At home they’d have been up much earlier, and already working.

This felt like a vacation day, a special day for sleeping in and eating out.

As quietly as she could, Annabelle slid the key for Room 7 into its lock and turned it, after giving Jody certain other instructions. When the two of them slipped in as quietly as possible, they found it dark. Annabelle saw by the lump of covers that her husband was still in bed. She could barely remember the last time Hugh had slept so late, and although she knew he’d complain about it, she was glad for the extra rest for him.

Grandmother and grandchild ran to the bed and hopped onto the covers.

“Wake up, Grandpa!”

Hugh Senior jerked awake as if somebody had stuck a gun in his spine.

“Wha? Wha?”

Annabelle sprawled on her back and Jody jumped up and down on the bed, both of them laughing so hard that Jody got the hiccups and Annabelle had tears running down her cheeks. When he finally saw who had invaded his room, he started laughing, too, grabbed Jody with both strong hands and lifted her above him. “I should keep you up there all day!” he said with pretend ferociousness. “You woke up the grumpy old goat.”

Jody was breathless, so he put her gently down again.

Annabelle got off the bed and said, “I told the boys to meet us at the truck stop in half an hour. And Jody and I are going over to Laurie’s now to get her, too.”

“What about Belle?”

“Oh, my lord, I forgot about Belle.” Pangs of mother-guilt shot through Annabelle. “Where is she?”

“With Laurie. Or else she’s at the bank.”

“Museum,” Annabelle reminded him absently. “You can stop by and pick her up.”

“I’m starving!” Jody told them.

“Well, then let’s go get your mother!”

16

WHEN JODY SAW Chase and Bobby emerge yawning from their room, she got excited and begged to go with them and her grandfather. And so Annabelle arrived alone at her son and daughter-in-law’s home that morning. As she pulled halfway up their drive, she noted that her son would have some yard pickup work to do when he returned from Colorado: the big old pin oak tree in the front yard, the only oak in Rose, had lost some branches. Annabelle smiled, guessing what her optimistic oldest child might say about that: Well, good. Now I don’t have to risk life and limb climbing that tree to prune it with my chain saw. And then he’d laugh, acknowledging the humor of his absurdly rose-colored glasses.

She saw no lights in the big stone house; their power was still out.

So glad I never had to live here, she thought.

Big old spooky monstrosity full of ghosts and dust. Mostly dust.

At the massive front door, Annabelle turned the old brass doorknob, expecting the house to be unlocked, but it wasn’t.

“Locked?” she asked the door, in surprise.

Had Laurie been afraid to stay alone while Hugh-Jay was gone?

She rang the bell and then knocked on the door.

When that raised no reply, she did it again.

“Are you still asleep?” she asked her daughter-in-law, looking up to their bedroom. Why did the idea of Laurie sleeping in annoy her, she chided herself, when just a few moments before she’d been happy for her sons and husband to do the same? It wasn’t because they worked hard and deserved it and Laurie didn’t; any woman with a three-year-old and a house this size worked hard unless she had a nanny and a house cleaner, and Laurie didn’t have either.

Annabelle walked back down the front steps and around to the back.

The kitchen door was also locked, and the windows were all pulled down, probably to keep the rain from spraying in during the storm last night.

She knocked, and then pounded on the back door.

“Laurie Jo!” She felt frustrated. “Answer the door!”

Maybe she had gone out in search of breakfast, too.

Annabelle turned to go, and it was only then that she realized her son’s truck was parked in the backyard.

Was Hugh-Jay home already? Or had he driven Laurie’s car to Colorado?

This was all very strange, she thought, feeling cranky about it.

And then she realized how she might get into the house.

Hoping that Laurie had forgotten to lock the basement door, Annabelle went around to the side of the house and descended the old cement steps to the basement, where they’d only recently cemented in the dirt walls. She had to stand in dirty water from the backed-up drain at the bottom to test the door, but when she did, it budged. She put a shoulder to it, and it gave with a cracking sound that she hoped didn’t mean some kind of expensive repair.

The basement smelled as if it had flooded, as indeed it had by a couple of inches. The water was gone, but mud coated the concrete floor. Annabelle grimaced as she stepped across it, moving carefully so she wouldn’t slip and end up lying in the muck. That was some rain they’d had last night!

She saw residue around the clothes washer and dryer.

“Hope they’re not shorted-out,” she said aloud.

When she climbed the wood steps, treading cautiously on her now slippery soles, she hung onto the banister and prayed the basement door upstairs wasn’t locked from the other side.

It wasn’t.

Inside the kitchen, Annabelle removed her muddy shoes.

“Laurie? Are you here?”

The appearance of the kitchen startled her.

A chair lay on its back. There was a battered straw cowboy hat on the floor as well. A yellow rain slicker lay crumpled on the floor, too. At the kitchen sink, water was dripping from the spigot. When she went over to turn it off, she saw what looked like blood on the sharp metal rim of the sink.

Suddenly, she felt anxious. Things were not as they should be.

This time she yelled it: “Laurie Jo! Laurie!”

She rushed out of the kitchen and into the front hallway, calling, “Laurie! Hugh-Jay! Is anybody here?” Quickly, Annabelle looked into the dining room and the living room, and then she ran upstairs, her heart hammering and her body trembling when she saw and smelled strange stains on the stairway carpet. It smelled like bleach, and the carpeting had pale blotches in it.

Too frightened to speak now, she raced from room to room on the second floor.

They weren’t in the master bedroom. Or its bathroom. Or Jody’s room. Or the other bathroom on this floor. Or the guest room across from Jody’s room. That left only the small guest room at the far end of the hall. Annabelle raced toward it, pushing its door wide open as she rushed inside.

“Hugh-Jay! Oh, God! Oh, no! My child!”

His body lay on the bloody carpet.

Annabelle screamed his name again and again as her heart broke.

OUTSIDE, a neighbor who came over to check on the Linders after the storm heard muffled screams through the closed, thick-paned windows and was alarmed. The neighbor, Sam Carpenter, finally located the same unlocked door that Annabelle had and hurried up the basement stairs, slipping on her slimy footprints several times in his rush, while overhead the screams-clearer to his ears now, and more terrible because of it-punctured the air. They terrified him. They were the worst thing Sam had ever heard in his life. They sounded as if a woman was being stabbed repeatedly. He only escaped falling back down the steps by hanging onto the painted railing for dear life. During one slip, he barked his shins through his trousers, but barely felt the pain. At the top, he flung open the door and immediately spotted ominous signs of struggle in the kitchen: the chair, the rain slicker, the ruined straw hat. Without stopping to think about any of it, he followed the harrowing wails to their source in the small guest bedroom at the end of the hall on the second floor of the old stone house.