Chapter Fourteen

SHAUNA SWUNG THE gun toward the other intruder. He dropped his pistol and cowered.

“Oh Jesus, no! Please! Please! Please no!”

“Who the hell are you people?” Shauna snarled. Her own voice sounded completely unfamiliar to her, as if someone had entered her body and was moving her mouth like a puppet. “What do you want?”

“Oh God, don’t kill me,” said the one named Poon. He was sobbing openly now, his head on a swivel between his partner’s crumpled body and the gun pointed at his face. “I don’t wanna die. I don’t wanna—”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Peter Sallers. People call me Poon. And that was—she was—Oh Jesus! She’s dead!”

“What are you doing here?”

“We were just trying to—”

The doorbell rang. Shauna was caught off guard by the cheerful melody bellowing out from the hall. When she looked back, Poon was gone. She heard the window in the en suite bathroom grind open, and then silence.

Shaking from head to foot, Shauna put the gun on the bed and took her fluffy robe from the hook on the door. She wrapped it around herself and looked in the mirror. Blood was running from her nose and mouth. She had to step over the body of the woman whose name she had never learned, as she went to the en suite to get a hand towel. The doorbell rang once again, and then the knocking began. Shauna stepped in a chunk of something warm and wet as she crossed over the body again—a piece of brain, or face, or who-knew-what—as she made for the front door.

She put her hand on the knob, seeing the familiar outlines of her young neighbors Kylie and Don on the other side of the frosted glass. It was as she stood there preparing to let the tears and sobs of horror take control of her body, to finally release the death grip that adrenaline had on her soul, that she realized something else was taking the place of survival mode. It was a white-hot rage. The voice pounding in her brain wasn’t her own cries of mortification. Instead, her son’s voice rang there in the gaping darkness.

The old woman will be dead in three years.

Shauna pulled the door open a crack, standing back so that her bloody feet weren’t visible. That voice still pounded in her head.

We’ll stuff her in a home.

“Oh my God, Mrs. Bulger, are you OK?” Kylie was hugging a big fluffy pink jacket around her small shoulders, her hulking husband shivering in a T-shirt and boxers. “We heard a massive bang! What happened?”

“A bang?” Shauna murmured. She held a hand up against the moonlight. “Oh. Uh.”

She looked behind her, at her own bloody footprints on the floorboards. She thought of the blood in the bedroom running down the walls in rivulets, spattered on the ceiling. She saw herself sitting wrapped in a blanket in some blaringly lit hospital, having her vitals taken “just in case,” Henry murmuring to his girlfriend that it was clear now his mother couldn’t handle herself, shouldn’t be left alone. She’d overreacted. Panicked. Killed someone. She couldn’t be trusted with guns, knives, flames, her own credit card. She needed to be stuffed somewhere immediately. Had she slept in her own bed for the last time, made her last adult decision, without even knowing it?

She looked at her big-eyed neighbors and made a decision, because she still could.

“Mark’s car,” Shauna said, straightening. “I was lying awake thinking about it. You know, I’m having trouble sleeping, since he’s been gone. You, uh, you have to run the Corvette every now and then, just turn the engine over, keep everything lubricated. It hasn’t been run since he died, so I decided to switch it on. I guess it must have backfired.”

“You guess it must have?” Don grinned, threw Kylie a look. “Damn, the sound of it shook our house.”

“Oh well, you know, my hearing’s not great these days, and I was inside the car.” Shauna gave a thin smile. “I thought I heard something, now that I recall.”

“But everything’s OK?” Kylie’s eyes were huge and earnest, the girl desperate to help in some way, probably so she could report what a good person she was to her thousands of friends on social media. “Do you need us to come in and sit with you? Can we make you a cup of tea or something?”

“I can make my own tea, thank you,” Shauna said. “Sorry to have made a racket.”

She shut the door. The words had given her a giddy feeling, a kind of lightness, like all of this wasn’t real, like she was reading lines for a play. She went back to the bedroom and looked at the headless body on the floor. Then she went to the laundry and pulled out a bucket and mop.