Surely he didn’t leave. It’s a miracle no one has spotted Marland or her at the abandoned house, especially with Steve Butler’s stupid patrol working the streets. She should remind him about the patrol. He might get caught if he leaves without being careful.

Now, at the bottom of the steps, she hears a harsh rattling noise, but in the darkness she can’t see anything. She flashes the light along the room.

Marland lies on the carpet, five knife wounds in his chest, his life bubbling out of him as she watches. The bloodied knife lies on the floor. Marland raises a hand, pleading for life, and then the hand drops.

Julia thinks: This just happened. The killer is still in the house.

Terror washes over her like a wave. She screams, twice, shattering the quiet of the night. She drops her phone, its screen giving the death room an eerie, faint glow. She stumbles out the open door. She can’t breathe. She can’t see, and then she realizes she dropped the phone in her terror and shock and she can’t go back for it. She can’t go back in that house. The sky lit by moonlight, she can see well enough to flee. She runs off the deck, stumbling, crashing down to the lawn and hurtling herself into the darkness of the greenbelt, which feels like a safer darkness than the house.

She runs, blindly, back into the greenbelt. But under the canopy of the trees, she can’t see the trail. She can’t see anything. Because the killer still has to be there. How long was she gone? Five minutes? An eternity? Then she hears it.

Voices. “Hey! Hey! Come back here! Stop! Citizen watch!”

Another voice: “Call the police!”

They know she was there. They saw me. Her terror is now like a thing clawing out of her chest.

Julia stumbles into her house, trying not to cry, a strange choked noise coming from her. Grant’s in the kitchen. She nearly falls to the floor.

Then through the haze of her panic, she remembers. Her phone. The police are coming and her phone is there. And the patrolling dads are there, and the police are coming, and it’s too late.

She sobs. Grant closes his arms around her, whispering, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

Where is Mom?

She’s come into the house off the back patio. They’re in the breakfast nook next to the kitchen and she gets to her feet, Grant holding her, now she’s screaming for her mother. Where is she? And then she sees the clear knife rack, with its steel black blades in an orderly row, and the biggest one, with a Japanese name she can’t remember, is missing.

52

From Iris Pollitt’s “From Russia with Love” Adoption Journal

2002

It’s showtime.