The banging started at 5:12 in the morning, and it was not the sound of a neighbor needing sugar or a delivery truck backing up wrong. It was fists, hard and flat, hitting the storm door of my little rented house on Route 9 outside Hazel Creek, Tennessee, and it did not stop between knocks the way a person’s knock stops. It just kept coming.
I came up out of sleep already afraid, the way you learn to be afraid when you have raised a child alone for fourteen years and every strange sound at that hour means something has gone wrong with her. I grabbed my robe off the chair and my hands would not work the belt right. Through the front window, past the gap in the curtain, I saw the shape of two people on my porch, and the shape was wrong. Too broad at the shoulder. Too much dark fabric. Then the porch light caught the badge on the taller one’s chest and the strap of the holster on his hip, and my knees nearly went.
Two sheriff’s deputies. On my porch. At dawn.
“Isabeau Fenimore?” the older one said when I got the door cracked, chain still on.
“Yes.” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.
“Is your daughter, Marceline, here with you?”
I felt her before I heard her. She had come up behind me in her socks, still in the t-shirt she’d slept in, and her hand found the back of my robe and gripped it the way she used to grip my finger when she was two years old and the world got too loud. My heart did not just sink. It dropped clean through the floor.
“She’s here,” I said. “What is this about?”
The younger deputy looked past me at Marceline, and something in his face was not unkind, but it was serious in a way that made my mouth go dry.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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