Don't Say a Word (Strangers Series) (18 page)

CHAPTER 30

WHEN ALLIE’S ALARM woke her an hour and a half later, she was still exhausted. But when she noticed the bed was empty, she sprang up.

Sammy wasn’t in the room, although she’d told him not to leave the bedroom without her. Then it hit her: Johnny had probably shown up and they were in the living room together.

But when she reached the living room, she found Sammy and Zoe alone on the floor, playing with minifigures. She was grateful to see that even though she’d upset Zoe, the girl was still willing to help out with Sammy. It showed maturity on her part. And maybe that she was starting to come around again.

“Have you seen Daddy?” she asked Sammy.

He shook his head.

Allie checked her phone and saw that Johnny had not texted or called back. She looked out the window and saw his truck was still there. Confused, she decided it was time to wake Bitty.

When she pushed open Bitty’s door, the woman was curled up in bed.

“Bitty?” she said, gently.

The woman’s eyes opened.

“Sorry to wake you, but have you seen Johnny today?”

“No. Why? Is he here?”

“His truck is . . . but I haven’t seen him.” She explained everything to Bitty. When she finished, Bitty immediately climbed out of bed and called Detective Lambert. He and Sergeant Davis showed up ten minutes later.

After Allie answered the officers’ questions, Detective Lambert told her to sit tight and went outside to speak with a few other officers who had shown up.

Sammy was getting antsy, so Allie asked Zoe to play with him. Thankfully, Zoe said yes, but Allie noticed her skin was pale, as though she, too, were beginning to feel ill. “You feeling okay?” Allie asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Zoe said. But there were dark crescents beneath her eyes.

Allie made her way to her bathroom. Her mind was foggy, and she was experiencing what felt like tiny spasms in her brain. It was one of the withdrawal symptoms she always got when she forgot to take her antidepressant.

But she’d taken it, hadn’t she?

In the bathroom, she twisted open her prescription bottle and took double the capsules she usually took. Just for now . . . until they were on the other side of some of the chaos. After she checked on Sammy and Zoe, who were playing in the family room, she bundled up and went out on the deck, watching uniformed and plainclothes cops walk around the perimeter of the house and into the woods. Every once in a while, someone would call out Johnny’s name, and she’d hear the static and high-pitched beeps of police radios going off.

She shivered against the brutal cold, but at least she knew if she were outside, she’d be able to stay awake.

Well, maybe.

Bitty appeared with two steaming cups of coffee and sat down beside her. She still looked awful.

“You should be in bed,” Allie said.

“There’ll be time for that later.” Bitty squeezed Allie’s hand and offered her a weak smile. Allie held the woman’s hand tightly and watched the police work.

They sat outside for several minutes before the frigid weather forced them back indoors. While Bitty was putting on a fresh pot of coffee, there was a knock at the front door. Allie lumbered across the living room, as though wading through mud, and looked through the peephole.

Detective Lambert stared back from the other side. She opened the door and let him in. His cheeks and nose were red from the chilly air.

His blue eyes held hers, and she could tell from the expression on his face, he had bad news.

Her blood ran cold.

Deep voices chattered from his radio, and on the radios of a few of the other officers who were standing on the side of the house. “I’m afraid I don’t have good news.”

Bitty joined them in the doorway just as a siren sounded in the distance.

Sammy came running. “I hear ambwance!” he shouted, excitedly.

Detective Lambert looked down at Sammy and his eyes softened. “Hi, buddy.”

“Hi.”

Detective Lambert’s eyes were on Allie’s again. “Do you have someplace where we can talk in private?”

Her breath left her with a jolt. “Yeah.”

She turned and saw Zoe standing against one of the foyer’s walls. “Zoe, can you play with Sammy for a few more minutes?”

“No, I want to see the ambwance!” Sammy whined.

Allie went to Zoe and whispered in her ear, “Please help distract him a little longer, okay?”

Zoe frowned. “Yeah, sure. But why’s there an ambulance here? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know yet,” Allie said. “But please . . . bring him to my room and close the door. Take his basket of minifigures. Please take Carrie in there, too.”

“Okay.”

As detective Lambert, Allie, and Bitty walked into the living room, a cacophony of sirens sounded outside as police, fire, and medical vehicles arrived.

Bitty took a seat on the couch, but Allie remained standing.

“You might want to sit, too,” Detective Lambert said to Allie.

Allie didn’t want to sit. “What’s going on?” she asked, pretty sure she didn’t want to know.

He stared at her for a moment, his lips pressed into a line. “We’d usually first notify the next of kin in a matter like this, but given your situation, and the fact that Mr. Thompson’s truck is parked right outside . . .”

Allie couldn’t breathe.

“I regret to have to tell you this, but we just found Mr. Thompson’s body in the woods.”

Allie’s arms broke out in gooseflesh.

“What? What in God’s name happened?” Bitty asked.

Adrenaline exploded through Allie’s veins, and she suddenly felt more awake than she had for hours. “Body? What? Are you trying to say Johnny’s dead?”

“I’m sorry. It appears he suffered multiple gunshot wounds.”

White noise roared through Allie’s ears. Now she needed to sit down. She felt Detective Lambert’s hands on her shoulder as he helped her to sit.

Her mind went to Johnny’s face the last time she’d seen him. His big smile. His offer for her and Sammy to move in with them. Her pulse pounded in her ears.
Oh my God. How . . . how am I going to tell Sammy?

“And you’re sure it’s Johnny?” Bitty asked.

“His wallet was in his back pocket. His identification’s in it.”

Allie swallowed back the bile that had slid up her throat.

“Where? Where did you find him?” Bitty asked.

“In the woods. Just a few yards from your property, I’m afraid.”

“Was it Gary?” Bitty asked.

“It’s too soon to know.”

Thoughts flooded Allie’s mind. Had Johnny shown up, waiting for her and Sammy to be back home, and seen Gary? So Gary shot him?

And if so, how did no one hear?

She tried to process the fact that Johnny was gone.
Dead.
She just couldn’t wrap her head around it.

Tears rolled down her cheeks as she remembered being unkind to him the last time she’d seen him. Taking his key. What if she hadn’t taken it—and he’d been able to come inside the house?

Would he still be alive?

As though she knew what Allie was thinking, Bitty squeezed her hand. “Don’t blame yourself . . .
for anything
. You hear me? This isn’t your fault.”

Bitty gave Allie a Valium, and almost instantly, Allie felt like a zombie. She lay in bed with the lights off, floating in and out of consciousness.

Sammy came into the bedroom at one point. She wondered if he knew something bad had happened . . . surely he did . . . but he didn’t ask any questions, or request to see the ambulance again, or the police officers, who she could still hear crawling around their property.

Bitty and Zoe appeared every once in a while, to make sure she had everything she needed. At one point, just as it was getting dark outside, Zoe whispered in her ear: “I’m not mad anymore.”

The last thing Allie remembered before fading away for good was a ruckus coming from the back of the house. Police officers yelling excitedly to one another.

She tried to stay awake for a little longer, to figure out what was going on.

But her eyes slammed shut.

CHAPTER 31

SAMMY SAT CROSS-LEGGED in the family room, playing a Marvel memory game with Zoe.

He was having a hard time concentrating. He couldn’t stop thinking of his daddy. He didn’t understand why his truck had been parked in their driveway but he wasn’t there. Why the policemen had come. The ambulance. Why his mommy and Grammy had cried. He knew something bad had happened. Something very bad.

And now his daddy’s truck wasn’t there anymore.

The policemen had towed it away.

He had lain in bed with Mommy for a long time, wanting to ask her what was going on, but he decided not to because he was afraid. So he’d gotten up and went to talk with Grammy, but she was still talking to the policemen, so now here he was, playing with Zoe again.

He had a yucky feeling in his stomach. Like maybe he was going to throw up.

“It’s your turn,” Zoe said.

He looked up. “Oh, sorry.”

He stared down at the cards, but couldn’t remember what any of them were. He sat looking hard at them, thinking that maybe if he stared hard enough, he would be able to see the pictures on the other side.

“You move so slow I can feel my hair grow,” Zoe complained.

He looked up at her. She had the same too-white skin and dark shadows beneath her eyes his mommy and Grammy had. He didn’t like everybody being sick and tired—and not knowing where his daddy was.

“Come
on
,” she said. “Seriously. I think I just got my first gray hair.”

Zoe had been acting different since he’d found Carrie’s stuffed bear. He didn’t understand why it had made her so mad at him, but it did. Her moods seemed to change a lot, too. She was nice one minute, mean the next. It was really weird. “That not very nice,” he said.

“That not very nice,”
she mocked, making a face and using a baby-sounding voice. She squinted her eyes. “News flash: Not everyone is
nice
, Sammy. Some people just fucking suck.”

His jaw dropped. “That a bad word, Zoe,” he said, his eyes wide. “A
really
bad word.”

Zoe laughed, but it sounded mean. “God . . . you’re such a retard,” she said.

“A what?” he asked, suspicious. He didn’t know what that word meant, but it sure didn’t sound good.

“Um, I think you just proved my point.”

Zoe was making his stomach feel even worse. He gathered his cards, trying to get them away from her.

He didn’t like her anymore.

And this time he wasn’t going to change his mind. He was going to not like her
forever
. That would show her. “I play all by myself.”

“Whatever. Go nuts, dude.”

Zoe stood up and looked out the window.

“Go nuts”? What that mean?
Sammy wondered. She was saying all kinds of stuff he’d never heard of before. It was making him feel like a baby. And frustrated.

He crossed his arms and was about to tell Zoe that he was going to tell his mommy the things she was saying, and the bad word, too, when he noticed something crawling on the hard wood floor. He bent over and saw it was an ant.

An ant! He
loved
ants. He didn’t think they came out in winter, but maybe they did. Because one was right there! He lay on his tummy so he could see the ant better. “Oh, hello, ant! Hi, friend!” he said.

The ant was carrying a little speck of something white. Probably something for his home. He wondered what it was. A piece of bread? No . . . it looked too round. A tiny bead? He bet Zoe didn’t know that this ant could carry things fifty times his weight. And she certainly didn’t know that ants were alive when dinosaurs were.

See, he wasn’t a baby. He
knew
things.

He used his hand to block the ant, so it couldn’t get closer to the wall and disappear. He wanted to watch it a while longer. When it reached his hand, it stopped, then changed directions. He blocked its path again with his other hand. The ant changed directions again. He smiled. The ant was fun.

All of a sudden, Zoe’s bare foot shot out. She stepped on the ant and ground the ball of her foot into the floor, hard, side to side.

“No!” Sammy screamed. He looked up in disbelief and saw a nasty look on Zoe’s face.

Tears stinging his eyes, he peered down at the ant’s little broken body. It was now in pieces. About a million of them. “You killed it!”

Zoe stared down at him. “So what? Ants are bad.”

“No they not,” he said, his cheeks wet with tears.

“Yes, they are. They sting you.”

Sammy stared at the squished ant on the floor again. “But he no sting you, Zoe.”

“Well, how do you know it wasn’t planning on stinging me tomorrow? Or maybe in five minutes?”

Sammy didn’t have an answer for that.

“God, you’re so cheesy,” Zoe said, rolling her eyes and leading Sammy to believe it wasn’t good to be called that either.

He stared at her.

“What? I’m playing! C’mon, it was a
joke
.” She reached out to ruffle his hair.

But he shrank away from her.