Just Evil (18 page)

When she saw tears pool in Baylee’s eyes, Kit drew the
shorter woman into a hug.  “Now that that’s settled, what do you need me to
do?”

Baylee patted the water from her cheeks with her fingertips,
began to plan what needed to be done. “We can switch out the car seat from my
car to yours, load up the Pack ’N Play. She can sleep in that. I’ll pack a
couple extra bottles of breast milk, but remember to save one to give to her
when you put her down for the evening. She goes down around seven, wakes up
again around midnight. I’ll be back long before then, of course. I’ll pick her
up around nine. Is that okay?”

“Perfect. I invited Jake to dinner.”

“Ah. Then you’ll need to take the baby monitor.” She saw the
puzzled look cross Kit’s face and broke out in a huge grin. “In case you get
distracted, you can still hear Sarah over…heavy breathing.”

Kit rolled her eyes. “Well, things are…heating up.”

“Nothing wrong with heat in the early stages. Look, I’ll
call Tanya, take the chicken way out and let her tell Dad I’m gone after I’m
gone. That way I can avoid a blow up with him.”

When Kit gave her a doubtful look, she added, “I can’t deal
with him, Kit. Even if he needs me to be around, I can’t be there when he’s
drinking. Lord knows we were never close, but for the past couple of months I
thought we’d turned a corner. And then…anyway, I was trying to give him the
benefit of the doubt. But now, I don’t want Sarah around him if he’s going to
drink like that.”

“Well, good for you.” In spite of her dinner invitation to
Jake, Kit offered, “Can you get your stuff and Sarah’s by yourself or do you
need me to go with you?”

Checking her watch, Baylee decided. “I can get it. I don’t
have that much.” And wasn’t that pathetic, she thought. “Maybe I should stay
and feed her when she wakes up. Yeah, that’ll work. And Kit—thanks.”

Later, Kit was dealing with diaper duty and contemplating
closing up fifteen minutes early when the bell over the door jingled and a
customer walked in. 

Used to customers coming and going in and out of the store
all day, Pepper usually gave them no more than a quick once-over before
ignoring them completely while they went about their shopping.

But now as the man, not all that tall and with salt and
pepper hair, approached Kit and the baby, Pepper took up a genuine guard-dog
stance. Head ducked low, growling, Pepper watched the man advance. Kit couldn’t
believe what she was seeing. Her usually docile dog had gone on the attack.

She gave Pepper a look, snapped her fingers and commanded,
“Sit. He’s usually not like this,” she told the man. As Kit stood up, she swung
Sarah to her hip, and watched as Pepper reluctantly obeyed, sitting in place on
his haunches, nervously eyeing the customer. 

“May I help you with something?” Kit politely asked the man
who continued to stand just inside the doorway, eyeing the dog as if he weren’t
sure the canine was friend or foe.

Looking around tentatively for several seconds, he answered
with just a hint of a brogue. “I hope so. I was in here the other day getting
coffee and noticed you have several paintings on the walls.”

He nodded toward the coffee house. He’d come back not just
to take another look at Kit Griffin but to satisfy a curiosity that had been
nagging at him, one he couldn’t shake. “I was wondering if they were for sale.
There’s one…I’m interested in the one where the woman with the long flowing
blonde hair appears to be floating on water. None of the art had a price.”

A confused look crossed Kit’s face momentarily before
realization dawned. “Oh, the paintings…” Some were hers, some were Baylee’s,
but there was only one that fit his description and it belonged to Ella Canyon.

She tried to think whether or not in the four years since it
had been hanging on the walls of the coffee shop if anyone had ever shown an
interest. That had been her original intent to showcase local artwork on the
walls of her store where customers might see the paintings and buy them. But
here in San Madrid the idea fizzled. The town wasn’t exactly a hotbed for art
lovers.

“Imagine my surprise at finding such art in a backwater
place like this, or the fact that anyone here would recognize such artistic
expression.”

Certain that she and her shop and the town had just been
insulted, Kit tried to offer up a smile when she pointed out, “It’s done in
oil. One of Ella Canyon’s works; she called it
Woman
Rising
.” She
jostled Sarah as she walked over to stand beside him under the painting. All
the while Pepper continued to stand guard.

The painting was of a semi-nude woman, draped only in a
sheer white gown, standing in a greenish pool of water on an oversized canvas. “Notice
the golden color of the woman’s long hair, as if you could simply reach out and
touch it, and the way the artist uses contrasting colors around the woman’s
form to create a reflective effect. I think that’s what causes it to look like
mist rising slowly out of the water. And as you can see, there’s no busy
background to detract from the subject of the painting, which is of course, the
woman.”

When she turned to get his reaction, the man had turned
white as a sheet and looked to be on the verge of hyperventilating. Fearing he
was about to faint, or worse, suffer a heart attack, Kit snapped out
instructions, “Sit before you fall down.”

It didn’t take much effort to push him into one of the
overstuffed chairs. “Do you want some water? Are you on medication? Is it time
for you to take a pill or something?”

He didn’t answer her, but continued to look as though he
might be having some kind of attack. She took off clutching Sarah, ran to the
counter, and grabbed the phone, dialing 911. While she waited for help to come
on the line, she slid behind the counter to grab a bottle of water from the
mini-fridge. She ran back past the register to where he was sitting and found
him pointing at the canvas. “Where…did you get it?”

The minute the dispatcher came on the line Kit stared at the
man, wanting to know, “Do you need an ambulance?”

The man shook his head.

Kit explained to the dispatcher that she’d thought a
customer was in trouble but that now he seemed to be fine. When she hung up,
she noticed the man continued to stare at the painting. Watching him, Kit grew
more uncomfortable. Bizarre was the word running through her mind as she
mentally measured the distance to the front door.

 “Do you know the woman in the painting, Ms. Griffin?”

This particular painting had been hanging in the apartment
she’d shared with Baylee and Quinn for several years before she’d moved here.

Quinn’s mother had given the three girls the painting as a
housewarming gift. But when Kit had moved out, Quinn had insisted she take it
with her to hang in the shop. Eyeing the man’s face, Kit decided he’d made a
connection to this piece. He deserved to know its history. “The painting was a
gift from the artist. Are you familiar with Ella’s work?”

He shook his head. “Does the artist—does she look like the
woman in the painting?”

“Why…no, it isn’t a self-portrait.”

“Was she ever in Ireland?”

“Ireland. Well, of course! That’s where Ella met Quinn’s
father, Nick Tyler.” When she saw absolutely no recognition at the name on the
man’s face she added, “Nick Tyler, the lead singer for Shatter, the Irish rock
band. As I understand it, Ella lived there for several years. Quinn was born
there. Ella used to be quite the artist.” When she wasn’t on drugs, Kit
thought, seeing no reason to share that little tidbit or the fact that Ella no
longer bothered with painting and hadn’t for years.

When she noticed the man still hadn’t taken his eyes off the
canvas and simply sat as if in a trance, she went with instinct and asked, “By
any chance, do you recognize the woman in the painting?”

“She looks—there was someone once. She looks—like my wife.”
As he made mental notes, his mind whirled with possibilities. The artist had
lived in Ireland. Was it possible? “Do you know where in Ireland?”

“I have no idea, but Quinn could tell you.”

“When did she live there? What was the timeframe?”

She racked her brain, throwing out the date. She knew for
sure Ella had been there during the height of the band’s popularity when she
was Nick Tyler’s girlfriend. But beyond that, Quinn’s early years were sketchy
at best, even Quinn didn’t know details.

His brow tightened. If true, the timing was right. How could
he tell her what having this painting meant to him?

He was staring at her and acting strange again, Kit thought
when their eyes met. She saw the pain in his eyes. “This isn’t just a
connection to a painting, is it? You actually believe the subject of the
painting might have been your wife.”

“Aye.”

Obviously, this man had loved her very much. His reaction to
the painting was one of the most remarkable responses to a work of art she’d
ever experienced firsthand.

Talk about art reaching out to a person, Kit thought, and
not ten minutes earlier this man had come into her shop with a bit of an
attitude, insulting her, and now sat in the chair as if he’d undergone some
sort of epiphany, or at the very least a change in personality.

Tentatively she asked, “Would you like the painting?”

The man simply nodded. Another difference in his attitude,
thought Kit. Just a few minutes ago he’d been making fun of her store, the
town.

“Okay. I’ll wrap it up for you.” She put Sarah down inside
the Pack ’N Play without a fuss then walked a few feet away to the closet and
dragged out the step ladder. When she’d climbed up a couple of steps to reach
the painting, she heard Pepper give a low growl and turned to see that the man
had finally moved out of the chair and was standing over Sarah at the Pack ’N
Play.

Kit panicked. “What are you doing?”

“I…I was just looking at the baby.”

An uneasy feeling hit her. She thought of him now not as a
customer, but a complete stranger who’d walked in off the street pretending to
want a painting she’d had hanging on the wall for four years. And she’d been
stupid enough to fall for his story. She knew nothing about this man, this
odd-behaving man who for all she knew could be Baylee’s long-held secret,
Sarah’s father, who was here in the store to distract her while he kidnapped
Sarah and took her off to God knows where.

While Pepper continued to hold the man at bay with his low
guttural snarling, she walked slowly down the ladder one step at a time,
hitting the floor with heavy feet. She inched closer to the portable phone on
the counter she’d held only minutes earlier. “Well, well, she’s…fine. She
doesn’t need you to be…that close.”

The man looked up and immediately saw the panic in the
woman’s eyes. He stepped back from the baby. Closing the distance between them
to within a few feet of where she was standing, he stopped short when he
realized it wasn’t just panic he saw in her eyes, but genuine fear.

Wanting to correct her misconception, he told her, “I meant
no harm…to the baby. I…”

Kit watched him rub at his forehead and close his eyes.
Watching his increasingly odd behavior, the uneasiness quivering within her
grew to major red flags. She heard herself telling him, “Maybe we should do
this another time.”

He nodded, opened the door to the coffee shop, and was gone.

When he was all the way out of the store, Kit ran to the
door and turned the lock. Then ran to the front door of the bookstore, did the
same thing there. She leaned her back against the door and tried to stop
shaking.

It wasn’t until she’d settled down and had gathered Sarah in
her arms that she replayed the scene. As she stood there clutching the baby to
her chest, she remembered he’d called her Ms. Griffin. She was pretty sure they
hadn’t taken the time to exchange names.

And that, she thought, made the whole incident even more
unsettling and creepy.

It was after seven when Kit heard a car pull into her
driveway. It was all she could do not to run out of the house and act like that
awkward teen she’d once been.

She had to take a couple of deep cleansing breaths to force
herself to continue chopping veggies for the salad she was making.

As she dried her hands on a dish towel, she cast a
please-help-me glance toward baby Sarah who sat in her swing gnawing on a fist.
“You’re my buffer tonight, Sarah. I won’t let my hormones rule while you’re
here. And hey, I’m no longer that goofy girl I once was. You’re going to
prevent me from doing anything really stupid tonight. Aren’t you, pretty girl?”

When the doorbell finally rang, Kit picked up her support
system from the swing and made the baby gurgle at getting free of her
confinement. As Kit wiped drool from Sarah’s chin, she smoothed out the baby’s
yellow romper, purposely taking her time getting to the door.

It wasn’t easy, but Kit managed to let him cool his jets on
the front stoop a couple of seconds longer than was absolutely necessary,
giving her some much needed time to appear more composed than she actually
felt. But she made the mistake of looking through the door’s peephole. At the
sight of him standing on her porch with a bottle of wine in his hand, her heart
jumped. She clutched the baby tighter, leaned her forehead on the door, trying
to ignore the flash of heat she felt in her lower belly.

How could she possibly feel this glad to see a man she’d
left mere hours earlier? Lord, help her, but she wanted so badly to jump the
man’s bones. This feeling was worse than any she’d ever had at fifteen. After
taking another set of cleansing breaths she got herself more under control,
opened the door, and gave silent thanks to Sarah’s presence.

Jake shot her that killer grin, held up the wine and hedged,
“Please tell me fifteen minutes after doesn’t mean I’m late. Traffic was
terrible.” Eyeing the baby in her arms, he asked jovially, “Are we
babysitting?”