the shadow of the pulled that hung from the ceiling trap. It was
directly over the hood. He swatted the dangling cord, but the mark on
the car didn’t leap and dance as it would have done if it had been just
the cord shadow.
Leaning over the grille, he touched the smooth sheet metal and felt the
depression, shallow but as big as his hand. He sighed heavily. The car
was still new, and already it needed a session in the body shop.
Take a brand new car to the mall, and an hour after it’s out of the
showroom, some damn fool would park beside it and slam open his door
into yours. It never failed.
He hadn’t noticed the dent either when he had come home this afternoon
from the gun shop or when he’d brought Regina back from school.
Maybe it wasn’t as visible from inside the car, behind the steering
wheel; maybe you had to be out in front, looking at it from the right
angle. It sure seemed big enough to be seen from anywhere.
He was trying to figure how it could have happened-somebody must have
been passing by and dropped something on the car-when he saw the
footprint. It was in a gossamer coating of beige dust on the red paint,
the sole and part of the heel of a walking shoe probably not much
different from the ones he was wearing. Someone had stood on or walked
across the hood of the Mitsubishi.
It must have happened outside St. Thomas’s School, because it was the
kind of thing a kid might do, showing off to friends. Having allowed
too much time for bad traffic, Hatch had arrived at St. Tom’s twenty
minutes before classes let out. Rather than wait in the car, he’d gone
for a walk to work off some excess nervous energy. Probably, some
wise-ass and his buddies from the adjacent high school-the footprint was
too big to belong to a smaller kid-sneaked out a little ahead of the
final bell, and were showing off for each other as they raced away from
the school, maybe leaping and clambering over obstacles instead of going
around them, as if they’d escaped from a prison with the bloodhounds
close on Their “Hatch?”
Startled out of his train of thought just when it to be leading
somewhere, he spun around toward the voice as if it did not sound
familiar to him, which of course it did.
Lindsey stood in the doorway between the garage and kitchen. She looked
at the gun in his hand, met his eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“I “Thought I heard something.”
“And?”
“Nothing.” She had startled him so much that he had forgotten the
footprint and dent on the car hood. As he followed her into the
kitchen, he said, “This door was open. I locked it earlier.”
“Oh, Regina left one of her books in the car when she came home from
school. She went out just before dinner to get it.”
“You should have made sure she locked up.”
“It’s only the door to the garage,” Lindsey said, heading toward the
dining room.
He put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, turned her around. “It’s a
point of vulnerability,” he said with perhaps more anxiety than such a
minor breach of security warranted.
“Aren’t the outer garage doors locked?”
“Yes, and this one should be locked, too.”
“But as many times as we go back and forth from the kitchen”-they had a
second refrigerator in the garage it’s just convenient to leave the door
unlocked. We’ve always left it unlocked.”
“We don’t any more,” he said finmly.
They were face-to-face, and she studied him worriedly. He knew she
thought he was walking a fine line between prudent precautions and a
sort of quiet hysteria, even treading the wrong way over that line
sometimes.
On the other hand, she hadn’t had the benefit of his nightmares and
visions.
Perhaps the same thought crossed Lindsey’s mind, for she nodded and
said, “Okay. I’m sorry. You’re right.”
He leaned back into the garage and turned off the lights. He closed the
door, engaged the deadbolt-and felt no safer, really.