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though Holly could not tell if it came from within or without. She hurried into her bedroom, discarded the damp towel on the bed, and put on a nightgown, robe, and slippers. The banging grew frequent and insistent. What is that boy up to? she thought, and hurried down the stairs.
    Perched on the couch where she had left him, an afghan wrapped around his legs, Jack now watched a nature program on public television. “Where is your father?” she demanded, but he had slipped into a TV coma and would not be distracted from the show. A brown bear lumbered across the screen. She stood in the middle of the room, alert to the possibilities.
    The next blow made her jump. It seemed to have come from the northeast corner of the house, but as she turned, the hammering began, a rapid-fire staccato that traveled the length of the waterfront wall. She raced to a window but could see nothing in the darkness. The southern wall came under attack, a rain of cannonballs against the siding.
    “What the hell is going on?”
    Curled beneath his blankets, Jack stared at the screen and smiled, as though he had not heard anything.
    Her overcoat hung on a hook by the front door, and Holly struggled to fit her robed arms into the sleeves. “Stay inside,” she said to Jack, catching the irony of her admonition as she stepped over the threshold.
    The air on her bare legs and wet hair chilled her quickly and crept up through her slippers and gripped the soles of her feet. Almost immediately she regretted her decision to leave the house. Tim should be out here in the cold, protecting them, looking for burglars or whatever strange thing was attacking their home. Where is that man? Where was that Father Bolden to protect her with his faith? She murmured a prayer from her childhood as she skirted the perimeter, creeping in darkness, listening for the whistle of cannon fire, watching for the madman with a maul, and shaking with anticipation. The thought of confrontation alarmed her. She had no weapon, not even a baseball bat, and she must have been a fearsome sight in her overcoat and slippers. Perhaps her attacker would perish with laughter. Windblown clouds passed between the moon and the landscape, creating patches of light and shadow on the beach and against the house. In the intermittent exposure, Holly inspected the siding for damage, but the blows had not so much as scratched a shingle. Where she had expected gaping holes with splintered edges, there was nothing. In the quiet of the night, the ocean, to which she had been long accustomed, fell and rose like a child’s respiration.
    Baby’s breath. When Jack was a baby, Holly used to hold him against her chest and sit out on the deck summer afternoons until she and the child breathed in rhythm to the tide. That first magical year when she could not get enough of him, before they fully suspected there was something wrong, before all the doctors, before all the talk of personality disorders. He was simply a baby. Asleep, he would leave a warm slick of perspiration against her skin, wet as a seal, face muzzled against her breast, his tiny fists working toward his mouth. Her baby. She missed him, wanted him to be outside with her, an infant in her arms or the toddler who held one of her fingers in the vise of his fist. Just as she looked for him in the windows, light pouring into the night, a shadow crossed the rectangle of glass and then a second shadow in pursuit. Jack was waving his hands above his head as though trying to scare away someone inside with him. Someone, she thought, that had been banging against the side of the house trying to get in. A man, a murderer, a monster.
    Rays of panic pierced her, and she scrambled through the pillowy sand, desperate to reach him. A hand reached out and grabbed her as she turned the corner, the monstrous thing that had been pounding to enter the house, but turning in the half-light, Holly realized it was only the sleeve of her coat snagged on the cyclone