Page 83 of Nightwatching

“Isn’t that fake? Just a movie thing?”

The sergeant shrugged. “You think he was crazy? Talking to some voice in his head?”

She distractedly traced a finger along the path of her skull’s deepest hurt. “I mean, is anyone who could do that totally normal? But it was scarier than him being crazy. He seemed calculated? Like he’d thought out exactly what he was doing. And that frightened me.” She thought a moment. “He did say he was bothered by the house. Something about it being creaky. Having too many doors. But that doesn’t make him crazy, I guess. Lots of people are afraid of my house. People think it’s haunted because it’s old.”

“And you don’t consider yourself superstitious?” the sergeant asked.

“No.”

“They say as many people in this country believe in ghosts as believe in Jesus,” the sergeant said, writing in his notebook.

Her head ached. Her eye made everything milky.

“Guess God and ghosts are about equally believable,” she muttered.

The sergeant’s head clicked up, eyes narrowing. “Excuse me?”

“Sorry, I—I just meant…religion’s a belief in the supernatural, too. Something beyond our understanding?”

Careless. You’ve offended him.

The sergeant’s eyes were cutting above his mask. “I guess you couldn’t believe in ghosts, to live in that house,” he said.

Again she realized she was twisting the edge of her blanket as though she’d worry it apart. “He did—he did quote the Bible. That bit about women learning in submission? My grandmother was religious, and she raised me, so I recognized—”

The sergeant gave a dismissive wave, and she stopped talking. He handed her a paper sketched with a basic floor plan of her house. Another with the property as a whole. “These look right?”

Her professional self frowned.Proportions all wrong, lines unconfident. Labels missing, no detail at all.

She gestured for his pencil. He handed it to her and rolled the hospital table she used for meals so it cantilevered over the bed. She drew swift lines, wrote additional words.

“Here.”

“Huh, whatdayaknow. That’s actually better.”

They went through the map. She marked where they’d heard footsteps. Where she knew the Corner had traveled. Valuables thepolice had found were itemized, their locations noted on the map—jewelry, safe, ammunition, her phone, the computers. It didn’t look to her like anything obvious was missing. They traced her escape through the woods. Putx’s over the graveyard and a spot on the trail, marking where she thought she’d been injured.

“Do you think he followed you out of the house?”

“That night I was so afraid I thought he might have, but no. Looking back, I don’t think he did.”

How can you not be sure? You should know that. Do you just not remember?

“So.” The sergeant consulted his notebook. “You heard this man for some reason say aloud that he was headed to the attic. You decided to go for help. How did the children react?”

The sergeant leaned back in his chair, but his eyes hooked to her, hungry as the mountain lion’s. She felt sickened, immediately sure the children had told him she’d pushed them off her. Hurt them.

“The kids, they were upset, didn’t want me to leave.”

“But you did leave. How did that work?”

He already knows. So tell him how it was.

“I told them I was getting help. They were terrified. It was awful.” She blinked back tears. Swiped at her eye with the blanket corner knotted in her hand. “I had to push them off me. I just kept thinking how it was maybe their last memories of me, and they’d remember me pushing them away. I had to make them listen. Make them let me go.”

The sergeant nodded, taking notes. “You pushed them? Physically? With your hands?”

“Yes. They wouldn’t let me loose otherwise. It was—”

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