The door opened. There were footsteps as someone entered. It sounded like it was one person who paused by the door, like they were listening back, which she did not like at all. The person walked through the living room, down the uncarpeted hallway, and then stopped somewhere beyond the passage into the kitchen. There was a pause that was hatefully long, then the footsteps moved back toward the steps, creaking up them.
Stevie swallowed, checked to make sure she was still breathing, examined Nate for signs of life, and then tilted her head toward the kitchen door. She got up, moving first to her knees, then up to her feet, tiptoeing over to it. It had a deadbolt, plus a twisty thing above the knob. She turned both of these gingerly. That went well, but as she pulled the door open, the door made a strange rattling noise. The footsteps overhead stopped moving.
There was no time to be precious now, no time to pretend they weren’t there. She grabbed for Nate and yanked him through the door, only barely concealing the sound of their leaving. Outside, night had fallen, and fireflies twinkled around the warm garden behind the house. If they ran straight out, whoever it was would be able to see them from the windows. She gestured for Nate to follow her, creeping close to the house. They went around to the front, which faced the trees and the driveway.
“Go!” she whispered to him.
The two of them tore off, running as fast and as quietly as they could down the gravel driveway. The moon was unfortunately high and bright and there were fireworks going off overhead, so there was no cover as they hurried away, but they were soon through the opening in the trees and down into the wooded part of the drive, away from the view of the house. Once they reached where it met the street, she turned back.
“Wait,” she said, catching his arm. “Wait, wait, wait . . .”
Stevie turned around and was taking a few steps back up the drive toward the house.
“Stevie.”
“Look,” she said. She remained there until he came up beside her to see what she was indicating.
“What?” he hissed. “There’s nothing.”
“Right. There’s nothing. There’s no car.”
Nate had nothing to say for a moment.
“What does that mean?” he finally replied.
“It means someone came here on foot.”
“But what does that mean?” he said again.
“Something,” she said. “Probably bad. Come on.”
They hurried back down the lane. Nate went ahead a bit and ducked into the trees. He emerged a moment later and stood there until Stevie reached him.
“The bikes are gone,” he said simply. “Must be the wrong spot, but . . . we put them by this sign right here. . . .”
On some level, once she had noticed there was no car in the driveway, Stevie had expected this. When things go bad, they tend to go bad all over.
“Come on,” she said, pulling him into the trees. “We’re going to walk back, but we’re going to stay off the road. We’ll go around the lake.”
She pulled out her phone as they walked and thumbed open a map. It was slow to load. The signal was poor. It finally opened the map, but it was of no use.
“It thinks we’re in the middle of the lake,” she said, shoving the phone in her pocket. “We’ll have to get to the lake somehow and follow it around. It’s got to be this way.”
“So we’re going to wander around the murder forest in the dark when there’s someone at the house we broke into.”
“Unless you have another plan,” she said.
“Just making sure I was up to speed.”
She reached for her keys. One of her keychains was a small pill container. She unscrewed this as they walked and shook out the tiny pill it held. She always had one Ativan on her, in case of a panic attack. Being lost in the murder woods was a pretty good occasion to take it. At home, it would make her sleepy. Here, in the woods, it would keep her under control in case her brain decided to spin out. She swallowed it dry, which wasn’t too hard as it was a small pill. She was putting the keys back in her bag when she noticed a small glint of light behind them. In one movement, she pushed Nate behind a tree. He nodded, indicating that he wasn’t going to speak.
A crunch of a step. Crunch, crunch.
Nothing. The person stopped moving.
There were two choices here. One, they could accept that whoever it was who had been at the house had followed them into the woods for completely sensible reasons. They had come to the house to do something, suspected someone was inside, looked around, seen two figures going into the woods, and followed. So they could simply step out from behind the tree and see whoever it was and fess up.
But this person had come with no car and had taken their bikes. This left option two.
“We need to run,” she whispered in his ear.
They ran straight out onto the cedar-chip path that rimmed the lake. This was good in terms of informing them of where they were, and bad in terms of being seen. But at this point, that didn’t really matter anymore. They could run faster on the path and they would know where they were going. She could hear the person following them and glanced behind once to try to catch a glimpse, but the person was out of sight. Stevie ran like she did in dreams—furiously, almost flying through the dark. Nate was just in front of her, ripping along.
She felt the bullet go past before she heard it, which was odd. It was this little whizzing thing, like a dragonfly. It landed in a tree nearby, sending out a spray of splinters.
“Holy shit,” Nate yelled, spinning around. “Shit.”
They both instinctively left the path, cutting between the trees, dodging and weaving in the dark. The ground was a tangle of roots and pits, giving way in unexpected places. Stevie was dimly aware of the branches that slapped and tore at her skin, of the way her ankles twisted from under her as she hit a snag or a hole. There was no telling where they were now—the woods had consumed them. Maybe they were heading toward camp; maybe they were running in circles. Trees all look the same in the dark. Up ahead, though, there was a peephole of a clearing through which she could see the fireworks crackling in the sky in happy red, white, and blue. She used the sparks as a guide point, making her way toward them, ducking behind the trees. From the tension in her legs and knees she could tell they were moving higher, which at least indicated a different, new direction.
Whizz. Another object cracked nearby; Stevie felt its explosive force. She could tell Nate was yelling and swearing, but she couldn’t hear him anymore, not over the blood in her ears and the crescendo of fireworks. The ground got rockier, easier to move on . . .
And then, the tree cover was gone. The forest opened up and the sky was all theirs. She realized that the opening she had been using to guide them was, in fact, Point 23. She backed off and tried to continue on through the wooded area, but the ground was impenetrable from here on out, cascading down in a perilous slope. She’d lost track of where their pursuer was as well.
“We have to,” Nate said, breathless, pulling at her arm.
“What?”
“We’re cornered. Jump out when you go. As far as you can. Feet together.”
She could see the lake below, silent and dark, like a black mirror, reflecting the moon and the fireworks. She had been in bad positions before—down in tunnels at Ellingham, trapped in the snow. This was different. This required action—a calculated leap into the unknown. She was too terrified to be merely afraid.