No Safe House by Linwood Barclay

the street at all. The homes along here all had driveways large enough to accommodate more than one car, so there wasn’t much need for people to leave vehicles on the street.
    In a few seconds, I realized we had no place else to go. Glen dead-ended.
    “If it’s on this street, then we must have passed it,” I said.
    “I keep looking for the car. There’s no car.”
    “Maybe Stuart’s okay and he went home,” I said, desperate for any positive development.
    “Maybe,” she said.
    I did a three-point turn at the end of Glen. “Okay, so study the houses on the way back, see if any of them look like the place.”
    I was also trying to take some comfort from the fact that the street was not overrun with police cars, their lights flashing. If something had happened along here, it sure looked as though no one had any inkling of it yet. And a gun going off—someone would have heard that, right? Called the cops?
    Maybe. Maybe not. A lot of times, people hear one shot, wait for a second, and when another one doesn’t come, they go back to sleep.
    “Tell me about the house,” I said.
    “It had two floors, and you couldn’t see the garage from the street because it was tucked around the back. It could be that one, or it could be that one, too, or—Cummings!”
    “What?”
    “That was the name. That was the name of the people who live there. Stuart said it was Cummings.”
    I stopped the car, got out my cell, and opened the app that allowed me to find addresses and phone numbers. I entered “Cummings” and “Milford.”
    I looked up from the phone, and then at the first house Grace had pointed to. “It’s that one.”
    I killed the lights and the engine. “Let’s have a look-see.”
    I grabbed a flashlight I kept under the seat. Grace was out of the car by the time I got around to her side. Tentatively, the two of us walked up the driveway.
    “I never wanted to do this,” Grace whispered, taking hold of my arm, clinging to me. “You have to believe me.”
    I said nothing. There was a part of me that wanted to go ballistic. To ask her what the hell she’d been thinking. To scream at her until I went hoarse. But not now. It was important that we both make as little noise as possible. Lectures would come later, but I feared a stern talking- to was going to be the least of Grace’s worries.
    “Where did you go in?”
    “Around back,” Grace said. “Stuart knew this trick, this thing he did, so the alarm wouldn’t come on. He was pretty good at it.” She turned to see whether I was looking at her, and I was. “Maybe he’s done stuff like this before.”
    I still resisted the urge to scold, but my look conveyed the message. Her head slunk down lower on her shoulders.
    Once we were around the back and the double garage was visible, I clicked on the flashlight. First I shone it through the garage windows, saw a red Porsche and another car in there. I’d wondered whether, after Grace had fled, Stuart had continued with his plan to take the car.
    Assuming he was okay.
    The fact that the car was there was not a good sign. But then again, was it a bad sign?
    I turned the flashlight on the house and saw the open basement window. The first thing I looked for was a gun on the ground.
    No sign of one.
    “That’s where we got in,” Grace said.
    I got close to the window, shone the light down into the basement, saw some shards of glass down there on the carpet.
    “Let’s see if we can look inside without going in,” I said. I wanted to look through the kitchen windows. Most houses had the kitchen at the back of the house. The first-floor windows sat up some, the sills hitting me around the base of the neck. Low enough to get a peek.
    There was flagstone right up to the wall’s edge, so I didn’t have to step into any gardens to put my face up close to the glass. A set of blinds covered the entire window, but they were turned to let the sun in, so I was able, at least in theory, to peer between the slats. I