For the Sake of Their Baby

by Alice Sharpe

  “You don’t know much about them, do you?”

  “Very little. The fire destroyed everything and Uncle Devon was never what you could call chatty. He turned my care over to a nanny who quit after a year or so because he was so nasty to her. After that, there was a whole string of nannies, one after the other, all leaving when his belligerence wore them down.”

  A stack of papers on the table caught her attention; she’d forgotten to return the drawings to their box and she picked them up now, looking again at the raging crayon fires, noticing for the first time the two little stick figures caught in the waxy flames.

  “What an awful way to die,” she whispered.

  Beside her, Alex said, “There are no good ways to die, honey.” He kissed her cheek and added, “Which brings us back to yesterday’s incident. Why don’t you call the sheriff and invite him out here? I want to hear what he has to say for himself.”

  “But you and he are like firecrackers when you’re together.”

  “I know, I know. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll be in the house, but I won’t barge into the interview unless he tries something.”

  “Like clubbing me over the head?”

  He laughed softly. “Something like that, though hopefully nothing quite so drastic.”

  “You’re wrong about the sheriff, but I’ll go ahead and arrange it.”

  “Good.”

  Liz yawned into her hand. “Another long day and it’s only half over.”

  Alex trailed a finger down her cheek. “You could take a nap,” he said, his eyes suddenly brimming with mischief.

  Ah, the memories, of lazy afternoons making love, napping, reading, making love again. So many memories…

  “I can’t go to sleep at night if I nap during the day,” she said, pretending she didn’t know what really lay behind his suggestion, pretending that the touch of his finger on her face didn’t have her aching for his touch in other, more sensitive areas. Last night, she’d wanted him to break down the door. Today, she was trying to keep her distance. She felt a continual pull toward him while at the same time fearing it. If she was this confused about her feelings, she couldn’t imagine the mixed signals she must be sending him.

  “I read somewhere that if you lay down without sleeping, you’re resting your body, and that if you lay down and go to sleep, you’re resting both your body and your mind. But there are ways to lay down and close your eyes and rest neither. We used to be pretty damn good at it.”

  “I know,” she whispered, “but I’m not ready for that kind of—”

  “Intimacy.” There was a note of irony in his voice, and his eyes narrowed.

  She nodded miserably. She’d let him save her, but not love her. How messed up was that? And in this scary time, could she deny she needed him in every way imaginable? Or that he needed her?

  His expression softened again, as though he understood how torn she was and didn’t want to add to her pain. He said, “Well, then, as an alternative, how about I bring down some of those Christmas boxes I found in the attic? The holidays are just a couple of weeks away.”

  “What with everything that’s been going on, I forgot all about it.”

  “I grew up in a house where no one put up anything. Mom had split and Dad was usually in jail or sleeping it off somewhere. My brothers had problems of their own, so it was usually just me and a television special. I don’t want that for our child, even if he or she isn’t technically here to celebrate with us.”

  “Of course not.” What he didn’t say but what Liz understood was that this might be the last Christmas he spent in his home with his baby, born or unborn, the last Christmas they all spent together.

  No! she screamed internally.

  But you don’t have control. You can go to the sheriff and tell him about your scarf and your late-night visit and Alex could still end up behind bars.

  “While you get the boxes, I’ll go buy a tree—” she said, but he cut her off with a jingle of his truck keys.

  “From now on, you aren’t going anywhere without me. Where you go, I go. From now on you and I are more or less joined at the hip. Tell me what obligations you have ahead in the next few days.”

  She shook her head. “Nothing important—”

  “What about your annual office Christmas party? Won’t you be responsible for it this year now that your uncle is…gone?”

  “Yes, but I’ll beg off—”

  “No. Don’t do that. I’ll go with you.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I said, where you go, I—”

  “I mean why do you want me to go to it? I can get someone else to stand around and hand out bonuses and congratulate everyone that we managed to pull through another year without losing more than ten percent of our leases. My assistant, Jane, can do it or Ron—”

  “But if we’re there, we can ask questions. We can ferret out information. Maybe there’s someone within the management team at the mall who hated your uncle enough to kill him.”

  “I thought you had Sheriff Kapp pinpointed for that dubious distinction.”

  “I like to keep my options open. Where is the soirée being held this year?”

  “The Egret Inn.”

  “Hmm, ritzy,” he said with a glint in his eye. They’d dined just a few times at the Egret Inn because Alex was right, the place was ritzy and expensive and exclusive and all the rest. She studied the floor in lieu of looking at her feet which she hadn’t been able to see in about two months, and said, “Alex, beyond our attempts at sleuthing, that party is likely to be kind of uncomfortable for you. People love to gossip—”

  “Let them. All I care about is finding Devon Hiller’s murderer and the fiend who almost killed you. Period. A little gossip can’t hurt me.”

  She nodded. He was right. Gossip couldn’t hurt them. Falling off cliffs—now that could.

  Chapter Seven

  After the stress of the day, walking around parking lots crowded with cut evergreen trees seemed like a veritable walk in the woods. It began raining midway through their search, but it was a relatively mild rain for December, and Liz had brought an umbrella.

  They stood beneath it, side by side, as a good-natured teenager straightened a dozen different trees for their perusal. They finally chose a Nobel Pine and Alex strapped it into the back of the truck. They made one more stop and Liz waited in the truck while Alex went inside a wireless phone company and signed up for a cell phone. By the time they finally arrived home, Liz was starving. As Alex secured the tree in the metal stand, she made a plate of sandwiches which they ate as they decorated the tree.

  In the end, it took up most of a corner and Liz felt a melancholy streak for Sinbad who would have loved the process. She couldn’t wait to get him home and see how he’d react to the red balls and twinkling green lights. Hopefully his cast would keep him from scaling the tree and bringing it crashing to the ground.

  The fact was that, thanks to the tree, the living room had assumed a magical radiance. Looking up at the star on the very top, Liz realized the warm glow of hope had replaced the icy despair she’d been feeling for days.

  But it was late and she was tired and she didn’t know what Alex had meant when he said joined at the hip. He cleared that up as he locked doors, turned off the lights and started down the hall.

  “I’m sleeping in our bedroom,” he said firmly, almost backing her against the wall. “I can bunk out on the floor or in a chair, that’s up to you, and I don’t expect anything from you, but I am going to be in the same room with you. Someone tried to kill you yesterday.”

  She said, “Okay.”

  He seemed surprised by her submission.

  “Don’t look so stunned. I’m not a complete idiot. Someone tried to kill me yesterday. I think sleeping with a big, strong fireman sounds like a great idea.”

  “So, all I am to you is Mr. Fireman?”

  “Yep,” she lied.

  He kissed her forehead. “It’s a start,” he said.

>   ALEX WATCHED Liz demurely take her nightgown into the bathroom to change. She looked as nervous as a new bride.

  By the time she emerged, swathed from throat to ankle in pink flannel, he had bunked out on the chair in the corner, fully dressed, his booted feet up on a stool he’d brought from her office, an afghan thrown over his legs.

  Mr. Fireman, safe in his corner…

  “You can sleep in the bed,” she said softly.

  And how he yearned to do so. But not like this. A man had his pride. He wanted her to want him. She’d refused him earlier and nothing had changed except her fatigue level. He said, “I don’t plan on sleeping much.”

  She came to his side and he took her outstretched hand. Resisting the urge to tug her onto his lap, he kissed her palm. She smelled like roses and looked like a pink angel with tousled hair. She brought his hand to her lips and kissed his fingers, then released him.

  She moved to her side of the bed, her movements so different than before and yet so familiar. As she settled under the blankets and turned off the light, he realized he loved her with a ferocity that almost scared him. He kept seeing the flames in her drawings juxtaposed on top of the image of her clinging to the cliff wall. It was all he could do not to bundle her away to safety.

  But they couldn’t leave unless they were willing to spend the rest of their lives running, and he wasn’t. There was a time and a place to make a stand and if it wasn’t here and now for their baby’s sake, then when? So he stayed in his chair and planned on keeping his eyes open.

  HE AWOKE sometime later and lay in the dark, listening. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked.

  He got up slowly and quietly, checking on Liz whose regular, deep breathing reassured him. He heard another noise and more barking and took off down the hall. Additional sounds came from outside, footsteps, something else. Without pausing to grab a weapon, he pulled open the front door as headlights across the road blazed on. Blinded momentarily by the lights, he heard the gunning of an engine, the spinning of tires. He ran toward the road as a car took off toward town.

  His first thought was to follow the car. Yanking the keys out of his pocket, he climbed into the truck and started the engine, whipping out of the driveway, just missing the mailbox. Red taillights were visible on top of the hill and he pushed down on the accelerator, determined to catch up with that car.

  Another thought struck him as he crested the hill.

  Was this a diversion to get Liz alone in the house?

  He pulled over to the side of the road, watched for a second as the taillights disappeared around a bend, pounded the steering wheel with a fist. Then he turned the truck around. He was back in his own driveway in record time.

  He unlocked the front door. The trip down the hall seemed endless. He threw on the bedroom light.

  The bed was empty. His heart stopped.

  The bathroom door opened and his beautiful wife stood blinking at him, rubbing her tummy, half-asleep.

  “What’s going on?” she said drowsily.

  Alex’s heart jump-started back into action, skittering around in his chest like a drop of cold water in a hot pan, bouncing and dancing and damn near evaporating. He managed to say, “Nothing, honey, go back to bed.”

  She smiled and nodded and hit the sheets again, never fully awake. He checked to make sure the window was locked, then turned off the light and went back outside.

  Okay, the car had pulled away from in front of Harry Idle’s house in such a way that suggested it was up to no good. A late-night visitor? But he’d heard footsteps. Could he have heard them from all the way over at Harry’s house?

  Doubtful.

  He finally noticed the rain had stopped. There was no moon to speak of, but a bevy of stars glittered in the night sky. As he walked along his own front path, he thought that his footfalls on the gravel encrusted redwood duff produced a sound similar to one he’d heard. He thought back and recalled another sound before the footsteps. Not the dog, something else.

  He went back for a flashlight, then returned outside. The garage door was closed but not locked. Had they left it open again? He raised it now and then closed it, pretty sure the sound he’d heard had been the muffled thud of the heavy wooden door hitting the cement. Opening it again, he shined the flashlight over the contents of the garage. Everything looked just as it had earlier that night. Liz’s uncle’s boxes in one corner, old furniture in the other, newly cleaned saw hanging in its proper place over the workbench.

  The workbench. Here too, nothing looked any different, though the cluttered condition of the surface made certainty a dicey issue at best. Nevertheless, his gaze drifted over the cans of spray paint and the row of old coffee cans used for storing nails and screws. Curled pieces of sandpaper vied for space with soft red rags and scraps of wood. The leather gloves lay on top of it all.

  The gloves.

  He propped the flashlight on top of the vise and tugged on the left glove.

  It fit. Not tight, just right, a good fit for a man with big hands. The right one was a perfect fit as well. And even more telling, there was a narrow brown tag sewn into the seam on both gloves. Of course, the brand he bought always had that tag, he just hadn’t remembered it until that moment.

  “They’re not the same gloves as earlier today, are they?” Liz asked from the open door.

  She’d put on a robe and slipped her feet into moccasins. Her hands were clasped together under her chin. Even in the semidark, her eyes looked huge.

  “No,” he said, putting the gloves down. “No, they’re not the same.”

  “Someone was in our garage.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked like she might faint. In a heartbeat, he was at her side.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “It’s just the thought of someone coming in the dark, sneaking around in our garage. It makes me feel…”

  “Let’s go back to bed.”

  As he followed her inside, locking doors as he went, he thought about the gloves and the anonymous trespasser. It had to be the same person who had sabotaged the stairs and so cruelly broken Sinbad’s leg. It seemed to Alex that this nameless monster was taking increasingly dangerous chances—he or she had left their own gloves behind and then he or she had almost been caught exchanging them.

  He had to be ready to pounce at the next mistake.

  “Don’t leave me,” Liz said as she climbed into bed, reaching out with pleading eyes.

  “No chance of that,” he said, and grabbed the afghan. He stretched out next to her, on top of the comforter, flinging the afghan over him. He had no intention of undressing and snuggling beneath warm blankets with his very desirable wife. If anything else was going to happen tonight, he wanted to be ready.

  Besides, she hadn’t invited him to snuggle. Instead, she reached for his hand and held onto him as though she was dangerously afloat and he was the only tether that kept her from drifting away.

  He told the parts of his body that spontaneously reacted to the warmth of her nearby body, the softness of her hand, the sweetness of her expelled breath, to take a hike. He lay awake with eyes wide open for hours.

  “I CAN’T EXPLAIN the mix-up the other day,” Roger Kapp said as Liz invited him inside. While Alex and she had rehearsed what she’d say, she knew there was no way she could actually control the conversation with the sheriff. He was a strong-willed man and wouldn’t take direction from her.

  “It must have been somebody’s idea of a joke,” Kapp added. He took up an inordinate amount of room. Not as tall or broad shouldered as Alex, he had an imposing way of standing.

  “It would seem so,” she said uneasily. “I made coffee, Sheriff. Would you like a cup?”

  Two mugs sat on the table in front of the chair she chose, the one across from the Christmas tree. He took the proffered cup. She didn’t intend to drink hers. The last thing in the world she needed was caffeine.

  “Sit down, please,” she said.

  He stood for a second, as though trying
to decide if he wanted to sit. Liz knew him well enough to know he coveted authority and she reasoned that he was probably a little uncomfortable interviewing her on her own turf. Too many variables, too many unknowns.

  Alex had said the sheriff would notice every detail of the room and he was right about that. It seemed the sheriff’s gaze never stopped moving and that he took in every little thing, including the new chain on the front door, the stack of cardboard boxes Alex had piled near the Christmas tree and his work boots lined up carefully by the front door.

  “So, Chase is living with you,” Kapp said as he finally decided to sit down. His voice held a note of scorn.

  “He’s my husband,” she said softly.

  Kapp shook his head. “You’re a brave woman, Elizabeth. A man like that can’t be trusted. I take it he’s around here somewhere.”

  “He’s in the office, working.”

  “And where’s that Siamese cat of yours?”

  She felt her throat constrict. Was mentioning Sinbad’s absence a threat? Was Alex right, had Roger Kapp set the trap on the stairs? She said, “He’s at the vet’s.”

  “Hope he’s okay.”

  “He’s fine,” she said, heart racing. She took a deep breath and pushed away the fear she recognized as a knee-jerk reaction to her own imagination. Roger Kapp wasn’t going to hurt her with Alex in the next room and, for that matter, perhaps he was just making polite chit-chat. The key to this situation was self-control. She added, “He broke his leg.”

  Kapp furrowed his brow. He’d taken his hat off when he entered the house and she noticed his sandy hair lay flat against his skull. Still, he had a large head and dark gray eyes and he looked at her now as though divining the truth from the recesses of her mind.

  “Sorry to hear that. We need to go over the night Devon was killed. If you’d feel more comfortable doing this away from your…house…I’d be happy to drive you into my office.”

  “I’m fine right here,” she said, adding, “I have to warn you that I don’t have anything new to add to my original statement.”