Susan M. Hooper
When their brand new security system fails the test, Helene and Jack Fentnor are awakened by their daughter’s screams, instead of the alarm systems’ bells and whistles.
Racing to her room, the frightened parents find their toddler huddled in one comer of her crib, looking toward a window that should have been shut tight... especially in the middle of a New England winter.
Calling on their grown son, Arnie Kotkin, and his partner, Barnaby Moss, for assistance the next day, the Fentnors once again entangle the two young men in solving a crime that turns out to be anything but ordinary.
Susan M. Hooper was employed as a legal secretary/legal assistant for 23 years before hitting the craft circuit as a doll maker in 1996 and beginning to write comedic fan fiction pieces about a year later.
Silent Alarm, her fourth novel, features many of the characters from her first three novels, Belle Harbor Skeletons, Murder Junction and Another Day, Another Murder, along with some new faces.
Ms. Hooper resides in Connecticut with her family, which includes several four-legged members; walking is an obvious hobby.
Chapter 1
The noise could have been in her dream--it seemed that way at first.
Somewhere in the lower region of the house glass was shattering violently, but Helene’s sleeping mind turned it into a part of the nightmare with which she wrestled.
Her dream self crawled out of bed calling her husband’s name; he was neither beside her in the bed, nor standing anywhere in the shadow-filled room.
With no response coming to her ears, she floated, wraithlike, along a familiar yet terrifying corridor, and stopped outside her child’s open bedroom door. A breeze she could not feel swirled her filmy, ice blue negligee lightly around her.
Inside the room, the floor seemed to be coated with ice crystals--she knew at once it was broken glass--and it sparkled dazzlingly in the same moonlight that allowed her to make out her husband’s body. His strong arms were raised threateningly above his head, as he leaned over Emily’s broken body.
The horrified mother screamed, “No! Jack! What are you doing?”
Even as the ghostly words rang through her subconscious mind, new sounds from the next room yanked her jarringly back to the real world.
Fully awake, she realized that her daughter’s cries and the dog’s incessant barking were not part of her dream.
Jack, her husband of more than two decades, was already passing her side of the bed when Helene threw the covers back and urgently whispered, “Someone’s in Emily’s room.”
“In the house, anyway,” Jack confirmed. “Dial 911.”
He said nothing else; he was already out the door.
> <
Huddled in one corner of her crib, Emily Kathryn Fentnor, her middle-aged parents’ personal trainer, screeched at the tops of her lungs.
Terrified, the toddler clutched tightly to her teddy bear, Mr. Boslee, whose fuzzy, tan and brown face was buried in the child’s dark curls; judging by the stranglehold she had on the stuffed animal, its beady, black eyes should have been open as wide as her own hazel ones.
As frightened as the cherub-faced toddler was, she was also confused, and even a little bit angry.
Snuggled comfortably beneath her Little Bo Peep quilt only seconds earlier, she had been enjoying a very nice dream about talking teddy bears and dancing dogs--now she was trying to understand whom it was who had barged into her room, banged sharply on the side of her crib, played chase with her dog, and then left her window wide open.
Where were Mommy and Daddy?
The child would scream until they appeared in her room, and made the world all right again.
Had Emily been old enough to understand and explain exactly what she had seen, the family’s devoted dog, Tillie--who even now growled menacingly at the window--might have been named the Humane Society’s Dog of the Year; not every Lab would chase an intruder.
The present situation had been a dangerous one, and somehow the dog had grasped that--most likely because the two people the dog understood to be the pack leaders would never have struck the side of the little one’s crib with enough force to push it back against the wall.
Lunging away from the corner in which she had been sleeping, Tillie had chased the intruder away from the side of the crib and over to the window, biting the seat of his heavy, corduroy slacks every step of the way.
The dog may not have broken the soft skin beneath the stiff material she grabbed, but she had still left the unwelcome guest with the impression that the Fentnors’ Labrador retriever possessed a rare set of choppers.
> <
With his child’s screams piercing his ears, Jack Fentnor, well established and highly respected oral surgeon--and now Litchfield’s amateur sprinting champion--assaulted the hardwood floor with his bare feet, making it to the side of his daughter’s crib in what he knew was record time.
‘Great, Jack…you’ve hit your personal best’ he thought, as his mind forced itself to stay calm.
“It’s all right, sweetie. Daddy’s here” he said reassuringly, knowing that his blood pressure had probably hit its personal best, too, and had it enjoyed the benefit of feet, his still-racing heart could have captured the Triple Crown.
“Tillie, quiet down, girl. It’s all right” he said, eternally grateful to the devoted dog, but not yet looking toward her--he did not need to. He knew his dog would obey any command the first time it was given.
Reaching to turn on the nightlight near his child’s crib, the frightened father already had a sense that his daughter was unharmed. Even before the soft light washed over the quilted sheep of Little Bo Peep and flooded the room with its comforting warmth, Jack recognized Emily’s cries as being those of temper and not of pain.
His little girl had her mother’s disposition, as well as her eyes.
As his brain finally registered the fact that the crib had been pushed, and he realized that a faceless intruder had been as close to his child as he was now, he thanked God that his precious little girl was only mad, even as he caught his balance. Jelly legs were hard to stand on.
Suddenly beside him, her breath coming in nervous gasps, Jack’s wife bent over the side of the crib, and pressed trembling fingers to her daughter’s cheek. In the next second, she was reaching to gather the toddler into her arms, and whispering, “Hush, sweetie, don’t cry…Mommy and Daddy are here.”
“She’s all right, Lenie,” Jack said, placing a strong, comforting hand on his wife’s shoulder. His knees were knocking, but his wife would never have known that, judging by the strength of his grasp and the heartiness of the voice with which he queried, “You called 911?”
