'Tis the Season (6 page)

She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I think it would be better if I met him. So he won't be worried that you were with me.”

“Well, he doesn't have to know about that,” Billy explained.

“If I were your father, I'd want to know.”

“He's just playing poker, anyway,” Billy argued. He wished she would just leave so they could sneak into the house before they got caught. “Really, it's okay. You should go back to your house and light your candles, okay? I mean—”

At that instant, the sliding door shot open and his father came charging out, looking half-insane, his eyes flashing and his hair a mess. “Oh, my God! Are they okay? What happened? Are my kids okay?” He froze a
few steps from the lady, his breath puffing in the cold air and his panic slowly fading, replaced by a frown as his gaze shifted from Billy—who was obviously just fine—to Gracie, snuggling up against Filomena, to Filomena herself.

His frown deepening, he asked, “What the hell is going on?”

H
E WASN
'
T SURE
what had prompted him to leave the game and check on the kids. Maybe it was that the lack of noise upstairs had seemed unnatural. Maybe it was that when he'd stood at the foot of the stairs, he'd felt a chilly draft blowing down from Billy's room. Maybe it was that Gracie's door had been standing wide-open. When he'd tucked her in fifteen minutes ago, he'd left her door open just a crack, the way she liked it.

“Hey, Evan, are you in?” Murphy called to him from the kitchen.

“Not this hand,” Evan shouted over his shoulder, already halfway up the stairs. He barged into Billy's room and saw the window up, the screen unhooked from its frame. Leaning out, he saw no sign of Billy.

He abandoned Billy's room for Gracie's. Her blanket was rumpled, her night-light on, her favorite stuffed animal—Pokey the elephant—propped on her pillow. She was gone.

Exerting superhuman self-control, he refrained from screaming, cursing or punching a hole through the wall. Inhaling and exhaling in an even tempo—this took some effort—he left Gracie's room. From the kitchen rose the sound of laughter. Apparently Tom had attempted to bluff his way through the hand, and the others were ribbing him about it. It amazed Evan that Tom could be a
private investigator, a profession that presumably required a flair for bluffing, but he couldn't bluff his way through a hand of five-card draw.

Evan's friends seemed a universe apart from him, their laughter an incomprehensible language. He staggered down the stairs, searched the family room, crossed to the glass slider, turned on the patio lights and surveyed the backyard. Empty. No children.
No children
.

“Evan?” Levi called from the kitchen. “Are you going to join us?”

“My children are gone,” he shouted—only, the words emerged as barely a whisper.

“What?” Levi appeared in the doorway, tall and craggy and bemused. “Something's wrong with your kids?”

“They're gone.” Evan stood in the middle of the family room, his heart pounding so fiercely that he was surprised his sweater wasn't fluttering with each beat. “They climbed through Billy's window and ran away.”

Murphy pushed past Levi and joined Evan in the family room. “Your kids ran away? You're joking, aren't you.”

Evan shook his head.

“Should we call the police? When my kids got in trouble—”

“Forget the police,” Levi broke in, gesturing toward the windows overlooking the backyard. “I think Evan's kids changed their minds about running away.”

Evan spun around and saw Billy coming across the dead grass, followed by an unfamiliar woman carrying Gracie and shining a flashlight. Billy was leading the way.

Evan absorbed the scene, then shoved open the slider
and hurled himself outside, wanting to weep, wanting to throttle the kids, wanting to sink to his knees and thank God for bringing them back safe, and then ask God to wreak vengeance on their miserable little souls for having come so close to giving him a heart attack.

He stared at them. Billy met his gaze for less than a second, then glanced away. Wrapped in a thick colorful muffler of some sort, Gracie peeked at him from her perch in the woman's arms, evidently trying to gauge his mood.

He started babbling, asking if they were okay, asking what the hell was going on, tossing in a few profanities for good measure. When no one answered, he paused to catch his breath and directed his attention to the woman.

He'd never seen her before. If he had, he would have remembered. She appeared mysterious and exotic and altogether riveting. Black hair flowed halfway down her back, framing a face of huge dark eyes, chiseled cheeks and full lips. Her skin was tawny in the diffuse light from the outdoor fixture, and her clothing struck him as arty, too big and bulky for her slender build. Her jewelry—flamboyant earrings and a moon-shaped necklace—was oversize. Her feet were encased in clunky boots.

He wondered what she would look like without all that oversize apparel hiding her. An image—a very erotic one—of her in lacy lingerie flashed across his mind, and he chased it away. Now was not the time to entertain adolescent fantasies about the stranger holding his daughter.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She smiled and extended her right hand, practically blinding him with the flashlight. “Oops!” She clicked it
off and handed it to Billy, then presented her hand to Evan again. “Filomena Albright.”

Filomena Albright? Quite a mouthful, he thought as he shook her hand. “Evan Myers,” he introduced himself. “What are my kids doing with you? Why are you holding Gracie? Gracie, why are you running around outside in your nightgown?”

“I'm not running around,” Gracie corrected him. “Fil is carrying me.”

“That's very nice of her, and she's probably going to send me a bill from her chiropractor once she assesses the damage to her back from hauling you around.” He reached for Gracie and eased her out of Filomena Albright's embrace. Gracie immediately lowered her head to Evan's shoulder. It was way past her bedtime. She was probably exhausted. “How did you wind up with my kids?” he asked Filomena. He was beginning to calm down; his voice was no longer edged with hysteria.

“They showed up in my yard,” she explained. “I'm not sure why, but I thought they needed to be brought home.”

“They should never have left home in the first place.” He glared at Billy, who glanced everywhere but at Evan. “I can't believe you climbed out your window.”

Billy peered up at the open window above the garage roof—one more place he could look to avoid meeting his father's gaze. “The screen snaps in and out real easy,” he mumbled.

“Too easily. Why did you do that? What the hell were you thinking? You could have fallen off the roof and gotten killed!”

“It's not that far to the ground. And anyway, the oak tree is right there.”

“I'm having that tree chopped down tomorrow,” Evan snapped, although of course he wasn't going to do that. It was a beautiful tree, older than Evan and the house combined. It deserved to live.

Which was more than he could say for his children at the moment. “Okay,” he murmured, then sighed, trying to keep his rage from erupting. “I don't know what's going on, but…” He caught Filomena's eye and managed a feeble smile. “I've got to get the kids inside. Would you mind coming in for a minute? Maybe you can help me make sense of this whole thing.”

“All right.” Something in the woman's smile befuddled him even more than the situation with his kids did. Her smile was dazzling, intoxicating. It overwhelmed him as the thought of his kids climbing through an upstairs window overwhelmed him. It made him just as breathless, but in a different way. It made his heart pound, not with fear but with something else.

Too much adrenaline. Too much anger, too much relief that the kids were home safe. What he was feeling right now had nothing to do with Filomena Albright.

She took her flashlight back from Billy and gave his shoulder a nudge, steering him toward the back door. Evan was grateful for her protective gentleness toward his children. If he'd been the one to give Billy a nudge, he'd probably have shoved the boy hard enough to flatten him.

Gracie was growing heavier on his shoulder. He twisted his head to look at her and found her fast asleep.

They entered the family room, and Evan used his free hand to close the door. “Upstairs,” he ordered Billy. “Now.”

Billy headed straight for the stairway, not daring to argue.

Turning to Filomena, Evan murmured, “I'm going to take Gracie upstairs, too. Please don't go away. I'll be right back.”

“No problem.” She smiled again. His heartbeat kicked up another notch. He blamed it on the physical strain of carrying his daughter's dead weight.

Following Billy up the stairs, he tried to sort out his thoughts. He didn't know any Albrights in the neighborhood, and he knew most of his neighbors. Where had she and the kids come from, anyway? One minute the backyard had been empty, and the next they'd materialized as if teleported there. Why hadn't they come to the front door? Had Billy intended to enter the house the way he'd exited, through the window?

Evan paused at Billy's door. Billy was seated on his bed, wrenching off his shoes. “This was bad, Billy,” he said grimly.

“I know.”

“It's late, and you've got school in the morning. So wash up, brush your teeth and go to sleep. We'll talk about this tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” Billy still wouldn't look at him.

Sighing, Evan lugged Gracie to her own room, unwrapped the muffler from her, slid her jacket down her arms and off and tucked her blanket around her. She looked so sweet and angelic when she was asleep. Evan snorted. There wasn't a single sweet, angelic cell in her body.

He returned to Billy's room. “Stop acting like you're on death row,” he said.

Billy glanced up at him, his expression defiant and
sheepish at the same time. “We were just checking to make sure her house wasn't haunted, that's all,” he said.

Well, that certainly clarified the situation, Evan thought wryly. He shook his head. “Climbing out the window was an idiotic thing to do. Going out alone at night was dangerous. Do you get the idea, Billy? What you did was really, really stupid.”

“Yeah.”

“And there's no such thing as a haunted house.”

“Well…well, when we saw it Sunday we thought we saw a ghost. We were only going back to check. And she had candles going in the house tonight, so Gracie thought maybe it was a witch inside, and she kind of freaked out.”

Candles or no, Evan couldn't imagine anyone ever mistaking Filomena Albright for a witch. “I kind of freaked out, too,” he said, “when I found you and Gracie gone. You scared the hell out of me. I don't like having the hell scared out of me, Billy. You shouldn't like it, either. Your life will be much easier if you never, ever scare the hell out of me again.”

“Okay.” Billy was trying very hard not to cry. Evan could see him biting his lip and forcing his eyes open to keep the tears from accumulating. His little-boy stoicism made Evan want to cry, also.

Instead, he entered the room and lowered himself to sit on the bed next to his son. “I love you, Billy.”

“I love you, too,” Billy said, his gaze on his knees.

Evan gave Billy a harder hug than he'd intended, the remnants of his fear making him want to cling to his son forever, to protect him from open windows and ghosts and all the demons that inspired him to take crazy risks. But no father could protect his child completely from
danger. He could only hug, and yell, and make sure his child knew how much he was loved.

Evan left the room, closing the door behind him, and descended the stairs. The voices of Evan's friends emerged from the kitchen in a rumble, but Filomena Albright remained in the family room, studying the framed portraits of the kids on display on the mantel.

“I think this is yours,” he said, presenting her with the muffler.

“Thank you.” She took it and smiled again. It was an amazing smile, full of energy and vitality, full of soul. He felt bewitched by it.

“Can I offer you a drink?” he asked. “Or an apology?”

“Don't apologize. Your children are adorable. I was hoping they'd come back.”

“Come back?”

“They've been to my house before.”

“They've been visiting you?” Why didn't he know this? How much of their lives was he in the dark about?

“No, they didn't visit me. They were just snooping around the house, I think. Peeking through the windows. I found your daughter's barrette near one, and their footprints. It's an intriguing house. I guess they were drawn to it.”

He struggled to assimilate this information, plus what he'd gleaned from Billy. “According to my son, your house is haunted.”

“Haunted?” She tossed back her head and let loose with a rich, throaty laugh that was even more enchanting than her smile. Maybe Gracie was right. Maybe Filomena Albright was a witch.

“They didn't say anything to me about my house be
ing haunted,” she told him. “But the house was empty for five years. I suppose it might have seemed a little spooky to them.”

Five years? Had they been going to her house for five years? That was impossible! Gracie wasn't even five years old.

Evan felt, if possible, more overwhelmed, more confused. He was sure everything would make sense if only Filomena Albright wasn't standing so close to him, looking so utterly gorgeous.

“Evan!” Murphy called from the kitchen. “Is everything all right, or should I phone the police?”

“No police,” he shouted back, then smiled at her and explained, “My buddies. I guess they deserve an explanation.” He deserved an explanation, too. Maybe Filomena would offer one.

Touching his hand to her elbow, he ushered her into the kitchen. The guys were standing around the table, clutching their beers, eyeing Evan curiously—and Filomena even more curiously. “This is Filomena Albright,” he said, discovering that the name rolled rather pleasantly off his tongue. “This is Dennis Murphy, Tom Bland, Levi Holt and Brett Stockton.”