John Saul - Perfect Nightmare

I know she watched me leave.

This is not good. This is not good at all.

S tuff!

Everywhere she looked, Ellen Fine saw stuff. Nothing valuable. Nothing she even wanted. In fact, she couldn’t remember where it had all come from. But there it was, the accumulation of five years in this tiny house, now piled on the floor in a mound that seemed to be getting bigger instead of smaller. She’d already filled three garbage bags with junk that was being consigned to the dump, and nearly a dozen boxes had been filled with Emily’s toys, shelves of books, and stacks of file folders.

For a moment she almost wished she’d married Emily’s father — at least then she would have had someone to help her sift through everything and make the hundreds of tiny decisions about what to keep and what to throw away. Of course, if she’d married Danny, this little cottage would have been far too small for the three of them. And in the end, she was sure, Danny would have wound up taking off with Brenda Lansky anyway, and nothing would have been any different than it was right now.

Danny — along with Brenda — had vanished, and with them had gone the monthly support checks for Emily. Which made perfect sense when Ellen thought about it; after all, Danny certainly couldn’t be expected to support his daughter and his girlfriend, too, could he? So now she was moving back to Missouri, back in with her mom and dad, because she simply could no longer afford Long Island.

Not even this tiny little cottage in Smithton, which wasn’t even half as nice as Camden Green, just a couple of miles farther out Route 25A.

Today was Goodwill and garbage day, and Saturday would be estate sale day. That was a laugh, thinking of this tiny house as any kind of an “estate.”

What wasn’t a laugh was that she was having second thoughts about the “estate” sale, which would be a “selling off everything I have left in the world” sale, with all kinds of people tramping through her house, making her ridiculous offers for what little furniture she had. And she would take the offers, because she couldn’t afford to ship anything back to Missouri, where her parents already had a houseful of furniture. But the truth was, it wasn’t the loss of her furniture that was bothering her. Instead, it was the idea of all those strangers tramping through the house. And even that wouldn’t have bothered her until this morning, when someone had been sitting in a car across the street and down the block, watching Emily and her.

She felt the eyes on her as soon as Marla Williams dropped her off, and for a second she’d almost asked Marla to stay. But then she’d decided she was being silly, that whoever was in the car probably wasn’t watching her at all.

So she’d said nothing.

And felt the eyes tracking her right up to the front door of her house.

She’d pretended to pull a weed and looked at the man in the car, and for an instant their eyes met and she felt a cold terror go through her. She’d turned away and gone into the house, and in about a minute he drove away, leaving her still shaken from that brief moment when their eyes had met.

Her first instinct had been to call the police, but even as the thought occurred to her, she dismissed it. What was she going to say? That there had been a man in a car who looked at her? She’d sound like a loony tune. Besides, she couldn’t even remember what the man looked like. Of course, he’d been in his car, but the weird thing was, even though she’d looked directly at his face, she couldn’t recall a single thing about it. Whether his cheeks were fat or sunken, or his lips thin and his nose thick, or vice versa.

In fact, she couldn’t even remember the color of the car, let alone the make, model, or year.

So much for calling the cops.

After that, she’d tried to dismiss the whole incident from her mind, but that had been no more possible than remembering what the guy had looked like, especially since that cold feeling of terror she’d felt when their eyes met was still with her.

What had he wanted?

And what if he came back?

What if he came to her estate sale and walked right into her house?

She told herself she was being silly, that absolutely nothing had happened or was going to happen. But no matter how long she argued with herself, she couldn’t shake the creepy feeling she had. Maybe she should just cancel the estate sale and let the open house happen on Saturday and Sunday with all her ratty furniture still there. Then she and Emily could simply pack whatever they wanted into her little Honda and drive back to “I told you so” land, and the heck with the furniture. Maybe the agent would be able to sell the house for enough to give her a new start, and she wasn’t going to get that much for the furniture anyway.

She picked up a worn, floppy-eared rabbit with a yellow ribbon around its neck and a yellow bow sewed to one of its ears. Emily hadn’t touched this rabbit in a year or more. She tossed it into the Goodwill box and picked up the next item for evaluation. A music box. She turned the key, trying to remember where it came from, but no music came out.

Broken.

Garbage.

Emily came down from her bedroom with an armful of books. “These, Mom.”

Ellen took the picture books from her daughter. “Oh, honey, this is too many books to take to Grammy's. Besides, these are too young for you — why don’t we give them to some little kids who don’t read as well as you do?”

“No,” Emily said. “I want them.” Then she picked the rabbit out of the Goodwill box and hugged it to her chest.

Ellen sighed. If Emily had never seen the rabbit, it would never have been an issue, but now it would be. “Emily, honey, everything that we take has to fit into our car. We’ll get new stuff in Missouri. Better stuff.”

“I need Mr. Spanky,” Emily said, hugging the rabbit.

“Honey—”

“ Daddy gave him to me.”

Ellen gently put the books into the Goodwill box and let Emily keep the rabbit. Since Danny had vanished, he had become a god in Emily’s eyes, and even though she was sure a time would come when Emily would see him for exactly what he was, that time was not yet at hand. For now, she was not going to interfere with her daughter’s idea about her perfect father.

“Okay, honey, if Daddy gave him to you, you can keep him, but the books have to go.”

Emily turned without a word and carried the rabbit back up to her room, climbing the stairs exactly the way she’d climbed the front steps earlier.

The memory of the man in the car — blessedly absent for the few moments she’d been talking to Emily — leaped back into the forefront of her mind, and she suddenly knew that it hadn’t just been herself the man in the car had been watching.

It had been Emily, too.

And with that realization, all thoughts of the estate sale vanished.

After the open house, they would come back just long enough to pack their bags, and then she and Emily would be gone.

Gone from Smithton, and gone from the memories of Danny and what might have been but hadn’t, and gone from this house. And gone from the man in the car.

I 'm going to die.

I’m not going to die, Lindsay silently insisted to herself. But even as she uttered the mute denial, the terrible, hypnotic chant rang in her head again.

I’m going to die… I’m going to die…

Lindsay had lost all track of time; she no longer had any idea how long she’d been held in the dank confines of her prison or in the strange child’s room, let alone whether it was day or night.

All she knew was that the man who had taken her from her home was crazy.