Did someone other than Morris have a key to the house? Maybe he’d forgotten something and was coming back for it. That couldn’t
be it. There was nothing Morris could have left that would require a midnight trip back to the house. He’d just wait until
the next day.
Mylie held her breath, clutched the shotgun with one hand, and then reached out to flip the switch to the porch, bathing it
with light. She could make out a form on the porch, and it looked male—decidedly not like Morris. She’d never wished to see Morris’s face so badly in her entire life.
The only thing she could do was try to scare whoever it was off the porch and back to wherever they came from. She readied
the broken shotgun and began to speak.