The Ranch She Left Behind. Kathleen O'Brien

she just kept on staying. She was comfortable here. She was used to the quiet, the shadows, the isolation. Even if she sometimes felt like Sleeping Beauty inside her castle tower, at least she always felt safe.

      The clock began to bong. One. Two. Three. Four. Then it fell silent again, leaving nothing but the eerie after-vibrations that pulsed invisibly up the stairs and made the air in Penny’s bedroom hum.

      Instinctively, she glanced at her cell phone. More like four-thirty, really. The clock had kept perfect time while Ruth had been alive, but ever since her death it had fallen further and further behind, as if time had begun to slow and stretch, like warm molasses. Just a minute here, a minute there... But it added up.

      Soon, the clock would perpetually be living in yesterday.

      Oh, well. Too tired to worry, Penny fell back against her pillow. The larger noise she had imagined, it must have been a dream.

      But then, with a cold shiver, she registered the sound of another noise—registered it more with her nerve endings than her eardrums.

      A much smaller noise this time. A sneaky sound, a muffled creak... She gasped softly, recognizing it. The fifth stair from the top, the one that couldn’t be fixed. She’d always had to step over it on her way to bed at night, so she wouldn’t wake Ruth.

      Someone who didn’t know about that little creak was, even now, tiptoeing up the stairs.

      Her heart began to pound again. Someone was in the house.

      Without hesitation, she slid open the nightstand drawer. Ruth, a practical woman to the core, had insisted that Penny keep protection beside her at all times, especially once the neighborhood began to deteriorate. A gun would have been out of the question—neither Ruth nor Penny liked weapons, or had any confidence that they could prevent a bad guy from getting hold of it.

      Therefore, Penny kept a can of wasp spray beside her. Effective from a safe distance, nonlethal, and carrying the added benefit of surprise. Penny had found the idea almost funny and had bought it more for Ruth’s peace of mind than her own.

      But now, as she saw the shadowy figure appear in her doorway, she sent a fervent thank-you to her practical aunt, who apparently was going to save her one more time—even from the grave.

      Ben Hackney, their next door neighbor and a retired policeman, had warned them that, if they ever had to use the can, they shouldn’t holler out a warning, but should spray first and ask questions later. So Penny inhaled quickly, put her finger on the trigger, aimed and shot.

      A man’s voice cried out. “What the fu—?”

      She could see the figure a little better now—a man, definitely, dressed in black, his face covered. Her breath hitched. Covered! His eyes, too? If his eyes were covered, would the wasp spray have any effect?

      But then the man’s hands shot to his face. A guttural growl burst out of him, a sound of both pain and rage. With every fraction of a second, the growl grew louder.

      â€œGoddamn it—”

      The voice was deep, middle-aged, furious. She didn’t recognize it.

      Absurdly, even as she shot the spray again, she felt a shimmer of relief. What if it had been someone she knew? Someone like...

      It could have been poor Ben. The man was eighty and had spent a quarter of a century nursing an unrequited love for Aunt Ruth. He’d been good to Penny, too, through the years.

      Thank God she hadn’t attacked some well-meaning friend like that.

      But the relief was brief. The calculations flashed through her mind in a fraction of a second, and then she was left with one awful truth—this was a real intruder. She was left with a stranger, who had, without question, come to harm her.

      And a can of wasp spray that wasn’t bottomless.

      For one horrible second, the man lurched forward, and Penny backed up instinctively, though she had nowhere to go. Her spine hit the headboard with an electric bang that exploded every nerve ending in her brain. Somehow, she kept her finger on the trigger and held her numb arm steady enough to keep the spray aimed toward his face.

      â€œYou bitch!” He dropped to his knees, shaking his head violently. With a cold determination she hadn’t known she possessed, she lowered her aim and found him where he had hit the floor.

      The spray connected again. Crying out, he roiled backward, a crablike monster, and the sight of his confusion gave her courage. She stood. She was about to follow him, still spraying, when she realized he was trying to reach the stairs.

      â€œNo! Wait!” she called out, though warning him made no sense. As long as he was leaving, what did she care what happened to him? But...the staircase!

      An irrational panic seized her, freezing all logical thought. He might be a thief, or a rapist, or a murderer. And yet, she couldn’t let him just fall backward, helplessly, down that steep, uncarpeted walnut spiral of stairs.

      A picture of her mother’s body flashed into her mind. The green eyes staring blindly at the ceiling. The black hair glistening as a red pool spread on the floor around her...

      â€œNo!” Penny cried out again, louder. She dropped the wasp spray onto the bed and moved toward the door. “No...the stairs!”

      But either the intruder didn’t hear her or he couldn’t think straight over the pain. He kept scrambling backward, kept bumping and lurching, his shadowy body hurtling toward the point of no return.

      And then, just as she reached the hall, he fell.

      â€œNo!” The word was a whisper that came out on an exhale of horror. “No...no...”

      The sound of his body hitting the steps, one after another, cracked like gunfire. It ricocheted through the house, through the empty rooms and the high ceilings, and, it seemed, through every muscle in Penny’s body.

      Oh, God. Frozen, she peered over the banister. She wondered if she was going to be sick. If his body lay there, arms and legs at crazed angles like an abandoned rag doll...

      If his head rested hideously on a red satin pillow of blood...

      She squeezed the wooden rail, squinting. But it was too dark to be sure of anything. He could have been a pile of black laundry at the foot of the stairs. An inanimate object.

      No, no, no... Her mind was like one of her father’s unbroken horses, running away faster than she could follow. “Please, not again.”

      But then, as if in answer to a prayer, the shadows seemed to shift, then jerk, then fall still again. Another groan.

      Not dead, then. Not dead. As relief swept through her, she heard the jagged gasps of her own lungs, as if she’d been unable to breathe until she was sure he lived.

      He lived.

      The crumpled shadow shifted. The man stood, moving oddly, but moving. Then he ran to the front door, dragging one leg behind him, and, in a sudden rectangle of moonlight, disappeared into the night.

      The minute she couldn’t see him anymore, she sank to her knees, right there on the upper landing. It was a complete collapse, as if the batteries that had locked her legs into the upright position had been abruptly switched off.

      As she went down, she grabbed for the phone on the marble table. It clattered to the floor. She couldn’t feel her fingers, but she found the lighted numbers somehow and punched them in.

      9...1...1...

      * * *

      LATER, AS A PINK DAWN light began to seep into the edges of the black clouds, Penny started to shiver. She grabbed her upper arms with her hands and rubbed vigorously.

      And only then did she finally realize why, as they interviewed her and took her statement, the police officers