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Finally, after three years of preparation, it was here. The night she’d long awaited. The night she’d do it, and get away with it.
The night she would murder her husband.
The full moon shining through the window gleamed on the knife in her hand as she crept down the hall, passing from one shadow to the next. Logically, she knew that her husband was fast asleep, knocked out by the sleeping pills she’d slipped into his dinner, but she couldn’t keep her overactive imagination from placing shadowy figures at the corner of her vision, transforming innocent creaks and gusts into sinister footsteps.
She was paranoid, that was all.
Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something to it— not just a fear of being caught, but of being killed herself; if she could do it, anyone could, right? Anyone, at any time, could snap and kill her. An ice pick, rope, gasoline, poison— anything could be her demise.
Was it really just the breeze playing with her hair, or the chill breath of someone else following in her shadow? Was it a premonition, footsteps on her grave?
No. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, taking a step back in the darkness. After all this time, she wasn’t going to give up. No matter what tricks her mind played on her.
And yet, why wasn’t the dark spot in her vision going away? Why was it approaching her, footsteps silent as the grave? Why did it weave from one shadow to the next, skipping across squares of moonlight?
A flicker of a smile, cast in negative. “What are you up to?” The intruder asked smoothly. “Planning on committing a crime?”
“N-no!” She cried, gesticulating wildly. The knife flashed under the moonlight. “I was going on a midnight stroll. Out to the garden. To, uh, chop some vegetables.”
“You don’t have a garden,” remarked the voice. It was male and deep, that much she could tell, but it wasn’t anyone she recognized.
“I was going to plant one.”
“With a knife?” The figure was impossibly tall, broad shouldered, limbs obscured by a shapeless mass.
“I didn’t have a shovel, so I had to make do.”
“No, your shovel is in the trunk of your car, along with a tarp, a pair of gloves, duct tape, rope, and two gallons of bleach.”
“How did you get into my house?” She demanded, voice cracking.
“That’s not important.”
“I think it is!”
“All right, why don’t you tell the police to arrest me for breaking and entering, and I’ll tell them about your plan to murder your husband?”
“Who told you about that?”
“You really should stop asking inconsequential questions like that, and start asking yourself,” he tilted his head, “if I can do all that, what else should you be worried about?”
“What are you going to do?”
“What are you going to do? There’s only one right answer to this question. After all,” his hand extended into a puddle over moonlight, white gloves wrapped around the handle of a gun, “I have a longer range and better aim than you do. So don’t disappoint me, eh?”
“Who are you?”
He grinned eerily in the darkness. “I’m just a ghost, passing through.”
And like the phantom he claimed to be, he was gone.
Hardly a minute later, the doorbell rang. Trembling, the woman made her way to the front hall and opened the door, still clutching the knife behind her.
Huddled under an umbrella that was purple and flowered and entirely too small for three people was a family; the father she thought she might have seen on tv or something, but his children were unfamiliar. Hanging like a cat in his father’s grip was a little boy who couldn’t have been older than five or six, with a world-weary expression behind his glasses, and standing next to him was a teenage girl with long hair plastered to her face by the rain.
“Our car broke down; can we stay the night?” The girl asked.
“Ah. I...don’t see why not,” the woman responded, taken aback. Honestly, she was just relieved to have company besides her thoughts, her drugged husband, and whoever had invaded her home and deduced her murderous intent.
“Thank you very much! Sorry for the trouble!”
“Hey, what are you holding? Can I see?” the youngest asked.
She twisted the knife nervously in her grip; logically, there shouldn’t have been any way for the kid to know what she was holding, but he had weird eyes. They looked older than the rest of him, more focused that she’d ever seen in a kid his age. For some reason she couldn’t quite describe, she felt like those eyes could see right through her.
“I’m afraid you caught me at a bad time,” she said, deciding it would be less suspicious to show the knife than to hide it. “Come on in; I was planning to sharpen this when I heard the doorbell.”
“Oh, that makes sense!”
“Your son is quite perceptive, isn’t he?” The woman gave a short laugh, and beckoned for them to follow her.
“Son? This is just the freeloading brat who lives with us,” the man complained, still holding the child by the back of his jacket as he stepped inside. The kid didn’t even seem to care, creepy eyes still trained on her. Gah.
“Sorry for this,” the girl apologized again. “Oh! We haven’t introduced ourselves yet!”
She proceeded to give their names, but after “the sleeping Kogoro, you might have heard of him” everything blurred together. That’s where she’d seen his face before; this was the man who had solved hundreds of cases in his sleep, literally, and she’d invited him into her home after she almost killed someone.
She might need to sit down.
After passing out towels to the three of them, she did just that, plopping down on the couch gracelessly and watching the man known as Sleeping Kogoro roughly dry the kid’s hair with a hand towel as he squirmed and protested he could do it himself. The boy didn’t protest, however, when the girl took the towel and dried his hair for him instead.
“The guest bedroom is down the hall and the second door on your left; I should have enough futons in the closet for everyone. I’ll be going to bed soon; it’s been a long day.”
“Hey, why were you holding a knife? Isn’t that weird?” the kid asked, hair still being rubbed by the girl.
“Is it?” Yes, her last shred of self awareness reminded her, planning to stab your husband is definitely weird and most people just get a divorce. “Oh, I’m sorry if I scared you.”
“I’m not scared!” he declared with far too much cheer.
“Well, you should be!” the girl scolded him, scooping him up like an ornery cat. “Knives are very dangerous, and you were lucky to have protection the last time you were stabbed. See, this is why I don’t let you chop food for dinner yet.”
“He was stabbed ?!?” the woman asked. Maybe she should have planned to poison her husband, if a kid like this could survive a stabbing.
“Yeah! Wanna hear about it?” the little boy asked her eagerly.
“Absolutely not; it’s past your bedtime, and you shouldn’t talk about scary things when it’s dark out.” The girl started carrying him off to the guest bedroom, scolding him the whole time about not scaring her anymore while he occasionally made noises of protest.
“Agh, kids,” the man— sleeping Kogoro— sighed. “You have any of your own, ma’am?”
“Thankfully, no. I doubt my husband would want them anyways.” And then, on impulse, “It’s not working out. I’m probably going to get a divorce soon. It’s better than the two of us living in the same house and getting on each other’s nerves until we do something rash.”
“Ah.” He nodded sagely. Then kept nodding. It was getting awkward.
“Well, I’m going to bed,” she announced abruptly.
In the morning, there were no dead bodies, just the teenage girl in her kitchen making breakfast. She was quite a good cook, too; apparently the breakfast was a thank you gift for allowing them to spend the night. The woman didn’t say that she was starting to regret it; rather, she smiled and thanked the girl whose name she couldn’t remember.
Halfway through, though, the old fashioned stove ran out of wood.
“I can go split more wood!” The girl offered, already organizing the stovetop to make sure nothing would catch fire in her absence. “Where do you keep the woodpile?”
“In the courtyard by the shed, but I’m afraid my axe is broken.” Actually, it was in the passenger seat of her car so that she could chop the body into pieces for easier transportation, but she was meaning to take care of that.
“Oh, that’s okay. I don’t need an axe!” she said cheerfully. Then she headed outside to the woodpile and began splitting log after log with her bare fists. What the actual—
“Ah! I got a splinter!”
“I’ll get the first aid kit!” The little boy offered from behind the woman. He ran to the car and came back lugging a red and white box half his size, which he set down in front of the girl and opened.
“I sorted the bandages by size when we were in the car! Since I figured the larger the injury, the more urgent it would be,” she said.
“Oh, that’s smart!” He grabbed a pair of tweezers and then plunged his arm shoulder deep, rummaging around until he retrieved a normal sized band-aid. “Here, I’ll get the splinter! Since it’s on your right hand.”
The scene would have been charmingly domestic had there not been a pressure bandage the size of a large cat, a defibrillator, and a book on Treating Bullet Wounds For Dummies in the kit.
“You’re awfully prepared,” the woman remarked tactfully.
“That’s because vacations always go wrong, and we end up tripping over a dead body.”
“But Ran-neechan, I was the only one who tripped, and it wasn’t the whole body!”
“It was a severed arm, and that was even worse,” she said with a shudder. “We’re going to have a normal family vacation for once, and leave dad’s work behind. But if things go south, I want to be prepared.”
“But the bulletproof vest is heavy !”
“Better safe than sorry~”
The two of them continued casually talking about dead bodies and stabbings and mortal peril as the woman walked away listlessly. Really, what other reaction was there?
And that was when the person who would have been just another murderer realized her mistake. This... this was no ordinary family. The father was an ace detective, his daughter could smash wood with her bare hands, and the little boy reminded her of the horror movie about a possessed plushie she’d watched as a child and still had nightmares about. If she’d followed through with her plan, she’d have put herself at the mercy of these people.
“And you would have ruined their vacation,” muttered the intruder listening in on the would-be murderer’s mumblings. Yusaku Kudou let out a frustrated sigh from the bushes where he was hiding. “Let my son go to the beach in peace, will you?”