by Mary Malcolm
Even though I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t miss the license plate. The same one from the drive back from Elmer. Several police cars turned to pursue him, others continued to us.
Eli ran out of the house and found me on the ground. “Lucy, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, cold rain stabbing my face and bare arms. “That was him. That was the green car.” I grabbed Eli’s arm, and he grunted. “Are you hurt?”
He sat on the lawn next to me. “It’s just a scratch.”
“You were shot. Oh God, Eli!” My stomach lurched. “Help!” I screamed, drawing the officers over faster. “Help! He’s been shot!”
Through all the commotion, Eli finally convinced them he was okay and gave them the license plate number to run down. An ambulance arrived and paramedics patched his arm.
“Shouldn’t take long to heal,” one of the men said. “It’s a graze. Still, we’ll take you in to get checked. You, too, miss,” he said, shining a light in my eyes. “You have quite the knot on your forehead.”
I hadn’t even realized I’d been hurt. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just get him taken care of.”
I rode with Eli to the hospital and called Ana from there.
Against my better judgment, I let them examine me. They gave me two small stitches and a cold compress. “Can I see him?” I asked. “I need to know he’s okay.”
“Sure.” The nurse opened the curtain between our beds.
Eli laid back, his shirt cut up to the shoulder and bandaged arm lying across his chest. The hero cop. No, hot hero cop. If not for his swollen face and puffy, split lip, that is. “You know, you’re not exactly a fun date,” he grumbled, sounding half-pathetic and half-proud.
I scrunched my face like a wrinkled old woman. “God, Eli, I’m so sorry. This is horrible. I can’t believe he came to your home.”
He coughed, then winced. “Believe it.” He repositioned his unbandaged arm to cover his ribs and groaned. “Whoever that bastard is, he’s one hell of a fighter. I couldn’t see a thing, missed every other hit. He managed to catch me most of the time. Damn.” He stared at the lights above the bed.
“What are you thinking about?”
Shaking his head, he said, “I just can’t figure it out. How did he know you were with me? Even if he was watching you, you left the station with me. He wouldn’t have known that unless he worked at the station too, or he was there for some reason.” Eli turned toward me. “Then again, we left through the underground parking garage.” He looked at me. “Lucy, that’s only for officers. I don’t think anyone would have seen us leave. Did you tell anyone else you were here?”
I had. I’d texted John. I didn’t want to hide anything from him. But I couldn’t believe John would be involved in this, either. “No,” I lied.
It couldn’t be him. It couldn’t. John could give someone diabetes with his sweetness. He carried guitars, not guns. He was someone I wanted to get to know better, not someone I feared.
Eli’s face hardened. “Lucy, whoever it was tried to kill us both tonight. How they knew you were there doesn’t matter. We just need to figure out who he is.”
“This is proof Natalie is innocent. You know that, right?”
Eli shook his head. “It’s proof that someone is still after you. The person looking through your window. That Ridley guy. Someone from Elmer.”
“God. I’m more wanted than most people on the FBI’s wall. I should just let them get me so this is all over with.”
“That probably won’t do much good. I mean, after the torture and slow death, where would they hide the body?”
Funny. Real funny. I sat up and touched the bandage on my forehead. My head swam at the movement, but I closed my eyes and let my body refocus. It wasn’t John, I was certain of it. My stomach churned, and I wanted to curl into a ball. I might not know if or how Aunt Dolores was involved in my kidnapping, but I wanted her. I needed her with me now. I felt like a little girl, that white room closing in, and I needed Dee’s warmth to swaddle and keep me safe.
“Look, we have the license plate number. We can trace it and go from there. At least we’ll know who the car belongs to.”
Eli sighed, sounding like someone who knew talk wouldn’t change a thing. “Most likely the plates were stolen off another car, Lucy. They probably aren’t going to lead us anywhere.”
“They have to,” I said, blinking back the tears gathering at the corners of my eyes. “They’re all we have.”
“We have Natalie. And we have a BOLO out for Ridley.”
“What is that, anyway? BOLO? I’ve heard it on cop shows but no one ever says what it is.”
“Be on the lookout.”
That mollified me, but only for a moment. “She didn’t do it. You said you didn’t think she did.”
“She’s all we have,” Eli said again. “Unless we come up with someone willing to confess, she’s it. Honestly, if she didn’t do it, someone is putting a whole lot of effort into making her look guilty as hell.”
I worried my bottom lip, tearing a piece of dry skin with my teeth. “Can you follow up on the car, at least?” My voice came out sounding small and quivery.
“I will.”
A commotion sounded from outside my curtain. “I don’t care if you’re busy. She’s my niece, and I’m here to see her. Now where is Lucy Carver? I know she’s here somewhere, and by God someone is going to do their job and point the way.”
A second later a twitchy-looking nurse yanked the curtain open, and Aunt Dolores pulled me into the tightest embrace of my life. “You scared the shit out of me,” she admonished in a voice that was as much rebuke as it was loving. “Don’t you ever disappear on me again.”
“Dee, I’m so sorry!” I buried my nose in her neck and let the sobs I’d been holding back finally break. “Thank you for coming. How did you know where to find me?”
“Ana called. We’ll discuss later how peeved I am that I heard it from that one and not you.”
Chapter Twelve
Officer Len turned his chair around and chewed the end of his pen. “I feel like we’re not getting very far, Lucy. What happened that brought you in here?”
“We’re just about there,” I said, not willing to let the full story go untold. “All of this really does matter when it comes down to what happened. Now, where were we?”
“At the hospital.”
“You should stop chewing on pens.” I motioned toward his mouth. “You’ve already had at least two bust in your pocket because you do that.” He had two separate ink stains on his shirt, both faded but definitely from different incidents.
Officer Len glanced at the pen in his hand, then tossed it in the trash, retrieving a fresh one from a drawer on his side of the table. “Bad habit. Go on.”
****
Eli closed the curtain separating us, and the privacy let me breathe in the reassuring powdery smell of my aunt. “Can we go home?” I asked, not sure if I knew what that meant anymore but not ready to give up what I’d had.
“Soon as they release you,” she said. “Let me go make them.”
She left, and I turned to Eli’s side. “She’s gone. Can we talk?”
“I need some rest,” he said through the curtain. “Go home. You need some too. I’ll talk to you in a few days when I’m back at work.”
****
I slept through most of the next day, but when I woke and checked my phone, I didn’t see any missed calls from John or Eli. Getting out of bed my head spun in protest, but it was time to move around, take a shower. In front of the mirror, I stared at Eli’s blood still on me. Some had washed away in the storm, but not all.
I traced the streaks of brown with my fingers and thought of what he’d risked protecting me. What he risked every day protecting people. I could never love someone like him. My heart would break every time he walked out the door.
Watching Eli’s blood rinse down the drain, I resolved I would never allow myself to love him. The fear of losing
someone I loved…losing someone else I loved—was more than I was willing to risk.
When I was eleven, my mother disappeared for a few days. “Why can’t you tell me where she is?” I begged my father, feeling as if a large piece of my being had gone missing.
He, for the most part, ignored my begging and instead worked around me. It had been the most terrifying three days of my life. She finally came back, bags under her eyes, looking as if she’d aged ten years in three days.
“It’s taken care of?” my father asked, not looking her in the eyes.
She nodded but didn’t speak. When I ran to give her a hug, she caught me at arm’s length. “Lucy-mine. I love you. Will you help me into bed?”
I nodded, hurt and caught off guard by her not wanting to hold me. I didn’t understand, why couldn’t my mother hug me?
Late that night my father and I ate supper without her. “We love you very much, Lucy. More than you’ll ever know. Someday you’ll be old enough to understand, but for today know we both love you and would sacrifice the world for you.”
****
I rinsed soap out of my eyes and laid my forehead against the shower wall to let the water cascade down my back. A knock sounded on the bathroom door, followed by Ana’s impatient voice. “Lucy, c’mon. You’ve been in there forever.”
“I’m coming.”
I toweled off and wrapped myself in a robe before stepping back into my room. She sat on the edge of her bed twiddling the blanket pills. “Did you stay with Bobby?” I asked.
“Yes.”
We sat in silence for a moment. “Don’t you ever go home?” I grinned.
She laughed. “You know as much as I do that home is here. I have that apartment but…”
“I know.”
Ana’s parents left her alone a lot as a child. Neglect sounded like a harsh word, yet I could think of no word more suited for how she’d been raised. When she started making good money modeling, she rented a gorgeous apartment over off West 7th near downtown Fort Worth. The view from her balcony overlooked the city. She kept the place more for entertaining fellow models or other visitors, but hated staying there alone. Our house was home.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“Starving.”
“Dee is cooking up beef stew and biscuits. She said we all need to talk.”
I sat on the bed next to her. “I don’t know if I can,” I said, searching for understanding in her eyes. “You saw what I saw. How am I supposed to talk?”
“She loves you, probably more than anyone else in this world. Except for me, of course.”
“Of course.”
Patting my knee, she leaned her head on my shoulder. “Hear her out. Things are never what they seem, and from what we saw of that town, I want to throw your parents a parade for taking you.”
What I couldn’t stop thinking about—couldn’t forgive—isn’t that they took me, but that they took only me.
I dressed, and we went downstairs.
The house smelled amazing. A mixture of holiday candles and home-cooked food. Aunt Dolores stood at her usual sentinel post, the kitchen island, and Ana and I occupied ours, barstools directly across from her.
“Dinner’s fixin’ to be ready,” she said, without her usual enthusiasm.
A nervous smile cracked my face. My arms braced in front of me like foreign appendages; my legs hung like slabs of pork. “Okay.”
“You feelin’ better?”
“A little. I have a headache.”
“Did you take somethin’?”
“Not yet. Maybe later, after I get something in my stomach.”
“Don’t let it get too bad. It’s harder to fix then.”
We stayed in uncomfortable silence for a few moments. For the first time in a lifetime together, neither of us knew how to start.
Ana stared first at me, then Dee. “Dolores, did you know Lucy’s parents kidnapped her?” she asked, her voice rising in mock or practiced disbelief at the end.
Both of us looked at her wide-eyed. Not the way you start talking about a deep, dark family secret. She might as well have said, “Dolores, did you know Lucy’s sister killed a bunch of people and now an entire town wants to kill her?”
“What?” Ana shrugged. “Dinner is essentially ready, and if one of you doesn’t start talking about what happened, it’s not going to taste as good. So go.”
“I most certainly did not,” Aunt Dolores said, not looking at me. Then she did look. “Well, no. I…had suspicions somethin’ was off, but I didn’t know what. I wasn’t close to your parents. We hadn’t talked in over a decade, and then suddenly you were here. What was I supposed to do, not take care of a niece I hadn’t known existed? Family is family.”
“What was it?” I moved up on the stool. “What made you suspect something?”
She shifted her feet a little, back and forth as if she were dancing to a tune only she could hear. “I didn’t expect you was kidnapped or nothing, but you were different. The way you acted, things stood out.”
Was she being vague on purpose? Who wants to be different like that? My shoulders fell a little, and I crossed my hands over my knees, suddenly not wanting to hear anything more.
Dee quickly caught the change. “Oh, no, honey! I mean, nothing bad. You were an amazing kid. That was it. You were so much more than your age, more like a tiny adult. I couldn’t have imagined what happened to you growing up to make you act like that. It was disconcerting at first, like I had to teach you how to be a teenager.”
She had too. She’d cursed around me, left the remote unlocked so I could watch whatever I wanted, never told me when to come home. I ate junk food and meat for the first time in my life, heard about sex, drugs, rock and roll—things I’d never learned from my parents. “So they raised me differently?”
“Oh, way more than that.” Ana twirled a strand of hair around her finger and examined it for split ends.
“You noticed too?”
“God, yeah. I thought you were an alien or something the first time I met you.”
“Thing is…” Aunt Dolores gave Ana a dirty look at the last part, “I knew you were mine. And it didn’t matter if you acted right or not, you were my brother’s so you were mine.”
“But I wasn’t his.” Officer Henderson never said who our father was, only that our mother died. “Did Ana tell you there were three of us?”
Dee’s countenance fell. “I’m sorry about your sisters,” she said quietly, a thoughtful expression on her face. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why your parents took you and not them, but I want you to know that you are a gift to me. I wish I had answers, something I could tell you. No matter what, though, blood or not, secrets or not, you are mine. Don’t you never forget that.” She reached her hand across the island and placed it on top of mine. Our eyes locked.
“I won’t.”
The stove timer dinged as if on cue. “Thank God that’s over with,” Ana said in a voice so overly dramatic she could go up for an Oscar. “I’m starving. Dolores, since you’re being all sappy and sentimental right now, do you need me to get everything to the table?”
Dee rolled her eyes and smacked at her with a towel. “I can manage just fine, little girl. Get your ass in there. Both of you get your asses in there.”
I stood and grabbed her into a hug before I went. “I love you so much,” I whispered into her ear.
“Back at’cha,” she whispered, her own version of ditto.
****
I called John three times the next day, and when he still wasn’t answering the day after, Eli’s suspicions about him grew like a poison in the back of my brain.
Although, to his defense, Eli didn’t answer either.
Even though I should have been a walking ball of anxiety, for the first time in weeks I could breathe; no men around to suck the life from me. Wednesday, I returned to work where I was called into Seth’s office and written up for having missed so many days.
“I’m sorr
y, Ms. Carver, but you can’t keep calling in sick and expect it to be okay. When you’re out the entire department suffers, do you understand?”
“You know I was shot at and in the hospital, right?” I asked, not quite believing he was reaming me out. Then again, he did care a lot about professionalism. I mentally gave a one-fingered salute.
“Regardless”—he tented his fingers and tapped his fingertips—“might I remind you, you are still on probation in this department. Other people would kill to work for HGR, and you need to have that in mind next time you decide to take a few days off.”
I nodded, keeping what I wanted to say deep in my mind and far away from the tip of my tongue where it wanted to be. What he said made me think, though, and after he excused me I went back to my desk to make some notes. I looked over my cubical wall to where Natalie usually sat. Even though her mom bailed her out, she hadn’t been back—on leave pending further investigation—and they hadn’t replaced her with a temp yet.
Who would have wanted to kill to get Mr. Winters’s job? No clues showed up in Central Processing, and I hadn’t had any further success in investigating anything at HGR, so I thought about that question. According to rumors, Lana Sousa was in line to take over the department, but she didn’t strike me as someone willing to kill for the chance. No one else in his department, or anyone I’d talked to about Mr. Winters, had a bad thing to say so it didn’t seem likely his death had anything to do with HGR. Which meant HGR was a front for something else, and if someone didn’t want his job, what else could it have been?
My brain slipped again to The Slotted Spoon.
I really, truly needed to talk to John.
****
John finally answered the next morning. “I’m sorry. I’ve been sick and my phone was missing. I found it in my car this morning,” he said, in possibly the lamest excuse ever. “How are you?”
“I’m okay.” I hadn’t planned to ask, but I couldn’t go forward until I did. “You were the only person who knew I went to Eli’s. He thinks you are involved somehow with the person trying to kill me.” Okay, so I didn’t exactly ask, I more tossed it out there. Still, the ball now sat firmly in his court.
