Chapter 5: Still Breathing

That night Winslow went into his study before bed.

He took Dorinda's paper sack into his study and set it on the desk.

He read the label on the bottle.

Then he put the bottle in the top drawer, under a stack of old letters, and locked the drawer.

He did not say why.

I stood behind his chair and tried to read his face.

He looked the way he did when he had lost a contract and would not say so.

At eleven he turned off the desk lamp and went upstairs.

I did not follow.

The house went quiet.

I had spent two days drifting from room to room, and I was tired in a way that made no sense for a dead woman.

I sat on the bottom stair, where it had happened.

The carpet had been cleaned.

You could not tell anything had been there.

At twelve-ten the landline rang in the kitchen.

The housekeeper had gone to bed.

Nobody in this house used the landline anymore.

It rang four times.

Then Sybil came down the back stairs in her robe and picked it up.

She did not say hello.

She said, "This is Mrs. Holloway."

She listened.

I drifted closer, as near as I could stand to her.

I could hear a tiny, tired voice on the line.

A woman, a nurse by the sound of it.

Sybil pressed her lips together.

"Has she woken?" she said.

My whole body went still.

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