Midway through her routine, she thought she heard a noise. A loud noise. In fact, she’d felt it. It was as if someone had dropped something large and heavy inside the house. She pulled out the earbuds.

Silence.

She left the bedroom, walked down the hall, looked in on the girls. Both were sleeping soundly. Emily with the covers twisted in a knot. Charlotte lying with the covers pulled up primly to her chin, like a children’s bedding ad in a JC Penney’s catalog.

Abby listened to her house. Other than the ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer, the house was silent.

Had Michael come home?

“Michael?” she called out in a loud whisper. Loud enough for her husband to hear – unless he had gone down to the basement – but not loud enough to wake the girls.

Silence.

Abby moved slowly to the top of the stairs. Another glance into the girls’ room. Still asleep. The Care Bears nightlight cast the room in a warm ginger glow. The house was so quiet she could now hear them breathing in tandem.

Abby half-closed the bedroom door, then gently padded down to the landing. The light was on in the kitchen, as was the light in the mud room, the small space near the back door in which they kept their boots, umbrellas, raincoats, slickers, and rain hats. In summer they usually kept that light on all night. In winter, when the snow was known to drift halfway up the back door, they kept it off.

She had imagined it. It was probably a passing car, one of the rolling boom boxes with the trunk-sized bass speakers that seemed to be passing by with more frequency of late. She hoped it wasn’t becoming a trend. They’d moved to Eden Falls precisely because it was quiet, and the thought that –

A light snapped off. Abby spun around.

The mud room was now dark.

Abby’s heart skipped a beat. She backed up one step. In a loud whisper: “Michael!”

No response. A few moments later, in the kitchen, another light snapped off.

Abby looked down the steps. She saw the alarm panel on the wall near the front door, the digital panel that armed the three doors and sixteen windows in the house. The single green light in the lower right-hand corner was aglow, meaning, of course, that the system was unarmed. If it were Michael, he would have come in through the garage door, through the kitchen, into the foyer, and armed the panel. This was his routine.

In the past year there had been two break-ins in their neighborhood. Because the houses on this block were relatively isolated, hidden by trees, there were no witnesses. Neither time were the burglars caught, nor any of the stolen items recovered. There had been no violence in either case – the owners had been out of town – but there was always a first time for everything. The burglaries were one of the reasons they had gotten an alarm system installed in the first place.

In the eight months since they had first subscribed to the security service, Michael had never failed to arm it the moment he arrived home. Not once.

If there was someone in the house – and there was no doubt in Abby’s mind that there was – it was not her husband. No one else had a key.

She listened intently, searching the silence for a noise; the creak of a floorboard, the scrape of a chair, the intake or exhale of a breath.

Nothing. Just the click of the clock. Just the sound of her own heartbeat pulsing in her ears.

Abby gently leaned over the railing and glanced at the dim light spilling into the living room from the kitchen. Her cellphone was charging on the small roll-top desk, right next to the cordless phone.

Shit.

The rest of the room – the dining room and living room beyond – was consumed by darkness, a darkness that drew shapes and spirits in every corner. She knew every inch of her house, but at the moment it looked like a foreign land, an ominous, threatening landscape.

There was no phone upstairs. She and Michael either had their cellphones with them, or when the cordless wasn’t charging, kept it on the nightstand.

Abby returned to the master bedroom, pulled over the short step stool, climbed on it. On the top shelf of her closet was an aluminum case. She pulled it down, spun the combination, all the while glancing toward the hallway, looking for shadows, listening for footfalls. She opened the box. Against the egg-crate foam lining was a Browning .25 semi-automatic pistol. Abby checked that the safety was on.

When she was ten, her father had taken her out to her uncle Rob’s farm in Ashtabula, Ohio. There he had taught her to shoot. They hunted quail in summer, rabbits in fall. Although never a great shot, the first time she bagged a quail she felt a rush of exhilaration. Of course, when Morton, their beautiful Golden, brought the bird back, Abby cried for two straight days. After that, it was target practice, and at this she excelled. She found that shooting a target, even the silhouette of a man, was easier than shooting small game. Although she liked a good steak as much as the next person, the notion of killing a living thing was anathema to her.

But this was different. This was her family.

She slipped the pistol into her pocket, stepped down the hall. She entered the girls’ room, snapped off the nightlight. She checked the windows. Everything was locked tight. Before pulling the drapes, she peeked out the window. From this vantage, at the front right side of the house, she could not see the driveway, nor the area in front of the garage. If Michael had returned, she would not have been able to see his car anyway. The yard, the street, the block was quiet, dark, serene.

Abby exited the room, closed the door, descended the stairs. Before she could turn around, she heard a noise, the unmistakable sound of someone walking across the kitchen floor. There were two boards, right next to the island, they had been meaning to shim for more than a year. Abby looked at the wedge of light spilling from the room.

There. A shadow.

Abby glanced back up the stairs. Should she try to bundle the girls up and get out of the house, or risk crossing the foyer to get to the phone and the police?

She thought about trying one last time to call her husband’s name, but if it wasn’t him, she would have to confront the intruder. She slipped across the foyer, and remembered. There was a panic button on the alarm panel. Press it, hit a three-number code, and the Eden Falls police would be alerted. All silently.

When she was just a foot away she heard the footsteps crossing the kitchen. The shadow on the floor grew larger, less sharply defined. Whoever was in the kitchen was coming right toward her.

She hit the panic button, drew the weapon, and put her back to the wall. The shadow grew even larger as it filled the doorway.

She smelled something in the air, something she knew.

Cologne. A familiar cologne.

She flipped on the light. The intruder screamed.

“Walk this waaaaay, talk this waa-aa-aay!”

It was Michael. He was signing Aerosmith. He was listening to one of the girls’ iPods and he hadn’t heard her calling his name. He hadn’t heard a thing.

“Hey babe!” He leaned against the counter, pulled off his headphones. His eyes focused on the .25. “Man,” he said, smiling. “Am I that late?”

Abby shook. Her eyes filled with tears of relief. She let herself slide down the wall to the floor.

The girls were fine, she was fine, Michael was fine. Everything was just peachy.

“So, I guess a blow job is pretty much out of the question,” Michael added.

Abby wanted to shoot her husband anyway.

ELEVEN

Aleks watched. from his vantage, in the darkness behind the house, he could see through the dining-room window, into what he imagined was the living room. Shadows danced on the walls.

He turned, and once again scanned the yard. His eyes played over the shapes. A pair of three-wheel bicycles, a swing set.