The water was lukewarm by the time the radio started cutting out against the tile, but I stayed under the spray anyway because the morning had started too quiet and I liked the noise of the shower drowning out my own head. I live alone out on the edge of town where the paved roads turn into caliche and the wind comes off the brush country without anything to break it, so silence usually means the heat is settling in for another long afternoon or a front is blowing down from the panhandle.

I had my hair full of shampoo, my eyes screwed tight against the suds, when the first sharp yip cut through the bathroom door like a dry cedar branch snapping under a boot. Barnaby does not bark at the mail carrier because he knows the truck by the sound of its transmission, and he certainly does not carry on like that for the meter reader, who always leaves a stale ginger snap on the front mat. This was a high, frantic rattling that made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up before the high-pitched wail of a child hit the drywall.

The noise did not belong in my house because nobody else had keys to the deadbolts, and my sister had stayed up in Dumas for the week to help with our aunt’s hip replacement, meaning there was not a soul within three miles who was small enough to make a sound like that.

I didn’t bother rinsing the soap out of my eyes properly; I just grabbed a faded blue bath towel off the rack, wrapped it around myself once, and shoved the hollow-core door open so hard it banged against the linen hamper. The hallway floor was cold against my bare feet as I scrambled toward the stairs, the dog’s barking escalating into that breathless, rhythmic stutter he only uses when a stray coyote gets too close to the chain-link fence by the tool shed. By the time I hit the landing and looked down over the banister into the front room, my heart was already hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird trying to get through a windowpane.

Therewas a