Excerpt
When the masked trucker opened the guest room door and saw Shea asleep, he quickly entered the room and closed the door behind him. The drone of the air conditioner softened any sound he made, and the chill air blowing behind Shea toward the intruder diminished the intensity of his odor. He approached the bed more deliberately, almost a shadow in the cool darkness. The time displayed on Shea’s cell phone glowing in the darkness was 3:51. Unsheathing a knife, he clutched it in his gloved right hand and leaned forward over our daughter, who was sleeping soundly on her back, her head turned slightly to the right. He watched her for a moment as she slept, listening to the sound of her shallow breathing. He pulled the covers down to her knees then reached over and placed his gloved left hand firmly over her nose and mouth.
Shea instantly awakened, but was disoriented at first. Feeling something over her mouth, her first thought was that it was her brother joking around with her, but even in the darkness she could tell that the hulking body leaning over her was not Ryan’s. She felt something cold and sharp pressed against her neck, and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see that the man was wearing a dark mask.
“If you make any noise, I’ll fucking kill you,” he said in a deep southern accent.
Shea wanted to scream but couldn’t. The man’s hand was so big that it covered almost her entire face, and it was pressed so tightly against her mouth and her nose that she could not breathe. Her big brown eyes were wide with horror as she peered up at the intruder’s own eyes leering back at her from the narrow slits cut out of the mask. To Shea, it was a living nightmare, and she began to panic.
Shea was a swimmer and had very strong legs, and when she kicked them out, it caused the headboard to knock against the wall between the two bedrooms.
I’ve always been a heavy sleeper, but this woke me up. I could hear soft whimpering and a strange sound of movement coming from the guest room where Shea was sleeping. In my mind, the combined noises could only have been our fifteen-year-old daughter in the throes of a nightmare, but something told me to go check on her anyway, having no idea what real nightmare was awaiting.
As I started to get up, I looked over at Kevin and saw that he was awake. He had heard it, too.
“I’ll go check on her,” he said as he peeled back the thin sheet covering him.
“No, I’ll go,” I told him, but he was already on his feet. So we went together.
It was unusual enough for one of us to get up in the middle of the night like this, but both of us going in to check on the kids was not something I ever remember our doing together, even when they were babies. Had either of us gone alone, however, the events that followed would have almost certainly been drastically different. Even more disconcerting, had our air-conditioning unit been operational that night, we might never have heard the sounds of Shea’s struggle with the intruder, or her muffled cries.
I didn’t even bother to put on my robe; both of us were in our underwear, not expecting to find anything more traumatic than our daughter half asleep in the midst of a bad dream. When Kevin opened the guest-room door, however, we walked in on a surreal scene that neither of us could ever have imagined.
There was a large figure in dark clothes leaning over Shea and holding a hand to her face.