I’m alone in the hallway, the door open behind me.

I close it, lock it. Then I wonder how we’ll escape if someone else is here. I unlock it. Then I lock it again and step back. I wish I’d found a knife like Claire’s instead of a summer dress. I shed the backpack and use it to block the door, most likely ineffectively.

Stepping as softly as I can, I cross to Claire’s bedroom first, and I halt in the doorway. Someone has been here. The drawers have been yanked out. The closet is open. All the sheets are off the bed in a tangle. Taking a deep breath, I check the closet.

Empty.

Under the bed.

Empty.

Behind the door.

Also clear.

I repair the bed, stretching out the sheet, fluffing the pillow, and laying down the blanket. I find her old bear Teddy tangled in the blanket, but the new bear doesn’t miraculously appear. I place Teddy on the pillow. I then check behind the bedside table and in its drawer. I look in every drawer and again in the closet. Tucked in one drawer I find a photo album. I open it. Smiling faces of a family—a mother, a father, a girl about Claire’s age but with strawberry-blond hair and freckles. In the first photo, they’re posing in front of a white house with red shutters. The house has a green lawn, as well as a neatly trimmed hedge of bushes in front of the porch. There are wind chimes and a potted plant with red flowers—geraniums, I think. Mom would have known. Another photo has the mother and daughter hugging in front of the ocean. Foamy waves swirl over their bare feet. The mother’s flesh sags around her bathing suit, but her smile lifts her face up so that she looks as full of life as the daughter who holds a broken seashell in one hand. The seashell is on the shelf over the desk. I cross to it and pick it up.

I wonder if this album reminds Claire of her mom—or if she only wishes that it did.

“Any luck?” Peter says from the doorway.

My fingers close around the seashell and then I force myself to put it back on the shelf. I shut the album and lay it on the dresser. I don’t look at Peter. There are tears in my eyes, heating the corners of my eyes, but I don’t want him to see. I shake my head.

I don’t have any mementoes or photos with me of Mom.

“Lunch boxes are gone, too. As are a bunch of utensils, like the can opener.” This is the first time I’ve seen him actually annoyed. His forehead crinkles, marring the perfection of his handsome face. “Damn scavengers.” He doesn’t seem to notice the hypocrisy in his words, given our day’s activities.

Claire appears behind Peter. She’s holding Mr. Rabbit. Solemnly, she delivers it to me. “He’s safe.” Her voice catches a little.

I take the rabbit and nod toward her bed. “So’s he.”

“Guess they were too old to take.”

“Guess so.” She’s not crying anymore, but her cheeks are stained with dried tears. I lift Mr. Rabbit up to my ear. “What’s that? You want to belong to Claire? No, I’m not offended. Yes, I think that’s a good idea.” I put the rabbit in Claire’s arms. “He’s sorry about your other bear and wants to be yours now.”

Claire tucks the rabbit under one arm and then throws her other arm around my neck. I feel the hilt of her knife digging into my ribs as she squeezes me tight. “What if they take him tomorrow?” she asks. Her grip around my neck is tighter than a turtleneck.

Peter pats her shoulder, but I notice he’s watching me. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. “They won’t. I know the type. This is a one-strike kind of hit. Just grazing through. He or she won’t be back. And I’ll make sure of it.”

She sniffs. “You will? You said you were leaving. I heard you tell her.”

“I’ll be back,” he promises, “with your bear.” And then he runs out the door and off the porch so fast that he looks as if he’s flying. Claire and I watch him disappear into the darkness.

I break the silence. “Come on. We’ll find Mr. Rabbit a hiding place,” I say as I ease her grip off of me. “Lift up a floorboard or tape him to the underside of the mattress. Or we just take him with us.”

She nods and at last releases me.

I smile at her. “That’s better. Let’s see if we have any dinner in those backpacks. I’m pretty sure I found a can of delectably slimy string beans.”

She sticks out her tongue.

“I can mush them up more and we can eat through a straw.”

She laughs. “Bleck! Lucky for me, we have no can opener.”

I shut the front door and double-check the locks. I know I should feel even more scared now that someone has found our house, but I don’t. Peter will come back.

I don’t sleep at all.

Or maybe in brief stretches. My night is full of imagined sounds in the darkness, creaks and thuds and cracks and...I dream that I am in the living room of the little yellow house. Moonlight pours in through the windows and bathes the couches and chairs covered with white sheets in soft light so that they look like ghosts. The dead man sits in one of the chairs. “You can’t leave,” he says. “Even if you die, you can’t leave. Not without the Missing Man.”

He starts to bleed.

I wake in a sweat.

The sheets are tangled around my legs. I sit up and untangle them, and I look around the room, trying to make sense of the shadows—that’s the shadow from the footboard, that stretch is from the wardrobe, that is my backpack in the corner, those are my shoes and pants. I stare at the closet door for a while.

Obviously, there’s no one in there. I checked the closet thoroughly when I hunted for Claire’s bear. Also, I locked the front door and dragged an end table to block it, in case the intruder came back. Peter is not in the closet.

Unless he is.

“Peter?” I call softly.

Just paranoia. It’s the darkness and the unknown and the weirdness and everything. I force my muscles to relax. Close my eyes. Breathe evenly. Crap, I think. Still can’t sleep.

I call a little more loudly. “Peter, are you there?”

I’ll laugh at myself in the morning. It’s not as if I’m a kid that needs a night-light. Even as a little kid, I never needed one, though I liked the bedroom door cracked and the bathroom light on, but that was more for practical reasons. If I had to get up, I didn’t want to trip on the cat and break either myself or the cat. I didn’t need the reassurance that—

“You talk too damn much.” Peter’s voice from somewhere in the darkness. “Go to sleep, Little Red.”

Clutching the sheets, I freeze. “Are you in my closet?”

“Maybe.”

I consider screaming, but who would come? I take a deep breath. Let it out. If Peter wanted to hurt me, he could have done so a hundred times already. I keep my voice nice and calm. “Why are you in my closet?”

“To sleep, perchance to Dream.”

“You have an apartment. I assume it has a bed. You could be sleeping in your own nice bed with your own pillows and blanket.” But as I say this, I’m thinking, He came back.

“Closets are comfortable.” I hear a laugh in his voice. He has a low, musical voice that rolls through the room. He’s almost whispering but not quite. I wonder if Claire is listening.

“Did you find the intruder?”

“Not yet.”

“Prince Fluffernutter?”

“No.”

I want to ask him why he came back if he didn’t find them, but I don’t want him to leave again. The nightmares are too fresh. Still, though, why is he in my closet? I hit on an explanation that doesn’t freak me out...or at least doesn’t for the same reasons. “Are you staying in here to guard me?”

“Sure. Let’s go with that.”

I’m not reassured. “Really?”

“I thought no one would find this place. I was wrong. So here I am, guarding you, in case I’m wrong again.”

That, oddly, does reassure me. “Why me and not Claire?”

He’s silent for a moment. “The Missing Man refused you,” he says at last, and for once, I don’t hear the mocking tone to his voice. “I’d rather no one kills you until I figure out why. If this is what it takes to keep you safe, then this is what I’ll do.”