Nail Biter by Sarah Graves

cabinet.
    Watching them, it struck me suddenly that their interaction wasn't at all what I'd have expected from a teacher and a newly recruited student. Their arguing, for one thing; it sounded too personal. Then there was the way she seemed to know without asking what to put in his glass, and the easy gesture she used to hand it to him. . . .
    “Not that I expect it will be, but
is
the name Eugene Dibble familiar to anyone here?” I addressed the group.
    Because if Hetty and Greg did know each other, maybe I had other things wrong about them, too. Maybe one of them
had
known Eugene.
    Stranger things had happened. Like for instance his corpse out in that shed.
    “Not to me,” Jenna said; Marge nodded agreement, and though Wanda said nothing her blank face was answer enough.
    But at my question Brand's highball glass tilted abruptly, spilling some of its contents.
    “Jesus, Greg,” Hetty protested, brushing angrily at herself. “You clumsy—”
    “Shut up, Hetty,” he replied, crouching to retrieve fallen ice cubes.
    Only not so fast that I didn't get a chance to see the color draining out of his complexion. Even by candlelight the change was striking, and when he stood again the ice chattered in his glass.
    Oho, I thought as he gulped down the contents; the plot thickens. Because not much was clear about this horrible night, but one thing was. Greg Brand had heard Dibble's name before.
     
     
    “Will your family at home be awfully worried about you?” Marge Cathcart asked kindly a couple of hours later.
    The power was still out but she had put together a dinner of packaged things and canned goods heated on top of the woodstove, and Jenna had lent me some dry clothes.
    “I hope not,” I told her. “I left a note and my husband will know about the jackknifed truck. He'll figure out where I am pretty quickly, I think.”
    In fact Wade was probably out there now helping to clear the mess. But it could take hours for a big enough wrecker to arrive and make the road passable.
    “All right, then,” Marge said. “You try to sleep.” Carrying a flashlight, she went away, closing the door and leaving me in the makeshift bed she and Jenna had helped me make on the floor of the upstairs spare room.
    Outside, the wind went on howling. Rain thrummed on the roof slanting a few feet from my head. A wave of homesickness swept over me as the rest of the house grew silent, the others gone to bed, too.
    But even as tired as I was, no way would I be able to sleep. Instead I lay there in the dark, eyes open and ears alert for the slightest sound.
    Tap, tap
. I sat up suddenly. The sound came from the window.
    Rain dripping from the eaves, probably. I lay down again. Just a few more hours, I told myself. By morning the storm would surely pass and the wreckage of the truck would be hauled away.
    Tap, tap
. I pulled the blankets over my head, then checked my watch once more. In the dark, the radium-green numbers said it was 12:31 A.M.
    Scuff-scuff
.
    I popped out of the blankets. Something crept quietly just outside the door to the spare room. But before I could react . . .
    Tap!
Another sound came at the window. A
purposeful
sound. But I was upstairs and so was that window, and I happened to know there were no ladders at the Quoddy Village house. So
how . . .
?
    Grimly I scrambled across the room and shoved the window open, stuck my head out, and squinted into the streaming night.
    “Wade!” His rain-slick face grinned up from the darkness at me. “What're you doing here? And how'd you get here?”
    Not that I cared. I'd have ridden a flying carpet home by then if that's what it took.
    “Come on down,” he whispered back. “No sense waking the rest of them.” He dropped the handful of small stones he'd been tossing one by one at the window.
    “Got the ATV, you can ride behind me. Come on, Jake.”
    Moments later I'd flown down the stairs and out the door, barely pausing long enough to pull my shoes on, and was seated on