Kathleen O'Brien - The Ranch She Left Behind

Therefore, Penny kept a can of wasp spray beside her. Effective from a safe distance, nonlethal, and carrying the added benefit of surprise. Penny had found the idea almost funny and had bought it more for Ruth’s peace of mind than her own.

But now, as she saw the shadowy figure appear in her doorway, she sent a fervent thank-you to her practical aunt, who apparently was going to save her one more time—even from the grave.

Ben Hackney, their next door neighbor and a retired policeman, had warned them that, if they ever had to use the can, they shouldn’t holler out a warning, but should spray first and ask questions later. So Penny inhaled quickly, put her finger on the trigger, aimed and shot.

A man’s voice cried out. “What the fu—?”

She could see the figure a little better now—a man, definitely, dressed in black, his face covered. Her breath hitched. Covered! His eyes, too? If his eyes were covered, would the wasp spray have any effect?

But then the man’s hands shot to his face. A guttural growl burst out of him, a sound of both pain and rage. With every fraction of a second, the growl grew louder.

“Goddamn it—”

The voice was deep, middle-aged, furious. She didn’t recognize it.

Absurdly, even as she shot the spray again, she felt a shimmer of relief. What if it had been someone she knew? Someone like...

It could have been poor Ben. The man was eighty and had spent a quarter of a century nursing an unrequited love for Aunt Ruth. He’d been good to Penny, too, through the years.

Thank God she hadn’t attacked some well-meaning friend like that.

But the relief was brief. The calculations flashed through her mind in a fraction of a second, and then she was left with one awful truth—this was a real intruder. She was left with a stranger, who had, without question, come to harm her.

And a can of wasp spray that wasn’t bottomless.

For one horrible second, the man lurched forward, and Penny backed up instinctively, though she had nowhere to go. Her spine hit the headboard with an electric bang that exploded every nerve ending in her brain. Somehow, she kept her finger on the trigger and held her numb arm steady enough to keep the spray aimed toward his face.

“You bitch!” He dropped to his knees, shaking his head violently. With a cold determination she hadn’t known she possessed, she lowered her aim and found him where he had hit the floor.

The spray connected again. Crying out, he roiled backward, a crablike monster, and the sight of his confusion gave her courage. She stood. She was about to follow him, still spraying, when she realized he was trying to reach the stairs.

“No! Wait!” she called out, though warning him made no sense. As long as he was leaving, what did she care what happened to him? But...the staircase!

An irrational panic seized her, freezing all logical thought. He might be a thief, or a rapist, or a murderer. And yet, she couldn’t let him just fall backward, helplessly, down that steep, uncarpeted walnut spiral of stairs.

A picture of her mother’s body flashed into her mind. The green eyes staring blindly at the ceiling. The black hair glistening as a red pool spread on the floor around her...

“No!” Penny cried out again, louder. She dropped the wasp spray onto the bed and moved toward the door. “No...the stairs!”

But either the intruder didn’t hear her or he couldn’t think straight over the pain. He kept scrambling backward, kept bumping and lurching, his shadowy body hurtling toward the point of no return.

And then, just as she reached the hall, he fell.

“No!” The word was a whisper that came out on an exhale of horror. “No...no...”

The sound of his body hitting the steps, one after another, cracked like gunfire. It ricocheted through the house, through the empty rooms and the high ceilings, and, it seemed, through every muscle in Penny’s body.

Oh, God. Frozen, she peered over the banister. She wondered if she was going to be sick. If his body lay there, arms and legs at crazed angles like an abandoned rag doll...

If his head rested hideously on a red satin pillow of blood...

She squeezed the wooden rail, squinting. But it was too dark to be sure of anything. He could have been a pile of black laundry at the foot of the stairs. An inanimate object.

No, no, no... Her mind was like one of her father’s unbroken horses, running away faster than she could follow. “Please, not again.”

But then, as if in answer to a prayer, the shadows seemed to shift, then jerk, then fall still again. Another groan.

Not dead, then. Not dead. As relief swept through her, she heard the jagged gasps of her own lungs, as if she’d been unable to breathe until she was sure he lived.

He lived.

The crumpled shadow shifted. The man stood, moving oddly, but moving. Then he ran to the front door, dragging one leg behind him, and, in a sudden rectangle of moonlight, disappeared into the night.

The minute she couldn’t see him anymore, she sank to her knees, right there on the upper landing. It was a complete collapse, as if the batteries that had locked her legs into the upright position had been abruptly switched off.

As she went down, she grabbed for the phone on the marble table. It clattered to the floor. She couldn’t feel her fingers, but she found the lighted numbers somehow and punched them in.

9...1...1...

* * *

LATER, AS A PINK DAWN light began to seep into the edges of the black clouds, Penny started to shiver. She grabbed her upper arms with her hands and rubbed vigorously.

And only then did she finally realize why, as they interviewed her and took her statement, the police officers kept giving her such strange looks and asking whether she might like to finish the interview inside.

She’d said no because she couldn’t bear the thought. She couldn’t go in there. Not yet. Not until she stopped reliving the moment the man fell down the stairs. Even then, she wondered if she’d be able to enter by the front door. At Bell River, where her mother had died, Penny hadn’t entered by the front in seventeen years.

But these officers didn’t know any of that. All they knew was how inappropriately dressed she was for a cold June San Francisco dawn. She was wearing only a thin cotton T-shirt. Dingy, shapeless, with sparkly multicolored letters across the chest that read Keep Calm and Paint Something.

It was too big—she’d lost weight since Ruth’s death—so it hit her midthigh, thank goodness. The letters were peeling because she’d washed it so often. But it had been a gift from Ruth, and Penny had worn it almost every night since her aunt’s death.

The officer taking her statement was young. Though Penny was only twenty-seven, she felt aeons older than Officer McGregor. Even the name seemed too big for someone who looked more boy than man, not old enough to be out of high school.

He frowned as she rubbed her arms, and he made a small, worried sound. Then, with a jerky motion, he darted up the steps and into the town house. When he emerged seconds later, he held her running shoes, which she kept by the door, and one of Ruth’s sweaters, which had hung on the coat tree for years.

He extended them awkwardly. “I just thought, if you really don’t want to go inside...”

“Yes. Thank you.” Smiling, she took the shoes gratefully, and wobbled on first one foot, then the other, to tug them on without even unlacing them. His arm twitched, as if he wanted to help steady her, but that was one impulse he did resist.

He held out the sweater so that she could insert her arms, but even that made him blush.

“Thank you,” she said again, warmly enough, she hoped, to make him feel more at ease about whether his gesture had been too personal. “I guess I was numb at first, but the chill started to get to me. I feel much better now.”