Free The Night Visitor by Dianne Emley Page A

before last night. He’d gone away little by little, day by day. She thought about how things get weird and you get used to it. Then they get weirder and you get used to that too.
    She’d shaken her head and gone about her business. With two kids, a husband, a house, and a full-time job, she had enough to worry about without dealing with Danny’s nonsense. Now, as she looked around at his austere living space, she wished she’d pressed him more. Taken him to a psychiatrist or a psychologist or whatever. Like they could afford that. Like he would have let her.
    The sole decorative item in the garage was a portrait of Danny as a young boy painted by Junior. It was propped on the seat of a straight-backed wooden chair beside the bed. Candles were in front of it on the chair’s seat, as was a bunch of dried mustard weed, which Danny had probably taken from the hillside behind the house.
    She closely peered at the portrait. Some of the paint was worn away. Danny must have sat here touching it over and over. Wore it clean away.
    Danny’s bicycle wasn’t there. She hadn’t seen him leave the house yesterday, but he’d probably ridden his bike like he usually did. Did he ride it to the party at the Tates’ house? She hoped it hadn’t been stolen by now. One of her kids could use that bike. She should put in a call to the police. She should go see if she could find it. She should do a million things.

    She didn’t move. Her legs felt leaden.
    Detective Auburn had asked her about the things the police had found in the garage. He’d showed her a partially empty box of bullets. She’d shrugged. She didn’t know anything about Danny having a gun or bullets. Other items were even more mystifying. Auburn had showed her a nearly empty jumbo bottle of store-brand ibuprofen. There were prescription bottles of antibiotics, well past their expiration dates. Some had been prescribed for other members of the family for different maladies. They hadn’t finished all the pills, and Sylvia had kept them in the back of the medicine cabinet. There was an almost-full bottle prescribed for someone Sylvia didn’t know. There were several empty tubes and a nearly full one of antiseptic cream, a roll of adhesive tape, empty tape containers in the trash, boxes of large gauze squares, and a Baggie with Vicodin tablets. In a wastebasket, the police had found blood-soaked gauze pads with strips of adhesive attached.
    Auburn had asked her, “Was Danny injured?”
    She’d blinked at the gory bandages and again shrugged, unable to say a thing. She wasn’t about to tell the police how crazy her brother had become, that he’d said he had some kind of connection to his comatose brother, Junior, that they communicated in some weird way. That Junior showed him images, like strange movies Danny had to interpret, and that Junior conveyed emotions too. That Junior reached out because he was dying and wanted Danny to help him prove that he didn’t murder Anya Langtry and shoot himself. That Junior relived that night in Five Points over and over, that it was Junior’s nightmare, and it had become Danny’s nightmare. Sylvia didn’t believe it. Danny had lost his mind and that was that.

    She haltingly made her way to a cabinet. The door was ajar. She pulled it open and shined the flashlight beam inside. The shelves were bare except for another large bottle of ibuprofen shoved into a corner. She reached to move it to the front. She was about to close the cabinet door but instead, with a swoop of her arm and an angry shout, she batted the bottle of pills. The loose cap popped off, and the tablets pinged off the concrete floor and bounced against the unfinished tar-paper-and-plank walls.
    Chiclets leaped from the bed and ran into a corner, where he eyed Sylvia, his tail tucked between his legs.
    Sylvia looked at the pills strewn across the floor. “Damn you, Danny. Damn you to hell.”

21
    Rory writhed in the hospital bed, tugging at the restraints that