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body shaking all over, broken out in gooseflesh from her neck to her heels. She wanted out of there. She wanted out of there in the worst way, and she made a promise to herself that first thing in the morning, she would be.
    Slightly calmed by this resolution, Elizabeth turned to retreat up the stairs but stopped.
    She was looking over Jared’s shoulder, past him, through the screen door, through the storm door he had left slightly ajar.
    Jared had stopped too. Frozen, in fact.
    Over his shoulder, past him, she stared. Her body went numb, her tongue dead in her mouth; she was unable to speak, unable to scream.
    Something moved on the porch, a humped shadow, from right to left across the doorway. Then it moved back in the other direction, a pale blur of movement, a silhouette in the porch light.
    She found her voice, a good voice, a good and powerful singing voice, a helluva set of pipes her father had told her more than once, and Elizabeth screamed, and screamed loudly.

CHAPTER FIVE
    By two o’clock in the morning, the rain was turning to snow. It was mid-March, and snow was still a grim possibility at this time of year. Tom Milliner still sat in his living room, watching with a certain displeasure as the large, white flakes fell outside.
    He hadn’t changed out of his soaking wet clothes; only his boots and jacket had been removed. The red-checked jacket, which had been drenched with the rain, dripped on one of the mudroom hooks where it had been hung an hour earlier.
    Tom’s house in the Acres was a modest two-bedroom. He’d bought it four years before for ninety-five thousand. The Acres, altogether, had been bought up nearly a century earlier and had been long since sub-divided. There were over a hundred lots. Tom’s, a sizeable three acres, was right smack in the middle. It was one of only a few vinyl-sided homes among the subdivision, built as a chalet. A narrow living room bordered two small bedrooms, next to a kitchen, above which was a loft. There was no lake to overlook, no river burbling past, but it was all he needed, tucked away amid the slender pines.
    The young man walked through the kitchen and into the living room and smiled softly at Tom. It was strange, having him there. No one else had been in the house since Stephanie, not for two years. Tom had no children — Steph had a son, a sixteen-year-old named Brian who had claimed the loft while he’d been there. To have Christopher in the house caused a stirring in Tom’s stomach, a queasy, nostalgic feeling. He smiled back at the young man and suggested that he sit down.
    Christopher sat on the couch which faced the picture window. There was no television in the living room. Tom didn’t own one.
    Christopher and Tom looked out the window. The large snowflakes spiraled lazily down.
    “Thanks for letting me stay. It’s unusual for a policeman, isn’t it?”
    “You want anything?”
    “No, I’m fine, thank you,” said Christopher. His voice was low, quiet, mindful of the late hour, perhaps.
    Tom opened his mouth, then closed it. He seemed to be having a hard time getting his thoughts together. It’s all the evasive maneuvering , Steph would have told him. You aren’t built for it.
    Tom had left on an exterior light, and it illuminated the snow.
    “It’s beautiful,” Christopher said.
    Tom looked out and nodded. “I didn’t always live here alone.”
    “Were you drinking then?”
    Tom turned his gaze from the window and studied the kid. Christopher was looking right back at him. His eyes, Tom saw, were green. He realized it was the first time Tom had really seen the kid in the light.
    Tom was aware that the question had triggered his defenses, but the kid’s face — something about the look in his eyes — was soothing. Tom looked back out the window, surprised at himself, critical of himself. Worried that he’d just been so easily triggered, and by someone barely half his age. He felt like a man realizing the chickens have come home to