For the Sake of Their Baby (16 page)

“You asked Emily and she told you she wasn’t there,” Doris insisted.

“But I saw her admiring that fantastic curio cabinet in your uncle’s study. You remember the one, Liz.”

“I remember it,” Liz said. As soon as her uncle’s estate was settled once and for all, she would have to catalogue his possessions. The thought was staggering—her uncle had been quite a collector.

For now, she made a note to ask Emily about the party, but it seemed to her that Marie must be mistaken, just as Doris said she was. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to clear it up.

Liz put a hold on the gadget that pureed baby food and left the store, making her way past the Santa and the crowd of wiggling children waiting to sit in his lap, past the athletic shoe store and the card shop, stopping for a second to admire the array of lovely green and red satin dresses she was still months from being able to squeeze into, moving at last to Nature’s Knits.

Emily’s store was one of the narrow ones, most of the front taken up by a large window and a glass door. The window was filled with knitted articles of clothing and toys, all done in beautiful rich colors seemingly plucked from the earth, the air, the sea. In deference to the season, a few crocheted white snowflakes the size of dinner plates were suspended in among the sweaters and caps.

A newcomer to Emily’s staff was behind the counter, wrapping a gift for an elderly man who leaned on his cane. They both looked up when Liz entered. The man smiled and the woman nodded a greeting. She had a pierced bottom lip and spiked orange hair and couldn’t
have looked more out of place in a store specializing in vegetable-dyed yarns than if she’d just fallen off a spaceship. When Liz asked to speak with Emily, the girl shrugged.

“The boss left early,” the salesgirl said as she taped the plain brown paper in place. Liz knew Emily liked to keep her wrappings simple to complement the earthy theme of her store. It made the wild-looking clerk’s presence that much more interesting.

“I can tell her you came by if you want to write your name down,” the woman said as she bound the package with several twists of twine, fastened a cinnamon stick on top with a casual bow, and stuck a green-and-gold store sticker in place. She presented it to the man who tucked it beneath one arm.

Liz couldn’t stop staring at the bolt of twine. Natural colored twine.

Her head said twine was everywhere and nine-tenths of it had to be this color.

Her heart skipped a few beats.

“Want to leave a message?”

“Uh, no,” Liz said. “No thanks.”

She turned to leave, and then, feeling like a traitor to her friend, picked up two skeins of beet-dyed yarn and asked for them to be gift wrapped.

U
SING TWENTY FEET
of his trusty rope, Alex dropped from the last remaining landing onto the rocks below. He knew he didn’t have a lot of daylight left to find the piece of twine Liz had thrown toward the beach, but he had to try.

He flashed on the image of her approaching through the food court, her face so pale it was almost translucent.
She’d frantically told him about Emily being at her uncle’s party—maybe—and the twine in the yarn shop.

He’d told her twine was everywhere, and it was. But if he could find the piece that had been used on Sinbad, they could compare it to Emily’s, a sample of which Liz had procured by having something wrapped. He had no illusions of being able to declare unequivocally that it was the very same twine from the very same spool that had been used to anchor Sinbad to the stairs; his hope was that the differences would be vast enough to show that it
wasn’t
the same.

Time was ticking away.

Liz was inside the house with the doors locked. She’d protested him coming to the beach alone; he’d circumnavigated her worries by waiting until, exhausted, she’d fallen asleep. He’d left her safe in their bedroom.

He scampered over the rocks and despite everything, felt a sense of joy and freedom at being this close to the cold Pacific Ocean. Icy spray tingled on his skin. The wind blew through his hair, its fingers cold and invigorating. Waves broke on the rocky beach and washed away with a rumble he loved. He came across a wide rock hidden by the curve of the land and recalled the moonlit night he and Liz had made love on the spur of the moment, seduced by the sounds and smells of the sea, seduced by their love for each other.

He turned his back on the past. The future was where he was headed, where he was determined to spend his life, not locked away in a cell, locked away from everything and everyone he cared about, locked into memories as his only comfort.

Taking a flashlight out of his pocket, he began searching each nook and cranny. Twine was so lightweight; the wind might have blown it anywhere, the rain might
have driven it into a tiny crevice, the currents might have carried it north or south or halfway to Japan. It seemed an impossible task to find one little bit of twine.

And so it proved to be. He gave up as daylight faded everything to shades of gray and even the white rope he needed to climb to get back to the landing above began to disappear. He climbed up the big rocks and over a stranded section of stairs that had yet to be washed away. It was then he saw something flutter in the wind.

A twelve inch piece of string—no, twine—was wrapped around one of the rail supports, caught on a contorted nail. It was too short to be the piece he was looking for, but too coincidental to be unrelated. Perhaps Sinbad had chewed this piece free before Liz came along. He spent a few moments untwisting it, crammed it in his pocket and grabbed his rope for the ascent up the cliff.

Yanking it hard, anxious to see Liz, he staggered backward as the whole length came hurdling toward him.

L
IZ AWOKE
with a start. The house was twilight dark and silent. She glanced at the digital alarm clock and saw that it was after five o’clock.

The last thing she remembered was Alex rifling through drawers, searching for the flashlight he’d had just the night before. Apparently, she’d fallen asleep, and as the baby kicked and rolled inside her, she sat up, angry with herself for leaving Alex alone to go down to the beach on a fool’s errand.

Now, after a rest, the twine at Emily’s store seemed more a coincidence than some ominous portent of doom pointing a shaky finger at Emily of all people. Liz slipped on a sweater and made her way down the fa
miliar hall and into the kitchen without turning on lights, anxious to keep her night vision intact. Sinbad yowled from his basket and she stopped to pet him and assure him how beautiful he was despite the raw wounds on his shaved neck and the ugly shaved area surrounding the stitches on his hip.

“I’ll feed you in a few minutes,” she assured him as she let herself out the back door and made her way carefully across the damp grass toward the bluff, expecting to see Alex’s flashlight at any moment, heralding his return. Halfway there, she heard a noise behind her and jumped.

A shadow seemed to move in among all the other shadows. She stared into the gloom, straining to hear something that would explain away what had startled her: a neighbor’s dog, a…well, a neighbor’s dog.

“Alex?” she called.

A dark shape seemed to dispatch itself from the recesses of the back of her house and move toward her, silent and ominous. Liz felt her heartbeat accelerate and the desire to run was quelled only by the knowledge that running from anyone in her present condition was all but pointless. Still, she poised ready for flight.

She said “Alex,” again, hopeful, but knowing he would never come at her like this. “Who’s there?” she demanded, her hands unconsciously protecting her belly.

The shadow stepped close enough that she finally saw the shape of a man—a big man. Harry Idle’s voice carried over the thumping roar of her heart.

“Liz?”

She almost crumbled with relief. “What are you doing out here, Harry?”

He moved very close, so close in fact, that she could detect the odor of stale cigarette smoke on his clothes.
“Your house is dark,” he said, coming another step closer. Liz backed away. “What are you doing out here in the dark by yourself?” he added. “I’m surprised Alex lets you wander around like this. You could fall right off that cliff and kill yourself.”

Outrage at his sexist remark fled in the face of a growing feeling of alarm. She said, “Why are you in our backyard?”

“I’m looking for you,” Harry said, advancing as she retreated. “You know, you shouldn’t be out here alone. It’s dangerous. There might be someone out here in the dark, someone who wants to hurt you.”

Like him?

“I think you should leave,” she said, fighting to keep her teeth from chattering with fear. The bluff wasn’t far away—the sound of the waves was more distinct and the edge more perilous. She couldn’t keep backing up without looking where she was going and she couldn’t afford to take her eyes off his face.

He grabbed her arm. “You’d better come with me.”

She twisted free and tried to turn, but her feet slipped on the grass. She ended up on her hands and knees, twisting as much as she could to face her attacker.

Harry loomed over her, hands plucking at her sweater. She screamed and the next thing she knew, a light appeared, a man yelled, Harry disappeared and Ron leaned down beside her.

“Liz,” he said, “are you hurt? Here, take my hand, come on now, get up slowly, be careful.”

He pulled her to her feet. Liz felt like crying, not from pain but from relief. She held onto Ron’s arm, swallowing her tears, facing Harry, shaking with outrage.

Ron said, “What in the hell were you doing to her?”

“I wasn’t doing nothing,” Harry insisted.

Liz tugged at Ron’s arm. “I can’t find Alex,” she gasped.

Ron flashed his light on Harry who covered his face with his hands. “What did you do to Alex?” he said, his voice low and threatening.

“I didn’t do anything to anybody,” Harry said. “I was just looking out for her. You’re here now, I’m leaving.”

“Wait a minute,” Liz said. “What do you mean that you were just looking out for me?”

“Your lights were all off and I thought I saw someone on your porch. I was going to call the cops but I thought I’d take a quick look for myself. You startled the hell out of me.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me this?” Liz demanded. “Why did you act so threatening?”

“I didn’t act threatening.”

“The hell you didn’t,” Ron said.

“I’m not taking any more of this,” Harry said and turned to leave. Ron reached out as if to stop him, but Liz pulled him back. “Never mind Harry, Ron. Alex went to the beach a long time ago. The stairs are broken two thirds of the way down. He might have slipped or—”

“Stay here,” Ron said as he started down the beach stairs.

She called, “Be careful,” as she looked over her shoulder to make sure Harry Idle had really left.

A
LEX TIED
a waterlogged piece of driftwood to the end of the rope and, swinging it into the gloom above, aimed for the landing and the rail surrounding it. He’d been stuck on the beach for half an hour now. Every once in a while, the stick would thud on the landing and seem
to catch, but it always came back and, a couple of times, damn near brained him.

He knew he was in no real danger. The tide was low and if need be he could hike down the beach and eventually find a gully or another way up the bluff. It would take a few hours, but it was doable. Only the potential of what was happening to Liz kept him swinging the rope.

Wasn’t this one of the main reasons he’d bought that damn phone? What was the point of having the blasted thing if he forgot to carry it?

He’d examined the end of the rope with his flashlight and knew it hadn’t been cut. Someone had loosened it or perhaps the knot he’d tied had worked itself open. That one was hard to believe. If there was one thing he knew about, it was tying knots and he’d bet a bundle that his had stayed in place.

He looked up when he heard the pounding on the stairs that signified someone was coming. A zigzagging light heralded help on the way, and he hoped against hope that it wasn’t Liz, not so pregnant, not in the dark. Still, if she was on the stairs it meant she wasn’t trapped in the house with a homicidal maniac, right?

“Liz?” he yelled.

A voice yelled back. A man’s voice. “Are you hurt?” The light had stopped on the last landing.

“Is that you, Ron?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Don’t worry, Liz is fine.”

Thank heavens.
He said, “I’m going to throw up a rope. Loop it around the stanchion up there. Tie it off. Watch out for the stick tied to the end of it.”

“You got it.”

Within a few moments, he was at the landing, Ron’s extended hand a welcome help as he climbed onto the
wooden platform. He clapped Ron on the back, damn near hugged him. “Liz is okay?” were the first words he spoke.

“She’s fine. When I got here, I found someone named Harry hassling her—”

Alex was off like a shot. Ron had left Liz alone with Harry lurking about? He took the stairs at breakneck speed, no easy task in the dark. He found Liz at the top, a small dark shape with a distinctive side profile, his wife and his baby—his life—and he ran to her, to them, gathering her into his arms, kissing the side of her head, holding her as close as he could.

“You okay? Ron said Harry—”

“I’m all right,” she interrupted, but her voice sounded shaky.

Cupping her cheeks, he kissed her forehead. “What happened to you? You took so long, I was coming to see if you were hurt—”

“Trouble with the rope,” he said.

Ron appeared just then and they all straggled toward the back of the house.

Ron said, “What in the devil is going on around here?”

Alex opened the door and switched on a light. Sinbad meowed and blinked his blue eyes. Ron leaned over the barricade to pat the cat and looked up at them.

“Emily came into my office this afternoon, very worried about Liz because of a phone conversation the two of them had had this morning. She said something about Liz finding Sinbad on the beach stairs…well, you know how cautious Emily is, how she worries about…things. I thought she was overreacting, but I agreed to come out here after work and check on you guys.”