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Regardless, you continue the journey. You are now our vehicle, a better vehicle. I know you will not fail us.”

Chapter Four
    Lori Reedan smiled as she threw open her front door, expecting to find Linda Bell. Instead, a squat, gray-haired man with a white walrus mustache squinted at her through purple-tinted glasses.
    “Mrs. Reedan, I’ve got a message about your husband,” he said in accented English, as he shoved his light-blue shirt into rumpled navy pants, his enormous stomach protruding over his belt.
    “Curt isn’t here. He’s on a business trip.” Nothing new there, she thought. Either away on business or isolated in his office, parked behind his computer. “I handle his business when he’s gone.” Curt’s SOP to her: he made her vice-president of their company.
    “I’ve got a message about him, not for him,” he growled as he flipped off his glasses revealing watery blue eyes perched above purple pouches as wrinkled as his shirt. He scanned her bare legs.
    Suddenly conscious of her brief shorts, she pushed the door forward and shuffled the lower half of her body behind it. “What do you mean, about him? Is something wrong?”
    “Is Daddy home?” Beth suddenly squealed from behind Lori. In her pajamas, she danced merrily on tiptoes at the top of the steps that led down into the foyer.
    “Beth, please get back to bed,” Lori said, thinking again how good it would be to get her into kindergarten in the fall. Every day it got harder to get her to take a nap.
    When Lori turned back to the man, he had the screen door open. She grabbed the door to slam it in his face, but she couldn’t budge his massive bulk. “You can’t come in here!”
    He shoved her backward with the door, the soles of her leather sandals sliding on the slate floor.
    “Mommy? What’s the man doing?”
    “Just take it easy, lady, and everything will be okay.”
    Head down, she leaned her weight against the door, her gaze falling on the chain lock Curt kept after her to use. She remembered the paper last week, where some guy on the other side of town came to this woman’s door, forced his way into her house, and raped her. But that was three-thirty in the morning, not in the middle of the day.
    “Mommy! Mommy!”
    His steel-gray head now protruded into the house, his puffed cheeks and thick gray mustache less than a foot away from her face. Sweat beaded his forehead.
    She strained against the door, but her feet glided backward. When she skipped forward to keep from falling, his momentum caught her mid-stride and shoved her farther back, the door now open wide enough for him to squeeze in. He grabbed her arms with damp hands, twisted her right hand from the doorknob and kicked the door shut. He jerked her toward him, his unbuttoned shirt flapping open to reveal a thick mat of gray chest hair, the air between them now filled with the odor of sweat—no deodorant. Up close, his body heat enveloped her as though she had just stepped outside; his breath reeked of liquor and onions.
    Lori started to scream and remembered Beth, who stood at the top of the stairs, eyes wide open. Can’t scare Beth, she thought, got to protect her from this madman. She flung herself backwards, but her arms were pinned as if in a strait jacket. She remembered the gun Dad wanted to give her ever since she left home.
    Standing next to him, she realized he was short, about her height. His bulk dominated. She skipped forward and aimed a knee at his groin. “Get out of here, or I’ll call the police.”
    With a twitch of his huge waist, he bowed slightly, causing her knee to barely graze his thigh. Reestablishing his grip, he held her at arm’s length, a leering smile on his lips.
    “No police, lady.” He grabbed her shoulders and spun her around so she faced Beth at the top of the steps. Beth stared down, mouth open.
    “Just get the hell up them steps, lady.”
    Lori twisted and squirmed in his grip, then threw her body to the floor, wrenching her