А Финн - The Woman in the Window

“Please be very careful.”

“I will.” He starts to stand.

“What are you going to say?”

He sits again, sighs wetly. “I guess—I’ll say that . . . you know. That you have evidence.” He nods. “I’ll tell the truth. I told you what happened, and you said we need to go to the police.” His voice quavers. “Before you do.” Rubbing his eyes. “What do you think will happen to them?”

I pause, pick my way through a response. “It’s . . . I think—the police will understand that your parents were being harassed, that she—that Katie was in effect stalking you. And was probably in violation of what was agreed when you were adopted.” He nods slowly. “And,” I add, “they’ll take into account that it happened during an argument.”

He chews his lip.

“It won’t be easy.”

His eyes drop. “No,” he breathes. Then he looks at me with such force that I shift where I sit. “Thank you.”

“Well, I . . .”

“Really.” He swallows. “Thank you.”

I nod. “You have your phone, right?”

He taps his coat pocket. “Yeah.”

“Call me if—just let me know that everything’s okay.”

“Okay.” He stands again; I stand with him. He turns toward the door.

“Ethan—”

He pivots.

“I need to know: your father.”

He watches me.

“Does he—did he come to my house at night?”

He frowns. “Yeah. Last night. I thought—”

“No, I mean last week.”

Ethan says nothing.

“Because I was told that I imagined something happening in your house, and now I know that I didn’t. And I was told that I had drawn a picture that I hadn’t drawn. And I want—I need to know who took that photograph of me. Because”—I hear my voice tremble—“I really don’t want it to have been me.”

A hush.

“I don’t know,” says Ethan. “How would he have gotten in?”

That I can’t answer.

We walk to the door together. As he reaches for the knob, I catch him in my arms, bring him close, hold him tight.

“Please be safe,” I whisper.

We stand there for a moment as rain spits on the windows and wind hisses outside.

He steps away from me, smiles sadly. Then he leaves.

94

I part the blinds, watch him climb his front steps, jab the key into the lock. He opens the door; when it closes, he’s disappeared.

Was I right to let him go? Should we have warned Little first? Should we have summoned Alistair and Jane to my house?

Too late.

I gaze across the park, at the empty windows, the vacant rooms. Somewhere in the depths of that place, he’s talking to his parents, taking a claw hammer to their world. I feel as I did every day of Olivia’s life: Please be safe.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my time working with children, if I could whittle those years down to a single revelation, it’s this: They are extraordinarily resilient. They can withstand neglect; they can survive abuse; they can endure, even thrive, where adults would collapse like umbrellas. My heart beats for Ethan. He’ll need that resilience. He must endure.

And what a story—what an evil story. I shiver as I return to the living room, switch off the lamp. That poor woman. That poor child.

And Jane . Not Alistair, but Jane .

A tear runs down my cheek. I touch my finger to it and it gloms onto the skin; I look at it, curious. Then I wipe my hand on my robe.

My eyelids sag. I walk up to my bedroom, to worry, to wait.

I stand at the window, scanning the house across the park. No signs of life.

I chew a thumbnail until it leaks blood.

I pace the room, walk circuits around the carpet.

I glance at my phone. Half an hour has crept by.

I need a distraction. I need to calm my nerves. Something familiar. Something soothing.

Shadow of a Doubt . Screenplay by Thornton Wilder, and Hitch’s personal favorite among his own films: a naive young woman learns that her hero isn’t who he pretends to be. “We just sort of go along and nothing happens,” she complains. “We’re in a terrible rut. We eat and sleep and that’s about all. We don’t even have any real conversations.” Until her Uncle Charlie pays a visit.

She remains oblivious a bit too long for my liking, frankly.

I watch it on my laptop, sucking at my wounded thumb. The cat wanders in after a few minutes, bounds into bed with me. I press his paw; he hisses.

As the story coils tighter, so too does something within me, some unease I can’t name. I wonder what’s happening across the park.

My phone buzzes, crawling across the pillow next to me. I seize it.

Going 2 police

11:33 p.m. I drifted off.

I step from bed and snap the curtains to one side. Rain batters my windows, sharp as artillery fire, turning them to puddles.

Across the park, through the smear of the storm, the house is dark.

“There’s so much you don’t know, so much.”

Behind me, the film is still playing.

“You live in a dream,” sneers Uncle Charlie. “You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you’d find swine? Use your wits. Learn something.”

I slope toward the bathroom, in the length of light falling through the window. Something to help me get back to sleep—melatonin, I think. I’ll need it tonight.

I swallow a pill. On-screen, the body falls, and the train shrieks, and the credits roll.

“Guess who.”

This time I can’t dismiss him, because I’m asleep, though aware of it. A lucid dream.

Still, I try. “Leave me alone, Ed.”

“Come on. Talk to me.”

“No.”

I don’t see him, don’t see anything. Wait—there’s a trace of him, just a shadow.

“I think we need to talk.”

“No. Go away.”

Darkness. Silence.

“Something’s wrong.”

“No.” But he’s right—something is wrong. That stirring in my gut.

“Man, that Alistair guy turned out to be a freak of the week, didn’t he?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I almost forgot. Livvy has a question for you.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Just one.” A flash of teeth; a curving grin. “A simple question.”

“No.”

“Go on, pumpkin. Ask Mommy.”

“I said—”

But already her mouth is at my ear, piping her hot little words into my head, her voice that full-throated rasp she uses when she’s sharing a secret.

“How’s Punch’s paw?” she asks.

I’m awake, with instant clarity, as though I’ve been doused with water. My eyes spring wide. A spine of light runs across the ceiling above.

I roll from bed and pad to the curtains, throw them back. The room fades to gray around me; through the windows, through the rain, I see the Russells’ house shouldering an unholy sky. A jagged seam of lightning up above. A deep toll of thunder.

I return to bed. Punch whines quietly as I settle in.

How’s Punch’s paw?

That was it—the knot in my stomach.

When Ethan visited the day before yesterday, when he found the cat draped along the back of the sofa, Punch slid to the floor and wriggled underneath. I squint my eyes, replay the scene from every angle. No: Ethan didn’t see—couldn’t have seen—his lame leg.

Or could he? Feeling for Punch now, closing my fingers on his tail; he rustles against me. I check the time on the phone: 1:10 a.m.

The digital light spangles in my eyes. I squeeze them shut, then peer at the ceiling.

“How did he know about your paw?” I ask the cat in the dark.

“Because I visit you at night,” says Ethan.

Monday, November 15