Darkness still enveloped Atawan when Catherine awakened with a start. She lay perfectly still, eyes wide but blind, straining to locate the noise which had roused her. Over the pounding of her heart she thought she heard a scraping sound and a muffled thump. It came from right under her window. Should she investigate? She held her breath and waited for the noise to come again.
A high-pitched bark shattered the silence. Then a volley of barks and screeches ricocheted in the night and a veritable battle broke out in the yard below. A metallic clang like a rake falling over added its note to the cacophony as the yelping and spitting moved away into the distance.
‘Duke! Duke, get back here!’ she heard Mr Steimann call.
Catherine let out her breath in a long hiss and released her grip on the sheet. Mr Steimann’s dog and cats were having a nocturnal skirmish. She smiled – not even angry at being awakened. In fact, she felt more secure. With Duke around, no one was going to sneak up on her. She snuggled back under the thin blanket, lulled by a reassuring, but misplaced, sense of security.
‘Mom,’ Morgan called, ‘do we have any more strawberry jam?’
Catherine stuck her head out of the bathroom door and clouds of steam billowed into the hall. ‘If the jar in the cupboard’s empty, then we don’t.’ She shut the door again and pulled her cotton blouse over her head. As she straightened the collar, she remembered the preserves in the basement.
After she had dressed she rushed down the stairs to the dank basement and headed straight for the shelves under the north window. She peered at the dusty labels, squinting in the gloom. The first shelf seemed to be all vegetables. She tried the next one. Peaches … rhubarb … apricot jam … strawberry jam. ‘Aha!’ She snatched up the jar and squinted at it. It looked normal, but she’d examine it more closely when she got upstairs into the light. As she turned towards the stairs, something about the dirty window caught her attention. There was an almost perfect hand print in the dust in the centre of the glass. She studied it for a moment, then, without touching the pane, Catherine stretched out her own palm over the imprint to measure the size. Her fingers fell a good inch shorter than the template. Biting her lip she tried to picture the window as she first saw it. The window had been dirty, but the grime had been uniform.
She stared around the basement. Nothing seemed different … missing, but she couldn’t be sure. She stifled a gasp as the hair rose on the back of her neck. Maybe those sounds in the night hadn’t been just a cat-and-dog fight.
Curious, Catherine reached up again to touch the window pane. She hesitated, then ran her finger through the edge of the hand print as if it were red hot. The mark was on the inside. The familiar lump of ice settled into her stomach as if it had never left and sent its chill through her veins.
She sat down on the bottom stair and put her chin in her hands. Maybe it had been Mr Grant … maybe he’d noticed the window was loose. Maybe she was wrong about the print not being there before. But it was fresh – there wasn’t even a thin film of dust over it. Maybe Morgan had let some workman in … a meter reader or something.
Catherine raced up the stairs. ‘Morgan!’
Her daughter stepped from the kitchen. ‘What were you doing down there?’ she asked.
‘What?’ The question didn’t register for a second. ‘Oh, getting jam.’
Morgan looked at her mother’s empty hands. ‘Where is it?’
Catherine, too, stared at her hands. ‘I must’ve left it downstairs.’
Morgan shook her head with exasperation. ‘I’ll get it.’
‘No, I will.’
Morgan’s brow furrowed in puzzlement.
‘I’ve got to get something else anyway,’ Catherine lied. No way she was letting her daughter go down there … not if anyone off the street could just waltz in. ‘Oh, by the way. Has anyone come to the house? Meter readers? Repair men?’
Morgan shook her head. ‘Nobody. You know I wouldn’t let them in if you weren’t here. Why?’
Catherine tugged at her ear, a sure sign she was agitated. ‘I asked the landlord to make a few repairs. I was just wondering if something was done while I was away.’
‘Not that I know of,’ Morgan replied, dismissing the subject. ‘My toast’s getting cold. What about the jam?’
‘Coming.’ Catherine hurried back down to the basement and grabbed the jar. Back upstairs, she slammed the cellar door and shot the thin bolt home. It wouldn’t keep much out but psychologically it helped.
‘I saw a poster for a dance at the high school,’ Catherine said to her daughter at dinner.
Morgan glanced up but then returned to chasing her peas around the plate. The sun glinted off her shiny brown hair and Catherine’s heart filled with love. If only life could become normal again.
‘It’s this Friday night, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. In the gym.’
‘Are you going?’
‘No … I don’t know anyone.’
Catherine took another forkful of broccoli quiche and chewed slowly. Since Paul was no longer with them, they ate a lot of vegetarian meals. ‘What about that boy Jason? What’s his last name?’
‘Royce.’
‘Like the garage?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You said you talk to him sometimes.’
Morgan wriggled uncomfortably. ‘Only walking from class to class.’
‘Maybe if you took your lunch to school instead of coming home you’d have more time to make friends. You could eat with Jason or even some of the others …’
‘Jason goes home too.’ Morgan pouted mutinously, her warning to drop the subject. ‘Anyway, I want to come home. I can relax here.’
Catherine sighed. She did understand Morgan’s withdrawal but it wouldn’t be good for them to remain the hermits they’d been in Kingsport. After all, one of the reasons for coming to Atawan was to leave the past behind and get on with normal life.
‘If you ever want to bring one of your school mates home, it’s OK.’ She watched the set expression on Morgan’s face turn to granite. She didn’t press the topic, but wished things were going as smoothly for her daughter as they were for her.
She opened all the windows in the car for the forty-minute drive to work and let the warm breeze blow through her hair. It was good to be away from the large cities with their dirt and their noise. The Agromics facility was in the country, halfway between Atawan and Glenview, the larger town. She was enjoying the life of a visiting scientist at the research labs.
She had spent the first week sorting her papers. Like all scientists, she tried to keep up with the literature, scanning the top journals in her field of mycology and checking Current Contents for interesting titles in other publications. She religiously photocopied each article, or if she didn’t have access to the journal, she sent out requests for reprints. In this way she had generated hundreds of pages of information which she never had time to catalogue, much less read. Now she had the luxury of time and she dove into the pile like an avid reader into a stack of best sellers.
Martha Morin stuck her head in at the door. ‘Going for coffee this morning?’ she asked, her homely face radiating good humour.
Catherine put down the Journal of Fungal Systematics and stretched. ‘You bet.’
Martha