A.P. Greenwood - Writer, Author & Story Teller

Barton MacLane began his new life in San Angelo, Texas. He landed a job at the historic Fort Concho. He had his health and all the money he needed. He hadn't felt such optimism in years. But sometimes things just don't turn out the way they should.

Friday, one week ago. Nine o’clock in the morning. West University Place.

“Always keep the door locked, and do not open it for anybody. Do you understand me?”

When Lee Tuttle was ten years old, those were the exact words her father spoke to her the first time she had been left alone at home. Both her mother and father had decided that Lee was then old enough to stay at home -- during the day -- without a baby sitter.

That warning was repeated many times until Lee left home for college.

It was twenty-five years ago the first time Lee had heard those words, and it had felt like a rite of passage. It was an indication that she was growing up. Lee was no longer a child, but was a girl approaching her teenage years. She wasn’t afraid to be by herself, especially living in River Oaks, one of Houston’s nicest neighborhoods, and one that had their own police force.

The few times the doorbell actually rang when she had been home alone back then, she’d gone to the front window, looked out and never saw anyone who had frightened her. There were strangers -- soliciting or spreading the gospel. The postman whose first name she knew, she recognized when he came to the front door with a package. And on a handful of occasions, there were people she recognized as being friends of her mom.

But Lee always heeded her father’s words. She always kept the front door locked, and never opened the door for anybody when she was alone at home.

Over time, Lee eventually came to understand that she’d always been spoiled by her parents. She went to the finest schools, wore fashionable clothes, even as a teenager, and had a weekly allowance that was more than any of her friends received. Her family belonged to the country club where she took tennis and golf lessons, and where she hung out at the swimming pool with her girlfriends almost every day during the summers. On those hot days, Lee would 5 treat her friends to lunch or soft drinks, and, because the wait staff knew her and knew her family’s member number, she never had to sign any tickets.

But Lee Tuttle secretly blamed her parents -- whom she loved dearly -- for her being spoiled, and as a result, for some of the regrets in her life. Because everything had come easy for Lee, she took much of what she had throughout her relatively young life for granted. Nothing had value to her, including her first marriage. She’d hurt people, including some of her friends and she definitely hurt her first husband. When she was thirty, divorced and living alone, she did a lot of introspection, and had decided that in the future she would be a different woman.

She got a job at a boutique, working twenty-four hours a week. She found love, remarried, and unlike her first marriage, she was committed to keeping her marriage vows. She adopted her new surname, Patrick, and lived with her husband, Bob Patrick, in a very nice home on Nottingham Street in West University Place. It wasn’t River Oaks, but it was a very nice, upscale neighborhood situated near Rice University. Her home was one of the many newer ones in the neighborhood that replaced an original 1940s-era bungalow. It was two-story, stucco, had a modern kitchen, and was fairly large at 4,500 square feet.

This Friday morning, she was alone. Bob, the owner of a small oil and gas exploration company, had, as always, left for work at half past seven, and she wasn’t due at the boutique until ten. When the doorbell rang, the words from her father that Lee Patrick had heard countless times, beginning when she was a ten-year old, didn’t even come to mind for an instant. But when she went to the front door, before opening it, she did call out, “Who is it?”...