by Nina Bruhns
Joe pointed to the empty chair. “Mr. Kline. I’m Officer Kessler. I’m here to ask you a couple of questions.
Keith’s square jaw twitched as his chin came up. “I demand to be released immediately. You have no idea who I am. I’m suing this entire department. Your incompetence is criminal.”
“I’m here to talk about Wendy Belle.”
“I already told the other officers. I didn’t touch her apartment. She is my girlfriend. She’s the mother of my child, for heaven’s sake. Why would I want to harm her?”
“Why indeed?” Joe waited a couple of seconds before saying, “I’m here about the package you sent her in the mail.”
The man’s eyes barely flickered. “What package?”
“The one with the bloody wig.”
Keith’s superior air switched to a slightly overplayed look of concern. “Is someone harassing her?” He sank into the empty chair at last. “Listen, you have to let me out. I need to be with her to protect her.”
Anyone with less experience with abuse and abusers would have bought the performance. Joe didn’t. He kept his expression neutral as he pushed on. “You haven’t sent Miss Belle a package recently?”
“Why would I send a package? If I want to give her something, I just take it over to her. I see her all the time.”
“When was the last time you were in her apartment?”
“I stopped by the day before yesterday.”
“And not since?”
He shook his head with what looked like sincere regret. “My job is fairly demanding. I don’t get to spend time with the family as much as I’d like.” He offered a flat smile. “I suppose people who provide for their loved ones often have that problem. I’m sure you understand, Officer.”
Joe flashed him a dispassionate look. If Keith thought they were going to bond over work schedules, he had another think coming.
“I’m sorry for my impatience.” Keith was trying on a more sympathetic role. “I understand that when women are harassed, more often than not, it’s by the men in their lives. But that’s not the case here. I love Wendy and my son. I would do anything for them. Me being locked up just makes them that much less safe. I need to be with my family. I want to see my lawyer.”
Joe stood. “I’ll pass that on, on my way out.”
He’d come to get the measure of the man, and he got it—cold, calculating, a manipulator. For now, Joe was done with the bastard.
He drove back to Broslin, passing by the Football Academy on Route 52. They’d asked him to coach, even if only part-time, had offered him an insane amount of money. Of course, they charged their athletes’ parents an insane amount of money for the training. The Academy touted close “connections” with several major universities. He’d turned them down. Police work kept him pretty busy, and he wasn’t overly excited about kids whose strategy to get into college football was to have their parents buy them a spot on the team.
He was more interested in kids like Lil’ Gomez who had real talent but didn’t stand a chance in hell. The boy’s death still sat heavily on his conscience. Trouble with inner city schools was that sports programs were often cut—no money for equipment, no access to facilities. Which meant, no team, no brotherhood, no promise of a better future, no place to hang out after school but some street corner, eventually joining—just to belong somewhere—whatever gang controlled those streets.
Joe thought about that as he drove. He knew a couple of guys who played for the Eagles. They trained a lot, but didn’t train twenty-four seven. If they could be talked into giving some field time to a nonprofit….
He made a couple of calls, received a couple of promises for callbacks. He had a semicoherent plan for a free inner city football school, staffed by volunteers, by the time he reached Broslin.
He drove by Sophie’s place.
With all the trees and bushes up front, the house looked like a fairy cottage in the woods. Wendy and Justin were probably sleeping, the upstairs windows dark. Only the downstairs hallway light was on, and the light on the front porch.
She’d left the lights on for him.
The gesture caught him off guard. He’d never had anyone leaving the lights on for him before. Well, duh, he lived alone. And he wasn’t scared of the dark. Yet, the stupid light, the thought that someone was waiting for him, made him feel good, made him think, for a moment, about what life would be like with a partner.
The captain had that now, and Jack too.
He kept driving. He wasn’t the settling-down type. This wasn’t for him. At the end of the street, he turned right, toward the station. He’d been missing too much work lately. He wanted to finish off the second shift, then maybe work some of the third.
* * *
Despite the damage, Wendy was having the best morning in a long time. She didn’t have to worry that Keith would show up unexpectedly. Safe. She could get used to the feeling.
With Justin’s help, she dropped the last bag of garbage down the disposal chute at the end of her hallway. “Thanks, buddy. Race!” She lurched forward.
“I win! I win! I win!” Justin yelled as he raced ahead of her. He reached the door first, grinning from ear to little ear.
“You won! Good job, buddy.” She opened the door for him.
“Big mess,” he said once they were back inside, the door locked and dead-bolted behind them.
“Yeah, but you have big, strong muscles.” She marched forward, swinging her arms. “Can we clean this up? Yes, we can!”
“Yes, we can! Yes, we can!” Justin echoed her as he marched behind her.
Now that the broken things had been carried out, they just had to straighten up the rest. She flipped the ripped couch cushion over. That would have to do for now. Later, while Justin napped, she would sew up the gap. With the cushion flipped upside down, nobody would know.
She gathered the couch pillows, then picked up the toys Keith had dumped from the toy chests. The ones he’d stomped on, she’d already discarded, but there were plenty of toy cars and balls and rubber cartoon characters left.
Justin settled in next to a pile of wooden blocks, scanning the living room. “Did a dinosaur sitted on it?”
Wendy bit back a smile. “I think he did.”
“Where is he?”
“He got grounded. He’s not coming back.” She didn’t want Justin to worry.
Not that he looked worried. He looked disappointed that he missed a dinosaur nesting in their living room. He set aside that disappointment pretty quickly, though, and began throwing his wooden blocks into his blue, car-shaped toy bin, helping to clean. The set had been a gift from Joe that morning to keep Justin busy while Wendy worked.
Joe had come back to Sophie’s place an hour or so before dawn. Wendy had woken up when he’d checked in on them before going to bed. He’d stopped in the bedroom door and watched them for a minute, a tender, protective moment Wendy didn’t know what to do with, so she’d pretended to be sleeping.
In the morning, she’d tried to be as silent as possible, a tough task with Justin. But Joe wasn’t angry at being awakened. He insisted on following her back to her apartment and helping her with whatever she needed to do that morning.
He’d even gone to Wilmington PD with her to file the restraining order. Then he came back to the apartment with her, carried the larger pieces of broken furniture to the Dumpster behind the building before he left, telling her to call him if she needed help with anything else.
“Where’s Joe?” Justin asked, finished with his blocks.
“He’s at work.”
“Is he coming back?”
“I don’t know.” He hadn’t said. She wouldn’t have minded if he did.
Broslin’s favorite son wasn’t as superficial as she’d thought. He played with her son and treated her with respect. But even if deep down she knew he was nothing like Keith, she still had trouble trusting him. He was a lot stronger than she, and she was wary of that, wary of the moment when a man might turn his
strength against her.
Even his kindness and protectiveness freaked her out a little. Keith had started out kind and protective.
Yet she had to find a way to trust Joe enough to tell him what she needed to tell him. Just the thought of that conversation made her feel like the walls were closing in on her.
She drew a deep breath. She was safe from Keith for the moment, back in her own apartment. She was not going to waste a perfectly good day by obsessing over Joe.
She picked up Justin and swung him around, drinking up the sound of his giggles. They both deserved a break. “Hey, do you want to go to the park?”
“Park!” Justin clapped his little hands with glee. “Doggies!”
So Wendy bundled him up in his red jacket and picked up her camera. She locked the apartment behind her, and they went down the stairs, hopping from step to step like a pair of grasshoppers.
“Cookie!” Justin demanded as soon as they reached the bottom landing.
“You can have your cookie when you’re in your car seat.”
She’d learned that trick from one of the makeup artists she’d worked with in the past, an experienced mother of three. Give the kid a treat each time he goes into the car seat, then he’ll associate it with good and cooperate instead of fighting it all the way.
Wendy’s second-hand Prius was parked by the curb. She strapped her son in, then handed him a small plastic bag of animal crackers from her pocket.
Sunday morning traffic was light. She pushed the button on the CD player and sang along with Justin about pillow-chewing puppies.
She was going around the steep curve of the on-ramp to Route 202 when her brakes gave out. She tapped the brakes again.
Nothing.
“Nonononono.” She couldn’t take the curve going as fast as she was going. She stomped on the brake pedal with both feet, yanking the steering wheel. “Justin!”
She had half a second to panic before the car crashed through the guardrail with a sickening lurch. They spent a split second in the air, then flew down a steep drop, before her car caught between two trees, shaking and rattling, perilously balanced as it hung over the edge.
Her mouth went dry as she stared down at the bottom of the rocky ravine, at least a hundred and fifty feet below her. For a moment, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, was frozen in place. Then adrenaline rushed through her, sending a burst of energy to her limbs.
“Justin?” She looked back at her son as the car swayed precariously. “Are you hurt, honey?”
He stared at her wide-eyed for a second, then started crying.
“Where does it hurt, sweetie?” He had no injury anywhere she could see. The car seat held him safely in place. Maybe he was just scared.
He squirmed as he cried. “Out!”
“You have to stay still, okay?”
She listened for the sound of tires squealing above, car doors slamming, people coming to help. Had there been another car in the tight curve with her? She couldn’t remember one. But somebody had to have seen her go through the railing. They had to.
If nobody had, then no help was coming.
“People will see the broken guardrail,” she told Justin. “Hang on for a second.”
“Out!”
“We’ll get out in a minute. We have to wait for help.”
Except, people might not stop at all. They might look at the damaged guardrail and think, Looks like there’s been an accident here. But they might not think it had happened this second. For all they knew, the guardrail could be busted from last week.
She looked for her cell phone that she’d dropped onto the passenger seat when she’d gotten into the car, but the phone had bounced off somewhere in the crash, nowhere to be seen.
Panic choked her.
Think.
She turned off the engine in case there was a fuel leak somewhere. She didn’t want to go up in flames. Doing that, being proactive, made her feel a little less helpless, a little more in control, even as Justin wailed in the back.
She rolled down her window. “Help!” Then again, louder, putting everything into the shout. “Help! We’re down here!”
She heard cars rush by above. They didn’t slow. And she had to accept that with everyone’s windows rolled up against the cold and the engines rumbling, nobody would hear her, no matter how loudly she screamed. And there’d be no pedestrians here, not on the on-ramp of a major highway.
They were on their own. If they were to be saved, she had to do it.
Since the car was chilling out fast, she rolled the window back up. Okay, what else could she do?
“God, you’re helpless. You’re weak. You’re stupid.” Words Keith had berated her with over and over floated through her mind. “You need me. You need someone to take care of you. Let’s face it, women like you don’t make it on their own.” She stared down at the rocks at the bottom of the ravine and swallowed.
If she was stupid and weak, then they were going to die here today. It could happen. At any minute. If she as much as twitched, the smallest movement could upset the car’s precarious balance.
Fear filled her, and she’d let fear rule her for so long now. Slipping all the way into it, letting herself be paralyzed by it would have been so easy.
“Mommy?”
She filled her lungs, looked back at her son, into those trusting blue eyes. Justin expected her to fix this like she’d fixed spilled juice and broken toys.
She smiled at him. Even weak and stupid people could have one moment of heroism now and then, couldn’t they? Today had to be her day.
As soon as she made that decision, an idea popped into her head. The horn.
Why didn’t she think of that before? She pressed the heel of her hand against the middle of the steering wheel, beeped long and hard.
Waited.
Nothing.
She beeped again.
Cars rushed on somewhere above them. Those drivers had no way of knowing where the sound was coming from in the curve, maybe somewhere way ahead or way behind them, no idea that she was trapped down here.
Disappointment choked her. She swallowed it all down and turned back to smile at Justin. “Mommy is going to get us out of here in a minute, okay?”
Then she shifted her weight carefully and stuck her head out the window, but she couldn’t see so much as a foothold outside her door, just the drop to the rocks below. As soon as she released her seat belt and opened her door, she’d fall.
She pulled back in and scanned the car for her phone again, and this time she finally caught sight of a plastic corner wedged between the passenger seat and the door.
Too far to reach.
If she released her seat belt and moved that way, she’d upset the car’s balance and it might come unstuck, might tumble into the ravine. Yet reaching the phone was their only chance for rescue.
Move slowly. Move carefully.
Justin started crying again, louder and louder, his voice filling the small car.
“Hang in there, sweetie. Mommy’s going to fix this.” She’d said those words a hundred times in the past two years, but never under more dire circumstances.
She said a brief prayer, braced herself on the dashboard with her left hand, then reached for the release latch with the right, pushed the button. She fell half against the door, half against the steering wheel, twisting her body to make sure she didn’t hit her belly.
The car creaked and swayed but didn’t plummet below as she held her breath. Even Justin stopped crying.
“See? We can do this.” She would do this. Because she wasn’t going to let anything happen to her babies.
She reached out her right hand tentatively. Not nearly close enough. She shifted her weight, holding her breath, bracing her right knee on the gear shift. She leaned forward as far as she could without shifting her entire body weight to the other side of the car.
Then the tip of her finger finally reached the phone. One more inch. She prayed out loud as she went for it.
A sense of triumph shot through her once she had the phone tightly clasped in her hands. She stilled, held her body in the same position, waited. But the car didn’t shift. She retreated slowly, no sudden movements, no upsetting the applecart. They’d made it so far. No making mistakes now.
She touched the screen. The battery icon flashed red in the top right corner. Of course, it would. Since she had no idea how much time she had before the phone went dead, she hit the speed dial for Joe. She couldn’t risk 911 and getting a busy signal or being put on hold.
If Joe saw her name flash onto his screen, he’d pick up. And he’d move heaven and earth to get to them. He might have been a jock, but he was also a damn good cop.
“Hey.”
Her heart leapt at his voice. “We went off the on-ramp to Route 202. Nobody can see us from the road. Nobody knows we’re here. I don’t know how long the car can hang on. We’re stuck between two trees, dangling over a long drop to the bottom. We can’t get out.” She gave him directions to their exact location.
“I’ll call 911. I’m on my way. You stay put, okay? Don’t try to get out. Do you hear me? Did you shut off the engine?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.” He sounded sure and steady, as clear as if he was standing next to her.
Her panic abated a little. Okay. Oh God. Joe is coming. “Hurry.”
She didn’t get to say more. The battery went dead and the phone turned dark with a last beep, disconnected. She put the phone into the cup holder, then rolled her window down partially so she would hear Joe arrive.
She didn’t have to wait long. A horn beeped above them fifteen minutes later.
She beeped her own horn, then shouted, “Down here! We’re here.”
“I’m coming down,” Joe called back. “Don’t move!”
The nicest thing she’d ever heard, other than her son’s first words.
She turned back to Justin. “See? Joe is coming.”
He cranked his neck. “Joe?” Nothing on his little face but perfect faith and trust.
God help her, but she felt the same.
