The opening chapter of Always Home, the first novel in the ALWAYS series by D.J. Cole. A psychological tech thriller set in the Adelaide Hills.
ALWAYS HOME – BOOK 1
Chapter One
The Door
The growl woke her.
Low. Continuous. Arlo was standing at the bedroom door with his ears forward and the fur along his spine raised in a line she had seen only twice in seven years. Both times he had been right. He did not bark. This sound came from deeper in his chest, and it was the sound a dog makes when the thing he senses is already too close.
She checked her phone. 4:47am. She sat up. Listened.
The house was wrong.
She could not have said what. The fridge compressor cycled and the router hummed. The thermostat ticked somewhere in the hallway. Normal sounds she had catalogued in her first week here: which ones meant structure, which meant trouble. These meant structure.
But Arlo did not growl at structure. Arlo growled at people.
She got up. Bare feet on the polished concrete floor she had poured herself, specifying the aggregate mix and the sealant because that was the kind of decision she made about her own house. She pulled a jumper over her T-shirt. Opened the bedroom door.
The hallway was dark. She kept it that way. Kept her hands away from the switches. If someone was in the house, light would tell them she was awake.
Arlo went past her into the dark with his shoulders low and his hackles raised. She followed. Nine metres of hallway. The kitchen at the end. The microwave clock showing 4:48 in green digits.
She stopped at the threshold. She smelled it before she saw anything.
Cigarette smoke. Faint. Stale. Someone had smoked near her house, or inside it, recently enough that the molecules were still in the air. Nora did not smoke. Nobody who had been inside this house had smoked. She had rebuilt it from the frame and she knew what it smelled like: concrete sealant, timber, the mineral scent of the Adelaide Hills. Cigarette smoke was foreign.
Arlo was at the front door. Rigid. The growl gone, replaced by silence. Total attention. The silence of an animal who had located the source.
The front door was open.
Two inches. Deadbolt withdrawn. Handle in the open position. Cool air came through the gap. Eucalyptus. Damp pavement. And the cigarette smell, stronger here. Someone had stood on her porch and smoked and opened her door.
She stood still. Her body did what it did on building sites when something was wrong: it stopped. She had learned that the first thing you do when you find a structural problem is stop moving. Look. Understand the load path before you touch anything, because the wrong action can bring the whole thing down.
She looked at the floor. The concrete was polished to a matte finish, a surface that showed marks. There. Between the front door and the hallway table.
A scuff mark. Dark. The shape of a heel, the kind of mark a shoe makes on polished concrete when the sole carries grit from outside. She crouched. She kept her hands down. The grit was still granular, still loose in the sealant. Fresh. Someone wearing outdoor shoes had stood inside her front door.
She stood. Looked past the scuff mark toward the living room. And saw something else.
The armchair by the window. The reading chair she kept angled toward the garden. It had moved. Six inches to the left. She knew because the chair legs had sat in four small impressions in the rug since the day she’d placed it, and now the front legs were off the impressions and the rug fibres where the chair had been were still flattened. Someone had sat in her chair. Or bumped it. Or moved through the room in the dark and displaced it on their way past.
She checked the rest of the house. Kitchen. Study. Bathroom. Laundry. Spare room. Every window locked. Every screen intact. Back door locked, key in the inside position. The house was sealed from every direction except the front door, which was open two inches and smelled of a stranger.
She closed the door. Turned the deadbolt by hand. Pressed her palm flat against the wood. The bolt was solid. The door was closed.
She picked up her phone and called 000.
The operator was calm. The questions were procedural. Front door open. No forced entry. Shoe mark on the floor. Cigarette smoke. A chair moved. Nothing taken.
“Are you alone in the property?”
“Yes. I have a dog.”
“We’ll send someone out.”
She made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table and waited. Arlo sat at her feet, facing the front door.
She thought about calling Dan. Her brother ran a network security consultancy in Adelaide. He would understand the systems. He would know what the scuff mark and the thermostat meant together. But calling Dan at five in the morning about a door and a temperature reading would sound like the kind of call her family had learned to dread, the calls from seven years ago, and Dan would come, and Dan would check on her first and investigate second. She put the phone down.
The police arrived at 6:20. Two officers. They walked the house. The woman photographed the scuff mark. They checked windows, the garden gate, the neighbour’s fence line.
“No sign of forced entry,” the man said. “The deadbolt wasn’t damaged. No tool marks.”
“Someone moved my chair.”
The officer looked at the armchair. He looked at the rug. He wrote something in his notebook.
“The scuff mark could be from a delivery,” he said. “Have you had packages recently?”
“I take my shoes off at the door. Nobody has been inside in two weeks.”
“It’s possible the lock malfunctioned. Smart locks can glitch. Firmware updates, power fluctuations.”
“Software doesn’t wear shoes,” Nora said. “And it doesn’t smoke.”
The officers looked at each other. The brief professional look that meant they had reached the limit of what they could do.
“We’d recommend checking your lock firmware. And if you notice anything else, call us again.”
They left. Nora stood in the hallway. She cleaned the scuff mark with a damp cloth. She put the cloth in a plastic bag in the kitchen drawer. She pushed the armchair back into its impressions. Evidence, collected and restored.
She went upstairs to work. The coastal renovation. The junction between the existing slab and the new extension. Forty millimetres of level change. She solved it by 10:15 with a tapered screed bed and a recessed aluminium strip. The satisfaction lasted six minutes.
At 12:40 she went downstairs to make lunch. She stood at the kitchen island eating a sandwich while she reviewed a supplier quote on her phone.
She looked up. The Nest thermostat on the hallway wall read 18.
The target was 21. Had been 21 since she configured the schedule eight weeks ago. 21 degrees from 6am to 10pm. She walked to the thermostat. The display was steady. 18 degrees. Heating symbol absent.
She opened the app. Target: 18°C. She tapped the activity log. Last adjustment: Target temperature changed to 18°C. 12:38pm. Source: Schedule.
Two minutes ago. While she was eating a sandwich.
She checked the schedule screen. It showed 21 degrees from 6am to 10pm. Exactly as configured. The schedule said 21. The log said the schedule had set it to 18. The schedule and its own record disagreed.
She screenshotted both screens. Emailed them to herself: Nest, March 15. She reset the target to 21. Heard the gas heater click on.
Two events in thirty-six hours. The door open at 4:47am, with physical evidence of a person. The thermostat changed at 12:38pm, with digital evidence of access. Whoever had been in her house had also been in her system.
She went back to the study. She changed the Wi-Fi password. Changed the Nest account password. Enabled two-factor authentication. She worked through the security settings the way she worked through a specification: systematically, closing every access point she could find.
At 6:14pm she came downstairs to start dinner.
The thermostat activity log had changed. The entry she had screenshotted, Target temperature changed to 18°C, 12:38pm, Source: Schedule, was gone. The log showed no activity between 11:00am and her manual reset at 12:42pm. According to the system, it had never happened.
She opened her email. Found the screenshot she had sent herself. There it was. The record she had captured before the system erased it.
She put the phone down. She made dinner. She ate it standing at the island with Arlo at her feet and the house warm and quiet around her and a screenshot on her phone that proved her house could change its own history.
Three events. A door opened by a person. A thermostat changed by the system. A record erased by something that did not want the change to be documented.
She went to bed at 10:30. She put a kitchen knife on the bedside table. She left the hallway lights on. Arlo slept on the floor beside the bed, his head toward the door. Guarding.
She lay in the dark and thought about the person. A person who smoked. A person who wore shoes with grit on the soles. A person who sat in her chair or bumped it in the dark. A person who also had access to her thermostat, her lock, her system. A person who could enter her house and her network and leave no trace except the traces she was fast enough to capture before they disappeared.
She did not tell anyone about the thermostat. The door was a story people understood: someone broke in, call the police. The thermostat was a number on a screen that changed itself and erased the change. The thermostat was the kind of story that made people think about seven years ago, when Nora had checked a structural calculation fourteen times in one night and driven to a building site at 2am. The kind of story that made people say: like last time.
This was different from last time. The shoe mark was real. The smoke was real. Something was happening in her house, and the something had a body and a cigarette and shoes, and it also had access to her digital infrastructure, and the combination of those two things belonged to a person, not a firmware glitch. A person with a plan.
She fell asleep at midnight holding the knife handle against her palm.
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