Wanted! (16 page)

She stared into the garage, her feet exactly where her father’s killer’s had been. If her guesses were right, Dick Arren had stood here. Was he Austin? Scote? Another employee? A client? Or was he a neighbor right here in Stratford Condominiums?

The people in the next condo would be shaken when they heard a car start from the empty home of a murdered man. She had to move fast. Alice had no fast left in her. She had only slow and muddled. She forced herself to climb behind the wheel of the Blazer.
What if her very own mother was afraid of her?

Alice turned the key; the engine caught; she hit the garage door remote and backed out.

Even at this hour, the roads were crowded and slow. No matter how early you got started, so did everybody else. Alice headed through the city to her mother’s house. Her hands were puffy with heat and fear. It was hard to hold the steering wheel.

Traffic was useful. Because she had to think about it, it kept her busy and anxious. But once she crossed the center of town and began to head back toward the suburbs again, traffic was light. Nobody drove in this direction in the morning.

Alice gave calming orders to her body, but her body refused them and became hotter, more tense. Explosions were building inside her, and she must not let this happen; she must be rational and careful.

She turned the last corner. Tree branches hung too low, and houses she had known for years were hunched and dark. She felt spied upon, expected. Neighbors who had once been her friends were peeking behind curtains, whispering to each other—There she is! She’s giving up!

I am not giving up, thought Alice. I have plenty of fight left in me.

She swung into her mother’s driveway. She drove all the way around the house and parked in back, hidden from prying eyes by a low hill covered with swooping shrubs. The garage doors were open. Mom’s good car was not there.

Alice stared at the garage.

Mom wasn’t home?

Impossible!

She had to be home.

And there were no other cars, either. No police, no friends, no nothing.

Alice had no key, and Mom didn’t keep a spare outside. Alice left the Blazer idling and ran to the back door, knocking, and then hammering, and then shouting, “Mom!”

It was Friday. A workday. But even if Mom left this early for work—which she didn’t—she wouldn’t go to work when she was waiting for Alice to call, would she?

She stayed at Richard Rellen’s, thought Alice.

Alice forgot everything. How dare she! Maybe Mom didn’t even mind that this was happening. Maybe it was a nice chance to be in Richard Rellen’s arms. Maybe Mom was so drunk with love that this was an opportunity for her.

Would Mom sacrifice Alice to her own second chance at love?

Parents did it all the time.

How many families did Alice know of where divorce ripped them apart once, and remarriage ripped them apart a second time? How many kids did Alice know who were going to college solely to escape a parent’s remarriage? Or worse, to escape the endless dating of a parent, the leaping from one boyfriend to another, the broken hearts, the teenager having to be parent to the parent?

Why hadn’t the police staked out the house, the way they did on television, ready to seize Alice? Perhaps in real life there weren’t enough police to go around, or perhaps they believed Alice long gone. Out of state by now.

Alice got back in the Blazer. She didn’t back up but circled hard and fast over Mom’s precious grass, wishing she could leave tracks like that on Mom’s heart.

She drove to Richard Rellen’s, going faster and seeing less.

His house was large, and its four-car garage faced sideways, so that from the street, it was just two quaint windows and a cupola. He had a lot of yard help, and the landscaping was flawless, every flagstone neatly edged, every flower carefully mulched.

She’d been in his house once. Mom stopped by to bring Rick darling some dessert she had baked—yes, Mom was that woozy about the man, baking little treats for him! Alice had refused to go in and sat in the car. After half an hour, Mom and Mr. Rellen had come out and said they had ordered pizza, come on in and share with us, and Alice had broken down, gone in and shared with them. She never told Dad.

Alice swung into the long split driveway, expecting to see her mother’s car. It was not visible. Well, at least Mom felt guilty enough that she’d driven into the garage to hide her presence from the neighbors.

Most people Alice knew had lots of cars. The parents each had one, and there’d be one for each teenager, maybe one for hauling, possibly one for showing off.

The garages were closed, but a row of windows ran across the big doors.

The Blazer was relatively high. Craning her neck, she could glimpse what was parked inside.

A big power boat occupied the first slot. Alice had not known about the boat. Did Rick darling and Mom go to the lake in that boat?

In the second was the green Volvo wagon. Rick darling was home anyway.

In the third was a beautiful classic Porsche, probably thirty years old, an incredibly lovely car; a collector’s joy.

The fourth was not visible. The windows were blocked with paper that had faded. How tacky and sloppy it looked above the neatly swept driveway.

The Blazer’s engine chugged on. Alice sat with her foot on the brake and her mind in neutral.

A heavy hand closed on the door handle, and ripped it open, yanking Alice out before she could think, before she could struggle. Richard Rellen held her arm, and incredibly, he was smiling.

The Blazer was still in gear, and it moved forward by itself. It had little time to gather speed, but it was heavy, and the garage door nothing but pressboard, and the Blazer slammed right through the fourth door and into whatever was parked there. The all-too-distinctive sound of crunching metal filled the morning air. The windows broke and fell in that strange, straight-down collapse of safety glass, a million teeny, harmless squares coming down on the hood of the Blazer.

“You didn’t have to do that,” said Alice. Her reserve strength vanished and she began sobbing. She tried to free herself from his grip, but he was way too strong. She stopped. After all, she wasn’t going anywhere. “I was coming to turn myself in. Now I’ve dented both cars, and Mom will be even madder.”

“I don’t think she cares about the cars,” said Mr. Rellen. “Let’s go inside, Alice.”

“Is Mom there?”

“No. Your mother has gone to the airport to meet your grandparents. She’ll be back in an hour.”

“Oh,” said Alice. She felt stupid and young. Mom was not somewhere being wrong or evil. Just going to the airport to get her own mother and father. Grandma and Grandpa were coming to the rescue.

Her grandparents thought Alice was perfect. They told her so all the time. They would be on her side. They would listen, and love, and agree. Alice’s tears became relief; family was coming, people who loved her.

Mr. Rellen moved her toward the house, in a practiced, steady way; the way Paul of the computer lab had escorted her.

Alice said, “But if Mom drove to the airport, what car is in the fourth space?”

Mr. Rellen smiled even more broadly. The smile decorated his face like a spaceship: an alien object that had no business being there.
Spaceship.
Alice swerved and looked back, and through the broken windows, lit by the rising sun, she could see the unmistakable spaceship front end of a navy blue Lumina minivan.

Mr. Rellen was chuckling. Alice stared at him. She stared at where his strong thick fingers held her own arm.

How close the name Rick Rellen was to the name Dick Arren.

The best disguise is weight.
Richard Rellen was heavy. If he had an elegant jaw, it was now obscured by a beard.

Could Alice’s mother actually be in love with the killer of Alice’s father? What a last laugh for Dick Arren—ending the life and taking the wife of his pursuer.

Alice’s mind sealed over at the idea of having eaten pizza and sat on the couch with that human being. “You killed my father,” she whispered. “You killed his brother, too!
Where is my mother? Have you killed her
?”

He said nothing but kept walking toward the house, and Alice had no hope of freeing herself. She stopped walking and let herself drop, a deadweight, the way strikers did when police tried to arrest them, but it did not work for Alice; Richard Rellen just picked her up.

I’m just like Dad, thought Alice, stunned. I knew there was a bad guy. Why hadn’t I been ready?…

“Is that the same Porsche?” said Alice. “Is that the car you drove when Rob drove his Triumph?”

“What can you be talking about, Alice?” asked Richard Rellen, smiling again.

“That’s why you didn’t yell and run after me and call the police when you caught me on campus. You had my backpack, and you knew Dad’s disks had to be in it.”

They were almost at the door. She could not let him take her inside. Inside, because nobody knew she was here, would be just as remote as a reservoir. She could see no point in screaming: people never looked up for annoyances like that—car alarms rang till they died and nobody went over to see why. If Alice screamed, he would put his hand over her mouth and suffocate her.

“It won’t work,” she said. “I have an E-mail master list on my laptop. I sent everybody the wanted poster with the updated photograph of you. So you can kill me, but you can’t do it in secret. I’ve notified the world.”

Rellen’s smile vanished.

Without a smile, the face seemed to belong to different people. Several of them.

Then he laughed. “There is no updated photograph, Alice. Because if there were, you’d have recognized me. You wouldn’t have come here, would you?” He reached for the door. The house had a decorative screen door and a heavy wooden storm door behind it. Both were closed. He was going to need a hand free to open them. Alice did not bother trying to free herself. She tried to keep his other hand occupied instead. She grabbed it and bit it and braced her flimsy torn sneakers against the door jamb.

He enjoyed it. Was that the last thing poor Uncle Rob had seen before his death? And Dad? Had he seen? At the last minute, facing the man his wife meant to marry, had he realized the terrible awful coincidence of this? Had Dad heard this sick chuckle, looked into this sick smile?

Maybe it was not a coincidence. Maybe Mr. Rellen purposely found Mom and got a laugh out of being Mr. Perfect to the woman whose husband was trying to hunt him down.

Alice heard a siren. Then two. Was there a car accident? Was there a fire? Or was this the sound of rescue?

Alice scratched him with the long hard false fingernails, making bloody tracks on his ugly fat hairy arm. He shoved her against the house wall and held her with his chest while he opened the screen door and the storm door.

A car drove into Rellen’s driveway.

Two cars. Three. Four.

Police.

Horns honked. Doors slammed. Feet pounded.

Richard Rellen released her and Alice slipped to the ground. So many people! Police in uniform, men and women not in uniform, people with guns in their hands. The guns were
out
, were
drawn.

“Be very careful,” said Richard Rellen calmly. “She’s truly violent.” He held up his bleeding arm. “She may be on crack. Or some hallucinogenic drug. There’s more here than just an emotional teenage girl.”

One officer said, “If you’d step away from Alice, sir…”

“Of course. Please think of Alice’s mother first. She’s a fragile woman who has suffered many shocks. For her sake, be gentle with Alice.”

“We’ll do that, sir,” said the officer. He put his gun away.

Alice pressed her back against the house, terrified of them all.

Mr. Rellen said, “She was crazed when she got here. She drove her father’s car right through the garage, screaming things about her mother.” He pointed. The Blazer’s engine was still running, trying to drive on through the building. It was an eerie sight. “Very sad,” said Mr. Rellen. “Poor Chrissie. She hasn’t done anything to deserve this.”

He’s used to bluffing, thought Alice. After all, he’s been doing it successfully for a quarter of a century. And now I know how easy a bluff is, how well it works. You walk into the dorm, you steal a car, you use an elementary school, you fib in the bagel line—all you have to do is stay calmer than the people around you and they don’t question you any longer.

He’ll win, she thought dizzily. I’ve had two days of practice and he’s had twenty-five years, and he’ll win.

An officer stood on each side of her, lifted Alice, and walked her toward a police car. She could not speak to defend herself. She was completely overwhelmed with the numbers against her.

“It’s over, Alice,” said the officer. “Let’s go sit in my car.”

They slid into the front seat: one officer behind the wheel, Alice in the middle, the other policeman at the door. She was surprised in an exhausted blurry way: Didn’t prisoners sit in the back behind the grill?

“You’re okay, Alice,” said the officer gently. “You were a brave girl. Dumb, but brave. Your father’s colleagues got in touch with us the minute they realized he’d been murdered. It can’t be the daughter, they said, it’s got to be the killer he’s been hunting. We let it stay on the news that we suspected you because we didn’t want the killer to vanish. We didn’t know about Richard Rellen. When your mother mentioned him, we put him on our list to talk to, but we had a bunch of names ahead of his. We figured with your mother dating him, your father would have met him and recognized him right away, no matter what amount of weight or hair or beard had changed. But in fact, your father never laid eyes on Richard Rellen.”

“You don’t think it’s me?” said Alice. “You know he sent the E-mail confession? My mother isn’t afraid of me?”

“Your mother is afraid
for
you, Alice. She hasn’t slept or moved from the telephone since this began.”

Fears ran off Alice like water from the shower. She felt cleaner and clearer. Mom still loved her.

“How did you find me?”

“Your high school friends. They couldn’t believe you had hurt your father. They believed you were a hostage, and somebody hidden in the backseat of all those cars was forcing you to drive away.” He grinned. “Though when you ran away from the boys in the Jeep, that theory got shaken up.”