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behind me.
    Echoes don’t do that.
    Two stairways, two guys, two bats. No other way down, at least not in the amount of time I had available to me. I’d identified an emergency exit on my walk-through, but it would take a good minute or even two to open it and close it again, and even then it might just turn out to be the shortest distance to a broken leg.
    One coming up the front, one coming up the back. I needed to get to the right-hand bedroom, but not by running down the center hall to the landing, which would put me directly in the sight line, momentarily at least, of someone coming up the marble stairway. I peeked at the rear stairs, saw that he hadn’t yet rounded the switchback, and darted straight across the hall to the door into the bathroom that connected to the bedroom I wanted.
    Who was the second guy? How did they know I was inside the house? An answer to that question presented itself in my imagination, immediately and with such force that it ended the earworm in between “achy” and “breaky.” The answer—betrayal—had to be the right one, but there was nothing I could do about it now.
    The bathroom was the architectural equivalent of a hairy calf, so male that it looked contrived. The wallpaper featured a pattern of green pine trees accented cleverly with brown log cabins and a few more-or-less taupe moose and mooselets, a design that might have been drawn personally by L.L. Bean on a bad day and intended for children’s pajamas. The seat on the toilet was up, and the water in the bowl was suspect. A broad leather strap hung beside the oak-framed mirror, and it took me only a tenth of a second, which seemed like quite a long time, to identify it as an old-fashioned strop for a straight razor. I pulled open the mirrored door, which yielded with a sound that I would have spelled bock had I been in a spelling mood, and there it was, gleaming at me, so I took it out, steel folded into bone of some kind. I’d never used a razor on anyone, and I never wanted to use a razor on anyone, but it seemed like a good thing to keep away from the Slugger.
    The tapping stopped, both front and back. The guy in front, whom I automatically assumed to be the Slugger, called out, “We gotcha. Come onto the landing right now , because if we have to look for you, you’re gonna be horse glue.”
    I knew with absolute certainty that I was not going onto the landing. Unfortunately, that was the only thing I knew with absolute certainty. The alternatives—and I was sure there were dozens of them—refused to line up and say hi. I stood there in that bathroom wondering why none of the servants had lowered the seat or flushed the toilet, and then three things happened at the same time. “Achy Breaky Heart” started up in my head again, and the guy in front slammed his bat against the floor with a bang like a pistol shot, but that was instantly drowned out by a crashing noise of industrial proportions, a sound that could only have been caused by something the size of a cruise ship taking the gate outside right off its hinges. I actually heard both stages: first the crash with the attendant shriek of hinges being torn away and then the clatter of the gate, probably flung backward, hitting the driveway.
    â€œWhat the fuck ?”
    That was the guy in front, the Slugger, and the words were still echoing when I heard him sprint down the steps. The one behind me called a question, but I wasn’t paying attention to the words: I was already in the right front bedroom, opening the window on the right-hand wall as quietly as I could.
    It had an old-fashioned twist-lock at the top, so that slowed me down a second, but then I had it undone and I’d eased the window up about half an inch and retwisted the lock to the secured position, meaning that the window would look to anyone who didn’t take the time to come over for an up-close inspection as though it had been