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Shit.
Tears rose in her eyes as the baby’s cries became louder and more insistent. Was someone right this minute across the hall, lifting her daughter from her crib with the intention of taking her? She wouldn’t put that past Kiki, who had spent half the day and all evening blowing up Melissa’s phone.Where is Marc? What have you done to Marc? Why aren’t you on TV pleading for Marc to come home?
Drunk. Hysterical. Vicious. Lunatic. Bitch. Stealing Madeline from her crib would be just something she would do.
Her instincts overriding her fears, Melissa threw the TV remote on the bed and ran for the door. No one was taking her daughter without going through her.
She bolted across the hall into the nursery, where a night-light cast a warm glow. There was no Kiki, no masked assailant, just Madeline sitting up in her crib, wailing as she tried to gnaw on her tiny fist.
Melissa scooped her daughter up and held her close and tight. Madeline was warm and wet, uncomfortable and inconsolable. She wailed and wriggled in Melissa’s arms, wrenching herself one way and then the other. She’d been fussy for days now as a new tooth worked its way through her sore, swollen gum.
For a moment, Melissa forgot about anything else but her baby’s comfort. Madeline needed changing and some ointment on her gums. She would get her comfortable, calm her down, sit and rock her back to sleep.
Bang!
That fast, she went back to panic mode.
She needed to find her phone. Oh for the days when every house had landline phones in practically every room. She had one device to connect her to the outside world, and no idea where she’d left it.
“I’ll be back, sweetheart,” she whispered to the baby, kissing her cheek and setting her back in her crib.
She went to the door of the nursery and stood there for a moment, trying to listen as the baby wailed behind her. She stuck her head out into the hall and looked both ways, seeing nothing but darkness.
“Fuck this shit,” she muttered.
She went back into the nursery and snatched up the child-size baseball bat Marc had bought in anticipation of having a son. He had insisted on keeping it for Madeline, willing to settle for a tomboy until they could have another baby.
“As if,” Melissa muttered, creeping back out into the hall.
She found the light switch and flipped it on. If she was going to be murdered in her own home, she at least wanted to see her killer.
There was no one in the hall.
Had she left her phone in the kitchen after Will had gone? She had brought their wineglasses in and rinsed them out. Maybe she’d left the phone on the counter. Bat in hand, she walked toward the heart of the house.
“If you’re in here to kill me, I already called the cops!” she bluffed loudly.
She paused at the entrance to the dining room and listened for anyone scrambling to get out a door or climb out a window. She thought she heard a muffled sound, like something shuffling or thumping. Maybe out on the porch that wrapped around the entire house.
She flipped the dining room light on. Nothing. No one.
Bang!
She jumped at the sound, much closer now than it had been before.
Outside, the wind came up again.
Thump, thump. Bang!
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” she muttered as sudden relief washed through her.
She knew what that sound was. This had happened once before, back when they had first moved in.
The house, built in the nineties, was done in the Caribbean plantation style, with French doors and windows all around, each of them fitted with a set of shutters. Not the decorative fixed kind, but fully functioning shutters, able to be closed and locked in the event of a hurricane. It seemed a ridiculous expense to her, considering they were miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. Will argued that people there liked the authentic historical details. Touches like working shutters and the wrought iron holdbacks that kept them open set this development apart from the cookie-cutter tract homes of the same era in other parts of town.
When she and Marc had first moved in, one of the holdbacks (called shutter dogs for reasons she couldn’t fathom, like many things in the South) had worked itself loose in the brick wall, allowing the shutter to move with the wind, rattling and banging against the side of the house during a storm. Obviously, the same thing had happened again.
She went to the French doors and turned on the porch lights. There was no one lurking outside the door. The wind came up slightly again, and again she heard thethump, thump, thump.She unlocked the door and stuck her head out.
