Robards, Karen (24 page)

“Sometimes you’re actually a pretty good guy, Detective, you know that?” Grace sent him a singularly sweet smile, the type that was seldom seen on her face anymore.

He met her gaze for a moment, then responded with a crooked smile of his own. “You want to put that in writing, Your Honor, I’ll frame it and hang it on my wall. It’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

For a moment they sat there smiling at each other. Then Grace remembered something and mentioned it almost reluctantly, regretting having to spoil the mood. “After you left today, I discovered that there was a picture missing from the arrangement on the wall going up the stairs. A picture ofJessica and me.”

He took a sip of coffee and looked at her meditatively. “So what are you trying to tell me?”

“I think he took it. The same person who left the cake and wrote on the mirror. I think he took the picture.”

The sound Marino made was very much like a notquite-perfectly muffled, long-suffering sigh. Grace

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bristled, then decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was, after all, sitting on her porch in the middle of the night, when he didn’t have to be.

“You want to show me?”

Grace put her coffee cup down on the table between the rockers and stood up. Marino did the same thing, then followed her inside. Grace was very conscious of his presence behind her as she led the way to the stairwell. Only a small amount of light from the kitchen reached the hallway. With a quick flick she turned on the chandelier that hung above the stairs, and blinked for a moment at the sudden brightness. She then climbed the stairs to the place where the bare nail stuck out from the wall.

“It was here,” she said, touching the nail’s small flat head as she turned to look at him. The side of her hand accidentally brushed his chest. The leather of his jacket felt slick and cool, the body beneath reassuringly solid. She was surprised to find that he was so close, close enough to allow her to see every individual whisker in what must be, when he forgot to shave, a heavy beard, close enough for her to feel the heat of his body and smell the aroma of leather and cigarette smoke that clung to him. With that single glance she took in the small vee of black chest hair just visible at the base of his throat, the fullness of his lower lip compared to his upper one, the slant of his thick black eyebrows as the inside corners were drawn toward his nose in a faint frown. Though he was two steps below her, their eyes were almost on a level. His were faintly bloodshot, as if he needed more sleep than lie was accustomed to get-236

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ting, and slightly narrowed as they stared at the place she indicated.

Grace was conscious, suddenly, of a strong desire to touch him, to place her hands on those broad shoulders and lean forward and …

Then he was looking directly into her eyes, instead of at the nail as he had been. His gaze dropped, and Grace realized that his focus had shifted to her mouth. Had something in her expression revealed what she was thinking? she wondered, embarrassed at the thought. Flustered, she turned quickly back to the wall and prayed her face wouldn’t turn red.

“It was one of three,” she said, conscious that she was babbling a little but unable to help it. “See, the other two are still here. They were a series of the two of us together, taken about three years apart. The one that’s missing is about a year old. You can see from the nail that it really was here.”

“Grace …” He drew her name out in a way that was pained and exasperated in equal measure.

She looked at him again, recognizing from his tone that he considered the missing picture meaningless, and felt herself start to get niad.

“I think whoever left the cake took the picture away with him,” she said firnily.

He glanced from her to the nail and back. “I’m not saying it’s not possible, but …”

“I thou-ht you said you were going to take this Zn

seriously, Detective!” Mindful ofjessica asleep upstairs, her voice was low but fierce.

He sighed and iiiet her gaze with a slight but unmis—

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takable twinkle in his eyes. “There you trying to bully me again.”

His amusement was too much. Grace sucked in her breath and glared at him. “Forget it. ‘This is useless. You’ve made LIP Your mind, haven’t vou None of this is happening. It’s Lill just a figment of my overactive imagination!”

“I’ll add the missing picture to the case file, okay?” His voice was soothing, and that was almost more inaddening than anything else.

“Forget it! just forget it!” Brushing past him, nearly knocking him down the stairs in her anger and not much caring if she did, Grace stalked to the light switch and flicked it off. “Go back out on the porch!” she snapped over her shoulder. “Better yet, go home! If none of this is happening, I certainly don’t need you hanging around playing bodyguard, do I? You

“Hush!” Two bounds brought him to the foot of the stairs. Grabbing tier from behind, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tightly against him as he clapped a hand over her mouth. His action was so urgent, SO unexpected, that Grace did exactly as he ordered: She hushed, hanging in his arms with the limp lack of resistance of a bean-bag toy.

“Look there!” He whispered the words into her ear as he lifted her clean off her feet and turned her around to face the living room. Clutching the hard, leatherclad arm around her waist for balance, she could feel the faint sharp stubble of five o’clock shadow scratching her skin as his jaw pressed close against her cheek. “Look at the window on the right!”

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For a moment Grace was bewildered. Then she saw it. The glowing lamplight outside had caught someone in the act of walking between the lamppost and the house. Thrown in sharp relief against the closed curtain, the shadow was visible for only a few seconds before it vanished from sight.

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TAY HEPLE!” Marino let her go, pulled a gun from the back waistband of his jeans and ran on silent feet for the front door.

Stay here nothing! Grace ran, too, for the kitchen, and her own gun. She would go out the kitchen door, and they would have him trapped between them.

The idea of catching the criminal who had been preying on her daughter filled Grace with a kind of savage triumph. She had always wondered if she would be capable of shooting someone if she had to. Now she had the answer, she thought as, pistol in hand, she slipped out the back door. She could.

The kitchen door opened onto a cement-floored, covered walkway that led to the door to the garage. The walkway was about twelve feet long by five feet wide, and it was wet and slippery. Roof-high verbena grew the length of it on both sides, so that the passage itself formed a kind of sheltered tunnel. There was an opening on either side just wide enough to permit a person to pass through, to the front and back yards.

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Grace stepped cautiously through the opening onto the flagstone path that led around to the driveway, unmindful of the shower of icy raindrops she dislodged or the rush of cold air that hit her in the face. She held the pistol stiffly in her right hand, and her glance darted all around.

The night was dark except for the round pool of yellow lamplight some thirty feet in front of her. Flanked by the house on one side and the garage on the other, the area where Grace stood was deep in shadow. She could see clear down to the hedge on the driveway side of the yard, but the house blocked her view of the rest. Moving carefully forward, she was conscious of the acceleration of her hearbeat.

Where was Marino? Where was the intruder? Remembering the direction in which the shadow on the curtain had seemed to be heading, the answer was obvious: in the backyard.

Grace turned and beheld a figure on the roof of the walkway. It was darker than the charcoal sky against which it was silhouetted, and it crouched low as it scrambled along. Whoever it was obviously meant to gain entry by the roof of the house, which slanted down almost low enough to meet the walkway roof over the kitchen door. From there the figure would, perhaps, seek out an unlocked second story window… .

Never afterward could she remember the next few seconds without a shudder, she raised her pistol and pointed it at the figure… .

“Freeze!” Marino yelled from the backyard. His voice sounded muffled and distant, but the order was

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unmistakable. The figure on the roof straightened like a puppet whose string had been pulled abruptly upright, and jerked around to look in the direction of the voice. In the process it seemed to lose its footing. Its arms windmilled, its feet danced, and then with a little cry it fell from sight.

Grace stopped breathing. All the blood seemed to drain from her face, her body. She would recognize that voice anywhere, any time, under any conditions, even as high-pitched and frightened as it had sounded then.

“Jessica!” she cried, horror in her voice, and ran toward the backyard.

When Grace reached her, Jessica was lying, arms outflung, in the grass, with Marino kneeling beside her. In the background, the tree house from her childhood looked down from the nearly bare branches of the sturdy oak where it had been built so many years before. Beneath it, the bright yellow plastic swings of her swing set were visible even through the darkness, swaying gently back and forth with the wind. A shower of droplets blew down from somewhere above, sprinkling Grace’s face.

“Jessica, Jessica!” Grace threw herself down on her knees beside Marino, uncaring of the wet grass that quickly soaked through her sweatpants. She leaned over the supine figure, unmindful of the gun, which she still clutched in her right hand. “Oh, my God, is she hurt?”

“Jesus!” Marino muttered, as Grace’s hand holding the pistol landed almost in his lap. Without another word he removed the weapon from her grasp. Grace

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barely even noticed. Her attention was all for the white-faced girl who, thankfiffly, was staring up at her wide-eyed.

“Hi, Mom,” Jessica said feebly.

Grace felt heat in her face as the blood returned to it in a rush.

“Hi, Mom?” she repeated disbelievingly, her voice a couple of octaves higher than normal. That answered her question for her, she thought. Jessica was not hurt. “Jessica Lee Hart, what were you doing on the roof?”

“At a guess, I’d say she snuck out again,” Marino said dryly whenjessica failed to answer.

Grace stared down at her daughter without speaking. For an instant, in an attempt to gain control of her emotions, she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Jessica was already scrambling to her feet, brushing off her clothes.

“I’m really sorry, Mom,” Jessica said in a tiny voice. “Are you hurt?” Grace’s voice was sharp. Jessica shook her head.

“Go into the house.” Grace knew she sounded preternaturally calm. What she felt was-blank. Nothing. just icy cold. She was in shock, she decided dispassionately. Which was probably a good thing, for the moment.

Jessica slunk into the warm, brightly lit kitchen, with Grace at her heels and Marino bringing up the rear and closing the door behind them. With the section of her mind that remained available to register such things, Grace saw that he carried her pistol, and only her pistol. His, she assumed, was once again tucked into the waistband of his jeans.

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Jessica walked past the table, tracking mud and bits of grass across the floor, to turn and face her mother at the center island. She rested one hand with its greentipped nails on the counter by the sink while the other flipped long strands of straight fair hair back from her face. The hot-pink strand in front was now purple, Grace noted, to match the earrings that dangled from her ears; Jessica must have recolored it while Linda was here. Grace also saw that Jessica’s hair and clothes were wet and covered with grass and mud, and she was dressed in jeans and the black leather jacket she had worn to the mall earlier. She flicked a glance to the coatrack, remembering Jessica removing the garment and hanging it there when she had come in from the mall. How had she failed to notice that it was missing? she wondered. How had she failed to sense that Jessica was not, after all, safe inside the house?

“Where have you been?” Grace’s voice was soft and controlled, and sounded unnatural even to her own ears. She moved to the end of the center island, her hand lying along the cold tiles just as Jessica’s was, staring at her daughter as if she were observing with curiosity a creature from a different planet.

How could Jessica have snuck out of the house again? Did nothing they had experienced mean anything to her? The mere idea that her daughter had been out roaming around in the dark, unprotected, when she knew that someone was out there who wanted, at the very least, to scare her badly, terrified Grace. Did Jessica have absolutely no sense at all? No notion of self-preservation?

“Mom, I’m sorry,” Jessica said. Her face was as

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white as paper, her eyes were huge, and she looked on the verge of tears. For the first time since she could remember, Grace found that the sight of her daughter’s distress did not move her. Not one bit.

““ere have you been?” This time there was a force to the question that made Jessica blink.

“I’ve been to a party, okay? A party. I knew you would never let me go so I snuck out. I’m sorry.” Truculence laced Jessica’s voice now. Her chin was up, and her hands were clenched into fists. Grace felt her muscles tense.

“Your bedroom door was locked. You crawled out your window, didn’t you? You deliberately locked your bedroom door and turned on your stereo so that I would think you were in your room when I got home, and you crawled out your window, along the roof to the walkway, and down the trellis on the back of the garage, didn’t you?” Now that she was alerted to the general idea, Grace could picture the route as clearly as if she’d seen a map of it. “To begin with, do you know how dangerous that is? I had a gun; Detective Marino had a gun. We thought you were that creep who’s been breaking into the house. What if one of us had shot you? What if the creep was out there watching somewhere and grabbed you? What if you fell off the roof? What if? … “