He glanced back to where he’d seen the muscular anomaly.

Gone.

Branford excused himself, met his associate for lunch, and saw no further sign of the man. The only thing he noticed after his second class was the arrival of another thunderstorm. His last class finished at five, but the rain did not. He spent the drive home wondering if the new drain in Caitlin’s room would prevent a repeat of the Paige debacle.

He’d given his Barbie a lamp, which she’d plugged into the jack under her bed. After a week of nonstop storms, groundwater snuck in where the wall met the floor. Paige took advantage of that opportunity.

Caitlin had neither lamp nor outlet, and her drugstore alarm clock ran on a double A battery.

You’re worrying about nothing. Worst-case scenario, you gas her, let her wait out the storm in the playroom.

Despite the urge to run across the field to the farmhouse, he parked in the Branford garage, went in the house, and loaded up the live feed on his computer. Caitlin shifted in the chair like she couldn’t get comfortable, a paperback open on the table. Her hair looked messy, but the floor looked dry.

Embower exhaled, sat back. Still, something was wrong. Not in the collection, but there in Branford’s house.

Smells fresh.

He switched his camera feed, checked the driveway and front door. Nothing unusual. He got up, walked the first floor. The dining room he never used felt colder than the rest of the house. He pulled back a curtain, found one of the windows open half an inch.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d opened that or any other window in the house.

He went back to his laptop, rewound the day’s footage, saw nothing at the front door, nothing at the driveway.

He went outside, walked the backyard. The dining room window wasn’t high off the ground, but Embower didn’t see any footprints or sign of forced entry.

You’re being paranoid. Remember the tornados in March? You opened the windows to depressurize the house.

He felt better, but not good enough. Something pink caught his eye where his land met the quarry’s fence. He walked over, picked a soggy plastic bag from the weeds. Inside, two more bags, both muddy, and wads of paper towels. He looked back at the stretch of grass from the fence to his back window and saw faint depressions in the grass every three feet. Someone had covered their shoes to avoid leaving discernible footprints.

“Shit,” he said, ran back inside.

He’d checked the feed from the Branford house, not the farmhouse. He scrolled through the second-story camera’s feed, stopped the time line at 1:45 PM, almost halfway into his second class. A big man in a rain jacket ran from behind the garage to the dining room windows, two bright pink plastic bags over his shoes.