Page 72 of The Intruder

I drop Anton’s lighter on our coffee table. I hate to leave something behind that he gave me because I have so little to remember him by, but I don’t have a choice. I don’t want the police to find a lighter in my pocket.

A second stack of papers goes up in flames. Soon, the whole house will be on fire. And I realize that there is not one thing in here that I want to save. Not even one.

So I walk out the door.

As I stand outside the house watching the fire crackling in the window, spreading throughout the first floor of our house, the full magnitude of what I have done finally hits me. I have sentenced my own mother to burn to death.

And my father is next.

51

NOW

CASEY

The final page in the book is another drawing.

All the other drawings were of women—more specifically, one woman—being tortured, but this one is a man. He is lying on the floor in a pool of blood, and there’s a girl with red hair and freckles standing over him, holding a knife.

And then above the drawing is a name and address.

I reach into my pocket to pull out the map that I found on the floor of the living room. I unfold it and look at it more carefully under the glow of the flashlight. I realize now that I read the map wrong. I looked at it quickly, by firelight, and I assumed that since the girl was here, the final location was my house. But now I realize that my house wasn’t the destination at all. The final destination is another house, just half a mile away from here.

Lee’s house.

Eleanor was never looking for me. She drew a confusing map and ended up here instead of at Lee’s house. But he was the one she was looking for. He’s the one she intends to torture. To kill.

She kept asking me questions about him while she ate those chocolate chip cookies. I thought she was giving me a hard time about my love life or the lack thereof, but I was wrong. She had a different kind of interest in him, although I don’t entirely understand why.

And now she has left my house to go find him. And I have given her a gun.

Oh my God. Lee…

Not only that, but the sun still hasn’t risen in the sky. Lee is probably sound asleep in bed. She’ll be able to surprise him and do whatever she wants.

I’ve got to warn him.

I pick up the phone, but before the receiver even gets to my ear, I know there isn’t going to be a dial tone. The phone lines are still out. They probably won’t come back for days.

I’ve got to get over to his house. It’s the only way.

It’s possible to drive from my cabin to his, but I’d have to go out to the main road and circle back. And I don’t know what the dirt roads look like right now. There’s a very real chance that the truck could get stuck, blocked by a fallen tree. No, the best way to get there is on foot.

I bring my flashlight to the closet and grab my warmest coat and my waterproof boots. Under the best circumstances, it takes me ten minutes to walk to Lee’s cabin. Now that all the dirt has turned to mud, I’ll have to be more careful so as not to fall and twist my ankle. It will take at least twenty minutes, maybe longer.

And when I make it there, it could very well be too late.

When I get outside the cabin, my yard very much looks like a hurricane hit last night. Between the fallen tree and the smashed toolshed, scattered in pieces all over the grass, it does not look good. I told Rudy yesterday that the tree was unstable, and now he’s going to have to deal with it sooner rather than later. But I can’t worry about that right now. I’m just glad it didn’t destroy my truck.

The path to Lee’s cabin is through a small clearing in the woods. I start down the path, wondering if Eleanor took the same journey when she left the house about forty-five minutes ago. She cut the binding on my ankles so that I would be able to get free but didn’t give me enough time to stop whatever is going to happen. That means whatever she is going to do, she plans to do it quickly.

I’ve walked several yards into the woods when I see it: a footprint. This means I’m on the right path. This is where she went, and if I keep going, I will find her.

As I continue walking through the woods, I start to wonder if I’m making the right decision. Say I make it to Lee’s house, and by some miracle, she hasn’t yet shot him dead. Then what? She has the gun. I have no way to stop her.

I should have gotten in my truck and driven to the police station. That would have been the smart thing to do. But that would have taken forever. It’s a twenty-minute drive to the nearest police station under the best circumstances, and once I found somebody and convinced them to help me, then they would have to drive out to the cabin. That’s an hour for Eleanor to shoot my friend in the head. Or to cut off his ear and blind him.

No, this is the right thing to do. I’ve got to get over there and somehow convince that girl that she is making a mistake. After all, why would she want to kill Lee? It doesn’t make any sense to me.