1
The doorbell rang, startling Noah Miller and interrupting him mid-sentence.
Who—?
Didn't matter.
He left a long pause on the audio track so his producer could find and correct the aborted sentence. Took a moment to re-center himself and repeat the words silently before speaking them aloud.
"She fumbled for her keys, almost dropped them, jammed them into—"
The doorbell rang again.
It was like a pulse of sensation in a limb that had gone numb. In his constant state of near-darkness, it was a reminder that the rest of the house, the space beyond his chair at this desk existed. In the absence of sound, he sometimes felt as if he were floating. As if there was no real connection with the rest of his surroundings.
It had to be the little hoodlums from next door. Yesterday, they'd played ding-dong-ditch for twenty minutes, ringing his bell at different intervals.
He hadn't answered his door in years. The rule didn’t change yesterday, either. He'd waited them out, knowing they would give up eventually.
Yesterday, he’d been eating supper. Their prank hadn't cost him valuable production time.
Who could have known their prank would be repeated?
Unbelievable.
His temper flared as the bell rang a third time. He quashed the instincts left from his former life. He wouldn't answer the door to yell at the rascals. Even if they deserved it.
He'd moved to this little house on twenty acres outside of Sutter's Hollow because he'd wanted peace and quiet. He'd built a career as an audiobook narrator and voiceover artist without adding any soundproofing to the small walk-in closet in his master bedroom. Something he regretted now. He would love to be enclosed in a soundproof booth right now.
Lord, save him from his next door neighbors.
Next door was relative. The 100-acre farm had a house, but it was nearly a quarter-mile from Noah's. With all that land, didn't the children have something better to do than bother him?
He hadn't even known anyone had moved in—the house had been vacant for over a decade—until several weeks ago, when he'd startled at the sound of a tractor plowing rows in the field closest to his property.
Since then, he'd occasionally noticed the children's shouts during his afternoon walks down to the pond. The tractor ran at odd times of the morning
He paused his recording. Then thought better of it and stopped the recording entirely. Saved it. After an interruption of this magnitude, he would have to go through his entire pre-recording routine again before he continued.
What time was it? A press of the button and his phone announced it was a little after four. He was two pages away from the end of the chapter. He'd planned to narrate another chapter tonight. Maybe two, if his voice held out.
But the hoodlums were out of school for the day—it was a weekday, wasn't it?—and if they didn't get lost, how was he supposed to work?
The doorbell rang again, and his blood boiled. His voice shook as he used commands to cue up the phone app on his phone. It took him two calls to get a non-emergency line to the sheriff's office. He held on the line and finally got transferred to a deputy.
"My neighbor's kids are running wild."
There was a pause. Maybe he shouldn't have just spit it out like that, but he couldn't seem to help it.
"Are they doing anything illegal? Playing music too loud? Selling drugs?" The guy on the other end of the line sounded like he'd just graduated high school. Young and inexperienced. Would he even be able to help?
"They keep ringing my doorbell."
Another pause. This one longer. "Have you tried answering it?"
Noah squeezed the back of his neck with the hand that wasn't holding his phone. "I don't want to answer it. I want them to stop."
"Look, man. It sounds like it's just kids being kids. Have you tried calling on their parents to express your concerns?"
