Deni felt pretty helpless, too. “Well, I’m sure we can help. I’ll go get you some water, and we’ll find diapers, and we have extra candles. That’s a start.”
The baby started crying, and Amber put the two-year-old down and went to pick up the other one. She turned back to Deni and took a deep breath, pulling herself together. “You’re a godsend,” she said. “I’m sorry you caught me on a crying jag. But if you could do those things for me, I would be so grateful.”
“Consider them done. Come on, Beth.”
Amber walked them to the door, and thanked them again on their way out.
When the door closed behind them, Beth looked back. “That’s so sad. I want to cry, myself.”
“Yeah, it is. But who knows? Maybe she brought it on herself. She’s the one who married a loser.”
“He doesn’t look like a loser. He looks nice. Kind of like Craig.”
“Trust me. He’s nothing like Craig.”
“Well, I’m glad you offered to help her.”
Deni winced. “Yeah, I guess we’re committed. We might as well get it over with.”
twelve
There was no relief from the May sun. It beat down on them from above, and heat radiated up from the sidewalk as Deni followed Beth to her teacher’s house. Deni had taken Amber one of the buckets of water from home, then offered to go with Beth to find diapers. At least that would keep her from being available for any more manual labor her mother might have for her. Sure, they needed to make more trips to the lake, but her brothers could do it.
Beth chattered as they walked. “They seemed like such a cute couple. Amber’s husband was really good-looking. And it seemed like he was a good dad. Why would he do a thing like that?”
“Don’t tell anybody,” Deni said. “Amber didn’t tell us so we could blab it all over the neighborhood. We just caught her at a weak time.”
“That could be you, you know,” Beth said. “You could be just like her in three years, with a bunch of babies and a jerk of a husband who left you for his secretary.”
“I told you, Craig isn’t like that.”
“How do you know?”
Deni grunted. “Because he’s better than that, okay? I wouldn’t marry some crud who treated me like that.”
“Miss Amber probably didn’t, either. Or she didn’t know she did. So what do you think he’s doing now?”
Deni raked her sweat-dampened hair back behind her ears. “What do I think who’s doing?”
“Craig, your fiancé! Hello! Aren’t you listening to me?”
Deni rolled her eyes. “Oh, Craig. I don’t know, Beth. What do you think he’s doing?”
“Depends on whether his power is out or not. Do you think it is?”
“I don’t know. If it isn’t, he’s probably on his way here to get me right now.” She sighed at the thought. What a relief it would be to see him driving up in his LaCrosse.
“That would be cool. But if other cities had power, wouldn’t we be seeing cars here already?”
“Not necessarily.” But even as she said the words, she knew Beth was right. The I-20 corridor would have traffic if any vehicles were moving from east to west, or west to east. Though the interstate was several miles away, she knew that the neighbors who’d been biking around town would have brought word back as soon as it happened. So far, there’d been nothing.
Beth pointed out her teacher’s house as they drew near.
“Deni Branning! Is that you?”
Deni turned and caught her breath. Mark Green, a friend from high school, was riding up on his ten-speed. She grinned. The track star who was president of the FCA had clearly grown up. “Hey, Mark! Great to see you!”
He stopped beside her, balancing with a foot on the curb. He reached over to hug her, and she felt his stubble against her face. She remembered when it was peach fuzz.
“I didn’t know you were back,” he said.
“Just for a few days. How about this power outage?”
He laughed. “Crazy, huh? Unbelievable. It’s gonna be one for the history books.”
She couldn’t help staring. “You look great.” He really did. He wore his black hair shorter than he had in high school, and he had a tan that would do a lifeguard proud.
“You don’t look so bad yourself,” he said. “But then, you never did. Hey, I heard you’re getting married.”
She thrust out her left hand to show him her ring.
“Sweet. Sure you wanna break all those hearts?”
She laughed and waved him off.
“So are you just out for a walk?”
“In this heat?” Deni said. “No, we’re scavenging for diapers for our next-door neighbor. We thought Beth’s teacher might have some.”
“Mrs. Abernathy? She’s my next-door neighbor. Yeah, she might. She had her daughter’s baby there last week. Hey, you don’t have a saw or an axe, do you?”
“I don’t know, why?”
“My mom’s freaking because she doesn’t have anything to cook with. I have to chop some wood so we can cook over a fire, but I don’t have anything to chop with. Our saw is electric.”
“We had enough charcoal for today,” Deni said, “but when we run out, I guess we’ll have to do that, too. You can ride over to my house and ask my parents.”
“Okay, I will in a minute. I’ve got to go in and drink something. It’s hot out here.” He pushed off from the curve and turned his bike back to his driveway. “Good luck with the diapers.”
Deni waved good-bye, then looked down at her little sister. Beth watched, eyes dreamy, as Mark rode up his driveway.
“He’s so cute,” Beth whispered.
“Yeah, he’s changed a lot. College did him good.” She turned her sister back to her teacher’s house. “Stop staring. He’s way too old for you.”
Beth’s cheeks flushed pink. “I wasn’t staring.”
They trudged up a steep sidewalk, then up ten steps leading to a massive front door made of leaded glass. Deni drank in the sight of the expensive architecture. “Doesn’t look like a teacher’s house. What does her husband do?”
“He makes jewelry.”
She pictured threaded beads at flea markets. “What kind of jewelry?”
“Diamond rings and necklaces. You should see the rocks on her fingers. They make yours look cheap.”
She shoved her sister. “Well, it wasn’t cheap, okay? It cost Craig an arm and a leg.” She jabbed at the bell.
“Doorbell doesn’t work, Einstein.” Beth rapped on the door, and it floated open. Deni shoved it open a little wider. “Hello? Hello!”
“Mrs. Abernathy! It’s Beth Branning.”
No answer, so Deni pushed the door all the way open. She could see through the dark house to the back window. There didn’t appear to be anyone out back, either. “Anybody home? Hello!”
Beth peered in past her and took a tentative step inside. Then she gasped, and Deni followed her startled gaze. In the doorway off of the foyer, she saw a bare foot, turned down, as if someone lay there on their stomach.
Deni caught her breath and pulled Beth back, then stepped inside, toward the doorway where she saw the foot.
She screamed.
A woman lay facedown in her own blood. A man lay a few feet away, his dead, white face frozen in horror.
thirteen
Beth started running, her screams echoing over the silent neighborhood. Deni ran after her.
Next door, Mark bolted out of his garage. “What is it? Deni, what’s wrong?”
“They’re dead!” She was trembling, and her legs wouldn’t hold her up. “Blood everywhere!”
He grabbed her and looked into her face. “Who?”
“In there!” She pointed to the house, and slowly, he let her go. Beth thrust herself into Deni’s arms and clung to her, still wailing.
Mark’s mother came outside, following him as he crossed the yard and bolted into his neighbor’s house. Deni felt her little sister shivering. She watched the
door through her tears, waiting for someone to come back out. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe the Abernathys were alive. Maybe it was a bad joke they were playing on someone . . . a Halloween prank, five months early.
Eventually, Mark and his mother stumbled out, their faces white.
“We’ve got to get help,” he said. “The police . . . an ambulance.”
Beth’s words were half screams. “They can’t send an ambulance. You can’t even call the police!”
He stood there for a moment, as if trying to think. “Right. I’ll take my bike and go to the sheriff.”
Deni nodded. “Mark?”
He turned his still-stunned eyes to her. “What?”
“Tell them to hurry.”
Doug had just gotten home when he heard his daughters’ anguished screams. He threw his bike down and ran around to the back of the house.
Kay burst out the back door, alarm widening her eyes. “What in the world? Is that Beth?”
Doug tore across the lawn, out the back gate, and went between two houses behind them. Kay followed.
He saw them then, Deni and Beth, clutching each other in the street. Neighbors were coming out of their houses.
“Deni, what’s wrong?” he yelled as he ran toward them.
At the sound of his voice, Beth let Deni go and ran into his arms, hiccuping sobs. “We knocked on the door . . . and it was open . . . so we went in—”
“They were dead!” Deni cut in. “Lying on the floor in there. Dad, they were murdered.”
Doug looked up toward the house. “Murdered?”
Kay pulled Deni into her arms and held her as she stared toward the house. “Doug, we’ve got to get the sheriff.”
“Mark Green already went for him,” Deni said.
Doug eased Beth out of his arms. “I’m going in.”
Kay tried to stop him. “Doug, be careful.”
“Mark’s mom and her husband are in there,” Deni said.
He went to the door and stepped inside. Martha stood there in her husband’s arms, weeping. Shock jolted through him as he saw the two bodies. He closed his eyes. Get a grip, Branning. Pay attention.
“His diamond case is open,” Martha said in a horrified whisper. “And all the stones are gone! The house is ransacked.”
He looked around, saw that she was right. Drawers were pulled out, bookcases toppled onto the floor. Wires and cords hung from the walls where the stereo and TV had been. A door from the kitchen to the garage was open, and the garage was a mess as well.
Doug turned back to the bodies, and wondered if anyone had checked to see if they were alive. The thought of approaching those blood-soiled corpses made him sick, but slowly, he went into the dining room where they lay. Trying to avoid the blood, he bent over to check for a pulse. Neither of them had one.
The cause of death was clear. They’d been shot. But why hadn’t anyone heard the gunshots?
He looked around, wondering how the robbers had gotten inside. And more important, how had they gotten away with the things they’d stolen? How would someone have gotten all this stuff out without a vehicle?
It had to be someone who lived nearby.
“Doug?”
He turned and saw Brad—his next-door neighbor and Jeremy and Drew’s dad. “I heard all the commotion. Kay said you were in here.”
Doug wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Yeah.”
He stood back and tried to make his hands stop shaking, as Brad looked at the bodies. “Have you been upstairs? Is anybody else dead?”
“They lived alone.”
Brad and Doug turned at Martha’s tear-choked words.
“Still,” Brad said. “It’s worth a look.”
Doug agreed, so he forced himself to go up the stairs. Pictures of the victims’ grown children, with a dozen or so grandchildren, lined the hallway. How would they notify their children of their parents’ deaths? He went from room to room, and saw more evidence of robbery. Drawers pulled out, an empty jewelry box.
When he’d seen enough, he went back downstairs. “Nobody else. Just the two of them. Brad, whoever did this lives right here in the neighborhood. They took a few big items. Things that would be hard to carry a long distance without a vehicle. They made several trips, apparently. Maybe it was even several people. But why didn’t anyone hear the gunshots?”
Brad was shaking now, too. “Maybe they used some kind of silencer. Wouldn’t have completely knocked out the sound, like in the movies, but it probably would have muffled it.”
Martha’s husband shook his head. “Hard to believe we would have missed that. We had our windows open last night.”
“We didn’t hear anything,” Martha said.
Brad stood there for a moment, staring at Doug. His adam’s apple bobbed. “Looks like we got more problems than we thought. And we better get outta here, guys. There might be some evidence here that leads police to the killer.”
Doug agreed, and as he followed the others out, he wondered what they were going to do with the bodies. How would they transport them out of here? There were no ambulances running, no hearses that could pick them up.
The sheriff and his deputies would be hard-pressed to gather evidence without their usual forensic resources. But they had to get to the bottom of this somehow . . . before the killer struck again.
fourteen
Sometime later, Doug walked his family home. Beth had said little since they’d found the bodies, and Deni seemed shell-shocked. Jeff and Logan just seemed excited at the turn of events—another story to tell about this bizarre outage. The gravity of it hadn’t slammed them in the faces like it had the girls. They hadn’t seen the bodies lying in their own blood.
The few deputies Mark had been able to summon to the scene recorded the information with notes instead of photography, since none of their digital cameras or camcorders worked. They had dusted for fingerprints, hoping that as soon as the power came back on, they’d be able to run them through the AFIS computer system to identify the perpetrators. They’d agreed the killer or killers had to be from close by. The deputies began to canvas the neighborhood, trying to find witnesses who might have seen anyone trekking home with their arms full of stolen goods last night. Word spread like fire around the subdivision, and someone called a meeting down at the lake’s gazebo for around sundown that day.
When the Brannings finally got back home, they all collapsed on the couches in the family room, silently looking up at Doug for answers.
Beth leaned against her mother, who stroked her hair, trying to comfort her. Her tears weren’t yet spent. “Daddy, why would anybody kill Mrs. Abernathy? She was just a nice lady. Nobody hated her like the other teachers. She was really cool.”
Doug wished he had an answer. “It looked like a robbery, sweetheart. Might not have had anything to do with them at all.”
“Then it could happen to us.” Logan’s face glistened with perspiration as he stared up at him. “They could break into our house tonight and kill us in our sleep.”
Doug swallowed and sat down on the hearth. “That’s not gonna happen. They probably struck them because they were older and weren’t likely to fight back. Or they thought they weren’t home, and got surprised.”
“Weird, huh?” Jeff muttered. “Yesterday we thought terrorists had attacked us. Now we find out we have more to fear from our own neighbors.”
Kay kissed the top of Beth’s head. Her eyes held a dark, haunted look, and Doug knew he couldn’t banish it. “This is sure bringing out the worst in people,” Kay whispered.
Deni scowled. “The worst in people? It’s turning them into murderers, Mom. I want to get out of here. I shouldn’t even be here. I should be in D.C. with Craig.”
“Well, thank heaven you’re not.” Kay let Beth go and leaned forward as she gaped at Deni. “I’d be worried sick about you if you weren’t here. We need to be thankful that we have our comfortable home and that our whole family is together. This is an inconvenience for us, nothing more
. We’re not as vulnerable as a lot of people.”
“Mom, how can you say that?” Deni cried. “There are murderers in our own neighborhood. Maybe our own street. We don’t know who they are, and the sheriff can’t do anything about it.”