Page 7 of Dread

I set my coffee mug on the counter. The ceramic made a soft click against the laminate.

“You can go out if you want.”

She turned. Not fast -- slow, deliberate, her gaze finding mine with the sharp focus she reserved for moments when the world offered something too good to trust. Checking. Always checking. Her chin lifted a fraction, the question forming without words.

I nodded. “Get dressed first.” She disappeared into the bedroom and came back ninety seconds later in shorts and a T-shirt.

Soon she was at the door, fumbling with the lock, her small fingers working the latch with a concentration that made my throat tight. The door slid open. Morning air rushed in, warm and carrying the smell of cut grass, and Ellie stepped onto the concrete stoop in her bare feet and stood there for one suspended second, poised between the threshold and the yard, between the world I’d built for her and the one waiting beyond the glass.

Then she was running.

I followed her out. Not running -- walking, one hand on the doorframe, the other wrapped around my coffee mug. The concrete stoop was warm under my bare feet, still holding yesterday’s heat, and I planted myself there with my shoulders against the siding and watched Ellie cross the narrow strip of grass between the townhome and the yard.

In unfamiliar territory she always moved slowly, measured, each step placed with the care of someone testing ice. The three children had noticed her. The girl with braids looked up from whatever she was holding, and one of the boys stopped mid-run and turned. Ellie halted ten feet from them, hands at her sides, and waited.

I held my breath. Didn’t call out. Didn’t wave her forward or back. Just watched, coffee cooling between my palms, while the yard held its collective breath with me.

The girl with braids stood up. Said something I couldn’t hear. Ellie’s shoulders dropped a fraction. Then the girl extended her cupped hands, and Ellie stepped forward to look, and just like that, the distance between them collapsed into nothing.

I exhaled. My coffee had gone lukewarm.

The woman came down the lane from the direction of the clubhouse while I was still standing there. She carried a covered dish in both hands, a dish towel draped over the top, and her dark hair was pinned back in a loose twist that had started coming undone at the temples. No makeup. No jewelry except a thin silver chain at her throat. She walked like someone who knew exactly where she was going and had all the time in the world to get there.

“Morning,” she said, and set the dish on the porch rail beside me before I could protest, close enough that the warmth reached me anyway. The smell hit me a second later -- butter, flour, something sweet underneath. Biscuits. Still warm from the oven.

“I’m Kitty.” No hand extended. No expectation of a handshake. She just leaned against the porch railing and crossed her arms, settling onto one hip like she’d carved that notch in the wood herself and was happy to occupy it. “Fox mentioned you’d arrived. Said your girl’s name is Ellie.”

I nodded. “Katy.”

“Hot one today.” She tipped her face toward the sky, squinting. “Supposed to hit ninety-five by noon. Garden’s going to need watering twice.” She glanced toward the clubhouse. “I help out around here sometimes. Been friends with some of these idiots for years.”

I glanced at her. “You’re not…”

“With one of them?” She laughed. “God, no. Although I had a thing for Knox once upon a time. Thankfully, I recovered.”

Something about the way she said it made me smile.

“Anyway, Fox mentioned you and Ellie were here, and I figured you could use breakfast.”

I blinked. The words had arrived in a single breath, effortless. Information released with an ease I didn’t ever remember having.

“Dog keeps digging under the east fence,” she continued. “Somebody’s lab mix. My money’s on one of the Prospects’ boys, though the kid swears it’s not him. Dog’s smart, I’ll give him that. Dug the hole where the cameras don’t quite reach. Little bastard.”

A laugh escaped me before I could catch it. Small, startled, more breath than sound. Kitty’s mouth curved at one corner, pleased. I’d not met the Prospects, but I’d caught bits and pieces of conversations from people passing the townhouse that led me to believe they had some new ones.

Other women appeared throughout the morning. Not all at once -- they drifted over in ones and twos, materializing from doorways and porch steps with the unhurried certainty of people who had nowhere more pressing to be. A plate of sliced melon appeared on the stoop beside my coffee mug. A folding chair materialized from somewhere -- metal frame, nylon webbing, the sort you take to soccer games -- and was unfolded and positioned in the narrow strip of shade beside the townhome’s front window.

Names were exchanged. I caught some, lost others. A woman with a long blond braid -- Lavinia, I’d caught that one -- brought a thermos of iced tea and poured it into paper cups without asking if anyone wanted any. Another -- older, gray at the temples, her forearms mapped with faded tattoos -- sat on the top step of my stoop and talked about the communal garden behind the clubhouse, the raised beds, the herbs that had taken over the south corner and refused to be contained. She introduced herself as Katherine -- fifties, unhurried, no patch on her back and no kids underfoot, just a friend of Faith’s who sometimes wandered over because the iced tea was free and the company was better than her own porch.

A younger woman crossed over from the direction of the garages not long after, hair so pale blond it read almost silver in the morning light, her eyes a clear, pale blue that found mine and held a beat longer than was strictly necessary before she smiled. She couldn’t have been much past her mid-twenties -- younger than the other women by a decade at least. She introduced herself with the faint, careful precision of someone who’d learned English as a second language and still weighed each word before spending it, the accent softening her consonants at the edges. “Vasha,” she said. “Slider’s wife.” She offered it plainly, no more ceremony than the others had offered their coffee orders, like the fact needed no further comment. “My daughters are somewhere in all this. Anya, she is nine and thinks she is in charge of everyone. Amara is two and agrees with no one.” She said it with the specific fondness of a woman who found her own life a little bit funny.

Faith turned up not long after, a toddler riding her hip with the ease of long practice, one small fist buried in her mother’s hair, a teenager trailing a few steps behind with the specific boredom of someone doing a favor she hadn’t volunteered for. Faith didn’t offer a hand -- both of hers were full -- just tipped her chin in greeting. “Faith,” she said. “This one’s Thorn.” Thorn did not say hi. Thorn had already spotted the rocks scattered in the grass near Ellie’s feet and was straining sideways against her mother’s grip with the single-minded conviction of someone who’d located the only interesting object within a hundred yards. Faith set her down with a small laugh and let her go.

“That’s Piper,” Faith added, nodding back at the teenager, who lifted two fingers in a wave that cost her nothing and didn’t look up from her phone. “Eighteen going on exhausted. She was supposed to be watching Thorn. Somehow, I still ended up carrying her the whole way over.”

“I was watching her,” Piper said, without looking up. “She’s fine. She’s always fine, right up until she isn’t.”

Thorn made straight for the rocks on unsteady legs, dropped into the grass beside Ellie without invitation, and closed both hands around the smoothest one like it might make a break for it.