Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra

Author:Tracy Sierra [Sierra, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

20

The vehicle wasn’t a police car but a big white truck with a light on the dash, washing the snow with alternating color until the sergeant flicked it to darkness. The road wasn’t plowed, and the tires kicked snow up high on the windows as they drove. Almost immediately they were at her driveway, creeping slowly between the reflective plow markers poking through the drifts until they stopped near the garage.

Again the sergeant swept her up like a man about to take his bride across the threshold. She was dizzied as he carried her to the front door, the boyish policeman following along behind them. Inside were two more policemen waiting in the mudroom.

So many eyes.

“This way,” said one of the new policemen, and she was flown through the house. When they passed the steep kitchen stairs, she felt the sergeant hesitate, step wide to avoid a spot at the base of the stairs the way visitors walked around the places bodies must have rotted under the graveyard dirt.

“You need any help, Sarge?”

“Nah, she doesn’t weigh a thing.”

Every light in the house was on, the living room ablaze as they walked through it. But there was only the little desk lamp in the office. Her husband liked to work in the semidarkness, said it made the images on the monitor clearer. Her eye rolled to the shadows at the edges of the room, searching for any movement in its corners. Her vision was so flattened, so limited, that every bit of darkness beyond the lamp’s small beam vibrated, alive and menacing.

“See? See here? Nothing.”

One of the men had a flashlight, was pushing on different wall panels, rough and impatient.

“Oh-kay, ma’am.”

The sergeant set her down next to the wall, and her knees went soft, slowly folding until she sat on the floor. The sergeant nodded to an officer who was holding up his phone. Its light was so bright in her one eye that she cringed.

“You ready there, man? Yeah? All right, ma’am, why don’t you show us where you put those kids. Can you show us that?”

She moved awkwardly to position herself in front of the panel. It was difficult to find the just-right spot with her fingers still numb, with her hurt hand bandaged. She shook out her good hand, tried again. Ran fingertips around the edge until she felt the telltale indentation in the wood. Pushed.

The door to the hidden place swung inward. Officers jostled behind her, one saying quietly, “What do you know!”

She stuck her head into the black nothingness.

“Loves? It’s all right, come out, the police are here, come on—”

Before she could finish speaking, she was shoved aside, a yelp of pain and surprise strangling in her throat. The sergeant and the policeman with the lit-up phone were all at once between her and the panel, and she fell backward, felt her calf crushed under the pressure of one of their legs as they went to hands and knees to look through the secret door. She used her forearms to drag her body away from their tangle of booted feet and heavy limbs.

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