by K. J. Emrick
Ellen drove faster after that.
They managed what should have been a five-hour drive in less than four. Darcy took over the phone, calling Izzy again and again. She even tried Lilly, pulling her number out of her memory. There was no answer there, either. But of course, she was in school, so there wouldn’t be.
“We should call the school,” Darcy said when they were nearly back home. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. If Adolphos sent people after Izzy then he might send people to try and get at Lilly. That man! I can’t believe he managed to turn Izzy’s life upside down again!”
“Darcy, it’s okay.” Ellen reached across and gently took the cell phone back from Darcy’s hands. “I already called the school. Remember? I spoke with the principal. He’s keeping an eye on Lilly until the police come for her. Connor’s with her.”
Darcy nodded. She had a vague memory of Ellen making phone calls as they drove, juggling the cell phone around curves and down straightaways in violation of several different traffic laws. At the time, she’d been too busy thinking about what they might find when they got back to Misty Hollow to pay attention to anything going on over there on Ellen’s side of the car.
“I’m sorry, Ellen. I’m just…”
“Worried? I get it. We’ve both been there before.”
“You have,” Darcy admitted readily, knowing everything that Ellen had been through to keep her son safe. “I haven’t. Not with Colby. She was with Izzy and I thought she was safe there and now I don’t know what’s happening! I can’t… I don’t know what I’m going to do if…”
“It’s okay to be afraid for your daughter,” Ellen said, her gentle voice at odds with the roar the engine was making as Ellen pushed the needles into the red zone. “You hear me, Darcy Sweet? I’m not going to let anything happen to your daughter. Not while I’m alive. Look, there’s the town. We’re here.”
They drove down Main Street like it was the Indy 500 and Ellen took the turn onto Darcy’s street with a squeal of tires that drew every eye around them. Darcy braced herself against the dash, silently urging the Fiero to go faster, go faster!
Until she saw what was waiting for them. Then she wanted everything to stop.
Misty Hollow’s police force had exactly four patrol cars, after losing one last year to a microburst that had dropped an entire pine tree across its hood. All four of those cars were parked on her street now, with their emergency lights flashing red and blue.
Darcy’s heart clenched into a knot. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. No… no…
“Darcy?” Ellen said, slowing to an abrupt halt. “They aren’t parked in front of Izzy’s house. This… this is your place.”
She finally unfroze herself enough to look where Ellen was pointing. Her house. The officers were standing in front of her house. They were walking in and out of the front door of her house. Her house, and Jon’s, and Colby’s.
Why were they here?
Ellen had no sooner came to a stop than Darcy was out the door and running up between the trees in the front yard. She wasn’t even to the steps before Sergeant Sean Fitzwallis stepped out from nowhere to take her by her shoulders and make her look at him.
He smiled down into her anxious face.
“They’re okay,” Sean said, holding onto her until he was sure she was listening. “Izzy and Colby are fine. Lilly and Connor, too.”
“Smudge?’ Darcy asked him, knowing that her little friend could take care of himself but even he got into trouble sometimes…
“Yes, even Smudge,” Sean told her, letting go finally. “Your cat’s waiting for you inside with that little kitten of his.”
“Then what’s with the troops everywhere?” Ellen demanded, coming up beside Darcy.
“Just playing it safe.” Sean motioned with his head for them to follow him up to the house. “Come on. There’s quite a story waiting for you here.”
The sound of a cat howling was Izzy’s first clue that something wasn’t right. She decided to start the story there for Darcy and Ellen, because it turned out that Smudge had saved the day for everyone again. Sort of.
She didn’t own any pets, of course. Not that Lilly hadn’t begged her for one. Every week. A different pet each time. Izzy had learned to smile and nod and ask her daughter to research what they would need to take care of a puppy or a hamster or a baby emu, and by the time Lilly had found the answer to that question, her fancy would turn to a different pet, and the cycle would start all over again.
Anyway, Izzy said to Darcy. Back to the story.
This morning she had driven Connor and Lilly to school just like they’d planned. They’d had to start out early so they could give Connor time enough to stop by his place and change clothes. The two teens had stayed up really late last night talking, under Izzy’s watchful eyes, and then had gone to sleep. Lilly in her bedroom upstairs with Colby, and Connor downstairs on the couch. Nothing had stirred in the house all night. Izzy figured she’d been doing a pretty good job of watching over the kids.
Then everything went wrong.
When she got home again, after dropping Connor and Lilly at school, she and Colby unloaded the groceries from the car. She had no idea how long Darcy would be gone, and Colby would at least need a good lunch, so they had bags of frozen smiley-face french fries and boxed mac and cheese to put away. Oh, and a new container of milk. Colby really liked milk.
They took the bags out of the trunk, and brought them inside Izzy’s house to set down on the counter while they kicked off their shoes and settled in for a long day of board games and watching cartoons.
As soon as Izzy closed the front door, Colby darted off for the living room to take over the television. Izzy put away groceries. It was still a few hours until lunch so she was going to make her and Colby a snack of carrot slices and peanut butter to hold them over.
Which was when the cat began screeching at the top of its voice from upstairs. It scared Izzy enough that she dropped the bag of carrots all over the floor.
There were no cats in her house. At least, there shouldn’t be.
“Colby?” Izzy called out. She started into the living room before she realized the paring knife meant for peeling the carrots was still in her hand. It wasn’t that she was worried about finding trouble. She’d just been too startled to leave it behind.
The girl wasn’t in the living room. That wasn’t surprising. Darcy’s daughter was adorable, and extremely bright for a girl of her age. She was always slipping out from under the attention of the grownups, hiding, and then popping out again from some random corner. It was one of her favorite games.
“Colby, honey? Where did you run off to?”
Upstairs, a man’s gruff voice cursed, and then there was the sound of something heavy crashing to the floor. Someone had just taken a bad fall.
There was a man in her house. Izzy held her breath. There shouldn’t be anybody else in the house but her and Colby.
And Smudge.
Darcy’s black and white cat came running down the stairs. He might be a little slower than he had been just a few years ago, but he was still as sneaky as ever. Izzy couldn’t figure out, for the life of her, how Smudge had gotten in here.
Right behind him came that little kitten of his. Tiptoe. She kept tight to her daddy’s paws as a man came stumbling to the top of the stairs after them.
He stopped when he saw Izzy standing there, a curse on his lips that had something to do with cats and how many lives he could beat out of them with his steel-toed boots. He blinked her way, and in one hand he held a long knife with a serrated edge. He was dressed all in black. Including black gloves on his hands. He probably wasn’t as big as he looked, but Izzy was sure his head scraped the ceiling as he got his balance again.
“Well.” His voice was rough, and a little amused. “I guess there’s no reason to hide now. I’ve lost my element of surprise, now haven’t I? Might even say the cat’s out of the bag.”
Izzy had a
flashback to when men had come hunting her, trying to find her husband, threatening to hurt her and her daughter both. It was happening just like before.
She would not let it happen again.
His smile widened as he brought his knife up and began walking down the stairs.
“I see you’ve got a knife too,” he said to her. “Care to see who’s got the bigger—”
He didn’t get the chance to finish his threat. When he was halfway down Colby’s little hand reached up from behind the stairs and took a hold on the man’s ankle. Missing a step, he was suddenly falling face forward, hands out and pin wheeling to catch himself.
Head over heels over heavy backside, the man came crashing down to the living room floor with a noise like Izzy imagined an entire forest falling down all at the same time would sound like.
“Found you!” Colby cried with glee.
She was all smiles as she popped out from behind the stairs, and ran over to put her little hand into Izzy’s bigger one. The one that wasn’t still holding the paring knife.
“We need to go now,” she said, like nothing unusual at all had just happened.
Izzy looked over from the unconscious body of the man at the bottom of her stairs, to Colby, trying to understand any of this. Had the man been hiding in her home all this time? What would have happened if she hadn’t had to take Connor and Lilly to school this morning… if she’d been here when this man came…
Colby tugged at her hand. “Don’t be scared,” she said in her little voice. “We can be safe in mommy’s house. Just not safe here.”
Izzy remembered asking her why. This was her house after all. What could possibly be wrong here—?
She looked back over at the intruder with the knife, still knocked cold. Something definitely was wrong here. In her house.
“Come on,” Colby insisted, tugging at Izzy’s hand with both feet braced against the floor. “Come on. We—” Tug. “—have to—” Tug. “—go!”
Izzy came back to herself. They weren’t safe here. They had to leave. If there was one intruder, there could be others.
They had to go!
She started toward the front door. Colby tugged harder, in the opposite direction, shaking her head so hard that her unruly hair swept across her face. “No, no, no! Not that way. This way. Hurry!”
“What?” Izzy asked her. “That’s the back door, honey. We need to get to the car.”
“We need to go home! Mommy’s home. We’ll be safe at mommy’s home. Come… on…!”
Izzy was about to argue more, but the girl was so sure. So confident that they couldn’t use the front door. Izzy finally just gave in and took off toward the back, picking Colby up to carry her in her arms. It was quicker.
As she unlocked the back door and opened it she heard the front door crash inward, and a man’s voice called out for Hubert.
That must be the unconscious guy at the bottom of her stairs, Izzy figured.
Colby had saved their lives. Izzy didn’t bother wondering how she could have known that danger was waiting for them out front, but she wondered about it now, when they were safe, and the police were here, and she was telling the whole story to Darcy and Ellen.
Izzy finished with a shrug of her shoulders. “I don’t know what to say. If it weren’t for Colby, then both of us would probably be in the hospital with Grace and Jon right now. Or worse.”
She shivered, and Darcy felt a tremor crawl up her spine, too.
They were sitting at the small kitchen table, Darcy and Ellen and Izzy, in the same exact place where this mystery had started just yesterday with Jon’s spirit appearing and then vanishing again as he came within a whisper’s breath of actually dying. An officer stood guard in the open doorway as warm breezes drifted in. Others hustled around with dire purpose, vigilant and serious.
Smudge purred in Darcy’s lap, his eyes closed, his tail curled up to the tip of his nose. Under the table, Tiptoe prowled and rubbed her sides up against random feet, looking for someone to scratch behind her ears.
Holding her hands up to her mouth, Darcy took a deep, shaky breath. She’d never been so glad to have this inherited gift be part of her family legacy. She’d passed it to Colby, and good thing she had. Colby had done the impossible. She had seen the trouble coming for her and Izzy before it was too late. There was no way her little girl should have known there was a man hiding upstairs, even with Smudge’s warning. There was no way she could know there was another man coming for them, either, but she had. Her sixth sense had told her so.
“Then when we got here,” Izzy said, “to your house, Colby took us down in the cellar and told me we needed to hide until the bad men got arrested. I wasn’t about to argue with her at that point. I don’t even know how long we were down there before Sean Fitzwallis came knocking on your door and calling out my name. They’ve kept us here ever since. Turns out the guy at my front door ran when the police showed up. They’re looking for him now. The other guy was still there, of course, but they wanted us to stay somewhere safe until they round all of them up.”
Ellen checked her watch, trying to work out the time frames. Darcy had already puzzled out that the men had been sent to Izzy’s house after they first confronted Adolphos this morning. He must have thought he needed to tie up loose ends quickly and called in this hit as soon as he kicked them out of his office. Izzy was on his list.
But why?
Izzy had been hiding in the cellar with Colby for hours. The police would have shown up at her house right after Ellen had called from the casino to say Izzy was a target. All the time they’d been driving home, terrified that something was wrong, everyone had been safe and sound in the basement of Darcy’s house.
“But we’ve been calling you,” Darcy pointed out, still picturing the whole thing in her mind. “We’ve been calling and calling…”
“I, uh…” Izzy’s face flushed red. “I left my cell phone over at my house. We ran out of there so quick I didn’t have time to get it.”
Darcy hugged her friend tightly. Everyone was safe. Adolphos had failed. He failed to kill Grace. He failed to kill Jon. He failed completely in his attempt to hurt Izzy, thanks to Colby. Her little girl was safe and sound upstairs, with Connor and Lilly, giving the grownups time to talk.
Darcy looked through the doorway from the kitchen to the living room. She couldn’t see the stairs from here, but she wanted to try something…
In her mind, she called out to Colby. Can you hear me, she wondered? Can you feel me down here? It’s—
“Mommy!” the girl’s voice carried from all the way up in her room, and soon enough there were running footsteps echoing through the house as Colby raced all the way into her mother’s arms. Smudge yeowled and jumped down from his perch on Darcy’s lap, showing Colby a cat-frown. Darcy was mine first, Darcy could see him saying. But I guess I can share her with you.
“We hid real well, Mommy.” Colby snuggled into her mother’s lap and sat there, very proud of herself.
Darcy was proud of her, too. She always would be.
Not far behind Colby, Connor came downstairs, his eyes a little wide even though there was a lopsided grin on his face. Ellen stood up to meet him, and Darcy could see some of the frightened little boy that she had first met at Bear Ridge all those years ago.
“Mom?” he said, a world of questions in that little word.
“Glad you’re okay, Connor Bear,” Ellen told him. Then she hugged him, and he hugged her back. He was nearly as tall as she was now. “You had me worried. I thought we agreed you keep that cell phone of yours on you at all times?”
“Uh, we did agree on that,” he admitted, “but the school has other ideas. We have to keep them off until free period. I didn’t know what was going on until the principal came down to get Lilly and me…”
His voice choked off, and he rolled his eyes, trying to keep his brave face on in spite of the memories and emotions this had all dragged up for him. Together, mother and son walked out to
the living room to have their own talk.
Still hanging back a bit, Lilly tossed the pink ends of her hair over a shoulder and then awkwardly rubbed her arm, shifting from foot to foot. She watched Connor with his mom, her thoughts clouding her eyes. Then she came over to sit at the table with Darcy and Izzy, shifting her chair closer to her own mother.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” she said to Izzy.
“Me, too,” Izzy said.
“I just wish…”
Darcy and Izzy traded a look. Colby picked up the salt and pepper shakers and began to make then dance slow circles across the table.
“Lilly,” Izzy asked her daughter in a whisper. “What is it?”
For a moment the teenager was silent, then she whispered just loud enough that only Izzy and Darcy could hear, “I just wish the bad things had never happened to Connor and me, and you, and his mom…”
Izzy wrapped an arm around her daughter. “Me too, Lilly. If I could go back and change things you know I would, right?”
Lilly had to suddenly wipe away a tear from the corner of one eye. She nodded her answer.
“Good. But you understand this, too. I wouldn’t change anything in my life that brought me this wonderful girl of mine. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me and I would walk through Hell to keep you around.”
“You already did that,” Lilly said. “The last time Dad’s mobster friends in The Hand came looking for us.”
“I did everything I could to keep you safe.”
“Yes, you did, and I love you for it. I just wish…” Now her eyes slid over to Connor again, standing off in the living room. “I just wish I could protect him the way you protected me.”
Colby smiled up at her. “You two are ‘sposed to be together. Like Mister Salt and Mrs. Pepper.”
She made the two shakers bow to each other, and then they took another turn around the table’s imaginary dance floor.
Lilly watched the dance, and in her eyes Darcy could see her picturing herself and Connor, dancing and happy. Then she gave herself a little shake, and she was back in the present. “I’m serious, Mom. How do I make it better?”
