For the Sake of Their Baby

by Alice Sharpe

  She fell asleep with tears in her eyes.

  ALEX PULLED UP the rope that still dangled over the edge of the cliff and checked every inch of it. It wasn’t enough that it appeared to be just as he left it the night before. He didn’t trust that whomever had plotted the first “accident” hadn’t come back during the night to wreak more havoc.

  It looked okay. Within minutes, he was scaling the side of the bluff, using muscles now sore from the exertion of the day before. By the time he pulled himself back up to the first landing, he knew for sure that Liz’s misadventure had been no accident.

  He’d already discovered scratch marks on the trim outside the bathroom window and now this. Fury flared in his gut. Someone had tried to kill Liz. She must know something about her uncle’s murder that the true killer was afraid would come out during a new investigation. She was in danger because of the new trial. If anything happened to her because of him—

  Well, it wouldn’t. He wouldn’t let it.

  He quickly made his way up to the top of the cliff where he found Liz just as he’d left her, wrapped in a coat against the drizzly winter day, arms wrapped around herself. She looked very pregnant and very vulnerable. He surmounted his desire to run to her, to wrap her in his arms and protect her from who knew who or for what reason….

  “It’s obvious someone sawed through the underpinning down there,” he told her as he worked the snug leather gloves off his hands and shoved them in his back pocket.

  Liz wrinkled her brow. She looked completely washed-out to him, almost wan, and he wished he could dare tell her to spend the day resting. He knew she wouldn’t; it was probable that she couldn’t, given the events of the past twenty-four hours. She was on edge, and frankly, she had every right to be so. He crossed mental fingers that her call to the vet’s office would result in good news.

  “If I had been…hurt…wouldn’t the authorities have checked for signs of sabotage?” she asked. “Wouldn’t they have investigated?”

  “Maybe the investigation would have been conducted by the sheriff’s office and maybe the sheriff knew he could control the outcome,” Alex said, knowing that he had no real proof that Kapp had had anything to do with it.

  “I guess…”

  A new thought entered his mind and refused to budge. “Or maybe they would have found just what they expected to find,” he said, alarm rising in his throat. He took off for the garage, Liz behind him.

  He found what he was looking for laying carelessly on his workbench, an old chisel with white paint chips covering the metal tip. He stared at it like it was a bomb which he expected the would-be assassin had intended it to be.

  Liz caught up with him as his gaze lifted to the peg board hanging on the wall behind the work bench, to the two wood-cutting saws he kept there. Sure enough, the larger of the two had fresh wood caught in its teeth. A sprinkle of sawdust had been dislodged when the saw was placed back on its hooks and lay scattered across the cluttered bench.

  “What—” Liz said, but then it must have struck her what she was looking at. “Your tools,” she whispered.

  “If the police were here investigating, they would find paint that matched the trim on the bathroom window right here on my chisel and sawdust from the underpinning of the beach stairs caught in my saw. It would look as though I jimmied the window and booby-trapped the stairs, and then tried to make it look like an accident. I would look guilty.”

  He reached for the chisel, but Liz caught his hand. “Is it all right to touch it? What about fingerprints?”

  “If there are any fingerprints on these tools, you can bet the farm they’re mine. More likely, they’ve been wiped clean. Whoever did all this would have worn gloves.” He recalled the gloves he’d grabbed from this bench the day before, the same ones that were now stuffed in the rear pocket of his jeans. He took them out now and stared at them, recalling how he’d had to all but peel them off his hands a few minutes before.

  “Are these yours?” he asked Liz.

  She looked confused. “No, they’re yours.”

  He pulled one on again and flexed his fingers. Either his hands had grown since yesterday morning when he’d dug the fence post holes or the gloves had shrunk. “I don’t think so,” he said, taking the one off again and searching for a label of some kind. There was no identifying tag in either glove.

  Was he wrong? Had they always been tight? Had wearing them out in the damp affected the leather? Or had the maniac who had rigged the stairs and broken Sinbad’s leg brought them along?

  Then why leave them behind?

  He spent the next several minutes looking for his own gloves, which meant he scoured the garage, searched out by the fence project as well as inside his truck, and all through the house. Back in the garage, he stared at the gloves on his workbench. They were either his or the would-be killer had taken the wrong pair.

  They had to be his.

  “What about the twine?” Liz said. “I threw the original bit down the bluff. It’s probably been washed away by now. But you don’t have twine out here, do you?”

  He shook his head, then stopped, considering. Rummaging around in a drawer beneath his table saw, he found a spool of twine left over from the garden two years before.

  “It’s green,” Liz said.

  “It sure is.”

  “The twine around Sinbad’s neck was natural colored.” She hugged herself and added, “Alex, I’m scared.”

  He put an arm around her slender shoulders. “Nothing is going to happen to you, sweetheart. I won’t let it.”

  “It’s not me I’m scared for.”

  He kissed her hair. The honey colored strands were damp and felt cool against his lips. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “Let’s call the vet and see how Sinbad is doing. Come on, you’re freezing. I’ll make coffee.”

  “Or hot chocolate?” she asked, looking up at him under a sweep of dark lashes. Her green eyes looked huge, and for a second he flashed back to the day before when she’d looked just like this as she glanced at him over her shoulder, the two of them dangling from a long piece of three-quarter-inch nylon rope.

  He tried to think of someplace he could send her where she’d be safe until he figured out what was going on. She could stay with Emily.

  Except, how would he protect her if she wasn’t by his side, day…and night?

  “Hot chocolate it is,” he said.

  “But first I need to call the vet,” she added, glancing at her watch. “It’s nine o’clock, they should be open now.”

  BEFORE SHE GOT a call in to the vet, Ron Boxer called. Ever sensitive, he reacted to the stress even Liz could hear in her own voice. “Did I catch you at a bad time?” he asked. “Has something happened?”

  “No, no.” She was surprised by how much she wanted to confide in him, but one look at Alex heating milk for her hot chocolate dampened the desire to spill her guts. She and Alex needed to discuss what information they shared before she said a word to anyone.

  Ron pressed her. “Are you sick, are you hurt? Is it Alex, is something wrong?”

  “Everything is fine,” she assured him. “As you know, this is a pretty difficult time around here, but we’re coping.” She suddenly thought of Alex’s observation about Emily trying to match her up with Ron and added a little self-consciously, “We’re working together. Me, Alex and Sinbad. We’re fine. What’s up?”

  He gracefully let the matter go. “Considering everything else, this is going to seem trivial, but I was wondering about your plans for after you give birth. Jane said you weren’t coming back to work after the baby is born, at least not for a few months. I’ve got a franchised sporting goods outlet interested in the big empty department store space at the south end of the mall. Should I bring this up at our monthly meeting? Will you be here in January?”

  Jane Ridgeway was Liz’s head of marketing. “Jane can handle it. I won’t be back in January though I’ll be in touch via e-mail and the phone and can come in if someone really need
s me. Go ahead and work out the details with Jane.”

  “Good enough. Get some rest.”

  With that good advice, he hung up and almost immediately the vet’s office called. Liz talked to Dr. Kippling for a few moments, then gravitated to Alex and the delicious chocolate mixture he had concocted.

  “Hmm, I love a man who can cook,” she murmured as he poured the hot chocolate into a mug and handed it to her.

  “That’s me. Master cook, specialties coffee, soup and hot chocolate. What did Ron want and what did the vet have to say?”

  She told him about Ron’s question, then added, “Dr. Kippling says Sinbad looks better this morning. She set his leg and said he licked a little food off the technician’s finger. If he keeps improving this way, we should be able to bring him home in a couple of days.”

  Alex leaned against the counter, his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. “He’s a tough little bugger.”

  Liz felt herself smile for the first time in what seemed like days. He took care of that with his next statement.

  “Someone is worried about what you know, so worried that they’re willing to risk everything to get you out of the picture.”

  She felt a shudder go through her that the steaming chocolate couldn’t touch. He was right, she knew this.

  “I’ve been thinking about it. It would be entirely too dangerous for someone to go down the stairs from this bluff. We could have seen him—or her. But someone could have come along the beach at low tide and climbed up to do the dirty work.”

  “How would they get your tools?”

  “The garage is unlocked. I’ve only been back two days and frankly, I don’t recall noticing either the saw or the chisel.”

  “What did you use when you installed the chain on the front door the other night?”

  “I used the tools out of the little box you keep in the hall closet for fix-it projects. Except I went into the garage for the cordless drill, but that wasn’t on the workbench. Even if it was, I’m not sure I would have noticed anything missing. I left it midproject last spring when I was arrested. I hadn’t put things away properly.”

  “I didn’t have the heart to straighten it up after…while you were gone,” she said. “I was going to. Ron offered to help me, but after boxing up your clothes and moving out your furniture, I just couldn’t—”

  He put a warm hand on her shoulder. “I’m glad you couldn’t. Anyway, the point is that the saw and chisel could have been missing for weeks or just hours and neither one of us would know.”

  “So, maybe someone took the tools, then walked along the beach and sabotaged the stairs, then came here while we were both gone, jimmied the window, replaced the tools, hurt Sinbad and tied him to the stairs for me to find.”

  “Either that or they took the saw weeks ago and got the idea to jimmy the window with our chisel when they came to use the cat as bait. So, who knew we’d be gone?”

  “Well, the sheriff—”

  “Exactly.”

  Liz shook her head. “He’s not the only one. Dave knew you were coming to his house.”

  “Why would Dave—”

  “All I’m saying is that there were other people who knew some of our plans and may I remind you that the sheriff is the one who offered to install a chain on my door? Would he have done that if he was running around stealing your tools?”

  “What better way to case out the garage and see what’s out there? Maybe he was formulating a plan.”

  “You’re hopeless. Okay, the sheriff knew about me leaving, Dave knew about you—”

  “How about Ron and Emily?”

  “They knew the sheriff was coming, but they didn’t know he changed his plans and called me into his office. And they didn’t know about you.”

  “I hate to say anything that might give Kapp a break, but do we even know if he was the one who changed the original meeting place from here to his office?”

  “I guess we don’t.”

  “Exactly. Take Harry Idle, lurking over there across the road, looking out his window. He sees me leave, he sees you at home, he disguises his voice and calls you away, he comes over here—”

  “Wait a second. I can’t picture Harry Idle messing with stairs and windows and cats. And he’s got huge hands.”

  “You’re thinking of the gloves. You’re right.”

  “Exactly. Plus, how would he know I was expecting the sheriff?”

  “Kapp knew he was coming, of course, and so did Ron and Emily and probably half the sheriff’s department. He could have heard it from a buddy in the department.”

  Liz shook her head. “I don’t know. And neither the sheriff or Ron or Emily knew you were going anywhere.”

  “This isn’t helping. How about your scarf? Have you remembered when you saw it last?”

  “I’m afraid not. I keep trying. It’s like I have a mental block.”

  “We need to find out for sure if the sheriff was behind the call that changed your meeting from here to there and we need to see if there’s anything incriminating about the sheriff in those boxes you brought home from your uncle’s house before he died.”

  “I think they’re just boxes of my school records and things he didn’t want to store anymore.”

  “Maybe so, but since the rest of his stuff is still tied up, they’re all we have. I’ll go dust off those boxes and bring them inside where it’s warm. We’ll go through them together.”

  “And I’ll call the sheriff’s assistant and make sure it was she who called here,” Liz said.

  “I DIDN’T CALL YOU,” the young woman said adamantly once Liz had reached her. “I’ve already been grilled by the sheriff about this, Mrs. Chase. I didn’t change anyone’s plans and I don’t know who did. And I don’t take too many long lunches, I don’t care what that pip-squeak deputy says. If he’d get a life of his own, he wouldn’t have to tattle about mine.”

  Liz related this information to Alex, speculating that since the sheriff had questioned Belle Carter himself, he was innocent.

  “Or just covering his tracks,” Alex said, piling the last of five boxes near the kitchen table. They each took a chair and opened a box.

  “Good grief, he saved these?” Liz said as the first bundle she touched turned out to be a dozen or so old report cards. “I never dreamed.”

  “He also saved the programs from your recitals,” Alex said, lifting out a stack of papers. “I didn’t know you took ballet. You look damn cute in your tutu.”

  “Let me see.” Alex handed over a picture of her in a pink tutu standing arm and arm with another girl dressed in lilac. “Oh—this is Carmen,” she said, gently touching the other child’s face. “She was my best friend. She had the most beautiful long, dark hair. Sometimes, she’d let me braid it. I haven’t thought about her in years.”

  “And you never told me you play the piano,” Alex added as he produced a recital card.

  “I don’t. Uncle Devon insisted I try, but I guess he came to my one and only recital and heard how hopeless I was because the next day the piano disappeared from the house and he never mentioned lessons again. I think my nanny at the time cried with relief.”

  He lifted out additional papers, all semi-yellowed with age. “I thought you said your uncle didn’t have anything to do with you when you were little. He sure kept a lot of stuff.”

  “The nannies probably collected it,” Liz said as she found several drawings she didn’t recall making. Her initials were on the papers, though, and since most featured a small house being consumed with red and orange crayon fire, she assumed she’d been working out the deaths of her parents.

  The realization that she’d coped with their loss by recreating their deaths this way made her feel a pang of sorrow for the little girl who had gone from beloved only child to orphan in the time it took a fire to rage through her home. At first, she could remember wishing she’d been with them when it happened. Not because she had a death wish, but because she was convinced she could have saved t
hem. Later, she’d realized that wasn’t a likely scenario; in all likelihood, her life would have ended with theirs.

  How ironic that she should fall in love with a fireman of all people. She looked at Alex and found him staring at the drawings in her hands. Their eyes met and he smiled at her.

  She sighed back a flood of tears and set the drawings aside. “Let’s try different boxes.”

  The next two held more memorabilia including pictures of Liz with her parents, pictures taken years before their deaths when Liz was a toddler with plump legs and arms and white-blonde hair. She’d never seen the pictures before and was startled by how much she’d grown to resemble her mother and how handsome her father had been.

  “I don’t think I can take too much more of this stroll down memory lane,” Liz said.

  Alex propped the last box on top of one of the others and cut it open. “There’s just the one more. We might as well finish the job. I’ll do it, you sit there and look pretty.”

  “It’ll be easier to search through the box than manage looking pretty,” she said. “My ankles are swollen, I have no lap to speak of, my fingernails are all cracked and chipped and I slept on my hair wrong.”

  “You look perfect to me,” Alex said, laying aside the box flaps, and damn if he didn’t manage to sound sincere.

  This box was slightly different from the others. While the top layer held scraps of Liz’s past, the bottom of the box was filled with correspondence, grouped in separate stacks and bound with string. Her uncle’s name seemed to be on every envelope.

  “The man never threw anything away,” Alex said as he thumbed through the letters. “There isn’t a postmark here that isn’t over twenty years old.”

  “I’ll go through them later,” Liz said, standing and stretching. “Maybe my parents wrote to my uncle once in a while and maybe he kept their letters. If so, I’d like to read them.”