Free Home Invasion by Joy Fielding

Chapter One

    At first, she heard the noise as part of a dream.
    Kathy Brown sighed and flipped from her right side to her left. Her hand brushed up against the warm body of her husband, Jack, asleep beside her. Kathy opened her eyes and stared at him. Jack’s eyes were closed and his mouth was partly open. He was snoring. Even louder than usual, Kathy thought, trying to block out the sound. Jack’s not doing it on purpose, she told herself. There’s no point in being annoyed.
    Kathy sighed again. Everything Jack did lately seemed to annoy her. Maybe that’s what happened to couples after almost fourteen years of marriage. Or maybe not. Maybe something else was bothering her.
    Kathy sighed a third time. She decided Jack’s snoring was the noise that had wormed its way into her dream and woken her up. She sighed again — her fourth sigh in less than a minute — and flipped back onto her right side, so that she faced the wall.
    Slowly, Kathy felt her body start to relax and her mind drift back to sleep. She hoped she could return to the dream she’d been having. The dream about Michael, her boyfriend in high school. He was tall and handsome and captain of the basketball team. She’d been crazy about Michael, and he broke her heart when he dumped her to go out with her best friend. Now, there he was, smack in the middle of her dream. He’d been just about to kiss her when the loud noise had startled her awake.
    Falling asleep again, Kathy could not recover the soft kiss she hoped for. Instead, she found herself stuck in the middle of a dream about ants.
    In her dream, Kathy stood in the large, all-white kitchen of her home in Maple Hill. She watched a parade of fat black ants march along the white counter. “Where did all these antscome from?” Kathy asked the young man standing beside her. She recognized him as the boy who had delivered her groceries a few days ago. The boy was tall and skinny, with chin-length black hair and a tattoo of a spider on the back of his left hand.
    “There isn’t much you can do to stop ants,” the delivery boy told her. “They get in everywhere.”
    Then Kathy heard the noise again.
    This time she opened her eyes and sat up in bed. She looked at the clock on her bedside table. It was two o’clock in the morning. The noise must be Jack’s daughter, Lisa, coming home from her date, Kathy thought. It was an hour past Lisa’s curfew, and she was probably trying to sneak in without her father finding out. At sixteen, Lisa was turning into more of a handful every day.
    Kathy was about to lie back down when she remembered that Lisa was spending the night at a friend’s house. So Lisa couldn’t be the one Kathy thought she heard moving around downstairs.
    Was there someone else in the house, or was she still dreaming?
    Kathy sat very still for a few more seconds, on the alert for more sounds. But she heard nothing. Only silence.
    “What are you doing?” Jack asked from beside her. He opened one eye and stared up at her from his pillow.
    “Shh,” Kathy whispered. “I thought I heard something.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “There’s nothing,” Jack said, tugging on her arm. “Go back to sleep.”
    Kathy lay back down. Jack’s arm fell across her waist. His arm was heavy, and Kathy felt it weighing her down, like an anchor. Jack had put on weight in the years they’d been married. Not a lot. Maybe twenty pounds, most of it around his middle. To be sure, Jack was still a handsome man. His eyes were a deep forest green, and his lips were soft and quick to smile. At almost fifty, Jack still had a full head of light brown hair, even if it had started greying at the temples. At first, Kathy thought the grey made Jack look mature. Lately, she thought it just made him look old.
    Not like her high school boyfriend. Michael still looked as good as the day he’d dumped her for her best friend. I never should have answered Michael’s letter on Facebook, Kathy thought now. I