I stayed beneath the bed.
The footsteps moved through the living room and stopped somewhere near the kitchen.
I couldn't see the front door from where I lay.
I could only listen.
A moment later, water began running in the sink.
I tightened my fingers around my phone.
The sound went on for several seconds.
Then I heard a glass touch the granite counter.
It was an ordinary sound.
That was what made it so unsettling.
Whoever had entered my house wasn't behaving like someone afraid of being caught.
They were comfortable enough to use the kitchen.
I wondered whether this was the person Mrs. Gable had heard.
I wondered whether she had been coming in every afternoon while I was away.
Then the water stopped.
Silence followed.
I stared at the strip of carpet beneath the bedroom door.
I could feel my heartbeat in my throat.
Footsteps started again.
This time, they were coming upstairs.
I knew the sound of my own steps on those stairs.
I knew which ones creaked and which ones stayed quiet.
These footsteps were different from mine.
Sharper.
More deliberate.
Then I heard the distinct clicking of high heels.
They stopped outside my bedroom.
I didn't move.
The door opened.
From beneath the bed, I could see the lower part of a woman standing in the doorway.
Black pumps.
Tailored trousers.
She stepped into the room as though she had every right to be there.
I watched her shoes cross the carpet.
She didn't look around nervously.
She didn't call out to ask whether anyone was home.
She walked directly toward my mahogany dresser.
That detail frightened me more than anything else so far.
She knew where she wanted to go.
The woman set something down on the reading chair.
A red designer handbag.
I could see its shape from beneath the bed.
She didn't bother to hide it.
She didn't seem worried about leaving it behind.
Then she opened the dresser and began moving things around.
Drawers slid out.
Objects shifted against one another.
Paper rustled.
I pressed my lips together.
She was looking for something.
I couldn't see her hands clearly from where I lay, but I could hear her searching.
She opened one drawer, then another.
She moved faster as the seconds passed.
Finally, she spoke.
“Where did he put it?”
Her voice was low and irritated.
I froze.
She wasn't asking where something belonged.
She sounded as though she had been searching for a particular object and had run out of patience.
She moved a few more things.
A drawer slid shut.
Then she muttered again, more angrily this time.
I couldn't make out every word, but I understood that she hadn't found what she wanted.
I looked at my phone.
My thumb hovered over the screen.
I could call 911.
I could tell the operator that a stranger had entered my house and was searching through my belongings.
But I didn't know whether she was armed.
I didn't know whether someone else was downstairs.
I didn't know what she might do if she discovered me beneath the bed.
I was afraid that moving even slightly would reveal me.
So I stayed still.
The woman stopped searching.
For a moment, I thought she might leave.
Instead, I heard her take out her phone.
There was a faint sound as she touched the screen.
Then she made a call.
I could hear the connection begin.
My entire body felt rigid against the floor.
She spoke before the other person had finished responding.
“I'm in the house.”
There was a pause.
Then a man's voice came through the phone.
He sounded close enough that I could hear him clearly, even though the device wasn't beside me.
“What about the insurance paperwork? Did you locate the endorsement?”
I stopped thinking about the woman.
I stopped thinking about my neighbor.
I stopped thinking about the front door, the kitchen, and the red handbag resting on my reading chair.
Because I knew that voice.
I knew it so well that for one brief moment, my mind refused to accept what my ears were telling me.
There were voices a person could forget after two years.
There were voices that became less distinct with time, until all that remained was a vague memory of how someone had sounded.
This wasn't one of them.
I knew the rhythm of the man's words.
I knew the way his voice settled at the end of a question.
I knew it from mornings in the kitchen, from conversations in the living room, from the ordinary days I had once believed would continue for the rest of my life.
It was Arthur.
My husband.
The man whose death had been confirmed after a fiery collision on Interstate 55.
The man whose remains had supposedly been identified through dental records.
The man whose ashes I had received and mourned.
The man whose funeral I had attended.
The man I had spent two years trying to accept I would never see again.
I was lying beneath my own bed, listening to his voice come through a stranger's phone.
I wanted to sit up.
I wanted to grab the woman's ankle and demand to know who she was.
I wanted to hear the voice again, because some part of me still believed I might have mistaken it.
But I couldn't move.
The woman was still standing beside my dresser.
Arthur was still on the phone.
And the question he had asked was about an insurance endorsement.
I didn't know what that document was.
I didn't know why she had come into my house looking for it.
I only knew that the man speaking to her sounded exactly like my dead husband.
My fingers began to tremble around the phone.
I pressed it against the carpet to keep it from making a sound.
I had spent two years learning to live with an absence.
I had learned to wake up alone.
I had learned to eat dinner without expecting another person to come through the door.
I had learned to stop setting out two cups in the morning.
I had even learned to put away the things that hurt too much to see.
Arthur's mug had been one of them.
Now I understood why the sight of it had frightened me.
Someone had been inside my house.
Someone had touched the things I had left behind.
And the voice on that phone belonged to the man I had buried in my mind.
I could hear the woman breathing.
I could hear the faint noise from the phone.
Neither of them sounded frightened.
Neither of them sounded as though they were discussing a dead man.
I was the only one in the room who seemed to understand that something impossible had happened.
I had no explanation.
No evidence beyond a voice I recognized.
No way to know whether I was hearing Arthur himself or something that only sounded like him.
But I knew that voice.
And I knew that whatever had happened on Interstate 55 two years earlier, the story I had been given about my husband's death could no longer be the whole truth.
Click here to continue reading: PART 4: I Had Mourned My Husband for Two Years, but the Woman in My Bedroom Was Searching for Something He Had Left Behind
My Neighbor Said She Heard Someone Screaming in My Empty House, and I Had No Idea Who Could Be Inside
Part 3 of 12
