A Fire in the Night Read online

  His brother’s teenage daughter was missing, yet Sams had not said anything about an Amber Alert or shared any theories about her disappearance—if she had run away, for instance, or even been abducted. Sams had mentioned her to gauge his reaction.

  If the police were looking for her, it was because she was a suspect.

  NICK MUST HAVE dozed, because when he opened his eyes, the fire was a glowing bed of coals. That and the single lamp were the only sources of light—the windows were black mirrors. Something had woken him up. He was making to get out of his chair when he heard it again: a scratching sound from outside, like a squirrel tentatively pawing at a porch screen. Except squirrels were like woodland ninjas and his porch was now open-air. Nick had discovered a nest of squirrels on the porch last winter by accident, stepping outside and seeing two of them on a rafter tucked up against the roof. After a short search he had found a squirrel-shaped hole chewed through a screen in a far corner of the porch, behind a chair. Nick had evicted the squirrels and removed the screens, which meant that right now he definitely wasn’t hearing a squirrel chewing through mesh. And raccoons and possums were just as stealthy, unless they got into a trash can.

  Nick stood, his senses reaching out, trying to locate the noise. There—a low scrape, definitely on the back porch, on the far side of the back door. For a moment Nick thought about the drawer in his office desk. Then he quietly walked out of the den into the foyer, opened the front door, and shut it carefully behind him. The air outside was brisk, his pores closing against the chill. He waited a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then he picked up the machete from where he’d left it leaning against the house when Deputy Sams had come to visit.

  Nick crept around the near side of the cabin, past the stacked firewood, holding the machete with the blade down. Could be that rattler, slithering across the porch, but Nick didn’t think so. Burglary wasn’t unheard of here, although usually thieves stole from empty cabins after the summer folk and other tourists had gone home.

  When he reached the back corner of the cabin, Nick crouched so his head was below the porch level, and then ever so slowly he raised his head until his eyes could peer over the floorboards. Faint light from the lamp inside the house shone through the back window, revealing a figure crouched on the porch. The figure was between the back door and the window over the breakfast table. His face was hooded. As Nick watched, the man raised his head and tried to peer through the window into the cabin. The man was slight—all the easier to wriggle into houses, Nick thought.

  In a dozen silent steps, Nick made his way around the corner of the house and to the bottom of the porch steps. He raised the machete. “That’s enough,” he said, not shouting but speaking loudly enough to startle the man. It worked—the man whirled around, hands half raised. He held a long blade in one hand. At least it wasn’t a gun. The last thing Nick wanted was to be shot in his own backyard. “I think you’re out-knifed,” Nick said, waggling the machete to make his point. “Put it down on the porch, slowly.”

  The man threw the knife. Nick ducked, and the knife hit a post and bounced off, skittering across the wooden steps. The man was already running for the far end of the porch. Nick took the steps in a single leaping stride, but he barked his shin on an Adirondack chair and stumbled, nearly falling onto his machete. He dropped the machete and ran, his steps thundering across the porch. The man was so fast—he was already sprinting across the side lawn for the trees. By the time Nick reached the trees, he could see about as well as a man in a box. He stopped, his breath like steam in the cold, and tried to listen over the pulse thudding in his ears. Footfalls, a cracking branch, but the sounds were muted, and receding. If he ran into the woods after the man, he’d likely run into a tree or poke his eye out on a branch. By the time he could retrieve a flashlight from the kitchen, the man would be long gone. And a light would only reveal his own location.

  Nick went back to the porch and picked up his machete, then looked at the window the man had been peering through. No sign of tampering on the window or the sill. He found the knife the man had thrown at him at the foot of the porch steps. It was a kitchen knife, long and curved, the kind of thing you’d use to carve a roast. A lousy handheld weapon. For a moment he thought about evidence, fingerprints. Then he picked up the knife and carried it and the machete inside, going through the back door, which was unlocked as usual, the screen door squalling as loud as any alarm system. He left the knife on the kitchen counter, locked both the back and front doors, put the fire screen up to cover the hearth, and then went to bed, the machete propped in a corner of the bedroom.

  WHEN NICK WOKE, his first thought was of Ellie. She had been in his dreams again, this time dancing away through the trees at night. There was a fire on a mountain peak ahead, and Ellie was leading him there, winding up a path of twisting tree roots, a granite cliff rising on his right. He couldn’t see Ellie. He called to her, and her laughter floated back to him. Then he opened his eyes, the dream gone.

  He sat up in bed. The light through the bedroom windows was colorless. He saw the machete leaning in the corner and recalled last night: the man on the porch, the short chase. He rubbed his face with his hands. He needed a shave, a good night’s sleep, a week of such nights. What he really needed was Ellie. He would have to settle for coffee.

  In the den his laptop remained open, balanced on the ottoman, the screen blank. A postmodern mirror reflecting his own blank life. He shook his head. It was too early for such bleak thoughts. He’d just forgotten to plug the laptop in last night to recharge. Look outside, he thought—the sun was coming up. Mist curled up off the lake; the mountain cliffs shone in the dawn. Another day of beauty, of possibility. But what was another day when the world had stopped?

  On his way to the kitchen, Nick paused by the back door, then looked out the door’s window at the porch. After several moments he returned to his bedroom and retrieved the machete. Slowly he unlocked and opened the back door, then pushed the screen door open with the point of the machete. The screen door protested with a rusty squeal, but the figure lying on the porch barely moved. The man wore jeans and a thin gray sweat shirt with the hood up, the same clothes he’d worn last night.

  “You come back to apologize?” Nick said.

  “No,” the man said. A boy—the voice was high, young. He was still curled up on the porch, knees tucked into his chest, facing away from Nick.

  “Polite people knock,” Nick said.

  “Sorry,” the boy said. His voice had a croak in it.

  Nick laid the machete on the floor inside the doorway and then reached for the boy’s shoulder. When he touched it, the boy shot up into a sitting position, trying to scramble away from him. Nick stared at the dark hair framing the bronzed face, the eyes wide and glittering, mouth open in protest, cheeks smooth and flushed, red as raspberries. A girl.

  “Please,” the girl began, then swallowed. It looked like it pained her. Her hair was matted, and her eyes weren’t shining from fear but from fever. “Please tell me you’re Nick Anthony.” Then she slumped to the porch floor, as if all the screen doors in the world wouldn’t wake her up.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Annalise hated whenever she got sick. She always caught a bug from someone at school who had a snotty nose, or coughed on everyone, or puked like Sally Maybank in eighth grade who had just walked up to Mrs. Honeycutt’s desk at the front of the room to say she didn’t feel well and then leaned over and barfed right into the trash can. All the air freshener in the world couldn’t cover up the sour reek, but Mrs. Honeycutt had just sprayed Lysol and then continued teaching them algebra.

  Annalise didn’t smell vomit now, but she knew she was sick. She was shivering and burning up all at once, like she was being roasted over a fire in the Arctic. That wasn’t a bad description. A little graphic, maybe, but her English teacher Mrs. Rivera would have liked it. But Annalise wasn’t going back to Mrs. Rivera’s class, wouldn’t finish the Neil Gaiman novel she ha
d started for summer reading, wouldn’t see Eric or any of her friends again, because her house had burned to the ground and her parents were dead and she had run all the way to the mountains, and my God the hot and cold shivering, maybe this was what her mother meant by hot flashes. It was like the menopause of the damned, ha that was funny, Mrs. Rivera would like that too wouldn’t she, stop it how could she be making jokes, her parents were dead they were dead they were dead.

  She was tangled in bedsheets, her head sweaty against a pillow. A man was trying to give her a drink of water. He reminded her a little of her father and yet was not her father at all. She started crying. “Shh,” the man said. “It’s okay. It’s just water. You have to drink something.” He put the glass to her mouth. Ice cubes bumped against her lips as she sipped. The cold water stung her throat, but she sipped as much as she could. “Okay,” the man said, and he said something else, but she had already slipped under, borne away by the current of her fever.

  WHEN SHE NEXT woke up, she was in a bed in a room she didn’t recognize. The shutters over the windows were closed, but the sunlight around the edges was bright. Wooden rafters crossed overhead, and there was a dresser across from the foot of the bed, with a long mirror on the wall above it. She saw herself in the mirror and stared. She looked like Medusa. Could Medusa turn herself to stone if she looked in a mirror? Maybe that would be a good thing, being turned to stone, everything grinding to a stop that would last for an eternal petrified moment. But what if her body was turned to stone and her mind kept spinning, like one of those magnetic top toys?

  “Shut up,” she said aloud. Her own thoughts exhausted her.

  “You’re awake,” someone said. A man’s voice. Annalise tried to sit up, but the best she could manage—she was so tired—was to turn her head to the left. A man sat in an armchair between the two casement windows. He looked a bit like a shaggy lion, dark hair shot through with silver, dark eyebrows over amber-colored eyes.

  “You’ve got a fever,” the man said. “Peaked at a hundred and four. One more degree and I was going to call a doctor.”

  There was a plastic bottle of water on a side table next to the man. Annalise looked at it. Her lips were so dry. When she licked her lips, the man stood and picked up the bottle and brought it to her.

  “Don’t have any straws,” he said, as if apologizing. He managed to tip some of the water into her mouth without spilling it all over her chin.

  “Thank you,” Annalise said. Her voice sounded like she was speaking through broken glass in her throat.

  The man nodded and put the bottle down, then sat on the edge of the bed, not too close. “You’re Annalise,” he said.

  She nodded. How could nodding her head be so damn difficult? You’re my Uncle Nick, she tried to say, but the words felt strange in her mouth. She had known her father had a brother, but when she was growing up her father had hardly ever spoken about him or told her anything about him. Until just a few days ago—two? Three? Then the fact of her parents’ deaths flattened her and she couldn’t move, couldn’t think beyond the enormity of that single awful truth. She must have started crying, because her uncle pulled two tissues out of a box and held them out to her. She shook her head, even though she felt the tears slide down the side of her face. She turned away from him and wept quietly, and mercifully fell back asleep.

  ANNALISE WOKE WITH a start. The light around the window shutters was dimmer, her reflection in the mirror above the dresser barely more than a shadow. Still she could see the handwritten note taped to the mirror: Gone to store for meds. Please don’t leave. It was the “please” that got her, as if her uncle knew that just writing “Don’t leave” would be creepy. She wondered what meds he needed to get. She wondered if she could stand up, and if so if she could then find a bathroom. She could make out two doors to her right. The one farther away was closed. Probably the bedroom door. The closest door was open onto what looked like a tile floor. Okay, bathroom located.

  Getting out of bed felt like facing the last stretch of a marathon, but she managed to swing her legs out to one side and sit up. Her head spun and she gripped the headboard, taking deep breaths. There was a tall plastic trash can next to the bed. She had a vague memory of throwing up in it sometime earlier. Fantastic. Someone had washed it out, and while her stomach didn’t feel too hot, she didn’t think she was going to be sick now. Her jeans were gone and she was wearing just a T-shirt and underwear. Had she taken off her hoodie when she came into the house? She didn’t want to think about how her jeans had been removed. And then she remembered what she had in her pocket, what she had to give to her uncle. Shit. Had he found it? And was she certain this was her uncle?

  First things first. Annalise put her bare feet to the cool wooden floor, paused for a breath, and then, one hand still on the headboard, stood up. A wave of light-headedness hit, and the room swam before her. When it stopped moving, she took a tentative step forward, then another. The tile-floored room beckoned through the open doorway. Her limbs felt like they were filled with wet sand. When she made it to the doorway, she sagged against it. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the thought of her dead mother and father circled like a vulture. But she wasn’t dead. Just hanging on to a doorway. She just needed a minute.

  The bathroom was like a hallway leading away from the door—a built-in counter with two sinks on the left, a glassed-in shower on the right. She saw the bright-yellow container of bleach wipes on the counter at the same time she registered the faint astringent scent of disinfectant. At least her uncle, or whoever he was, had apparently wiped down the bathroom. Beyond the shower was a water closet with a toilet, and beyond that at the end of the bathroom was what looked like a walk-in closet. Annalise didn’t see her jeans or hoodie anywhere. She made her way past the sinks and shower to the water closet, then sat down on the toilet to pee. And, honestly, to rest her shaky legs. Was this what it would be like to get old?

  She flushed and then stood back up, almost proud when she didn’t feel immediately dizzy. Baby steps. Still, she wanted to go back to bed. There was a bar of soap by one sink, though, so first she washed her hands, then dried them on the hand towel dangling from a ring in the wall. As she did so, she looked at the counter. The sink she was using, the one farthest from the door, had a little plastic caddy holding a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste, plus the bar of soap. Except for the container of bleach wipes, the other sink was bare. Annalise looked at the glassed-in shower, saw soap and shampoo and a shaving mirror suction-cupped to the glass, a razor hanging from the bottom. A man’s razor. No pink plastic disposables like her mother had. Used to have, a voice in her head corrected, but she ignored it. She opened a drawer and found a stick of deodorant, shaving cream, aftershave, Q-tips, a hairbrush, and an electric razor. Another drawer had mouthwash, more toothpaste, floss, and more shampoo. Two cabinets contained towels and toilet paper and an old hair drier. No hair products, no flat iron, no makeup. There was nothing feminine at all, in fact, in the whole bathroom.

  Annalise looked at the walk-in closet at the back of the bathroom. The bed called for her. Instead she walked, steadily for the most part, to the closet. It was carpeted and held built-in shelves and drawers and rods. A window in the closet let in a little light—it was late afternoon, almost dusk, she guessed. She stood on tiptoe and looked out the window and saw the front yard and the gravel drive that led away to the trees. There was a light switch inside the closet door, and she turned on the light and looked at the hanging clothes, men’s shirts and pants and jackets. Sweaters and shorts and socks and underwear were stacked neatly on shelves. There were a couple of pairs of jeans, but they weren’t hers. Nothing had a name on it. On the far side of the closet, almost all the shelves were bare, but a single red garment bag hung from the rod.

  She was reaching for the zipper on the garment bag when she heard the sound of a car engine. She got back on tiptoe and looked out the window again, just in time to see a dark-green SUV exit the trees and approach the hou
se. Annalise turned and hurried out of the closet, remembering to turn the light off. She crossed the bathroom and reached the bed, sliding beneath the comforter at the same time she heard a car door slam. A few moments later, she heard a door into the house open. She closed her eyes, pretending to sleep.

  She must have really fallen asleep, because when there was a tentative knock on the bedroom door, she jerked awake. “Are you up?” her uncle—the man she thought was her uncle—called from the other side.

  Her heart beat like a caged bird in her chest. “Yes,” she called out.

  “Okay, I’m coming in,” he said. The door opened, and he stood there in a plaid flannel shirt and jeans and tall boots. He had some folded clothes under one arm. “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired,” she said truthfully. “But better.”

  He smiled, clearly relieved. “Good,” he said. “I got you some Theraflu,” he said.

  “I’ve got the flu?” she asked, surprised.

  He shrugged. “Fever, chills, exhaustion, sore throat. Figured we’d hit all the symptoms. You don’t seem to be having any trouble breathing.” He paused, and Annalise realized he was waiting for her to confirm. She shook her head and he continued. “If you get worse, I’ll take you to the doctor. There’s a decent ER nearby.” He glanced around the room, saw the note he had left for her and took it off the mirror. He held the note up. “Thanks for not leaving,” he said.

  Annalise wasn’t sure why he thought she might have left. She had come all the way up here, after all. Plus, she was sick. “Sure,” she said.

  He laid the note on the dresser, then put the folded clothes on the foot of the bed. She saw it was her jeans and hoodie.

  “I washed your sweat shirt,” he said. “And your jeans.” He looked out the window, then back toward her, but not directly at her. “You kicked your jeans off when you were trying to sleep.”

  Annalise felt her cheeks blush a little, not from her fever. “Thanks,” she said. And then she remembered. Fear stabbed her. “Did you find anything in my jeans?” she asked. “Before you washed them?”