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Fear

by Sandra M. Odell

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“I hear something downstairs. Denny, you go down the basement and check the door. Make sure it’s locked tight.”

Dennell Baker clutched the doorframe beneath the latch until he could feel his pulse in his fingertips. “Sorry. What?”

The realtor in her sensible blue pantsuit and blued hair, what his mother used to call “old white lady church hair”, paused. “I wondered if we could go downstairs and –”

That’s what he’d thought she’d said. “No.”