Page 266 of The Professor's Wife

His car was here, but the house was dead. That made no sense. I moved to the next window.

It was the kitchen. Clean counters. Copper pots hanging. A knife block. A glass on the counter, turned upside down on a folded cloth. Empty.

I looked toward the car again.

The driver’s door was shut. The windows black. But there was mud smeared along the lower edge of the door, fresh and dark enough to shine. One of the tires had dragged wet earth onto the gravel, but it wasn’t much.

There were footprints too. A few heavy impressions near the car. One set leading toward the cabin steps. Another set leading away from them and toward the side of the property.

Toward the trees.

My skin prickled.

I stared into the bush.

There was a broken branch and a dark path through the wet grass where someone had pushed through recently.

Rationalize this.

Perhaps Oliver had gone for a walk. In the night. In the woods. Fucking hell, maybe the guy liked creeping around his property at night like a lunatic. Though I knew my presence was more fucked up.

It could have been that there was a perfectly normal reason his car was parked outside a dark cabin while a trail of fresh prints led into the woods. In another setting, this would have been amusing. I wasn’t fucking amused

I stayed still, listening.

Somewhere deeper in the bush, something shifted. A branch settling. An animal. The wind. I didn’t know.

My hand found the knife in my pocket again.

I moved around the back of the property, slower now, every step careful. The back opened wider than the front. There was a woodshed and a gravel path. I passed a stack of cut logs under a tarp and a small generator. A locked storage box next. Everything was in perfect order and well-maintained.

Everything was pristine and perfect. Except beyond the storage box, it was not. The grass there had been pressed down in a narrow line. Leaves clung wetly to the earth. A smear of dark soil marked one of the flat stones near the path, like a boot had come down too hard and twisted.

I stared at it, trying to make it mean something, but it didn’t.

Then I saw the other shed.

Not the woodshed.

This one sat farther out, near the tree line, almost swallowed by shadow. Smaller. Dilapidated. As I slowly approached, I noticed the door had been reinforced with a newer lock, the metal shining faintly when the moon moved out from behind acloud. I found that strange. To have a nice fucking lock on such an ugly-looking shed.

The grass was longer here, wet against my shoes. A moth battered itself against the side of the shed, wingstapping, tapping,tappinglike a tiny, frantic knock.

The lock was heavy but not latched properly, like it’d been left in a hurry. My pulse lurched. A voice in the back of my head told me to stop, turn back, and don’t return. But I touched the metal and pushed instead. The door opened with a soft groan.

The smell hit me first.

Stale air. Old paper. Damp wood. Kerosene. Something sour beneath it all. I stepped inside, and instantly, this felt wrong.

The darkness was almost complete, but moonlight leaked through gaps in the boards. Thin stripes of light fell across the floor. Across a small mattress. Across a chair positioned in front of the mattress.

Something clinked beneath my shoe.

I looked down, and my body went still.

No thought came.

For a few seconds, I was nothing but eyes.