The blade rammed through the groceries, puncturing a carton of milk.
Frye roared in fury.
The dripping bag was knocked out of Hilary’s grasp. It fell to the floor, spilling milk and eggs and scallions and sticks of butter.
The knife had been torn from the dead man’s hand. He stopped to retrieve it.
Hilary ran toward the stairs. She knew that she had only delayed the inevitable. She had gained two or three seconds, no more than that, not nearly enough time to save herself.
The doorbell rang.
Surprised, she stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked back.
Frye stood up with the knife in hand.
Their eyes met; Hilary could see a flicker of indecision in his.
Frye moved toward her, but with less confidence than he had exhibited before. He glanced nervously toward the foyer and the front door.
The bell rang again.
Holding on to the bannister, backing up the steps, Hilary yelled for help, screamed at the top of her voice.
Outside, a man shouted: “Police!”
It was Tony.
“Police! Open this door!”
Hilary couldn’t imagine why he had come. She had never been so glad to hear anyone’s voice as she was to hear his, now.
Frye stopped when he heard the word “police,” looked up at Hilary, then at the door, then at her again, calculating his chances.
She kept screaming.
Glass exploded with a bang that caused Frye to jump in surprise, and sharp pieces rang discordantly on a tile floor. Although she couldn’t see into the foyer from her position on the steps, Hilary knew that Tony had smashed the narrow window beside the front door.
“Police!”
Frye glared at her. She had never seen such hatred as that which twisted his face and gave his eyes a mad shine.
“Hilary!” Tony said.
“I’ll be back,” Frye told her.
The dead man turned away from her and ran across the living room, toward the dining room, apparently intending to slip out of the house by way of the kitchen.
Sobbing, Hilary dashed down the few steps she had climbed. She rushed to the front door, where Tony was calling her through the small broken windowpane.
***
Holstering his service revolver, Tony returned from the rear lawn, stepped into the brightly-lit kitchen.
Hilary was standing by the utility island in the center of the room. There was a knife on the counter, inches from her right hand.
As he closed the door he said, “There’s no one in the rose garden.”
“Lock it,” she said.
“What?”
“The door. Lock it.”
He locked it.
“You looked everywhere?” she asked.
“Every corner.”
“Along both sides of the house?”
“Yes.”
“In the shrubbery?”
“Every bush.”
“Now what?” she asked.
“I’ll call in to HQ, get a couple of uniforms out here to write up a report.”
“It won’t do any good,” she said.
“You never can tell. A neighbor might have seen someone lurking here earlier. Or maybe somebody spotted him running away.”
“Does a dead man have to run away? Can’t a ghost just vanish when it wants to?”
“You don’t believe in ghosts?”
“Maybe he wasn’t a ghost,” she said. “Maybe he was a walking corpse. Just your ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill walking corpse.”
“You don’t believe in zombies, either.”
“Don’t I?”
“You’re too level-headed for that.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t know what I believe any more.”
Her voice contained a tremor that disturbed him. She was on the verge of a collapse.
“Hilary … are you sure of what you saw?”
“It was him.”
“But how could it be?”
“It was Frye,” she insisted.
“You saw him in the morgue last Thursday.”
“Was he dead then?”
“Of course he was dead.”
“Who said?”
“The doctors. Pathologists.”
“Doctors have been known to be wrong.”
“About whether or not a person is dead?”
“You read about it in the papers every once in a while,” she said. “They decide a man has kicked the bucket; they sign the death certificate; and then the deceased suddenly sits up on the undertaker’s table. It happens. Not often. I admit it’s not an everyday occurrence. I know it’s pretty much a one in a million kind of thing.”