“I didn’t wash them.” Then she added, “Where’s my gun?”
Josh stared at her blankly.
“Where’s the fucking gun? I had it with me when I went to bed. Where is it? Where’s the fucking gun?”
“Um, I think I saw it upstairs.”
Sarah dashed back up the stairs. She found the Sig Sauer sitting on the dresser. Her hand shook as she reached for it. She paused, her hand hovering over the pistol as if she was afraid to touch it. She turned and looked at Josh who was watching her, holding his breath, as if she were about to pick up a poisonous snake. They were both breathing hard.
“Did you put this here, Josh?”
“No. It was there when I walked in.”
“It was lying on my chest when I went to sleep. I was holding it with both hands.”
She picked up the gun and ejected the clip. It was empty. She pulled the slide back. The bullet she’d placed in the chamber was gone. Josh sucked in a quick breath and began looking around the room for bullets.
Sarah knew that this must be hard on Josh, suddenly being forced to be the calm, steady one while she fell apart. It was a complete reversal from their normal roles. She could tell that he was having a hard time holding it together. Seeing the panic on her face was unnerving him but he was trying to remain calm for her sake. Staying calm was not one of his strong suits and the strain was showing on his face. She loved him for the effort he was making.
“Do you smell that?”
Josh’s expression was beginning to look as panicked as her own.
“What?” Sarah asked.
Josh took the gun from her and sniffed the barrel. He held it out to her. Sarah sniffed it as well. There was the unmistakable smell of burned carbon.
“It’s been fired.”
Sarah began looking around the room for bullet holes while Josh checked the floor for spent casings. It didn’t take her long to find one. There was a hole in the bedroom door. Josh closed the door and behind it was a nice, neat round hole in the drywall.
“You shot at something, someone maybe? The neighbor? Did you have another one of those dreams?”
“I don’t think they’re dreams, Josh. Do you think I changed the sheets and did a load of laundry in my dreams? I think someone was in here. I’m scared, Josh.”
“Should I go over to the neighbor’s house?”
“And do what? We have no proof he did anything. If you kill him or kick his ass, then you’ll just go to jail and I’ll be all alone.”
Sarah reached out and pulled her husband close. She wrapped herself in his big, thick arms, leaning her head on his muscular chest, searching desperately for some sense of security, wanting to believe that her husband could protect her from whatever this was.
“Well, then what happened? Do you really think he came in here and attacked you? Then stripped the sheets off the bed and washed them? That just sounds so crazy. This…this can’t be happening.”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I laid down with the gun on my chest and then I woke up when you came in the room.”
“Well, something happened. I’m calling the cops.”
“And telling them what?”
“I don’t know. But I’m calling them. Something is definitely going on.”
“B-but what if it’s just me? What if I’m going crazy or something? I don’t want them to put me away somewhere.”
“They won’t put you away. I don’t think it works that way. They don’t just lock you up for saying crazy shit. Half of Las Vegas would be in the loony bin if that’s how it was. But maybe they can test the place, see if someone has been in here?”
Sarah was confused, uncertain, but she was scared to death. Maybe she would feel better if the cops came. Josh stood next to the bed holding his cell phone, looking at her, waiting.
“Okay. Call them.”
Sarah looked around the room as Josh dialed the phone number for police emergencies. The more she
looked the more things she noticed out of place. The light on the nightstand and the radio alarm clock had switched places. There was a big red stuffed bear that Josh had bought her for Valentine’s Day the year they got married. She always kept it next to the bed and there it was, next to the bed. Only it was on Josh’s side of the bed. Even her laptop was unplugged and sitting on top of the dresser instead of plugged in on the floor by the bed. And there were clean spots on the floor again. Places where the carpet was lighter, where it had obviously been scrubbed. Sarah knelt down and rubbed her hand over one large spot beside the bed that was almost three shades lighter than the rest of the carpet as if someone had used bleach on it. The carpet was wet.
“Yes. My name is Josh…Josh Lincoln. Someone has been in our house. I think they may have attacked my wife. Okay. Okay. How long before they get here? Okay. Thank you.”
“Josh.”
“They’re on their way.”
“The carpet is wet. It’s been cleaned.”
Sarah stood back as Josh knelt down and inspected the carpet. She already knew what he was going to say. There was just no denying the fact that the carpet had been cleaned. It looked as if all the color had been bleached out of it in spots. There was a cream-colored spot on the tan carpet that was nearly four feet wide. As they looked around they began to notice spots on the walls behind the bed that looked as if they had been cleaned or freshly painted.
“And, before you ask, no, I didn’t decide to get up and clean the carpet in the middle of the night.”
Josh just shook his head and rubbed his face with
his palms. He was trying to figure out what to say, obviously wracking his brain for the right words, visibly distressed by his inability to explain what he was seeing. Sarah was almost hoping that Josh would have had some rational explanation for it all, even if the answer was that she was crazy. But fear and confusion was written clearly across his face.
“Do you really think someone’s been in the house? How could they sneak in here without waking you up? You think maybe somebody drugged you? Some sort of date-rape drug like rufinol?”
Sarah thought about it. If she had been drugged, then the gaps in her memory, the hazy dreamlike images that came back to her in brief flashes, would make a lot more sense. Even her memories of being murdered could be dismissed as drug-induced hallucinations.
But how could someone have gotten in here to drug me in the first place? How would they have slipped me the drugs?
Sarah wondered. The idea created as many questions as it answered. And if it was true, that would mean that her dreams about being raped by the neighbor were real. Sarah hugged herself and shuddered.
“I don’t know. But maybe I should go to the hospital to get checked out.”
“Before the cops get here…” Josh paused. Sarah looked at him quizzically.
“What, Josh? What?”
“This is fucked up, but I have to ask you…”
“Ask me what?”
“The drugs…um…they aren’t going to find…I mean…someone drugged you, right? You’re not using…”
Sarah realized what he was getting at and some
thing dark and mean spread inside of her, wanting to lash out at Josh and tear his face off his skull or at the least, slap the shit out of him. She knew that, given the circumstances, it was a perfectly reasonable question to ask. The whole thing looked and sounded insane. And if she wasn’t schizophrenic, then the only other possibility, besides someone breaking in and raping and drugging her without her being able to remember it, was that she was using drugs herself and doing all of this in some kind of drug-induced delirium. Given the choices, it was far more likely from his perspective that she had started using drugs. She had also confessed to Josh once that she had used methamphetamines in high school as a weight-loss aid, “The Meth Diet” she and her friends had jokingly called it. She’d started using it again in college to help her stay up late to study just before she and Josh had met. He had every right to be suspicious. But right now she needed him to be on her side and this question, right at this moment, felt like a horrible betrayal.
“No, Josh. I’m not a fucking drug addict. I’m not snorting meth or smoking crack while you’re at work.”
Sarah turned her back on Josh as the tears began to flow. She started to throw herself down onto the bed but just the sight of those clean white sheets halted her. She didn’t want to touch them. Whoever had broken in here and done things to her had also touched those sheets. Sarah stood in the middle of the room, with tears racing down her cheeks, and screamed.
“So, you’re saying that your neighbor has been breaking into your house and drugging you and raping you?”
The cop looked like he’d just gotten out of high school but he already had that disinterested look of someone who was used to seeing the worst of humanity. He had that look of one who had grown bored with anything short of gunfights and fatal car accidents, that superior cop swagger as if everyone without a badge owed their existence to him. His prematurely thinning copse of blond hair, acne scars on his cheeks and forehead, and bulbous Adam’s apple were clear indications that he had probably been on the wrong end of many insults and ass-kickings during his school years.
“We’re not sure. That’s why we called you. Someone has been in the house though.”
“Someone came in and scrubbed your floors and walls and did the laundry but didn’t take anything?”
“Someone raped my wife and cleaned up to hide the evidence. I mean…someone might have. She just keeps having these dreams and then all this stuff in the house that’s out of place.”
“And why do you think it’s your neighbor?”
“My wife saw him. I mean…she thinks she did.
She has these dreams and in them it’s him. He’s there and he’s raping her and killing her.”
The police officer, who looked like a young blond Anthony Perkins, stared at Josh. He was obviously suppressing a laugh. Sarah felt terrible for putting Josh through this.
“Look, I know this all sounds crazy. Can you just check the house and see if there’s any sign that someone has broken in?”
The cop sighed deeply.
“Okay, I’ll check the doors and windows.”
Sarah and Josh looked at each other. Sarah felt so foolish, she couldn’t hide her embarrassment. She was blushing and fidgeting. She wished they hadn’t called the police but she wanted to know. She had to know if someone had been breaking into their house.
The police officer checked the windows in the living room, the kitchen, and the den. He checked the front door and the rear sliding door.
“Sir? Ma’am?”
“Yes?” Josh walked over to the sliding-glass door where the cop was standing. Sarah came with him.
“How do you lock this door?”
“You just flip this latch at the bottom of the door.”
“Up or down?”
“You just push it down with your foot.”
“Uh huh. Go ahead. Flip the lock.”
Josh stepped on the latch.
“Now, open the door.”
Josh pulled on the sliding-door handle and the door slid open easily on its track.
“Try it again.”
This time Sarah pushed past her husband and stepped
down firmly on the latch. She grabbed the door handle and once again the door slid easily open.
“You should get yourself a security bar for this door. With all these empty houses around it might not be a bad idea to get a security alarm too. Gangs and drug addicts sometimes squat in these abandoned houses. It’s a real problem. These foreclosures send the crime rate through the roof.”
“So, do you think someone has been breaking in here?” Sarah asked a little too anxiously.
“There’s no sign of forced entry but then an intruder wouldn’t really need to break anything to get in when he can just slide the door open.”
“We’ll get it fixed.”
“Get that security system installed too.”
“We will.”
“Is that it?” Sarah asked. Her voice rose higher than she had intended it to, giving a panicky edge to it.
“That’s all I can do with the evidence we have right now. If you remember anything more, then you can come down to the station and file a report. But I can’t go across the street and arrest some guy because you had a bad dream.”
“But you can question him?”
“Do you really want me to do that? I can. You’re right. I could go across the street and ask him if he’s been breaking into your house and attacking you when you’re sleeping. But if he didn’t do anything and all you had was a really scary realistic dream, then you might just piss him off and start a war between you.”
“He’s right,” Josh said, and Sarah knew he was too, but that’s not what she wanted to hear. She wanted the neighbor fingerprinted. She wanted her entire house dusted for fingerprints, checked for blood and semen
and hair fibers and whatever the hell else they could find. She wanted him locked up and interrogated until he admitted the things he’d been doing to her.
“What about fingerprints? Can’t you check the house for prints?”
“We would need to get his prints to compare them to and that would require a warrant. Unless you can tell me right now that you know for a fact that he attacked you, I can’t get that warrant. If you tell me it wasn’t a dream and you remember him breaking in here and raping you, I’ll have that warrant in minutes and we’ll get fingerprints and semen samples from him, run a rape kit at the hospital and dust the entire house for prints and blood and any other body fluids. Without that, there’s nothing we can do. I can’t get a warrant or call in for a CSU team based on a dream and some clean sheets.”
“Could you run a rape kit on me anyway? Just to make sure it was only a dream? I haven’t showered yet so if something happened there might still be…” Sarah paused. The words did not want to come out. A shudder went through her body once more and she grimaced as if she had tasted something foul, as if she could still taste
him.
“…evidence.” She turned away in embarrassment, then turned back and forced herself to meet the cop’s eyes, not wanting him to know that she was embarrassed, trying not to appear weak. She had no idea why that was so important to her. But she hated the idea of appearing weak in front of anyone except Josh and not even him most of the time.