Praying for Sleep

dining-room chair and shoved it into the hallway, wedging the door shut.
    The knob turned sharply. She leapt back, wondering if he could still shatter the door, just kick his way in. But he didn’t. After a minute of playing with the knob—almost timidly—he started back down the stairs. The blanket of silence returned, broken by an eerie laughter and the sound of his feet scraping on the basement floor. He muttered words she couldn’t hear. After five minutes, even these stopped. Was he still there? Would he set the house afire? What was he doing?
    She heard no other sound from downstairs. Or from outside either, other than the steady patter of rain. Michael Hrubek had vanished again. Holding the knife in one hand and leading Heck’s hound with the other, Lis Atcheson walked into the greenhouse and sat in a dark corner to wait.

    The rain clattered like marbles on the greenhouse roof. Portia’d been gone twenty minutes. It was only eight miles or so to the Sheriff ’s Department but the road might now be completely impassable. It could take her an hour or more to get through. Yet as the time passed and she heard nothing more of Hrubek, she began to relax. She even let herself wonder if maybe, just maybe, he’d fled. She felt a glow of euphoria and reflected that perhaps this was all that comfort ever was: believing that we’re safe despite the clear and unobvious dangers from which we’re protected by nothing more than single-strength glass.
    She found herself wondering about Owen. She refused to think the worst. No, no. He was fine. With so much flooding he’d probably ducked into a garage or house to wait out the worst of the storm. She looked up at the black sky above her head and uttered a short prayer for dawn—exactly the opposite of what she usually prayed for, lying in bed, trying so desperately to sleep.
    A prayer for light, for morning, for rampaging red and blue and white lights atop approaching cars.
    She smelled a rose, whose scent now wafted past her face. Only twenty minutes more. Or nineteen. Or fifteen. Help will be here by then. Surely Michael Hrubek was lost in the forest. Surely he’d fallen and broken his leg.
    Lis scratched the dog’s ears. “It’s all right, your master’ll be all right,” she said to him as he tilted his head. Lis put her arm around the drooping shoulders. The poor thing. He was as nervous as she—his ears were quivering and his neck was a knot of muscle. Lis eased back and looked at him, the folds of skin and bored-looking eyes. His nose was in the air and his nostrils began twitching. She smiled. “You like roses too, boy? Do you?”
    He stood. His shoulder muscles tensed.
    An unearthly growl rumbled from deep in his throat.
    “Oh, my Lord,” Lis cried. “No!”
    He sniffed the air hard, his legs eager, his head lifting and falling. He began to walk quickly back and forth over the floor. Lis leapt to her feet and grabbed the knife, looking around her at the misted glass of the greenhouse. She couldn’t see through it. Where was he?
    Where?
    “Stop it,” she shouted to the dog, who continued to pace, sniffing the air, growing more and more frantic. Her palms were suddenly slick with cold sweat and she wiped them and gripped the handle of the knife once again.
    “Stop it! He’s gone ! He’s not here anymore. Stop howling!” She was turning in circles, looking for an enemy only the dog could detect. The growling became a bay, a banshee’s wail, ricocheting off every inch of window.
    “Oh, please!” she begged. “Stop!”
    And he did.
    Silently the hound spun around and ran straight to the lath-house door—the one Lis recalled she’d been on her way to check when Heck had arrived.
    The door that she’d forgotten completely about.
    The door that now burst open and struck the hound in his ribs, knocking him down, stunned. Michael Hrubek stepped into the greenhouse. He stood, dripping and huge and muddy, in the center of the concrete floor. His head swiveled, taking in the gargoyles, the flowers, the mists—all the details—as if he were on a garden-club tour. In his hand was the muddy pistol. Seeing Lis, he called her name in an astonished whisper and his mouth hardened into a smile—a smile that arose from neither irony nor triumph nor even mad humor, but was instead reminiscent of an expression one might find upon the faces of the dead.

31
    Standing before her, he was so much larger than she remembered.
    At the trial he’d seemed small,