Another Man's Children. Christine Flynn

was doing wrong since the little girl seemed more interested in chewing on her spoon than on what was in it, Lauren eventually coaxed a few bites into her and by the time she got them bathed, read Jason a story while rocking Jenny, and tucked them in for the night, she was ready to fall into bed herself.

      She couldn’t indulge in that escape, however. She still had to do dishes and throw a load of towels into the washer, since she’d just used the last two clean ones. If she didn’t, she’d have nothing to dry herself off with after her shower in the morning.

      There was also something wrong with the furnace.

      For the past hour, the air in the house had grown steadily cooler. At first she’d thought it was because, busy as she’d been, she’d forgotten to add another log to the fire and the fire had gone out. So, between Jason’s story and tucking Jenny into her crib, she’d turned up the thermostat in the hallway.

      That had been at least twenty minutes ago and the chill had yet to disappear.

      Standing in the hall with her arms crossed over the cabled sweater she’d pulled over her jeans, she frowned at the thermostat’s thermometer. It was actually four degrees colder than when she’d turned the heat up.

      The thermometer read fifty-nine degrees. Since it was all of forty degrees outside, she wasn’t interested in seeing just how cold the house could get before they all got pneumonia.

      The washer and dryer were in the basement. Taking the load of towels down with her, she tossed them into the washer along with the soap and had the machine running when she turned to warily eye the black behemoth of a furnace in the middle of large, cement walled space.

      She hated basements. They were cold and damp and shadowy and the corners were inevitably filled with boxes and old furniture that took on sinister shapes when illuminated by a single bare bulb.

      Reminding herself that she was an adult, she ignored the set of narrow night-blackened windows high on the wall above the agitating washing machine. The furnace was still running. She could hear the fan or whatever it was that pushed the air to the upper floors. But the air it was pushing was cool.

      So was the heavy black metal of the huge contraption when she reached her hand, palm out, toward it.

      “Great,” she muttered, then felt her heart knock against her ribs at what sounded like a faint groan above her.

      It’s just the house settling, she chastised herself, torn between figuring out what the problem was with the heat, wishing her brother were there and indulging her chronically overactive imagination. She was trying hard not to think about what might be in those woods. She was also trying to avoid the thought that, while she was an adult, she was the only adult around for a lot more miles than a scream could carry.

      An instruction manual dangled by a chain from one of the pipes that poked like the arms of a saguaro cactus from the furnace. Spotting it, she pulled it from the plastic envelope protecting it and flipped through pages of schematics and diagrams that were as clear to her as Sanskrit.