Page 211 - LEIBY

Chapter 27 211

was the dining room, where he found Yaktarina’s saucer filled to
the top with fresh milk. The window was wide open and it was
obvious that someone had been there just a short while before
and had poured the cat her milk. The sound of the pebbles that
Leiby had thrown at the window had probably frightened off
the intruder, for other than the cat, there was no one in sight.

Leiby walked through the farmhouse, noting the disorder in
the corridor and the many packages strewn all over the floor. A
sudden thought struck him and he left it all, running straight
to the office. The door was wide open, papers and documents
littered the floor and it seemed that someone had left in a hurry.
Alexander’s knapsack had disappeared, and the picture of the
‘hikers’ too.

“Miriam, where are you?” Leiby called to the empty room. He
had a decidedly uneasy feeling that elements stronger and more
powerful than him were manipulating events, always one step
ahead of him, and he had no idea of what their objective or
target could be.

He deliberated for a few minutes as to whether it would be
wise to sleep in the building or not, and in the end decided
that he would sleep up in the loft; he was certain that no one
would think of looking for him there. It was common partisan
strategy, to sleep in the most unexpected of places. He turned
to the stairwell that led up to the roof and cautiously climbed
up a rickety ladder. He found himself in the dusky loft and
wanted to collapse directly down on a pile of straw and just go
to sleep, but he forced himself to check out the place first. He lit
a match, and in the dim light that it cast, tried to see if he could
make out anything suspicious. But the wind that whistled in
through the cracks in the windowpane blew out the tiny flame
almost immediately. At that moment the moon slipped out
from behind the clouds and lit up the room with an eerie white
light. Leiby watched in absolute terror as the heap of straw rose
up, seemingly all by itself, and a dark figure clothed entirely
in black crept out. The figure leaped to the window, jumped
down onto the second-floor roof, and was swallowed up in the