A Shroud for Aquarius

13

I clutched Jill’s arm and whispered: “Somebody could be in the house.”

She breathed my name back, some fear in it; I didn’t blame her.

“Just sit tight.” I whispered in her ear; hardly a sweet nothing. “Don’t make a sound.”

I slipped out of bed, my right toes touching my jockey shorts on the floor where I’d discarded them in a considerably more carefree moment. I bent down, found them with my hand, climbed into them, bumping against the chest of drawers as I did. The sound of it was like bumping unwittingly into the car behind you as you parked, but louder. The silence that followed was louder still.

I felt better with my shorts on — I didn’t particularly relish being naked while confronting a midnight intruder — but not that much better. The burglar alarm system I’d inherited covered most of the doors and many of the windows in the house, so I had no real sense of where this possible intruder might have entered. There had been a rash of house break-ins this summer; kids with no jobs looking for loose change and/or kicks. That’s probably all this was.

But at the very least a door or a window had been breached. The alarm system had, as I’d told Jill earlier, been disconnected as far as alerting the local cops was concerned and I rarely, almost never, switched the key in the control panel to turn on the loud, neighborhood-rousing alarm that went with the system; that left only the various tiny glowing green lights on walls about the house to provide a constant source of security, telling me my doors and windows were secure.

Or not.

I was in the little connecting nook between my bedroom, study, bathroom, and dining room, the carpet beneath my bare feet helping keep my footsteps down to a minimal squeak. I paused, listening.

I heard nothing.

I edged carefully toward the open door to my study. Listened. Heard nothing. Just my heart pounding.

I moved into the dining room; there was a little light coming from the dining room windows and filtering through sheer curtains: street light, moonlight, not much, enough to help me and my memory maneuver around chairs, tables and such.

Soon I was in my small kitchen, a little hallway with appliances, the linoleum cold on my soles. Cold on my soul, too. The lingering smell of that Italian sauce I was so proud of now made my stomach turn; why nausea accompanied fear was a puzzle to me — I’d noticed it first in Vietnam, but had never got used to it.

I took tentative steps, because walking made more noise in here; no getting around it. I’d pause between steps, listening, stepping sideways, my back to the stove and dishwasher, brushing their cold metal, so that should anyone enter via the door at either side of the small kitchen, I’d not provide that someone with my back. Also, that allowed me to face the doorway to the basement (here in the kitchen), several windows of which were among those wired to the alarm system, meaning an intruder could be coming up via the basement steps. I crossed to the basement door as silently as I could, shut it as silently as I could, bolted it as silently as I could, which in the latter case meant making the following noise: THUK! which seemed to echo through the house.

I moved back against the appliances, trembling, waiting, listening.

Nothing.

I began wondering if the alarm system had shut down for some maintenance reason; but every little green light in the system — there were half a dozen of them — couldn’t burn out simultaneously. If such were the case, I’d be sure to call Ripley tomorrow. Still, there could be some other bug in the system. Could any intruder be this quiet?