enough to encounter something that couldn’t be brought down with five
shots at close range, he wouldn’t live long enough to reload, anyway.
He went to the front of the house, climbed the porch steps, and tried
the front door. It was locked.
His house key was on a bead chain, separate from the car keys. He
fished it out of his jeans and unlocked the door.
Standing outside, holding the shotgun in his right hand, he reached
cross-body with his left, inside the half-open door, fumbling for the
light switch. He expected something to rush at him from out of the
night. downstairs hallway–or to put its hand over his as he patted the
wall in search of the switch plate.
He flipped the switch, and light filled the hall, spilled over him onto
the front porch. He crossed the threshold and took a couple of steps
inside, leaving the door open behind him.
The house was quiet.
Dark rooms on both sides of the hallway. Study to his left. Living
room to his right.
He hated to turn his back on either room, but finally he moved to the
right, through the archway, the shotgun held in front of him. When he
turned on the overhead light, the expansive living room proved to be
deserted. No intruder.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Then he noticed a dark clump lying on the white fringe at the edge of
the Chinese carpet. At first glance he thought it was feces, that an
animal had gotten in the house and done its business right there. But
when he stood over it and looked closer, he saw it was only a caked wad
of damp earth.
A couple of blades of grass bristled from it.
Back in the hallway, he noticed, for the first time, smaller crumbs of
dirt littering the polished oak floor.
He ventured cautiously into the study, where there was no ceiling
fixture. The influx of light from the hallway dispelled enough shadows
to allow him to find and click on the desk lamp.
Crumbs and smears of dirt, now dry, soiled the blotter on the desk.
More of it on the red leather seat of the chair.
“What the hell?” he wondered softly.
Warily he rolled aside the mirrored doors on the study closet, but no
one was hiding in there.
In the hall he checked the foyer closet too. Nobody.
The front door was still standing open. He couldn’t decide what to do
about it. He liked it open because it offered an unobstructed exit if
he wanted to get out fast. On the other hand, if he searched the house
top to bottom and found no one in it, he would have to come back, lock
the door, and search every room again to guard against the possibility
that someone had slipped in behind his back. Reluctantly he closed it
and engaged the dead bolt.
The beige wall-to-wall carpet that was used through the upstairs also
extended down the inlaid-oak staircase, with its heavy handrail. In
the center of a few of the lower treads were crumbled chunks of dry
earth, not much, just enough to catch his eye.
He peered up at the second floor.
No. First, the downstairs.
He found nothing in the powder room, in the closet under the stairs, in
the large dining room, in the laundry room, in the service bath. But
there was dirt again in the kitchen, more than elsewhere.
His unfinished dinner of rigatoni, sausage, and butter bread was on the
table, for he’d been interrupted in mid-meal by the intrusion of the
raccoon–and by its spasmodic death. Smudges of now dry mud marked the
rim of his dinner plate. The table around the plate was littered with
pea-size lumps of dry earth, a spadeshaped brown leaf curled into a
miniature scroll, and a dead beetle the size of a penny.
The beetle was on its back, six stiff legs in the air. When he flicked
it over with one finger, he saw that its shell was iridescent
blue-green.
Two flattened wads of dirt, like dollar pancakes, were stuck to the
seat of the chair. On the oak floor around the chair was more