Too Close to Home Read Free Page B

quiet.
    Derek realized he was trembling. His teeth were nearly chattering. He heard more footsteps going through the house, slower now, calm steps, measured steps. They came down the half flight of stairs, paused, turned, came all the way down to the basement. Couldn’t hear the person walking around that well now, not on the basement broadloom, which was laid over cement. But he could sense someone in the room. The person who had fired the shots. A killer. A few feet away, on the other side of the couch. Derek could hear shallow, rapid breathing.
    He clamped his jaw tight together, determined to stop the chattering. He wondered if the killer could hear the blood pulsing in his temple.
    Then the person went back up the stairs, turned out the light. The front door opened and closed, then a car door, same thing. Open, then slamming shut. A moment later, tires rolling away on gravel.
    Derek waited about five minutes, slithered his way back out from behind the couch, crossed the rec room, and went up the stairs to the landing at the back door, just enough moonlight streaming through the window to show Adam lying there, his legs still splayed across the stairs, his head in a pool of black blood.
    Derek delicately stepped over him, his hand shaking as he turned back the deadbolt, opened the door, and ran off into the night.

ONE
    T HE NIGHT THEY KILLED our neighbors, the Langleys, we never heard a thing.
    It was warm and humid that evening, so we’d closed all the windows and had the air conditioner cranked up as high as it would go. Even at that, we couldn’t get the temperature in the house much below 76. This was late July, and we’d been suffering through a heat wave the last week, the thermometer hitting mid-90s pretty much every day, except for Wednesday, when it hit 100. Even some rain early in the week had failed to break it. It wasn’t getting much below the mid-80s even after the sun went down.
    Normally, it being a Friday night, I might have stayed up a little later, even have been up when it happened, but I had to work Saturday. That rain had set me back with all the customers I do yard work for. So Ellen and I had packed it in pretty early, nine-thirty or so. Even if we’d been up, we’d probably have been watching TV, so it’s pretty unlikely we’d have heard anything.
    It’s not like the Langleys’ place is right next door. It’s the first house in off the highway along our shared driveway. Once you pass their place, it’s still another fifty or sixty yards or so before you get to our house. You can’t see our place from the highway. Homes out here on the outskirts of Promise Falls in upstate New York have some space between them. You can see the Langleys’ house up the lane, through the trees, but we never heard their parties, and if the racket I make tuning up lawn mowers ever bothered them, they never said anything about it.
    I was up around six-thirty Saturday morning. Ellen, who didn’t have to go into her job up at the college, stirred as I moved into a sitting position on the side of the bed.
    “Sleep in,” I said. “You don’t have to get up.” I stood up, wandered down to the foot of the bed, saw that the book Ellen had been reading before she’d turned out the light had fallen to the floor. It was just one of a stack of books on her bedside table. You have to do a lot of reading when you organize a college literary festival.
    “It’s okay,” she mumbled resignedly, turning her face into the pillow and pulling the covers tighter. “I’ll put some coffee on. You’re just going to wake me up getting dressed anyway.”
    “Well,” I said, “if you’re already getting up, some eggs would be nice.” Ellen said something into the pillow I couldn’t hear, but it didn’t sound friendly. I continued, “If I heard you correctly, that it’s no trouble, does that mean you could fry up some bacon, too?”
    She turned her head. “Is there a union for slaves? I want to sign up.”
    I got