“Where the hell are you guys?” this new voice called out from the hall. This man’s voice, now that he was closer, sounded familiar to Olive, but she couldn’t place whom it belonged to.

“Third floor,” Dicky called back from up above. “But we’re coming down.”

Olive was standing against the wall beside the door, listening, trying to slow her racing heart. The lounge was dark, the old tattered shades over the arched windows drawn. The room had a stinky, acrid smell, like burned hair. She heard footsteps coming down the curved wooden steps from the third floor, where Dicky lived. It sounded like hoofbeats during a stampede. It was impossible to tell how many people he had with him: Two? Twenty?

Then they were coming her way.

Footsteps and voices, laughter.

Crap. They were coming to the lounge! Of course they were.

She looked around, frantic. There was nowhere to run, no back door or escape hatch. No closet. Only a bunch of broken chairs. Windows with tattered curtains. The fireplace. Could she fit inside it, climb her way up and out the chimney like Santa Claus? Not likely.

She hurried over to the bar, got behind it, and ducked down.

Please don’t let them come behind the bar, she thought. She remembered the tequila and the glasses, prayed no one wanted a drink. She tried to make her body as small as she could, concentrated on disappearing into the wood of the bar, being invisible. She was good at holding still, at not making a sound. She’d honed her skills during years of hunting with Daddy. Only now she felt like the hunted rather than the hunter.

They gathered in the hall, a jumble of voices and footsteps, calling out greetings to each other: “Hullo there,” “Long time no see.” Then they tumbled into the lounge, and it did sound more like tumbling than walking, like a river breaching its banks, spilling over.

Olive listened hard, tried to pick out the distinct voices, to count the number of people.

They made small talk, discussing the weather, work, baseball. Some of them lit cigarettes—Olive could smell the smoke. Every now and then, someone new joined them and the greetings would begin again. They all discussed whether someone named Carol was coming, and some of them seemed very distressed by the possibility that she might not be.

“We all need to be here,” Dicky said, clearly agitated. “It won’t work if we’re not all here. I thought I made that clear.”

The talk moved back to boring things—someone told a story about seeing someone named Bud in the supermarket and how good he looked considering he was now missing half his liver; someone else talked about how to make the lightest angel food cake you’ve ever tasted.