The House on North Canon Drive is Susan Reynolds’s Beverly Hills home and the setting of the novel’s November 7, 1981 home invasion. Planned as a place for Susan and Robert Mallory to spend a quiet evening alone, it becomes the scene where an intruder attacks Susan and Thom Wright, Robert carries the injured Thom to the hospital, and the threat surrounding the Trawler turns suddenly intimate. The house’s familiar protections—its size, its location, and the expectation that Susan is safe there—prove unreliable.

Setting and Planned Evening

Susan arranged for Robert to arrive at eight, on his eighteenth birthday, while her parents, Donald and Gayle Reynolds, were out to dinner. The plan was simply to watch television together in Susan’s bedroom; whether Robert would stay overnight had not been decided. Her parents were expected back around eleven, leaving the two teenagers alone in the house for several hours.

The house’s apparent security shapes Susan’s first response when she hears noises downstairs. She has taken Valium and is already anxious because Debbie Schaffer has disappeared, but she initially persuades herself that there is little danger in a Beverly Hills mansion. The contrast between that confidence and what follows makes the house more than a backdrop: it is a supposedly protected domestic space whose defenses have failed before Susan understands that anyone is inside.

Signs of an Intrusion

While getting ready upstairs, Susan hears what sounds like a slamming noise below. She stops the blow-dryer and listens, then calls Robert, who does not answer. After hearing another noise, she goes downstairs rather than immediately calling the police. In the living room, the phone rings; when she answers, the caller hangs up. She then notices that the sliding glass door between the backyard and dining room is open.

Susan cannot tell whether the door was left open earlier. She thinks she sees a figure beside a tree in the dark yard, then doubts her perception and closes the door. Her uncertainty persists even as her apprehension grows. She decides to wait for Robert outside, in her car, but the attack develops before she can reach that refuge.

The Attack and Escape

After Susan calls Thom and tells him she is frightened, the telephone line is cut. She finds an intruder in the living room wearing black clothes and a ski mask and holding a butcher knife. The encounter turns into a physical assault; Susan is wounded, and the intruder then attacks Thom when he arrives at the house after hearing her call for help. Thom is seriously injured in the struggle, and the intruder escapes through the open sliding door into the backyard.

Thom had driven over barefoot and in a bathing suit, racing from his home after hearing Susan’s plea. He found her in the living room and was attacked by the same masked figure. Susan crawls to him, then attempts to call for help, only to realize that the house’s phone lines have been cut. She runs outside to Canon Drive to attract assistance.

Rescue and Aftermath

Robert arrives in his Porsche as Susan reaches the street and tells him that Thom is inside and needs help. He enters the house, carries Thom out, and drives him and Susan to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center rather than waiting for an ambulance. At the hospital, Susan asks Robert to contact her parents; he does so, and Donald and Gayle arrive shortly afterward. Thom is taken into surgery, while Susan is also treated.

The rescue complicates the meaning of Robert’s presence. He appears at the critical moment and acts decisively to help, yet Bret Ellis learns of the attack in a call from Donald and immediately asks whether Robert is still at the hospital. Donald says Robert has left for Century City after speaking to the police. The novel places this report against Bret’s existing suspicion of Robert, leaving the rescue as a concrete act while preserving the narrator’s uncertainty about what Robert’s movements mean.

Place in the Trawler’s Pattern

The attack at the house follows a pattern already associated with the Trawler’s home invasions: a household experiences unsettling warning signs, an intruder gains access, and the victim does not initially recognize the danger as part of a larger series. Earlier reports describe calls before attacks, changes inside homes, and missing neighborhood pets. At Susan’s house, the open sliding door and disconnected phone line make the domestic setting’s vulnerabilities decisive.

The location also belongs to the wider geography of the novel’s threat. The Trawler’s reported attacks extend across neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley and beyond, while characters themselves move through Los Angeles by car, following roads and trying to interpret where others are going. At North Canon Drive, that dispersed menace enters the home of someone known to Bret and Thom. The attack therefore shifts the threat from newspaper reports and rumor to a crisis that reshapes personal relationships and raises the stakes of Bret’s investigation.