The Unquiet-CP-6 by John Connolly

She also struck me as both older and younger than her years: older in appearance yet younger in her demeanor, and I wondered if perhaps her mother sheltered and protected her a little too much. There was another woman sitting with Jenna. Rebecca introduced her as April, a friend who lived nearby. She shook my hand and said that, since I was there and Jenna seemed okay, she’d go home so that she wouldn’t be in the way. Rebecca kissed her on the cheek, and they hugged, then April leaned back and held Rebecca at arm’s length. A look passed between them, one that spoke of shared knowledge, of years of friendship and loyalty.
    “You call me,” said April. “Anytime.”
    “I will. Thanks, hon.”
    April kissed Jenna good-bye, then left.
    I watched Jenna while Rebecca walked the cop around the outside of the house, pointing out the place where the stranger had stood. The child would grow up to be a very beautiful young woman. There was something of her mother in her, but it was rendered more striking by a slim, aquiline grace that came from elsewhere. I thought I saw something of her grandfather in her as well.
    “You doing okay?” I asked her.
    She nodded.
    “When something like this happens, it can be kind of scary,” I continued. “It’s happened to me, and I was scared.”
    “I wasn’t scared,” she said, and her tone was so matter-of-fact that I knew she wasn’t lying.
    “Why not?”
    “The man didn’t want to hurt us. He’s just sad.”
    “How do you know that?”
    She just smiled and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Have you spoken to him?”
    “No.”
    “Then how do you know that he doesn’t mean you harm?”
    She looked away, that almost beatific smile still on her face. The conversation was clearly over. Her mother came back inside with the cop, and Jenna told her that she was going back to bed. Rebecca hugged her and told her that she’d check on her later. Jenna said good-bye to the cop and me, then went upstairs to her room.
    Rebecca Clay lived in an area known as Willard. Her house, a compact but impressive nineteenth-century structure in which she had grown up, and to which she had returned after her father’s disappearance, stood on Willard Haven Park, a dead end that ran perpendicular to Willard Beach, a few steps across Willard Haven Road. When the cop eventually left, promising that a detective would call either later that night or the next morning, I took a look around, walking in his footsteps, but it was clear that the man who had broken the glass was long gone. I followed a trail of blood to Deake Street, which ran parallel to Willard Haven Park on the right, then lost it where he had climbed into a car and driven away. I called Rebecca Clay from the sidewalk, and she gave me the names of some of the neighbors who lived within sight of where the car had been parked. Only one of them, a middle-aged woman named Lisa Hulmer, who sported the kind of look that suggested she might consider the description “whorish” a compliment, had seen anything, and even that wasn’t much help to me. She remembered a dark red car parked across the street, but she couldn’t tell me the make or the tag number. She did invite me into her home, though, and suggested that I might like to join her for a drink. I had clearly disturbed her in the act of consuming a jug of something fruity and alcoholic. When she closed the front door behind me, it reminded me uncomfortably of a cell slamming shut on a condemned man.
    “It’s a little early for me,” I said.
    “But it’s after ten-thirty!”
    “I’m a late sleeper.”
    “Me too.” She grinned and arced an eyebrow in what would only have passed for a suggestive manner if you were especially susceptible to suggestion, like a dog or a small child. “Once you get me into bed you just can’t get me out of it.”
    “That’s…nice,” I said, for want of a better word.
    “You’re nice,” she said. She swayed a little and fiddled