Page 16 of Sharp Lies

I didn’t see him, though, and I turned back toward the house and trudged on, intent on making it without tripping again. The problem was, I’d made the classic mistake of buying way too much at the market and then insisting on taking it all to the house in one trip. So I was currently carrying about ten bags full of groceries. On a path made of very loose gravel.

In shoes that definitely didn’t like uneven footing.

I ground my teeth and pressed on, my eyes on the red door and my mind on only one thing: getting there without any more mishaps.

If I was really lucky, I’d also get there without Warren looking out his window and seeing me.

I hadn’t seen him again since last night, and as far as I was concerned, that was for the best. The one time I had made eye contact with him, he’d looked like he wanted to shout at me for stepping on his lawn, and when I saw him last night...

Well, I’d seen more of him than I thought he’d probably like. Though I’d certainly enjoyed it.

I finally made it to the ramp that led up onto the patio and staggered upward, thanking the universe that I had the ramp to keep me from attempting the stairs, which would almost definitely have been too much for me. I cursed myself once again for thinking I could carry so much and then congratulated myself on not having to go back to my van.

And then I got to the patio itself and dropped all the bags in front of the door.

“Phew,” I sighed, glancing down at what I’d just dropped. I hoped the eggs were okay. Probably should have thought of that before I just dropped everything.

Oh well.

I reached out to unlock the door...

And realized that it was ajar.

Shit.

I went quickly through my memory, trying to remember the exact moment when I’d come out the door and locked it behind me, but there was nothing there. I couldn’t recall even walking through the door, much less closing and locking it, but I must have done it, right? Who just walks out the front door without closing it behind them? Who forgets to lock the door?

You know who does that? Someone who’s in a hurry to get past the house directly to her right because she’s worried that her neighbor, who she saw naked the night before, has realized that she saw him and is going to come out and say something to her about it.

That’s who.

I still didn’t think I would have left the door open, though. That was just so unlike me. Leaving it unlocked? Maybe. But completely open?

I reached down and pushed on the handle of the doorknob, testing to see whether it was locked or not, and then paused.

Wait.

First of all, it wasn’t locked, but secondly, it was one of those doorknobs that wasn’t actually a knob. Instead, it had a long handle that you grasped and pushed down on.

A handle that a dog could push down on to open the door, if that door hadn’t been locked.

Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no.

I threw the door open and strolled quickly into the house, leaving the groceries on the porch where I’d dropped them. “Silver?” I shouted, pausing to listen for the now-familiar sound of her claws scratching on the hard wood floors of my mother’s house. The dog always came running the moment I came through the door, no matter how long I’d been gone. It had always made me wonder whether she was sitting at the window watching for me to come home.

Right now, there was dead silence. No barks of excitement. No claws scrabbling on the floor.

No dog coming to greet me.

And the panic started growing in my stomach. “Silver?” I shouted, my steps growing quicker and my heart hammering behind my ribs. “Pup? Where are you, girl?”

There was no answer, and I felt my mind starting to put together the pieces, though I still walked through the house, searching every room as I came to it in the hopes that maybe she was just sleeping or something. Maybe she’d fallen so deeply asleep that she hadn’t heard me come in. Or maybe she was just being lazy about getting up and coming to see me.

It would have been the first time ever, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen, right?

I got to the kitchen and then the stairs that led up from the back of the kitchen toward the second floor and didn’t see her. So I took the stairs two at a time, racing for the upper floor and my bedroom, where I’d seen her last. I went skidding into the hallway at the top of the stairs and raced for my room, but knew immediately that she wasn’t there. The bed was still rumpled because I hadn’t made it, and Silver’s own bed was lying on the floor next to it.

Both were empty.