Vic approaches the open doorway and ventures out onto the stoop, cocking his head to one side and then the other. “Someone must be having car trouble out on the road—or else they’re signaling for help. I should probably see what’s going on.”
“Darling, why don’t we call 911?” Ava suggests, a trace of nervousness in her voice.
“It’ll take forever to get them here. And it’s just a car horn.”
He steps back inside, swings open the small closet in the foyer, and grabs a flashlight from a wicker basket on the top shelf. “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful,” he tells Ava.
At the same moment, Dan comes scurrying down the stairs. “Oh, there you are, Vic,” he calls. “I went up to your office to look for you.”
“I came down the back stairs and then stopped in the kitchen. But I’m headed out now to see what in hell is going on.”
“Why don’t I go with you?” Dan says, pushing his horn-rimmed glasses on top of his head.
As the rest of us hang back, Vic and Dan exit the house. They hesitate briefly in the front yard, exchange a few words that we can’t hear, and then take off to the right.
“Why aren’t they going toward the road?” I ask no one in particular. Tori, I notice, still has her hands pressed tightly to her ears.
Ava shakes her head, clearly as clueless as I am. She takes a few stepsout onto the stoop, and I follow behind her. She cocks her head just as Vic did. “I think because the noise is actually coming from behind the barn,” she says after a minute. “That’s where most people parked tonight.”
“Jamie,” I say at the same moment his name bursts into my head. “His car was out there.”
“But he’s been gone for a while now,” Ava says.
“No, I just spoke to him in the solarium,” I say. “Then he left through that door.”
My heart has started to skitter. If Jamie’s having car trouble, why wouldn’t he come back in the house instead of blowing his horn so obnoxiously? And what was the first sound we’d heard?
Without even thinking, I hurry down the steps and set out in the same direction Vic and Dan went.
“Kiki, wait,” Ava calls.
“I just want to make sure Jamie’s okay,” I call back to her.
The sound of the horn is even worse out here, of course, a deafening blare that could make you lose your mind. There’s enough illumination from the house that I spot the two men at the very end of the yard, the beam of the flashlight bouncing in front of them. With Vic a few steps ahead of Dan, they approach the weathered barn. As I trail behind, the three-inch heels of my slingbacks keep sinking into the dirt, but I don’t dare go barefoot out here.
It’s obvious now that the noise is coming from the field. I watch as Vic and Dan reach the barn, hurry along the side of it, and round the far corner. Before I can catch up with them, though, the blare stops as quickly as it started, leaving behind the faint chorus of insect mating calls. A second later, a howl cuts through the night. It’s coming from one of the men, Vic maybe—as if he’s crying out in anguish.
Fear fizzes through my body. I start to run, feeling the manicuredlawn give way to bristly field grass. As soon as I round the far corner of the barn myself, I stop in my tracks.
There’s a single car parked in the field, about ten yards away from me, and though there’s a security light shining from the top of the barn, it’s too dark for me to tell the make of the car, to know if it’s Jamie’s. What Icansee is that the door on the driver’s side is open, and Vic is leaning into the car a little, with Dan stopped a few steps behind him. The car’s interior light is on, but I’m not close enough to see inside—even if Vic weren’t blocking my view.
Dan steps forward and peers over Vic’s shoulder.
“Jesus,” I hear him exclaim.
“What?” I cry out, advancing again. Something bad has clearly happened. “What’s going on?”
Vic spins around and spots me across the field.
“Go back to the house,” he yells.
“Is it Jamie?” I plead.
“Go back, Kiki, please. We’ll be there in a minute.”
I don’t want to defy him, so I turn around and stumble back to the house, my panic spiking with every step. As I near the stoop, I see that Ava’s still standing there, waiting, while Tori and Dan’s wife are hanging back in the foyer.
“Kiki, what is it?” she yells.
