Page 73 of The Intruder

But then again…

I always got a strange vibe from Lee. Even though he seemed nice enough and said all the right things, I never trusted the man. He knew a little too much about me—he was too interested.

Also, what man remembers the birthday of a woman he isn’t trying to sleep with? That alone was suspicious.

If Eleanor hates him that much, she must have a good reason. I’m not saying he deserves to die, but someone hurt that girl badly, and whoever did it ought to get what’s coming to him.

After what feels like an eternity of picking my way through the woods, Lee’s cabin comes into view. I quicken my pace, my boots splashing through the mud, drenching the bottoms of my jeans. Orange rays of sun are starting to peek out from the horizon—it’s just about morning—but the windows of Lee’s cabin are still dark.

Except for the one window that is wide open.

I calculate the possibility that the window might have been left open independent of Eleanor. It seems extremely unlikely, since when he went to bed, there was a storm raging outside. He certainly closed all the windows, but he might not have latched them. If the window is open, then she must have found an unlatched window and crawled inside. She’s in his home.

The question is, is it too late?

As I walk over here, I rack my brain to try to figure out why Eleanor could possibly be so angry with Lee. After all, it seemed like she hardly even knew him, so it seems unlikely he’s responsible for the burns on her arms. Yet she despises him. She came after him with a knife, and now she has a gun. She wants him dead.

It doesn’t entirely make sense to me, but now I remember the conversation we had in my bathroom, when she was admiring that painting of the two birds.

I don’t know my father. He abandoned my mother before I was even born. He’s a terrible person.

I believe that bad people always get what’s coming to them.

And now it all makes perfect sense.

Eleanor, who never met her father, set out on a quest to find him and make sure he got what was coming to him. And her quest has come to an end at Lee’s cabin.

Lee is Eleanor’s father.

Now she plans to kill him, to punish him for abandoning her and her abusive mother. I’m not sure what his reasons were for not living up to his paternal obligations, but I don’t believe he deserves to die for it. Not unless there’s something else I don’t know.

I have to go in there and get Eleanor to see the light. I have to keep her from doing anything terrible—something she may someday regret. Something that might ruin her life.

And there is absolutely nobody in this world in a better position to convince her of that than me. Because I have been there, just like she has.

52

BEFORE

ELLA

I am sitting in the back of an ambulance with the doors open, a blanket around my shoulders. A female paramedic sits beside me, a concerned look on her face. Every few minutes, I start coughing. At first, I was kind of faking it, but now I’m not. There’s a lot of smoke in the air. It’s hard to breathe.

“Are you taking me to the hospital?” I ask the paramedic.

She takes my hand. “Yes. But you seem okay, so we’re waiting around to…”

She doesn’t complete her sentence. When the fire trucks arrived, I told them my mother was still inside. And now I’m waiting to see if they save her. I wasn’t the one who called the fire department—that was a neighbor. By the time the trucks arrived, there were flames visible in the windows of every floor, and the stench of scorched wood filled my nostrils. Although it smelled good compared to my mother’s cigarettes or those rotten pumpkins.

She couldn’t have gotten out. There’s no way.

Could she?

“The firemen are looking real hard for your mother,” she says tenderly. “If she is in there, they will do their best to save her.”

I close my eyes, squeezing out a few tears. I imagine my mother waking with a jolt to the sound of the fire alarms. I imagine her running down the hallway and then seeing the mess of paper all over the stairs. I imagine her brown eyes widening as she realizes the situation, then trying to get down the stairs the best she could. Maybe she slips and falls, almost making it but then hitting the wall of mattresses.

I imagine her realizing that she was going to burn to death in a house with all her junk.