Page 57 of Deceiving Grier

“Did the police look down here?” he asked.

“I assume they did.” I didn’t actually see them go down there, but they surely would have checked behind the door and noticed the stairs.

I opened the door and switched on the flashlight app on my phone, then crept down the stairs with Jett right behind me. The thin glow from my phone did little to penetrate the gloom at the bottom of the rickety wooden steps. Once we reached the bottom, damp coldness wrapped around me like a fist. I swung the beam from my phone back and forth until it landed on a switch mounted to a beam next to the stairs.

I turned the switch on. White fluorescents flickered to life overhead, filling the silence with a high-pitched hum and casting an eerie white glow over the cavernous space.

Unlike a lot of the houses in the area, Mackenzie’s had a full basement rather than a cellar or crawl space. It was unfinished, with all concrete floors and cinderblock walls, but the ceiling was high enough that we could stand up straight without having to worry about hitting our heads on any of the beams. There were half a dozen windows mounted high up on the walls that during the day would have allowed some daylight into the dreary space.

If Mackenzie had used the basement for anything while he’d been alive, his belongings had long since been removed, leaving behind just the furnace, a water heater, and a fuse panel. Other than that, the space was empty.

“God, it’s creepy down here,” Jett muttered from beside me.

He wasn’t wrong. A frigid draft swept through the basement. The occasional flickering white lights combined with the fluttering cobwebs dripping from the beams above cast fading shadows up dull gray walls.

“Let’s make this quick,” I said, making my way deeper into the basement and checking that there was no one tucked away and hiding in any of the shadowy corners. Jett did the same on the far side of the room.

The farther we moved toward the back of the basement, the colder the room grew and the more noticeable the draft. The chilled air whispered over the top of my head. I looked up at the window nearest me and froze. The glass pane, which swung out to open like a metal garage door, had been propped open about an inch with a short wooden board and icy air from outside wafted through the narrow gap.

“Look,” I said, pointing up at the window.

This was the entry point. There was no ghost, just a flesh and blood person who’d been coming and going whenever they pleased.

“Holy shit,” Jett said, moving to stand beside me. “So this is how they’re getting in.”

“I think so.” Sliding the board out from with the edge of the frame, the pane slapped closed with a quiet thud. I stood on my tippytoes and secured the latch, locking the window. “And it looks as though they’d planned on coming back.”

“How the hell do they get out again?”

That was a good question. The windows were mounted high on the walls. It would be tough for even someone athletic to climb up the smooth cinderblock wall and pull themselves through the window’s narrow opening. It might have been different if there’d been something to stand on to give them a boost, but there wasn’t.

I thought of all the times we found doors that we’d been certain we’d closed mysteriously open. The times we’d assumed Jett had been careless and forgotten to lock the front or back doors.

“Fuck,” I said, shaking my head. Slowly, it dawned on me. “They’ve just been walking out the front door!”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Sawyer

Despitetheexhaustionpullingat my limbs when I finally crawled into bed in the wee hours of the morning, I didn’t sleep well. Every time the house creaked, or the wind rattled the windows, I jerked awake, straining my ears for the sound of quiet footsteps in the darkness. Unlike the uneasy feeling I’d had early in the evening while I’d been working in the study, I knew for certain now that all those noises weren’t always just the wind or the house settling.

Eventually, I drifted off into a deep sleep only to dream about hearing Grier crashing down the stairs. In my dream though, instead of running out into the hall and finding him unconscious, his eyes are wide and staring and dead.

I jerked awake and gave up on sleep altogether. I had things I wanted to do before I brought Grier home, anyway.

In the kitchen, I peered out the back window while I waited for the Keurig to gurgle out my coffee. The sun was already creeping up over the houses, gold light spilling through the leafless trees and casting long shadows over the frost-tinged lawn. Absently, I gripped the backdoor’s knob and tried to twist it, but it didn’t turn.

Locked.

I blew out the breath I’d been holding and turned away to get my coffee. Despite the early hour, not quite eight o’clock, I made my way out to the dining room and my jacket draped over one of the chairs where I fished out Officer Robot’s card—Collins, actually—from the pocket.

I dialed his number and was surprised when the man picked up instead of my call going to voicemail. His response, however, was significantly less surprising. Even though I told him about finding the basement window propped open and the implications that we’d had an intruder coming and going for months, he remained unimpressed.

“We can make a point of driving past your house, but I really believe your best bet is to change your locks and invest in a security system. Something with cameras.”

I don’t know what I’d been expecting since he’d said pretty much the same thing the night before.

“Right,” I said, making no effort to hide my flat tone.

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