“Let’s go,” Slim said. “Me first. Dwight, you wanta get the door?”
First, I opened the pocket knife. Holding it in my right hand, I used my left to pull open the screen door.
Slim walked in. Rusty followed, staying close to her back. Bitsy went into the house behind him. I took up the rear and eased the screen door silently shut.
In the foyer, we stopped moving. We listened.
There were a few quiet sounds of the sort that houses always make: creaks, clicks, humms and buzzes from some sort of appliances. I heard breathing sounds and hoped they came only from us.
Slim’s black shirt moved like a shadow in the darkness. She seemed to be swiveling slowly, scanning the living room, ready to shoot.
All of a sudden, my left arm got grabbed. I flinched and gasped, then realized it was only Bitsy.
Only.
She clung to my arm with both hands and pressed her body against it as if she’d mistaken my arm for a pole she hoped to climb. My upper arm was clasped against one of her breasts so tightly that the small, soft mound seemed to be mashed flat. My forearm was pressed to her belly. I could feel her heartbeat and breathing. She wore a flowery perfume so sweet I almost gagged.
It wasn’t exactly the same as if she’d been Slim.
I resisted the urge to push her away.
“Somebody get a light,” Slim whispered.
“Let go,” I told Bitsy.
She held on. I made my way toward a wall switch, anyway, with Bitsy clinging to me. When I got within reach of where a switch should be, I said, “Let go. Come on, I need my arm.”
At last, she released me.
Without her body mashed against it, my arm felt strangely cool. I raised it and flicked a light switch. Two lamps came on in the living room, one at each end of the sofa.
No Lee.
No strangers.
No one at all.
Everything looked just the same as usual.
“Okay,” Slim whispered, “let’s check the rest of the house.”
Again, she led the way, walking slowly, her bow partly drawn back, ready to let an arrow fly if we should come under attack.
Chapter Forty
We made our way through the entire house, turning on lights in every room, looking in closets, glancing behind furniture and drapes. In the bedroom, I dropped and peered into the space between the bed and the floor while Rusty checked the adjoining bathroom.
Lee was nowhere to be found.
Nobody seemed to be in the house except the four of us.
Done with our search, we returned to the living room. Slim swung her arrow over her shoulder and dropped it into her quiver. Rusty sank onto the sofa. I folded my knife shut and stuffed it into a front pocket of my jeans.
“Can we go to the movies now?” Bitsy asked.
We all looked at her.
She frowned. “What?”
“We’re worried about Lee,” Slim exlained.
“Don’t you think she just went someplace? I mean, people go places. We don’t want to miss the movies, do we?”
“Screw the movies,” Rusty said. “We were never gonna go to the movies anyway.”
“Were, too.” She gave me a betrayed look. “We were, weren’t we? You said so.”
I nodded to Bitsy, but spoke to Rusty. “We figured to head on out to the Moonlight and take in the first one, anyway.”
“Why not both?” Bitsy asked.
“We’re supposed to be back here by ten-thirty....”
“Dwight!” Rusty blurted.
“We might as well tell her the truth.”
“She’ll tell on us.”
“Will not,” she protested.
“Like hell.”
Slim said to Bitsy, “This has to be a secret, okay? We’ve let you come along tonight, but if you ever want to do anything with us again ...”
“Ever in your whole life,” Rusty added.
“... you’ll have to keep quiet about what goes on. We can’t have you going home and telling your parents about everything we do.”
“About anything we do,” Rusty said.
Bitsy raised her right hand as if taking an oath. “I promise.”
Looking disgusted, Rusty shook his head and muttered, “She’ll tell.”
“Will not.”
I gave Slim the nod.
She nodded in return, then said to Bitsy, “We think somebody’s after us. Maybe someone from the Traveling Vampire Show.”
“What for?”
“To shut us up,” Rusty said.
“We don’t really know what they’re up to,” Slim explained. “I saw them ... do something horrible to a dog today. Maybe they want to scare us into keeping quiet about it. The thing is, weird stuff has been happening ever since. Someone was in my house this afternoon. They chewed up a book in my bedroom....”