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She had been at high school with Gray Turner, so she called him by his first name. Not Officer Turner, as most would have.

Carl had been at high school with him, also.

YOU TELL ME WHY I’M HERE, she replied.

The taps spelled out a message.

I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT IT

She felt the beginnings of a horrible, destabilizing sense of uncertainty. What if Carl was telling the truth? What if he did have nothing to do with this?

Then who had written the notes?

More to the point, who had trapped them here and tied them up? Who was the intruder who had killed their dog?

Who was it that had a fatal vendetta against her and her family.

And maybe against Carl, too. Because otherwise, what on earth was he doing here?

The Last Fadings

In the last fadings of the light – Mary estimated that about an hour, maybe ninety minutes had passed since the car had arrived – she looked around the room.

To her right was the twin bed Otis and Sally had shared up until Otis had demanded to sleep on the couch in the living room. There was little else in the room. A nightstand, a trunk at the end of the bed, some trinkets on the windowsill. She was able to move the bed with her foot, but that was about the limit of what she could do.

Was it Carl in the other room? If it wasn’t, who was it? Names circled in her head: Ryan, Ben. Trent, Byron. Rona, even.

But why would they lie? If it was Carl, who had put him in there? And why?

There was no obvious explanation.

There wasn’t even a non-obvious explanation, which left one other option.

And the more she thought about it, the more she thought it made sense.

It was Carl, but he was pretending to be trapped. She didn’t know why he would do that, but then she didn’t know why anybody would do any of this.

And then it came to her.

The only thing that had ever really made any sense in all of this, was the theory that Carl was in love with her and wanted to break up her and Ryan’s marriage. The main problem with that theory, the problem that she had never been able to resolve, was that once she found out it was Carl she would have nothing to do with him.

The problem was that he must know that. And if he did, what was the point? He would simply defeat his own purposes.

So why would he do it?

Unless there was a way he could do it where he did not get the blame.

If, say, he was a victim as well.

If, say, he was a captive who managed to escape. Then at some point there would be a struggle, which she would overhear, and then he would come into her bedroom and free her.

He would be her hero.

Except she would still be married to Ryan, although maybe somehow he would use this to discredit him.

It was pretty desperate stuff, and quite hard to imagine that he thought it would work, but it was the only thing that made sense of it all.

So maybe that was it. This was all staged.