The window lowered with a squeak and a tremble, but she got it down all the way. Her fingers throbbed from the effort. She rubbed her hands together, her stiff knuckles crackling like dry tinder.

And she noticed, in the glass, the reflection of someone standing behind her.

Lily spun, a gasp caught in her throat.

The room was empty. She was alone.

Her pulse raced, blood pounding in her skull. Had her mind, stimulated by hours of challenging reading each day, finally begun to falter in spite of her best efforts? The prospect of dementia frightened her far more than the idea of a stranger in her home.

She slipped out the gun again, held it in a shaky grip.

“Who’s there?” she said. Her voice was no longer as clear as she’d hoped, and held a discernible note of fear.

A floorboard creaked out in the hallway; a sound it might have made underneath someone’s weight.

An ordinary home invader would not have employed such stealth tactics. These lost kids, she knew, cared nothing for subtlety. They knocked down your door and stomped like the Gestapo through your home, overturning furniture and ransacking through your possessions without any fear of reprisal. That was what had also happened last summer to Cecil Taylor, the kind fellow who’d once lived across the street. He’d been sitting in his recliner watching Family Feud when two teenagers had broken in, pistol-whipped him, stolen jewelry and his TV and computer, drank the liquor in his cabinet, and urinated on his carpet. Cecil had been hospitalized for three weeks and moved to a nursing home afterward.

Whatever was happening here in her house was something different. It was either a wild flight of imagination—which she didn’t accept—or something else.

Lord, give me the strength, Lily prayed. Do not let my strength fail me now.

She tightened her hold on the gun. She crept forward. Entering the hallway, she swung to the left, where she thought the noise had come from.

The corridor was illuminated with light streaming from the bedroom behind her, and from the fixture burning above the nearby staircase. But the hallway was empty.

She released a deep sigh, lowered the gun.

She needed to take her old, tired tail to bed. She could spend all night wandering through the house, chasing shadows and phantom noises. She would call her granddaughter, chat for a few minutes (she wouldn’t tell the girl about any of this, of course), read a bit of Scripture, and let herself drift off to sleep. Tomorrow morning, she’d call Claudia and remind her to close the windows next time she visited, too, since her housekeeper’s oversight had launched this foolish misadventure.