Curled up on a bed that, sans one man and two cats, feels as vast as the Smoke Creek Desert, Rose blows out the candle and lies back. After rest and food, shower and family, she is far less shaky than she was when she broke into 87 Applegarth that morning. Nevertheless she remains exhausted, underweight, with gaps in her memory, and wanted by the police.

Smiling in the dark, Rose realizes she’s living in the fast lane now.

Smoke from the candle has scarcely cleared before she is asleep.

Then awake.

The clock on the bed stand reads two forty-seven. Since it is dark, Rose assumes it is A.M. Six hours of undrugged rest have banished the last—or so she hopes—cobwebs from her mind. Still, six hours is only six hours. Tired as she is, she wouldn’t have been surprised had she slept the clock around. Except she hasn’t. Something awakened her.

Rose lies quietly listening. Strange house, strange noises. One of the many wonderful things about having cats is that one can blame unsettling night noises on their nocturnal habits. Too bad Nancy stole them.

There is the faint clack of the overhead fan. Far away a jet flies, that or it is distant thunder. None of this wakened her. The human mind is a marvel. Even sleeping it can sort the familiar and unthreatening from the alien and threatening. Most of the time.

Swish.

Whisper.

Creak.

Cloth sliding along cardboard, Rose guesses; rubber-soled shoes on carpet, then weight on aging hardwood. Alien and threatening. A jolt of adrenaline brings her out of bed and to the bedroom door. Before she came upstairs, she’d checked all the locks, and laid a perilous trap of heaped pots and pans in the kitchen sink so any intruder larger than a mosquito would knock them down with a racket sufficient to wake the not-yet-dead.

Whoever or whatever this is did not come in via the broken kitchen window or the front or back door. Rose did not hear shattering glass or breaking deadbolts. Hoping the hinges will keep silent, she opens the bedroom door half an inch, and puts her ear to the crack.

Downstairs, the intruder is weaving through the maze of moving boxes. Not a small, light-footed individual—Rose has no trouble negotiating the boxes in the dark without brushing against them—but a careful, practiced individual, who breathes through a stuffed-up nose and, despite the probable bulk, does not bump into anything.

She could dial 911. Then the intruder will run away, and the police will arrive and arrest her. Call Mel? The courageous little creature would probably Uber over with a baseball bat. Not calling Mel. Not if her hair were on fire.