Catherine Huntley stiffened. She turned her head slightly, angling toward the sound she thought she had heard. She relaxed…marginally. It was nothing, she argued with herself, as she had been doing most of the night.
Just your silly imagination.
She dropped her head back into the pillow’s embrace and tried to persuade her over-active mind to accept sleep. But she knew that it was useless.
She felt her legs beginning to twitch nervously, a sign she easily recognized. She wouldn’t get to sleep for a long time tonight.
At her side, Willard snored lightly-not enough to have awakened her if she had been asleep but enough to help keep her from getting there.
The snore stuttered into a muffled snort as he turned onto his side, flopping heavily on the mattress and pulling most of the last of her grandmother’s hand-stitched quilts-a delicate Wedding Ring pattern in rose and palest blue-with him as he turned.
She smiled.
As if he were awake to her smile, he snuggled against her, his curving back and buttocks nestling against her side. His spine caressed her ribs. She smiled again. Part of her felt warm and tingly tonight, in spite of the light rain that had begun late that afternoon, in spite of the prediction of near freezing temperatures by morning-a rarity in near-tropical Coastal Southern California.
The faint draft from the windows touched her cheek with a chilling briskness, and the air in the bedroom was both cold and faintly damp, almost musty, even though the previous owners had only been out three days before the Huntleys began moving in.
That morning, in fact.
Willard had put the bed up first thing, with a grin and an unspoken promise that he had more than fulfilled tonight.
Catherine smiled again.
She still felt his fluid warmth inside of her.
She still tingled with the memory of his touch, his body pressed against hers, his lips seeking hers, his tongue penetrating. Loving Willard had always been special. But tonight it seemed even more so.
Because they were doing it in their house.
Their very own.
Catherine raised her head, the tendons in her neck straining and streaking her flesh with knife-sharp shadows.
There it came again.
A low murmur.
Like water rustling through pipes.
Or the toilet tank in the back bathroom running.
Or…
Get a hold of yourself, she thought sternly, it’s nothing. Remember the first night in the apartment in Riverside, thirteen long years ago, when you made poor Willard get up and tramp through the house barefoot, not even letting him have enough time to throw a robe over his nakedness, then him stubbing his toes on every box and carton in every room, all because you knew you heard someone pounding on the back door.
Well, she thought in her own defense, there had been a pounding.
Right.
And she remembered how embarrassed she was when they drove away from the manager’s office first thing the next morning.
“Pounding,” the woman had said, leaning back in her chair. “Probably just the pipes. You turned the hot water on, right?”
Willard had nodded.
“Just the pipes expanding and contracting.” She had turned away, the action eloquently expressing her mixture of contempt and humor at the couple sitting stiffly before her, already complaining after only one day in their apartment.
She seemed to have known that it was also the first apartment for either of them, that they had only been married a week and were just returned from their honeymoon.
She must have imagined the two of them…
Catherine’s cheeks flushed in the darkness.
Her hand strayed over Willard’s shoulder. She turned on her side and moved against him, spoon-fashion. She didn’t know when she had first heard that expression, but it was right on. Spoon to spoon. Her hand strayed further now, along the lines of his chest and stomach, still taut after thirteen years of marriage, and down to his hips. She nuzzled the back of his neck, not really caring whether he was awake or not, half hoping he was, half resigned to the fact that he almost always fell asleep-no, she corrected herself, he always crashed, that was more like it, tail-spinning, out-of-control, earth-shattering crash — right after they made love.
At first it had bothered her.
She would come back from the bathroom, still warm with passion, her skin alive and so sensitive that the faint movement of the silent night air against it made her light-headed. And Willard would be lying there, stone-still.
Asleep.
Oh well, she sighed, repeating herself for the umpteenth time in thirteen years.
If that’s all I have to worry about, I’m better off than…
Her head snapped up again.
This time she was certain.
She had heard something.
She sat up, dragging the covers with her.
Willard shifted and one hand reached back and tugged on the edge of the quilt her grandmother had given them as a wedding present. In his sleep, he burrowed further under its warmth. But Catherine couldn’t ignore this sound.
It was definite.
Not really loud, but definite.
And she couldn’t quite identify it. But it was something.
Just the house settling, stupid. Old wooden joints do creak, you know.
She listened more intently. She turned her head from side to side, trying to fix a location for the sound.
There it was. A muted thump, thump…, thump, too irregular to be the winter wind splaying a naked branch against a window. Too random for anything else she could imagine.
She slipped out of bed, pulling on her long flannel robe, the high-necked white one Willard hated because he claimed it made her look like someone’s great-great grandmother out of another century…and because (although he would never admit to it) it was infinitely harder to remove in the dark than her others. But it was warm and thick, and the night had promised to be a cold one.
She slipped her feet into scuffs and padded from the room, stopping at the door into the hall. Directly in front of her, the hallway extended past the bathroom and the front bedroom she had requisitioned as a combination sewing-room/all-purpose escape-from-the-children-when-things-got-too-hairy room. Beyond that lay the blackness of the entry and, to the right, the living room and from there the kitchen.
Straight ahead, she could dimly see a reflection through the door the previous owners had built to join the entry hall with what had once been the garage but was now a large, comfortable family room. It was presently chock-full of unopened boxes, but it promised to become the focal point for their lives for years to come.
She strained her eyes.
The reflection focused into a small orange glow, like an unblinking eye studying Catherine Huntley from the darkness. For a moment her skin crawled and her breath halted. Then she exhaled in a long, relieved hiss that echoed in the silence.
Stupid, she thought, not for the first time that evening. Stupid stupid stupid.
It was only the clock. Right.
The electric clock with the luminous dial that she had carefully set to the exact time then placed on a stack of cardboard boxes along the far wall. Not the glowing eye of the cannibal goddess Kali, or anything so exotic.
A stupid clock.
She felt her heart slowly creep back to its steady pace. Her arrested breathing resumed as well, and her goose-fleshed, crawling skin crept coldly back to its rightful place on her arms
Thump thump…thump…thump.
A long pause, then… thump.
It was definitely coming from her right, from somewhere along the darkened hallway that led to the second bathroom, past Suze’s room and dead-ended by the doors to the boys’ room on the right and what would probably end up as Willard’s office on the left.
They had intended for Will, Jr., to have his own room-finally, the twelve-year-old’s dream had come true-but both Burt and Samuel (Sams to everyone since the day he had come home from the hospital and Suze tried to say his name and tripped up on the syllables, and everyone laughed and from then on it was just Sams) had unaccountably refused to sleep in the back room without their older brother.
So, for now at least, all three boys were together, the older two in the bunks, Sams in the little box trundle-bed that each of the boys had slept in until they turned four or five. She stepped down the hall.
Thump.
She stopped, waiting for the sound to return and give her some idea of what it was, where it came from. When it didn’t she continued. There was no sound, no movement in Suze’s room. Catherine flicked the light on, just long enough to see the top of the six-year-old’s head sticking out of a bundle of quilts, blankets, stuffed animals, and favorite clothing that somehow had not gotten hung up that evening and that-Catherine knew ruefully from past experience-would somehow never quite make it to a closet or dresser drawer. Suze was short for Susan; the Huntley’s first girl-child had been named after Catherine’s grandmother.
Catherine breathed in relief.
Suze was fast asleep. And safe.
Catherine turned the light off. The sudden darkness seemed deeper, colder. She shivered. Even though the forced-air furnace was on, the house still felt damp, unlived in.
It would probably be all right in a couple of days, though, she reassured herself.
Thump.
The sound jerked her from her stasis and reminded her that she had a job. Mother’s responsibility number 483-investigating strange but undoubtedly harmless noises in the dead of darkness on cold December nights.
She paused by the bathroom door but heard nothing there. Again she flicked on the light.
And again everything was normal.
The storage bedroom was next to the bathroom. Enough moonlight filtered through the dusty but curtainless windows for her to make out most of the shapes-again, boxes and cartons, things they wouldn’t need for the next few days, pushed into this room as soon as the boys announced their decision that Will was going to have to sleep with them for a while. The room was silent.
That left the boys’ room. She swallowed tightly and looked across the dark hallway. To her imagination, the open door into the back corner bedroom seemed unaccountably threatening, like an open mouth of impenetrable darkness against the faint gray of the hall.
For a frightening instant, she didn’t want to walk through that opening-it would be too much like stalking down a demon’s throat.
Don’t be absurd, Catherine Huntley, she told herself sternly. You’ve play enough mind-games tonight already. It’s just a room.
She crossed the hallway and entered.