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crucifix, a vase …
    Carson fell back to sleep listening to the catalog. But Nessa remained awake, staring at the ceiling. Her house in White Plains was on a quiet cul-de-sac, where the only noise she heard was the occasional bark of the golden retriever next door. But here in the Stitchery, the night seemed full of sound and menace. She heard the jungle of the streets—cars blaring heavy bass, people shouting to one another down cramped alleys, a baby crying, crying, left to cry. And she heard the house itself creaking, rumbling like the belly of a great beast with her trapped inside.
    “Carson?” she whispered. “Are you still awake?”
    He didn’t answer. She knew he wouldn’t.
    There was something about the Stitchery that she did not trust. It seemed redundant in the darkness of the bedroom to close her eyes.
    * * *
    That night, hours later, Aubrey was startled out of a deep sleep, which was unusual. Thumps in the night never woke her. The hedgehog liked to rearrange his cage or run on his wheel at all hours, but she’d stopped hearing him years ago. Words spoken by strangers came in so clear and crisp that the speaker might have been sitting on the dimpled brown chaise in her bedroom instead of chatting on the sidewalk below.
You’d sleep through an earthquake
, Mariah had said with a glint of admiration in her eye.
    But tonight, something wasn’t right. A noise, a thump. Aubrey woke and didn’t move. She strained to listen.
What is that?
Nessa getting a glass of water? Carson losing his way? The noises—a small shuffling, irregular thuds—were too self-conscious to be innocent: the sounds of someone trying not to make sounds.
    For a moment, she thought:
This isn’t real
. And yet she knew better.
    The neighborhood of Tappan Square was full of good people—working parents, mothers who pushed their groceries home in shopping carts, men who sprawled in lawn chairs on the sidewalk, smoking cigars. But along with all the good people, there were people to be afraid of. Somebody’s son gone haywire. Somebody who needed the money. Somebody’s friend’s friends.
    The Stitchery had always been a hot mark for hopeful thieves; the rumors of treasure were a temptation to crooks big-time and small. But the same gossip that lured curious delinquents to the Stitchery also acted as a force field to turn them away. The last time the Stitchery had been robbed was in the early seventies, when a few stoned hippies snuck into the empty house and took only what they could carry in theirmacramé sacks. Shortly after the theft, which had left Mariah shaken but not cowed, the thieves had been found outside of Jersey City, floating on a powerboat-turned-ghost-ship down the Hudson, naked, blue, and dead, with their haul from the Stitchery spread out around them. Officially, the police said they’d overdosed. Unofficially, Tarrytown believed the devil had driven them mad. The rumors had been enough to keep most of Tarrytown’s crooks at bay.
    But now the neighborhood was changing, more each day. New people from all over the world flowed in and out like a tide, and they had increasingly little patience for the superstitions of old Tappan Square. Aubrey had talked about getting an alarm system installed, but Mariah had scoffed:
Whatever for?
She believed firmly that the Stitchery protected itself. Of course, she also believed that three starlings on the grass meant good luck and that there was no vegetable that couldn’t be improved by a good long pickling. Now, with the shuffling and thumping getting louder, Aubrey wished she’d been more insistent about the alarm system. If the Stitchery was robbed tonight, her sister and children would never return.
    She threw off the covers. She had no weapon, so she grabbed a metal knitting needle from her bedside, a size eight—just big enough to be firm, thin enough to be sharpish.
    At the door at the end of the hall, she could hear noises. Someone was definitely inside. Shuffling.