I had spent two years believing my husband was dead.
Then my neighbor told me a woman had been screaming inside my house while I was at work.
I was standing beside our cedar fence when Mrs. Gable said it.
Her face was red, and she had both hands pressed against her hips.
“Clara, you need to put a stop to this.”
I looked at her, waiting for her to explain.
“Put a stop to what?”
“The woman in your house.”
For a moment, I thought I had misunderstood.
I lived alone.
I had lived alone since Arthur died, and I had never given Mrs. Gable any reason to think otherwise.
“What woman?”
Mrs. Gable stared at me as though I was pretending not to understand something obvious.
“The one who keeps yelling in the afternoons.”
I remember looking past her toward my front windows.
The curtains were open.
Nothing moved behind the glass.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” I told her.
She let out a short, frustrated breath.
“This has happened three days in a row.”
Three days.
That was the first detail that stayed with me.
Not because it made sense, but because it didn't.
Every weekday, I left home before eight in the morning and spent the day at my downtown Chicago office.
I usually didn't return until sometime after six.
There was no woman living with me.
There wasn't even anyone who regularly visited.
At least, nobody I knew about.
Mrs. Gable stepped closer to the fence.
“On Monday, I heard shouting. Yesterday, it happened again. Today was worse.”
I tried to keep my voice calm.
“Maybe you're hearing something from another house.”
“I know what I heard.”
She sounded offended that I would question her.
Then she told me what the woman had shouted.
“She was yelling at somebody to leave them alone.”
My stomach tightened.
Mrs. Gable continued before I could answer.
“And then I heard something hit a wall. Hard.”
I looked at my house again.
The place seemed exactly as it always had.
The trimmed lawn.
The narrow walkway leading to the front porch.
The windows I checked every evening before going upstairs.
There was nothing unusual about any of it.
“I leave for work in the morning,” I said. “Nobody should be there.”
Mrs. Gable didn't look convinced.
“Then you need to find out who's getting inside.”
She turned away before I could ask anything else.
I watched her walk toward her own house.
For a few seconds, I stayed beside the fence, listening to the ordinary sounds of the neighborhood.
A car passed.
Somewhere, a dog barked.
The wind moved through the trees along the street.
Everything sounded normal.
That was what frightened me later.
Nothing about the afternoon warned me that my home might not be as empty as I believed.
I was thirty-nine years old.
I had a steady job, a house in suburban Illinois, and a husband whose death I had spent two years trying to accept.
I thought I understood the shape of my life.
I had no reason to believe a stranger could walk through my front door whenever she wanted.
And yet my neighbor was certain someone had been doing exactly that.
I went inside.
The first thing I did was check the front door.
It was locked.
I tested the handle twice, then examined the deadbolt.
Nothing seemed wrong.
I checked the windows on the ground floor.
All of them were shut.
I moved through the living room and into the kitchen, looking at familiar objects as though one of them might reveal what I had missed.
The counters were clean.
The chairs were tucked beneath the table.
There were no unfamiliar shoes near the door.
No coat hanging in the hallway.
No bag left beside the sofa.
I went upstairs.
The guest room was empty.
The bathroom was empty.
My bedroom looked the way I had left it that morning.
I checked the closet anyway.
Then I checked beneath the bed.
I felt foolish doing it.
I was a grown woman searching her own home for an imaginary intruder because a neighbor had heard shouting.
But I couldn't dismiss what Mrs. Gable had said.
She had not described music or a television.
She had heard a woman arguing with someone.
A woman who sounded frightened or angry enough to scream.
I returned downstairs and checked the back of the house.
The sliding patio door was closed.
I tried the handle and looked along the frame.
It appeared secure.
I stood there for a while, staring at the glass.
The backyard was empty.
The fence was undisturbed.
There was no sign that anyone had come through.
I wanted to believe that settled the matter.
Instead, I found myself wondering whether Mrs. Gable had heard something coming from inside my house at all.
That evening, I moved through my usual routine.
I changed clothes.
I ate dinner.
I straightened a few things in the kitchen.
None of it felt natural.
I kept stopping to listen.
Every small noise made me turn my head.
The refrigerator clicked on.
The heating system made a low sound somewhere in the walls.
A car door slammed outside.
Each time, I waited for something else to follow.
Nothing did.
I was beginning to feel embarrassed by my own fear when I noticed the mug.
It sat on the drying rack beside the kitchen sink.
White ceramic, with the Seattle Seahawks logo printed on the side.
Arthur's favorite.
I knew that mug as well as I knew my own hands.
He used it almost every morning.
He would fill it with coffee, carry it into the living room, and leave it somewhere he would forget about until he wanted another cup.
I used to complain about that.
He would grin and tell me he was giving the mug a chance to see the whole house.
After his death, I put it away.
I couldn't bear to look at it.
For two years, I had kept it out of sight with the other things I wasn't ready to touch.
I was certain of that.
Yet there it was beside the sink, clean and dry, as if somebody had washed it after using it.
I picked it up.
The handle was cool beneath my fingers.
I turned it over, checking the bottom for some explanation that would make sense.
There wasn't one.
I stood alone in the kitchen, holding my dead husband's coffee mug.
Then I put it down very carefully.
I didn't call Mrs. Gable.
I didn't call the police.
I told myself I must have taken the mug out at some point and forgotten about it.
Grief could make a person absentminded.
That was what I wanted to believe.
But I knew how I had packed away Arthur's things.
I remembered the box.
I remembered the decision to put the mug somewhere I wouldn't see it every morning.
And I remembered never taking it back out.
That night, I locked the doors again.
I checked the windows.
Then I went upstairs and lay in bed with the lights off.
I didn't sleep much.
Every time I began to drift off, I remembered Mrs. Gable's angry face.
I remembered the woman shouting.
And I saw that white mug beside the sink.
By morning, I had reached a decision.
If somebody was entering my house while I was gone, I needed to see it for myself.
I couldn't keep searching empty rooms after the fact.
I couldn't keep telling myself that everything was fine.
The next morning, I would leave for work as usual.
But I wouldn't stay away.
I would come back and wait.
And if someone really had a key to my house, I intended to find out who it was.
Click here to continue reading: PART 2: I Drove Away at My Usual Time, Then Returned Through the Patio Door to Wait for Whoever Thought My House Was Empty
My Neighbor Said She Heard Someone Screaming in My Empty House, and I Had No Idea Who Could Be Inside
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