The House Behind My Dreams

I clapped both hands over my mouth and bit into my fingers, desperate to keep a scream from escaping. My feet slid backward. I fell off the table and struck the concrete, shoulder hitting the wall. The pain barely registered.

Arthur wasn’t some frightened landlord. He wasn’t an old innocent man trying to stay out of my husband’s way.

He was the one who had shut me in.

I scrambled away on my palms and knees, sucking at the air as my chest bucked. My thoughts collided, none of them settling. The papers in the lockbox had made Mark look like a killer. The journals had painted him as the stalker. So why had Arthur attacked him?

Unless the two of them had been in this together. Unless Arthur was only clearing away the last loose end.

I stared at the floor beside me. When I’d swept everything off the table, the little leather journal had landed open near my knee, its cover curled back.

I picked it up carefully. Across the first page, neat cursive filled the paper beneath a date from four years ago. He found me today.

My thumb rested on the writing as I turned the page. Then I paused.

Dark blue ink marked the pad of my thumb.

I looked from my skin to the sentence. The letters beneath my thumb had smeared into a wet blur, leaving a streak across the paper.

Gel ink dried quickly. It couldn’t still be fresh after four years.

This journal hadn’t been written years ago. It had been written today.

I grabbed the life insurance paper from the floor and flipped it over. On the front, it looked official enough to convince anyone. But at the lower corner of the reverse, almost invisible gray lettering showed through.

A printing watermark. A code for a nearby library, with yesterday’s date beside it.

My breath caught. The basement seemed to tip beneath me.

The corkboard. The pictures of someone watching. The legal papers. The journals supposedly left by my dead mother. The whole display had been assembled to make Mark look like a monster.

It was a constructed scene, a roomful of evidence arranged to turn me against my husband. But I couldn’t tell who had put it together, or why.

I reached into my hoodie pocket and found the curled slip of paper I’d picked up in the empty bedroom upstairs. I pulled out the luggage tag and read the black type again.

DEN to CVG. The date printed along its edge was today.

Arthur had said Mark came here six months ago to gather my mother’s belongings. He’d said Mark alone had a key. He’d said Mark was the person moving around above me.

But the tag hadn’t been dropped half a year earlier. Mark had been here today.

I pictured that upstairs bedroom again: the raised window, the lace curtains swelling in the air, the scuffed marks on the angled porch roof. I remembered Mark’s message from earlier. Boarding my flight from Denver now.

He hadn’t simply arrived in a rental car and come to the house. He’d gotten here before me. He’d entered, searching for something, and found this staged basement.

Then he must have heard Arthur coming up the stairs.

Mark had climbed out through the bedroom window to get away. He’d reached his car, still trying to catch his breath, and spotted me walking toward Arthur’s porch in my green delivery vest.

He’d FaceTimed me at once.

I could see the call again in my mind. I’m right outside, Mark had said. His smile disappeared as he looked at me. Come out to the car, Chloe. Leave the old man alone.

There had been no coldness in his voice. I’d mistaken fear for something else—fear so intense it seemed to close around me.

He hadn’t been ordering me to obey him. He’d been pleading with me to get away from the man at the door.

And I had ended the call.

A blunt metallic sound struck from above. The first deadbolt slid free.

A second followed. Then a third.

The kitchen door groaned open, and a narrow blade of yellow light spilled down the steep stairs.

Arthur was coming down.

His boots thudded along the wooden steps in a slow, measured rhythm. After each step came the rough drag of something heavy. Thud. Scrape. Thud. Scrape.

I stood rigid beside the flimsy folding table, my back against the cold, damp wall. Above me, the fluorescent bulb swayed, making the shadows jerk across the basement.

My hand trembled. The thumb streaked with blue ink seemed to burn against my skin. I shoved it deep into my hoodie pocket, hiding the smear and what it had shown me.

Arthur appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He wasn’t aiming the shotgun at me. He held it by the barrel in his left hand, like a cane.

In his right hand, he gripped my husband’s jacket collar and dragged Mark into the basement, unconscious.