Stranger in the Room

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  I grabbed onto the deck railing, closing my eyes against pelting rain, pulled myself up. The screen door was latched. I punched out the mesh and reached in, lifted the hook from the eye, then pushed open the wooden door. The wind roared. And I knew the pressure had shifted too. He’d know a door had opened somewhere in the house. I left it open, hoping he’d blame the storm. Maybe he’d come to check it out.

  I stopped, listened. No crying. No raging. No sounds to support the sickening scene I’d witnessed through the window. Richards’s fucked-up birthday party, with its little plates and napkins and cone-shaped caps with elastic bands and cake, was silent now.

  I kicked off wet shoes and pushed them under the bed, waited, shivering, behind the bedroom door. I’d started to consider the odds. Richards was a big guy. I couldn’t handle him physically. He’d have his 9mm and Officer Jacobs’s service weapon too. I closed my eyes, breathed out some tension, waited.

  Five seconds, ten, fifteen. Not a sound.

  I came around the door and started down the hallway, sidestepping an old floor register on creaking 1950s hardwood floors. My clothes were heavy and dripping wet. I looked into the guest room where Miki had been propped up in bed. The covers were half off the bed. She’d been dragged out. I peeled off the soaking APD windbreaker and kept moving, Glock steadied.

  I leaned around the doorway to the living room and took a quick look. Jacobs’s handheld scanner was on the floor, smashed into pieces near the front door. The scanner had squawked and annoyed Richards. Or frightened him. Police dispatch would have tried to contact Jacobs as soon as Rauser received my call. Richards had probably run into the living room on hearing it. I imagined him crushing it under the heel of his big shoes, raging around Rauser’s house. Miki must have been frightened to her core.

  I turned the corner into the living room, first right, then left. Nothing.

  I moved down a long wall toward a wide archway, part of the house Rauser had renovated, the dining room with an open kitchen behind it. My body let me know I’d reached that leaping-off point. No turning back. That’s when the rest of the world retracts. I heard my own breathing and the pat-pat, pat-pat of my pulse. Everything else shrank away. That’s what pure, blind fear does. It pulls you through the keyhole.

  I swung into the dining room, saw Miki and Jacobs. Something struck a window, was whirled away by the wind. There was blood spatter under the officer’s chair. He was struggling against his restraints. The birthday candles on the cake flickered. The gun was gone. My eyes swept the kitchen. The light changed. I’d been in Rauser’s house enough to know something had just moved in front of the living-room windows. I hit the floor and heard the quick pops of the 9mm. I scrambled on my elbows to get out of the way.

  “We’ve been waiting for you, Keye. You’re the missing party guest.” It was the first time I’d heard his voice undisguised. It was weirdly high pitched and deeply southern. I was at the far end of the table, pressed against the floor. I needed to get into the kitchen and away from Miki and Jacobs before they got in the way of a bullet. I heard footsteps approaching and Richards called my name again, tauntingly. “Keye …”

  That’s when I felt it—pressure, like coming up from the ocean floor too fast. I felt it in my head and in my ears a split second before it sounded like we were on a tarmac. The air smelled like sulfur and natural gas. The entire house trembled. The windows shattered, popped out. A filthy, black cloud slammed into the front of the house like a transfer truck. Richards was thrown forward. His gun went off again. I saw him hit the floor on his stomach. I aimed. He raised his head, looked at me through the table legs.

  “Jesse, freeze. Now.”

  And then a bomb went off. The ceiling split. Drywall and insulation and everything stored in the unfinished attic rained down. Tree limbs punched through the roof, punctured windows, whipped out across the house like they’d been rubber-banded, sweeping away anything loose, scraping against my body like huge wire brushes. Dirt and water poured into the house. I looked up and saw the swirling sky and the wide trunk of a pine tree, thousands of pounds balanced on brick and wood.

  Richards had disappeared. Miki and Jacobs had both been knocked over in their chairs. The table had tipped. Cake splattered on the floor.

  I climbed over a tangle of broken branches to get to them. The house shuddered, the pine tree broke through. It seemed to split the place in two. The noise was unearthly. The roof groaned, then began to cave. Long branches that had punctured the house shifted, whipped up, lashed out. I lost my balance, fell on my stomach. My Glock spun out of my hand. Something hit my back, hard. A hand grabbed my ankle, jerked me backward. He was dragging me. He wrenched me up and over the big limbs that had stabbed through drywall and stone and brick. I fought to yank myself free, flailing and kicking at him. He grabbed the front of my shirt and jerked me up. A closed fist slammed into my face. The world turned a gold-speckled navy blue. It registered somewhere in my brain that water was splashing my face. Gasping, I felt his knee on my chest, hands squeezing my nose shut, the bottle shoved between my lips, the searing pain in my eyes. My throat was on fire. I was choking on it, trying not to swallow, strangling on the bottle of bourbon that always sits on Rauser’s counter. He was pouring it down me as I choked, as I fought to keep from drowning on the thing that had almost killed me already. I tried to open my stinging eyes. His gun. Where was his gun? I saw him leaning over me wearing the cone-shaped party hat, now soaked and drooping crazily. Blood ran down his face and neck. His temple and cheek had been sliced by glass or brick. His dark eyes were fixed on me. He took the bottle away. I saw movement in the background. Miki was on her side, still bound to the chair, pushing herself toward us.

  Richards followed my eyes, turned for just a second. I didn’t wait. I jerked the 9mm out of his waistband and shot the sonofabitch. Right through the forehead as soon as he turned his bloody, frosting-splattered face back to me.

  A symphony of sirens played in the background—car alarms, security systems, ambulances, cop cars. No rain or wind. Just an eerie stillness. I pushed his body off me, flopped over on my side, retching. I heard Rauser’s voice.

  39

  Enormous trees had been yanked up by the roots out of the soaked red-clay ground and toppled over on houses, blocked streets. Parts of the city were still without power. Cops at intersections tried to control traffic under blacked-out traffic lights. It was my first chance to see in daylight what the super-cell had unleashed on us yesterday when a tornado twisted out of it and roared down Atlanta’s streets. I saw a telephone pole with the top half sheared off. A section of Dekalb Avenue had been closed because of the tangle of cables and wires in the street. You really don’t get a sense of how huge a telephone pole is until you see one lying across the road. Some businesses had boarded-up windows. Others were dotted with black punctures where windows had been.

  Atlanta was shaken, but it had survived another storm. And so had I. Still, my dreams and sleep had been tainted by the alcohol Jesse Owen Richards had poured down my throat. I had my first hangover in years. I had stood in the shower last night feeling the water stinging the cuts on my body, letting myself cry, too softly, I hoped, for Rauser to hear. Later, he had propped up behind me in my bed with his arms tight around me and a towel-wrapped ice pack pressed against my face as I drifted off.

  I pulled up to Miki’s old Victorian and saw a Mercedes in the driveway. My mother and father had driven her home, then gone to the pharmacy and gotten the sedatives she’d been prescribed. She was sobbing as they walked her out of Rauser’s torn-up house. Officer Jacobs had been rushed to the hospital. Richards had shot him in the stomach when he’d opened the door.

  I tapped on Miki’s door. No answer. I tried the knob. Locked. I sent a text message to tell her I was here. The door opened a minute later and I looked up at Cash Tilison.

  “That’s quite a shiner you got there, Keye. I hoped we’d meet again under better circumstances.” He stepped aside for me. “Miki’
s in the sunroom.”

  I found my cousin on her love seat, leg propped up. “It’s my hero,” she said. “Hey, we match.” She pointed at the bruise on her face. There was a vodka bottle on the table, a bottle of pills, a hand mirror, a razor blade, lines divided out on the mirror. Cocaine, I assumed. She smiled at me. “Help yourself.”

  “Miki, what are you doing?”

  Tilison came in and relaxed in one of the chairs. I ignored him. “Are you okay?” I asked my cousin.

  “She’s wondering if you’re safe here with me,” Tilison told Miki. “She really thought I was your stalker, can you believe that?”

  I kept my eyes on Miki. “Do you seriously want to go back to that place with him? With drugs and alcohol, with him calling you names, following you? Haven’t you had enough?”

  “I want him here,” Miki told me.

  “Because he brings you that shit?” I pointed at the mirror. “Is that the hold he has over you?”

  Miki unrolled a Time magazine, tossed it at me. I looked down at it—acres of green land with a swirling black tornado bearing down on a farmhouse. It was a stunning photograph. “You should see the spread inside. I’m not just going to be a finalist this time. I’ll get that award and more awards. You’re always on your high horse, Keye. I’m going to be a star. How’s your career going?”

  “You’re drunk,” I said.

  “Oh Christ, relax. Pour yourself a drink. What does it matter anyway, after yesterday?” She laughed. Cash laughed with her.

  I had wanted to protect her so badly, but I couldn’t save her. Not from herself. I wanted to cry again. I didn’t. I turned and walked out.

  Epilogue

  Rauser and I were sitting at Southern Sweets. He always knew how to cheer me up. We each had an enormous wedge of old-fashioned chocolate cake on our plates, the best cake in the city, in my opinion. The café had that old-time ice-cream-parlor feel, with heart-shaped wrought-iron chairs and little round tables and a black-and-white tiled floor. Rauser always looks funny to me sitting in a small chair. He was turned sideways because his legs wouldn’t fit under the table. An overdeveloped sweet tooth was just one thing we had in common, and another reason I loved this man.

  “Man, this is good. I didn’t think I’d ever eat cake again after seeing the remnants of the creepy birthday party,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  He checked his watch. “We have to be there in an hour. Then I’m taking the rest of the day off. How about we order in tonight, find some chick flick, and process our feelings?”

  “Sweet talker.” I smiled and glanced at Hank the poodle. Just outside the glass doors, he was licking a cup of doggie ice cream. His new leash was wrapped around a bicycle rack. Rauser had thrown away his old leash and collar and bandanna and hit the pet store for a new look for Hank. “I really can’t believe you adopted a serial killer’s dog,” I mumbled, my mouth full of cake.

  “Oh come on, Street. Poor dog didn’t know the guy was a freak.”

  “You held him up like a toddler this morning and baby-talked him, Rauser. I don’t know if it was endearing or just … alarming.” I took another bite of cake so moist and dark it was almost black. “Also, White Trash is not happy.”

  “It’s gonna take three months to rebuild my house. They’ll get used to one another.”

  “He was dry humping my foot in bed last night.”

  Rauser took a greedy bite of chocolate cake. “That was me,” he admitted. We both laughed. Life was back to normal. Our normal, anyway. “Listen, Keye, I been thinking. You and me, we get along pretty good. And I love you and all. Why don’t you marry me and make it official. I promise to love you and make sure you get to shoot somebody now and then. We could get old in rocking chairs.”

  I set my fork down. “We could talk about all our aches and pains.”

  Rauser nodded. “And how all our friends have died off.”

  “I could help you to the bathroom, ’cause you know you’re a lot older than I am.”

  Rauser smiled. We were quiet for a minute.

  “That sound like fun to you?” I asked.

  Rauser frowned. “Not so much. Forget I asked.”

  I leaned over and kissed him. “I love you, Aaron Rauser.”

  We left Avondale Estates and drove through Decatur toward Midtown. We were quiet. Hank was lying across Rauser’s lap. Rauser parked in front of a little redbrick building near the power station off Monroe Drive.

  “We’ll be waiting,” Rauser told me. “I think Hank misses the freak. We need to talk it over. He’s kinda mopey.” He squeezed my fingers. “Hey, it’ll be okay, Street. It’s like riding a bike.”

  I pulled open the glass door and saw a table with foam cups, a commercial coffee dispenser, a couple of boxes of doughnuts. Jon stood at the front of the small room. I hadn’t seen my sponsor in two years. He smiled, held out his hand for me.

  I walked past rows of gray folding chairs, turned and looked at twelve complete strangers. “My name is Keye. I’m an alcoholic.”

  To my friend Kari Bolin, whose diabolical imagination inspired me even on dry days.

  Acknowledgments

  To everyone at Random House, thank you for your hard work and support, for your faith in me, for your dedication to and love of words and books. And for just being so darn nice. Special thanks to Libby McGuire, Sharon Propson, Lindsey Kennedy, Randall Klein, Susan Corcoran, Kristin Fassler and Ania Markiewicz, Kimberly Hovey, Theresa Zoro, Denise Cronin, Kelly Chian, Benjamin Dreyer, Carlos Beltran, and Toni Hetzel. Thanks also to Amy Brosey.

  Kate Miciak, you are my rock star editor, the better, brighter half of my brain. I’m very sorry to tell you I’m preparing another shell of a book for you. And, of course, you will be expected to whip it (and me) into shape. And, of course, you will.

  To my superhero agent, Victoria Sanders, and to everyone at Victoria Sanders & Associates, I love you guys! Chandler Crawford and Angela Cheng Caplan, thanks for everything you do and for the gentle nudges that helped me get this done.

  I’m so grateful to Benee Knauer, my friend, first reader, and advisor. You are simply the best!

  Huge thanks to the following professionals for so generously sharing your time and putting up with all those emails and phone calls: Georgia Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Dawn Diedrich; Dr. Jamie Downs, Coastal Regional Medical Examiner for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation; GBI Special Agent Lanny Cox; Brent Turvey, MS, forensic science; Atlanta Police Department Homicide Unit Sergeant Liane Lacoss; Lesley Slone, forensic psychologist; Mitch Holland, director, forensic science, Penn State University, and founder of Forensic DNA Consultants; Gabriel Gates; Angie Griffin and Dragonfly Copters; and Betsy Kidd of Blue For You, Inc.

  And finally, to my friends who so graciously offer the names I love and allow me to have my way with them, thank you. Belated thanks to William LaBrecque for playing a bad guy in the last round.

  Also by Amanda Kyle Williams

  The Stranger You Seek

  About the Author

  AMANDA KYLE WILLIAMS is the author of The Stranger You Seek. Williams is currently at work on the third Keye Street thriller, Don’t Talk to Strangers.

  AmandaKyleWilliams.com