Page 77 of I Know She Was There

“But if I could just ask you a few questions, I’d really appreciate it.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you.” She stepped back. “Now I must ask you to leave.”

“All right,” I conceded. “Thank you for your time.” As I spoke, she closed the door on me.

I retreated the way I’d come and got into my car, certain Cynthia Saunders was watching my every move from behind a window blind.

Two blocks later, I pulled up in front of a bi-level and quickly got out of the Honda, grabbing a black sweatshirt from my back seat before I exited. Pulling the sweatshirt over my pink top, I looked down at my attire: deep blue jeans and black sneakers. I was nearly indistinguishable from the dark.

I slunk through two yards, careful to make no noise. After my many forays into Deer Crossing, I was a pro at nighttime surveillance. Dodging between bushes and trees—and on the lookout for any of the dozen large dogs penned in their yards—I made my way to the Saunderses’ side yard. I crept toward the house and hovered near a darkened window, hoping it was open. It wasn’t.

Glancing around, I noticed a privacy fence extending from a back corner of the house. It comprised what looked like giant upside-down pencils with tapered tips pointed skyward. It was between five and six feet high. I pressed my body against the wood, stood on tiptoe, and glanced between two sharpened tips and into the backyard, seeing nothing at first. But as I scanned the shadows, a pinpoint of light in a back corner of the enclosed space moved up and down rhythmically. Too uniform to be a firefly. It took me a few seconds to realize it was the glowing tip of a cigarette. It sparked a tad brighter, then swerved upward to the left, suspended in the thick velvet of the night.

Brightness suddenly blazed through the dark, flooding the fenced yard in light, illuminating the woman sitting in the corner, one elbow leaning on a bistro table, her slender body settled in a small chair, legs crossed, hand with cigarette extended gracefully outward. She looked like the woman I’d just met, only younger. I squinted, taking in each feature.

“Turn that off,” she hissed.

“There you are,” Cynthia Saunders stepped out onto the patio just as the light went out. “We have the same problem as Brian. That woman—Caroline Case—showed up looking for you.”

“Tim’s wife came here?”

“Yeah, and we know what that means, don’t we? Tim must know you’re my sister.” Cynthia’s voice took on a desperate, high pitch. “You’ve got to leave now, or this time you may not escape with just a few cuts and bruises. This time he could kill you.”

I slapped my hand over my mouth to cover my gasp. After all this time, I’d found Annie Connolly. She was hiding from Tim, but she was alive. My muscles released, the tension in my neck and between my shoulder blades dissipating—until a new, equally terrifying thought washed over me like a rogue wave poised to take out everything in its path.

Annie Connolly was not the woman I’d seen in the window at 21 Pine Hill Road.

CHAPTER39

SUNDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 24

Isat in my car, fingers pressed into my temples, my mind spinning like a roulette wheel. I took a few deep breaths, telling myself to concentrate on getting air in and out of my lungs. Eventually, my adrenaline-spiked blood ceased skittering through my shaky limbs.

If Annie Connolly was hiding out in her sister’s place, who was the doomed woman I’d seen atherhouse?

I stared into the night. Darkness was not the friend I’d so desperately relied upon these past months. Light was what I needed now. Illumination.

A streetlight flicked on overhead. I blinked. Divine Providence? I stared at the fluorescent globe, thinking again of Matt’s eyes under my harsh cell phone light. Was he responsible for what I saw in the window that night? Melanie was not the same person as Annie Connolly, but Ihadseen her with Matt, hadn’t I? Maybe Matt and Melanie had purchased the house from the Connollys. Perhaps they’d been fixing up the place before they moved in.

That made sense. Suddenly, I realized how off course I’d gotten, thinking the Connollys were the same couple I’d seen through their living-room window, dancing, that first night in August. Melanie and Annie both had dark hair and slight builds, but that may very well have been where the similarities ended. I remembered asking Jeffrey if Annie liked to dance and he’d been surprised by the question. I focused on Jeffrey.He’d been the man standing in the Connollys doorway, with Annie’s arms wrapped around him. I’d noticed she’d cut her hair to a chin-length bob, but of course Melanie never had. I squeezed my eyes shut, picturing the ends of her dark tresses layered over her shoulders as she’d desperately clutched her neck and stared at me from the window. Oh God. I snapped my lids open. How could I have gotten things so wrong?

I blinked against the overly bright beam streaming from the streetlight, my mind sorting through the players in the macabre drama of my own making. I could account for Annie at her sister’s house. Jeffrey was probably at his own place on a Sunday night. Matt was likely still squatting in an empty house on Woodmint, next to the Brocktons. But I had no idea where Melanie was, or if she was even alive. I took a ragged breath, suspecting I’d never see her again.

Her bloodied body loomed before me as I replayed the way I’d rushed into the foyer of 21 Pine Hill, stopping only when my head exploded, and I’d dropped into unconsciousness. I’d revived in the cold, watery depths of the nearby pond. The memory shot frost through my body, making me shiver uncontrollably. How had I gotten in the water? Had the killer dumped me there after what I’d seen? Preparing to pull me underwater, disposing of me too? No, that couldn’t be right. I recalled Jeffrey’s headlights cutting through the murky night as I was crawlingoutof the pond.

There was another possibility.

I rubbed my face as Emmy’s sweet visage floated before me. For months I’d seen her, felt her—even reveled in her unique powder-and-milk scent—as I’d tended to a specter. A baby who had been dead for three years. Pain squeezed my throat, my chest. For a wild second I couldn’t breathe.

I forced myself to swallow, focused on inhaling. As my lungs filled, I considered the horrifying possibility: Melanie was not real, and never had been. The anguished woman I’d seen that August night had been nothing more than a physical manifestation of my mounting stress. Once my issues with Tim resolved, would she fade into the recesses of my demented mind? I thought of the neon-orange fingernail fragment. Again I wondered if I’d conjured that as well. After all, I’d been the only one to see it. And now I no longer possessed the nail chip. Maybe never had.

I shook my head, praying for clarity, for a way to distinguish between reality and fantasy in my own mind. How to tackle such a formidable task? It seemed as impossible as singing the aria to an unfamiliar opera or conjugating verbs in Swahili. How could I convey my conviction that a woman had been harmed in Deer Crossing one quiet summer evening when I couldn’t even prove tomyselfit had happened? I pondered this for what seemed like hours but could have been mere minutes. Time lost meaning as my mind wound around the events of the past few weeks. I tried to isolate individual incidents and put them in chronological order, but they swirled together. One chaotic mass of confusion. I had to get out of there.

I put the car in drive, remembering that other night I’d driven through the darkened streets while the element of time eluded me. I’d been missing for hours after stalking Jeffrey. Had that been happening regularly? Was I losing pieces of my life without even knowing it? A trickle of sweat ran down my back at the possibility. I pulled into my dark driveway and walked to the front door, fishing for my key in my handbag and chiding myself, as usual, for not leaving even one light on.

I let myself in and flicked up the light switch, freezing when nothing happened. In the dark, I was unable to see anything.

I stumbled across the living room, approached the kitchenette, reaching toward the electrical switch to the right of the kitchen table as my eyes finally adjusted to the lack of light. I bucked like a startled mare when I saw Mary’s shadowy form seated on one of the chairs at the table, her eyes starkly wide, noticeable even through the waxy darkness, a wad of material stuffed in her mouth.

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