Kevin O'Brien - Disturbed

Molly tiptoed down the hallway and slowly opened Erin’s door. She felt a cool breeze against her hands and face. The window was open. The lacy white curtain billowed. The wind slammed the door shut, it’s that simple, she told herself. Still, she checked Erin’s closet before she went to the window and shut it with one hand. She wasn’t ready to let go of the crowbar, not just yet.

Molly looked in the guest room and Chris’s bedroom — the closets, too. She poked her head in the kids’ bathroom, and then scurried down the hallway to the master bedroom. It was empty — as was the big walk-in closet and master bath. Molly even peeked behind the closed shower curtain. Nothing.

Jeff had let her redecorate their quarters. But even with the bedroom’s new Mission-style furniture, a recent paint job (sea-foam green), new carpeting, and photos of her and Jeff prominently displayed — it still seemed like Angela’s domain. Angela had been with Jeff in that bedroom first.

Molly still held on to the crowbar, but it was down at her side. She paused at the doorway to the third floor. Maybe she was being silly, but it was worth checking up there — just to put her mind at rest. She climbed up the stairs.

The third floor was the only place in the house Molly felt was totally hers. With her own savings, she took Angela’s unfinished attic and transformed it into an art studio. She’d even had a bathroom installed up there. There was also a very comfortable chaise longue on which life-study models could pose — and Molly could nap.

She glanced inside the bathroom: nothing. Her one closet was so narrow and crammed with easel frames, canvas, and paint supplies, if someone could hide in there, he’d need to be half her size and a contortionist. She was alone up here.

With a sigh, she looked at the painting-in-progress on her easel in front of the dormer window. It showed a shapely, gorgeous, tawny-haired woman in a torn bodice — which still needed some detail painted in. Standing proudly, she looked skyward as a shirtless hunk knelt behind her with his brawny arms wrapped around her trim waist. In the background, a full moon illuminated a castle by the sea. This would be the cover to Desiree’s Destiny , the latest in a series of romance novels. Molly had already gotten the advance money for it: $1,750, minus her agent’s commission. She would get the same amount once she delivered the finished painting. She’d created all seven of the Desiree covers, so far. Both Desiree’s resemblance to Angelina Jolie and the always-shirtless Lord Somerton’s similarity to Jude Law were no mistake.

It wasn’t exactly what Molly had intended to do after six years in art school, but book covers, magazine illustrations, and ads had become her bread and butter. Occasionally, she sold one of her more serious works. She was proud of those paintings, mostly still-life studies or moody portraits that seemed to tell a story. Her Woman Playing Solitaire (at a dinette table with a melancholy look on her face and a cigarette in one hand), went for $2,600 at the Lyman-Eyer Gallery in Provincetown. But sales like that were few and far between.

Before marrying Jeff, she’d barely eked out a living as an artist, so Molly had taken on an assortment of parttime and temp jobs: everything from office worker to waitress to hotel desk clerk. She’d figured she was paying her dues. Molly felt a bit guilty for not needing to work those kinds of jobs anymore. She had quite a nice setup here. She wondered if Angela and her friends said as much behind her back.

She was glad for this space on the third floor, where Angela had no claim. The studio was Molly’s escape, a haven for old family knickknacks she couldn’t part with, photo albums, and her collection of elephants.

When she was a kid, she’d heard elephants brought good luck, so Molly started collecting elephant figurines — in marble, jade, porcelain, mahogany, plastic, you name it. She’d given most of them to Goodwill two years ago, but kept about forty figurines — all of them now neatly arranged on a bookcase along one wall of her studio. No photos of her family were displayed. It just didn’t seem right. Her dad and her brother were dead, and she and her mother weren’t on the best of terms.

Considering how her brother had died, Molly wondered if those elephants were really so lucky. A few of the elephants on that bookshelf had originally belonged to him. He’d collected them, too.

Nearly every time Molly looked through her family albums, she ended up crying. So it seemed pretty masochistic to frame those pictures and put them on display. Jeff and his children were her family now.

Though she sometimes felt like a houseguest they merely tolerated, Molly still really cared for Jeff’s kids. It was why she waited at the bus stop with Erin this morning. And it was why she worried about Chris getting through his school day when Ray Corson had just been murdered last night. It was why she tried to be cordial — albeit distantly cordial — to Jeff’s ex. After all, she was their mother.

At the same time, she dreaded this Neighborhood Watch potluck with Angela and all her pals. Molly glanced at her wristwatch. It was less than an hour from now.

Downstairs, the phone rang, and it startled her. Molly hurried down to the second floor and rushed into her bedroom. She snatched up the cordless from the nightstand. “Yes, hello?” she answered, a bit out of breath. She set the crowbar down on the bed.

“Molly?” the woman whispered. It was the same voice from before. What she murmured next still sounded like gibberish: “It’s above the heart now. . ”

“I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Molly cut in. “Could you talk louder, please? Who is this?”

“I said. .” She still spoke in a whisper, but the words were very clear this time. “It’s about to start now.”

“I don’t understand. What’s about to start? Who—”

Molly heard a click on the other end of the line — and then nothing.

It was stupid of her to think he might be grieving, too.

Chris Dennehy seemed to go about his morning as if it were a normal day. Walking through the corridors between classes, he didn’t appear disturbed or troubled — only slightly aloof toward all his fellow students, who couldn’t stop staring at him. He didn’t make eye contact with anyone.

He certainly hadn’t seemed to notice her.

She felt invisible in the crowded second-floor hallway of James Monroe High School. Now and then, someone bumped into her and kept walking as if she weren’t even there.

She was just like the others, watching Chris, waiting for him to snap or start crying — or show some kind of emotion, for God’s sake. His former guidance counselor had just been murdered last night. They’d been very close at one time, and everyone knew it.

“Are you — like — totally freaked out, man?” she’d overheard a tall, lanky basketball player ask him in the stairwell an hour before. She’d strained to hear Chris’s answer. But there were too many other students stomping up and down the stairs, and too much noise. Chris had shrugged, muttered something to his classmate, and then he’d continued up the steps. He’d seemed pretty nonchalant about it.

Now he walked down the corridor by himself, close to the lockers on the wall. Even though his brown hair was a mess, and his blue-striped shirt needed ironing, he still looked handsome. He was on his way from Ms. Kinsella’s trigonometry class to third-period study hall.

She knew his class schedule. She knew he occasionally rode his bike to school — though most of the time, he carpooled with those bitches from his cul-de-sac, Courtney Hahn and Madison Garvey. He had swim practice from 3:30 until 5:30, and usually caught a ride home from a teammate or took a bus.