Divine Evil

lone spider silently building a web in the corner.
    Clutching her purse, she moved from room to room. The big front parlor, the den, the kitchen.
    The appliances were new, she noted. Sparkling and ivory against the navy ceramic counters and the sky blue floor. She did not step out onto the terrace-she wasn't ready for that-but instead turned and walked down the hall to the stairs.
    Her mother had always kept the newel post and railing polished to a gleam. The old mahogany was smooth as silk with age-countless palms and youthful bottoms had brushed over it.
    She found her room, the first off the hall to the right, where she had dreamed the dreams of childhood and adolescence. She had dressed for school there, shared secrets with friends, built her fantasies, and wept away her disappointments.
    How could she have known that it would be so painful to open the door and find the room empty? As if nothing she had ever done within those walls had left a mark? She turned off the light but left the door open.
    Directly across the hall was Blair's old room, where he had once hung posters of his heroes. Superman to Brooks Robinson, Brooks to John Lennon. There was the guest room her mother had furnished with eyelet lace and satinpillows. Granny, her father's mother, had stayed there for a week the year before she had died of a stroke.
    Here was the bath with its pedestal sink and its soft green and white checkerboard tiles. Throughout their teens she and Blair had fought over possession of that room like dogs over a meaty bone.
    Going back into the hall, she turned into the master bedroom, where her parents had slept and loved and talked night after night. Clare remembered sitting on the pretty pink and lavender rug, watching her mother use all the fascinating bottles and pots on the cherry vanity. Or studying her father as he'd stared into the cheval mirror, struggling to knot his tie. The room had always smelled of wisteria and Old Spice. Somehow, it still did.
    Half-blind with grief, she stumbled into the master bath to turn on the faucet and splash her face with water. Maybe she should have taken it a room at a time, she thought. One room a day. With her hands pressed on the sides of the sink, she looked up and faced herself in the glass.
    Too pale, she thought. Shadows under her eyes. Her hair was a mess. But then, it usually was since she was too lazy for hairdressers and almost always chopped away at it herself. She'd lost an earring somewhere, she noted. Or had forgotten to put it on in the first place.
    She started to dry her face with her sleeve, remembered the jacket was suede, and decided to dig in her purse for a tissue. But she'd set it down somewhere along the tour.
    “Doing great so far,” she murmured to her reflection and nearly jolted at the echo of her own voice. “This is where I want to be,” she said more firmly. “Where I have to be. But it's not going to be as easy as I thought.”
    Brushing away the excess water on her face with her hands, she turned away from the glass. She would godown, get her sleeping bag, and tune out for the night. She was tired and overemotional. In the morning she would go through the house again and see what she needed to make her stay more pleasant.
    Just as she stepped back into her parents′ bedroom, she heard the creak and groan of the front door.
    Panic came first, quick and instinctive. Her always vivid imagination conjured up a pack of roving convicts newly escaped from the correctional institution that was only twenty miles away. She was alone, in an empty house, and for the life of her, she couldn't remember one move she'd learned in the self-defense course she and Angie had taken two years before.
    Pressing both hands to her heart, she reminded herself she was in Emmitsboro. Convicts didn't tend to roam the streets of tiny rural communities. She took a step forward and heard the creak on the stairs.
    Yes, they did, she thought again. Anyone who had ever watched a B movie knew that convicts and psychos always headed for out-of-the-way towns and quiet villages to spread their mayhem.
    In the empty room, she looked around wildly for a weapon. There wasn't even a ball of dust. Heart thudding, she searched her jacket pockets and came up with three pennies, a half roll of Lifesavers, a broken comb, and her keys.
    Brass knuckles, she thought, remembering how she'd been instructed to hold the keys with the pointed ends sticking out between the fingers of a closed fist.