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Her husband's voice lifted through the floorboards of the old house. She was awake, suddenly. She couldn't remember having fallen asleepwhat time was it?-she sat up, shivering, and heard now the voice from downstairs, familiar, but too loud, as if Alan were on the telephone. But it was too late for him to be talking to anyone: it was nearly two o'clock in the morning. ...she could hear her husband's voice but could not distinguish any words.
She got out of bed, slowly.
On the landing she heard the anger in his voice. And the pleading. "...why don't you go home? ... go somewhere else?"
The lights were out downstairs. Alan stood at the front door, in the darkened hallway, talking to someone out on the porch. Joanne was fully awake now: she stared at her husband's shadowy figure, wondering if the frightened anger in his voice, in his tense body, would be enough to protect them. She could not see who was there-only a blurred form, on the porch, pushed in close in the space between the door and the screen door, which he had opened. They never bothered to latch the screen door.
"...why don't you go home? I'm not going to let you in. What do you want? Look, I can't help you," Alan was saying. He spoke quickly, yet gave to the final words of each sentence a peculiar dragging weight, almost a plea, the way one might speak to a child. "I said I can't help you... What do you want?"
Outside, a man's voice-high and thin-the words unintelligible. Then a burst of laughter.
Joanne was at the foot of the stairs now, and she could see the intruder more clearly-a head of long blond hair, a face in continual movement, youthful and creased, sunburned, the mouth contorted in a wide grin. He kept jerking his head from side to side, furiously. He was arguing with Alan through the door but his words were only plunges and leaps of noise. In Joanne's panic she seemed to see him as someone come back to reclaim the farm, the old farm-house she and Alan had just moved into-six miles outside Beulah, Vermont, and a quarter-mile from the interstate highway to the south-but...