Strega (Strega Series) (3 page)

The old Victorian on the corner of Willow Street, a familiar beacon that sat at the edge of Ruth's neighborhood, renewed my hope that I would make it to safety. A new fire burned in my legs as I wove through the streets toward her house. I pushed my body harder than ever before. I'd run that stretch so many times, but never had I moved so fast. Everything I passed was a blur. Though I couldn't afford to waste any air, I let out one terrified scream for help. I hoped someone was getting out of their car or stepping outside for some air, anything. But all was quiet. No one heard me. I was on my own.

The front steps of Ruth's house finally came into focus. When I saw my car sitting idle in the driveway, another twinge of regret twisted in my gut. I could have avoided this. The footsteps were deafening as they pounded the pavement behind me. With deepest determination, I ran the final stretch faster than my previous limits. I longed to be safe inside, but I wondered if I'd ever know such comfort again.

As my foot hit the first stone step, an intense heat spread across my back like violent hands grabbing and dragging me to my death. He would pull me into the woods, to a remote place where nobody would find me. He would torture and kill me, and leave my body to rot. I scaled the steps two at a time, petrified by these thoughts. As my foot reached the top step, in one quick motion I pulled the rest of my body up and desperately shoved my key into the lock. He was there behind me, so close I swore I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.

His foot landed hard on the top step behind me. As I pushed the door open, his fingertips grazed my back. In one motion, I slipped inside and threw my body against the door. But it didn't close. His hand was wrapped around its edge. I threw my body against the door again and pushed hard until his fingers finally withered away. The door slammed shut and I quickly twisted the lock. He turned the doorknob furiously, and as I watched it quiver from the inside, my shaking fingers pushed the deadbolt into place.

My chest was raw from my heart's violent pounding. I held my face in my hands as blood rushed into my throbbing head. I gasped for air and my body folded in half involuntarily. Before I could catch my breath, I lunged toward the small wastebasket in the hallway and I vomited.

Bright red and blue lights cut through the curtains after seven long minutes. A stout police officer stepped out of his car and lazily swung his flashlight, pointing it down the street in one direction and then the other before making his way to the door. Tightly gripping the railing, he heaved himself from one step to the next. I stared at him from behind the living room curtain with anticipation, as if expecting to see him jolted by the electricity I left there in my wake just moments before.

His thick knuckles slowly fell against the door several times as I unlocked it.

"You all right?"

His lethargic tone and drooping face reflected his lack of genuine concern, but somehow his presence still brought me comfort. I was safe, and now I was not alone. In that moment, all the panic and fear building within me burst forth and tears poured down my face. I recounted every detail of the previous hour from the moment I left work to the moment he arrived. Through my uncontrollable sobs and hyperventilation, he extracted all relevant information. But there was one detail he needed that I didn't have.

"What did he look like?"

I didn't know. I didn't see his face. Just like my dream, I never saw his face. But that night I'd actually tried.

We were separated only by the thin door, inches away from each other. The doorknob shook violently as he tried to get inside. As I slid the deadbolt into place, I gathered all the courage I could muster and looked out the small peephole. At first, I peered through half-closed eyes, too terrified to see his face all at once. But my eyes soon opened wide in disbelief. No one was there. The doorknob was suddenly still. I ran to the living room window and carefully peered around the curtain, expecting to see him running down the stairs or across the street. But he was gone. In an instant, he'd vanished.

"You sure you were followed?" he asked skeptically, suspecting that my raw nerves after Gram's murder may have caused me to imagine a non-existent aggressor. All the officers in town knew Gram's case. It was the biggest, and most horrific. They all saw me down at the station each week talking to Detective Laine. But there were no suspects. No leads. No suspicious activity reported by anyone else in town. The trail had gone cold.

I nodded emphatically.
Of course I'm sure, you jerk.
I may have been experiencing some heightened anxiety since Gram died, but this time it was justified. It was not all in my head.

"Well, there's nothin' out there. No description of a perpetrator, nothin' I can do," he said half-heartedly. "You know, you really shouldn't be walking alone at night."

The languid officer turned toward the door and I watched my one source of protection walk away. He was the only thing bracing me from complete isolation. I struggled with the simultaneous desire to grab onto his jacket and beg him to stay with me, and the urge to reach out and choke him for being so indifferent. I thought of all the other officers in town that I knew, and I wished that any one of them had been dispatched instead. His awkward, misshapen body made its way back down the stairs and when he reached the bottom, he turned his head slightly.

"I will have a patrol car come by the house tonight. Call if you see or hear anything suspicious."

Ruth was in Europe for ten days with her husband Jack. He was a college professor and had been in Northern Italy on a research project since June. Ruth originally planned to go with him for the entire trip, but after Gram died, she stayed with me and insisted that Jack go on without her. She and Celia were so worried about me after Gram died, and refused to leave me alone.

After my incessant urging, Ruth finally agreed to join Jack before the summer was over. She wanted me to stay with Celia, who insisted on it too, but I assured them that I would be fine. Rena was going to stay with me. Ruth made me promise to be safe, to keep the doors locked, and to keep the phone with me at all times. And I had to call her if I needed her, no matter what time of day or night. Until she was gone, I didn't realize how much I would miss her.

For the first time in months, I was alone. The haunting quiet of the old house weighed heavily upon me and I wished for our back-and-forth chatter about what came in the mail that day or what was for dinner, the soft sounds of classical music infusing the house from the old living room stereo, or even the coarse squeaks of her violin as she practiced a new song.

I hit play on the answering machine. There were two new messages. For days, there were always at least two new messages. One from Ruth. One from Celia. Since Ruth left, they'd both called every day. The house, and my cell. And in each of Celia's messages, she reminded me that she had an empty guest room for me.

Rena stayed with me in the quiet house for the first few nights after Ruth left. But she was at Max's that night, sparing him from having to do everything with one arm. She'd texted me earlier, reminding me that I was more than welcome to come crash there. Max's place was technically her place too. She unofficially moved in with him that summer, even though most of her stuff still lived at her dad's house in Amesbury. I declined. I could handle being alone, I convinced myself.

Ruth and Jack's house was old—a historical relic from 1723. They were both historians and fell in love with the old charm of the place. It had too much space for just the two of them. They occupied the west side of the house, which was a roomy two floors. My bedroom was upstairs, just down the hall from theirs. We shared a freshly tiled bathroom with an antique soaking tub that I used almost every night. The guest room where Rena had been staying for the past few nights was around the bend. Otherwise neat and tidy, the room was strewn with a ten-day supply of Rena's clothes and shoes, and it looked like a bomb had gone off inside.

In the hallway between our rooms, display cases were filled with unique historical items, and shelves were chock full of history books that beckoned me. I perused them and grabbed a new book each night as I waited for the tub to fill up with warm, soapy water. I loved history, arguably as much as Ruth and Jack did, and their house was my own personal candy store.

From as far back as I could recall, the east side of the house was always rented to tenants. But the last tenants moved out almost six months before, and the space was still empty. For the first time, I wished it wasn't.

Several beautifully tended acres in the backyard seemed to go on forever, stretching into the vast preservation land beyond the property line. In the late summer mornings, as the sun started to peek over the horizon, deer approached the far side of the stone wall that separated the tightly manicured lawn and garden from the wild landscape beyond it. The garden's plethora of greens drew them in. As autumn approached, the crisp mornings brought families of wild turkeys. Each morning as I made my coffee, I watched for my winged friends through the wide bay window above the kitchen sink.

Minutes passed on the clock as night slowly crawled toward dawn. I texted Rena, asking her to call me. Though I hoped she would, I knew she was already asleep and wouldn't get the message until morning. Before I sunk into the sofa for the night, I turned on every light in the living room, kitchen, and hallway, closed all the curtains and blinds, and dug my aluminum baseball bat out of the hall closet. My stomach turned as I thought of the predator I'd led straight to my doorstep.

Every few minutes I'd peek around the curtain to survey the street and the front steps. To my relief, nobody was there. The rain had stopped, but lightning continued to strike and illuminate the dark night sky. It was the only thing that brought me comfort. I loved lightning. Mom said the night she was in labor with me, it was unremitting. She was convinced it was the reason I was so drawn to it. When I was small, I'd stand on the porch during warm summer storms just to watch the lightning tear down from the sky and touch the earth, casting its light on everything for miles.

Three flames danced atop the thick candle on the coffee table. As hours passed, the pool of dark purple wax grew wider until finally it broke free and cascaded over the edge. Between surges of fear and adrenaline, waves of exhaustion tempted me to drift to sleep. But sleep was the one thing I couldn't do. As terrifying as my dreams were, they paled in comparison to the very real nightmare that had walked into my life that night. Somebody made not of shadows but of flesh and blood was after me, and for all I knew he was lurking outside, waiting for an opportunity to get in.

I made myself a cup of tea, obsessively looking over my shoulder until I returned to the sofa. I bundled myself in a blanket, shivering with nerves and exhaustion, and counted the minutes until morning.

I opened my eyes to complete darkness. The candle had burned out. The small green lamp in the dark corner was off. As my eyes struggled to bring my surroundings into focus, my limbs tingled with panic. I'd drifted off to sleep, for how long I did not know, and the power was out.

I peered behind the curtain and out over the street. The soft glow of a neighbor's tall lamppost cast its light like a coveted beacon on the dark sea. The small porch lights of several other houses also illuminated the sleeping neighborhood. Ours was the only house without power.

In the short time that I lived in that house, it was a regular occurrence for one of us to blow a fuse while drying our hair or running the coffee grinder. The circuits were so old, so sensitive, that we accommodated their weakness. Upgrading the electric panel was next on the list of renovations. But for now, using too much power inevitably resulted in total blackout and required replacing a fuse. This most often happened during the morning rush, or in the evening when I was getting ready to go out while the dishwasher was running.

Surely that night, I put on too many lights. Jack was always the one to venture downstairs to the fuse box. But I was alone, and if I didn't do it, I would be sitting in darkness until morning. I relit the candle and found my way to the closet, grabbed the long-handled metal flashlight, and gathered my courage to go to the basement.

I slowly lifted the old-fashioned iron latch on the door that separated our side of the house from the vacant side. Slowly, I crossed the threshold into the unfamiliar space where the darkness was strange. Silhouettes that I didn't recognize seemed to come alive around me and reach for me. With each step I took, their eerie vagueness tickled the back of my neck with long, haunting fingers. I aimed my flashlight in every direction, unmasking foreign objects and for a moment destroying their intimidating forms. The basement door loomed in front of me, beckoning me deeper into the darkness until I could restore light. Everything in me wanted to turn around and run back to the space I knew, even if it meant being stranded in the dark until dawn. But I reached out for the doorknob and turned it.

The steep stairs descended into the basement with no walls or railings to insulate me from what might be waiting in the shadows. I frantically waved the flashlight from side to side as I took each step down, half expecting to find a pair of leering eyes waiting for me. When my foot finally hit the basement floor, I spun around and cast my light in all directions to ensure that I was alone.

The basement was as spacious and uncluttered as the rest of the house. In one corner, there was a workbench with a rotating saw and several small ends of wood beside it. Behind it, a few old screens, glass panes, and half-used cans of paint. Beside the washer and dryer, there was a wooden drying rack with a bright, colorful neck scarf hanging from the top rung.