Page 30 of Night Falls on Predicament Avenue
Effie spun around. Another creak came from behind her. She squinted, making out the framed pictures on the walls, the corner table with the potted fern, and the narrow carpet runner. Darkness swallowed everything else.
Her breathing had become shallow, faster. A sense of foreboding entered Effie’s being, and she questioned the reality of the supposed innocence of the night. The James manor was safe. Itwasn’t Predicament Avenue with its stories of transients and its graveyard. The manor was the home of a stable family, a strong father, security, and...
No. She was not alone. Effie could feel it as strongly as she could feel the banister at the top of the stairs beneath her palm.
“Ezekiel?” she whispered. A quick glance toward her bedroom told her nothing had altered. Effie shifted her attention to the far end of the landing, past the mauve velvet settee nestled into a corner surrounded by more potted greenery. Her brothers’ rooms were near there. Both doors were closed. Just around the corner was Polly’s room.
Effie tiptoed in that direction. She would check on Polly. Though her sister was eighteen and a woman, Effie had not lost her sense of duty to her younger sister. Besides, tonight someone would be with Polly, keeping vigil by her side.
As she passed her brothers’ rooms, Effie stopped. If it was Ezekiel or even fourteen-year-old Charles... She twisted the knob on Charles’s door, opened it a crack, and peeked inside. The boy lay still beneath his bedding, his chest rising and falling slowly. She quietly closed the door and turned to the door opposite.
Ezekiel the troublemaker. A thick fear gripped her throat with no good explanation as she took note of Ezekiel in his bed, soft snores proving it was really him and not a pile of pillows.
The floor creaked again. This time it was distinct and in the direction of Polly’s room. The hired nurse perhaps? Effie shut Ezekiel’s door. She knew the floors creaked only due to the weight of someone traversing them. What bothered her was the fact that each creak she’d heard had long pauses between them. As if some person were sneaking through the house and stopping after each noise, hoping not to be detected.
Effie continued tiptoeing toward Polly’s room. She held her breath as she rounded the corner and saw the door partly open. She hugged the wall as she neared Polly’s room. Another creakalerted her senses further, and Effie stilled. It had to be the nurse moving about the room.
Effie peeked around the doorframe. Surely she would find her sister curled in her bed, and she would once again be assured of how ridiculous her imagination could be. She would not witness someone pressing a pillow against her sister’s face, smothering her cries. Nor would there be anyone wielding a knife, stabbing the prone body of her sister as she pled for her life like the woman at 322 Predicament Avenue had. There wouldn’t be—
Hands clawed at Effie’s neck, shoving her back into the door. The knob ground into the small of her back as thumbs squeezed into the hollow of her throat. The moon was wicked on this side of the house and lent very little light to the room. Effie gargled, straining for breath, her fingers raking at the hands that clutched her neck. She could smell peppermint. A whiff of peppermint and then even her ability to smell dissipated as oxygen was withheld from her lungs. The man’s thumbs dug into her throat with an insistence that intended her death.
“Miss James!” The night nurse’s scream ripped through the eerie silence of her struggle against a man whose features remained hidden by a hat pulled low and his face covered with a kerchief.
Effie’s assailant dropped his hands at the nurse’s horrified scream as she approached from the hallway carrying a pitcher of water. In an instant, Effie’s assailant ran back into Polly’s room toward her window, which was open allowing in the cool May night air. The man slipped through the window, wrestling with the trellis outside until the thump of his feet and the sound of his fleeing across the gravel drive persuaded Effie that he was gone.
She sank to the floor, grabbing at her throat, gasping for air that refused to make its way into her lungs. The nurse was beside her, her cries for help echoing in Effie’s ears.
A door slammed.
Footsteps thundered toward them.
Her father’s bellows filled the hallway.
Her mother’s cries soon followed.
Ezekiel and Charles entered the room and hauled her up from the floor to lie beside Polly per their father’s command. Effie grappled for Ezekiel’s hand only because the feel of his familiarity brought comfort amid the terror that had wrapped itself around her.
The nurse hovered over her.
“Call for the doctor!” Effie heard her father shouting.
And then came the dreadful realization that although it had been she who had been strangled, it was Polly’s room the intruder had entered.
Effie struggled to grab on to her sister. No one was connecting these important pieces. In her semi-aware state, Effie desperately tried to speak, to choke out that they needed to protect Polly.
But no one was listening.
11
NORAH
Present Day
“TELLMEWHATYOUKNOW,” Sebastian said, his voice thick with the accent of an Englishman.
Startled, Norah stared at him from across the table in their corner booth at the small diner in downtown Shepherd. He couldn’t know that she knew that he didn’t know that Harper had told her she was pregnant! Could he?
Norah’s thoughts flew into a panic. It wasn’t her place to out Harper’s news. Why had she come here tonight anyway? She could barely leave Predicament Avenue, let alone be expected to dine in public. She understood Sebastian’s offer to take her to dinner wasn’t a date; it was to discuss all things Predicament Avenue and the crimes committed there. Yet that wasn’t why Norah had agreed to come. It was for Harper. Maybe she could somehow stand in the gap for Harper. Convince Sebastian tolook at his daughter and see her desperate need for a father. For input. For a safe place to fall.
