The Thriller Collection

by S W Vaughn

  I’m still leaning on Ollie when the doorbell rings, and he lifts my chin tenderly to look at me. “That’s Pete. Detective Garfield,” he says. “Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll let him in?”

  I sniffle and nod, and he leads me to the couch and helps me down before he goes to answer the door. A minute later he’s back with a cell phone in his hand, just a cheap throwaway. “It’s not your number, but it’s activated,” he says. “I need to keep in touch with you. I’m going to put the number for this phone in mine, okay?”

  “Sure,” I say with a shrug.

  He messes with both phones for a few minutes, and then hands the new one to me. “My number’s in there,” he says. “And I’m so sorry, but we have to go for a while. I’m not leaving you alone, though. There’s a squad car with two officers out front, and we’ll have a constant presence here with you until we find Alyssa.”

  My throat clenches, and I’m grateful that he said until. “All right. Thank you,” I say. “I guess I’ll … be here.”

  I might not be for long, but I won’t tell him that. I haven’t decided fully myself. I’ll try to stay here and stay safe, try to wait and let the police do their job, but I can’t guarantee it will work out that way.

  My daughter isn’t safe, and I need her to be. That’s my job.

  Ollie rubs my shoulder and reminds me to call him if I need anything, and then he and his partner leave. I stay where I am for a few minutes, and when I hear a car engine start outside and a vehicle drive away, I get up and walk into the kitchen. So I’m near the exit.

  Now that I have a working phone to myself, I dial Jill’s number. It rings once and goes to an automated message about the person I’m trying to call not being available. I didn’t really expect her to answer, anyway. Still, I compose a text to her number.

  If you hurt my daughter, I’ll kill you.

  I send the message without a second thought, and then sit at the island counter and try to breathe. Try to think. I have to do something, I just have to. But what? If I was Jill, where would I go with Alyssa?

  And why would I take her in the first place?

  No answers come to me. I sit for a few more minutes, and decide that maybe I’ll call Hannah. I’m not sure I could even tell her what happened without breaking down and probably being unable to continue, but at least she might understand how I feel. She has a daughter, too.

  Plus, I never did anything about cancelling or rescheduling the showing. She might be worried about me if she went there and I didn’t show up.

  I dial her number and wait. It rings several times, and then her voicemail picks up, but I can’t bring myself to leave a message. I don’t know what I’ll say. I hang up and think vaguely that I’ll try again later.

  That’s when the new phone dings with a text message. It’s from Jill.

  If you want your daughter back, come to Bronmeyer Park tonight at ten. Come alone. Do not tell the police, or she dies.

  My heart freezes, and a new spark forms deep in my gut. It’s pure rage. I consider telling Ollie about the message for all of five seconds, but I refuse to risk my daughter’s life for any reason. I know Bronmeyer Park — it’s about a block away from the Quintaine property, Hannah’s new house. I can’t imagine why Jill wants to meet there, but it doesn’t matter. I absolutely meant what I said. If she hurts my daughter, I’ll kill her.

  I tap the reply box, type out a message, and hit send.

  I’ll be there.

  Chapter 29

  Waiting around to confront the woman who’s stolen my daughter is agony.

  I’ve talked to Ollie at least four times since I got Jill’s text. I haven’t told him about it, even though I want to. He’s grown steadily more exhausted every time we’ve spoken, and I know he’s running himself ragged trying to find my daughter.

  I wish I could tell him. But the risk is too big. I won’t lose her.

  He calls again around nine. When I answer the phone, he says, “No news yet. Just checking in. How are you holding up?”

  “Still breathing.” It’s the same thing I’ve told him every time. It’s all I can do — at least until ten o’clock. One more slow, torturous hour. “What about you?”

  “Same here,” he says. “Listen, I know it probably seems like nothing is happening, but we’ve pulled out all the stops. And we’re still well within the critical time frame for …”

  When he doesn’t continue, I say, “Finding kidnapped children?”

  “Missing persons,” he says. He’s been trying to get me not to use the K-word. “Celine have you eaten anything at all today?”

  The question is so unexpected that I laugh, and it startles me. I sound like a maniac. “Come to think of it, no. I haven’t,” I say.

  “Well, tell me what you want. Anything, and I’ll have it delivered to you,” he says. “You have to try and keep your strength up.”

  That’s probably a good point. But I don’t want an extra police officer or two showing up here with dinner while I’m trying to sneak out of the house without them noticing. “Tell you what. I’ve got plenty of food here, and I promise I’ll make something right now and eat. Deal?”

  “Are you sure you want to cook? I really don’t mind getting something sent over.”

  I open the fridge and look. “There’s sandwich stuff. So I won’t have to cook,” I say.

  “And you’re really going to eat.”

  “Yep. Right now.” I’m already pulling bread and lunchmeat out, placing it on the counter. I want to keep my strength up, but not for the reason he thinks.

  I may have to overpower Jill.

  “Okay. You’d better be,” he says. “Can I do anything else for you?”

  God, why does he have to be so thoughtful and concerned? It’s killing me that I can’t tell him about Jill’s message. But if something happens to me and Alyssa … well, maybe I can drop a hint, and maybe he’ll be able to pick it up. Or not.

  I’ll try anyway.

  “You know, I’ve tried to call Hannah a few times today, but she isn’t answering her phone,” I say. “I’m a little worried about her. I might go over there later, just to check on things.”

  There’s no way I can work the park into anything, but at least it’s near Hannah’s house. Maybe if I don’t come back, he’ll be able to look in the right area. At least I know that if I make it out of here, it won’t be long before Ollie realizes I’m gone and starts trying to find me.

  “Absolutely not. You can’t go anywhere,” he says. “Don’t worry about Hannah, or anyone else except yourself. It’s not safe for you.”

  I can’t help smiling at the stern worry in his voice. “All right. I’ll stay here,” I tell him. “And I’ll eat this sandwich I just made.”

  “You do that.”

  He says he has to make more calls, so we hang up. I know he’ll check in with me again soon — and next time, I might not be able to answer. The idea terrifies me, but I’m determined to go through with this.

  I eat the sandwich, and then make a second one and force it down too. By then I think enough time must have passed for me to go and get my daughter, but it’s only 9:15. I still have to wait.

  Suddenly I realize that there’s one more person I should talk to about this, and I haven’t even thought of him once in all this time.

  Brad is her father. He should know that his daughter is missing.

  I have to get the scrap of paper with his room number on it out of my purse, since it was in the memory of my previous phone. I send the call through, and it rings and rings and rings. There’s no answer, and no voicemail or ‘unavailable’ message. Maybe he’s sleeping.

  But a deep, cold feeling in my gut says I’d better make sure.

  I dial information and get connected to the main hospital number, and then ask for the fifth floor nurses’ station. The woman who answers the phone sounds irritated, and I know she’s not going to volunteer much help.

  So I’ll have to make her.

  �
��I need to speak to Brad Dowling right away, and he’s not answering the phone in his room,” I say after the terse greeting. “Can you go in there and get him for me?”

  “Who is this?” the woman says, and then adds, “Never mind. He’s probably sleeping, and we don’t wake up sleeping patients to take phone calls. This is a hospital.”

  “He’s not sleeping. He’s missing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Speaking the words out loud make me certain of it. “I said, he’s missing!” I shout. “Go in his room and check. He’s not there.”

  “This is ridiculous,” the woman says, and there’s a clunk. But I can still hear the background noises in the hospital. She hasn’t hung up the phone — she’s just put it on the desk, and hopefully gone to check on Brad.

  The few minutes she’s gone are endless. When the woman finally returns to the phone, she says angrily, “How did you know that? Who is this? I’m calling the police, right now.”

  “You do that,” I say, and hang up. I’m shaking again. But I make myself stop. Now more than ever, I need to be calm and in control. I’ve suddenly realized why Jill wants my daughter. Because she’s Brad’s daughter. And now she has him, too.

  She’s taking my family, and giving it to herself.

  I can’t wait one moment longer. I grab a hoodie from the hook beside the kitchen door, slip it on, and move into the garage. There’s a back door leading to the yard, and I go through it and run across the grass, cutting across the neighbor’s lawn behind my house to the next block. My heart smashes like it’s being pounded hard on an anvil, but I don’t stop.

  The park is just a little too far away to walk there in time. So I head for the convenience store on the next corner and call for an Uber. I’m told that a car will be there in fifteen minutes, and I ask them to please hurry. They say they’ll try.

  My ride gets to the convenience store in twelve minutes. I pay almost no attention to the driver as I get in and give the address of the park. I’m watching the phone the whole time, watching the minutes tick closer to my daughter.

  It’s 9:50 when the Uber car stops in front of the park, which is nothing but a green, grassy expanse with a small clustered playground near the back, bordered by a fringe of trees. I tip the driver extra and get out, rushing across the shaggy, late-fall grass toward the playground. That’s the most likely place for Jill to meet me. She wouldn’t want to do this out in the open.

  I stand by the swing set and wait, facing the street and listening to the neighborhood winding down. The steady sound of crickets overlaid by a brisk, steady autumn wind, and the creak and rustle of the trees as the branches blow. The faint, constant hum of streetlights and the louder, intermittent hum of tires from passing cars. The babble of someone’s television through an open window, and someone shouting in the distance. If I squint, I’m pretty sure I can see lights that belong to Hannah’s house from here.

  Time crawls toward ten o’clock and then past it to 10:01, then 10:02 and 10:03. By ten after, I’m almost too horrified to move and thinking about calling Ollie anyway. She’s not here. Something must have happened.

  Just then I hear something behind me. A rustling sound like the trees, but closer. Before I can turn to look, there’s a huge, hollow thunk, and pain explodes in my head, bringing total blackness with it.

  Chapter 30

  I open my eyes with a gasp, but it’s still just as dark as it was when I passed out. There isn’t a drop of light anywhere, and my head is pounding. I can feel something sticky and wet on the back of my neck that has to be blood. It takes a minute, but I piece together what happened.

  Jill hit me with something, knocked me out, and took me … somewhere.

  Moving is slow and painful, but I can’t stay here and do nothing. I feel around with my hands, find that I’m lying on a cold, flat surface — smooth concrete, I think. Is this a garage? The air is cool, slightly musty, but I don’t smell anything oily or metallic. This is more of a basement scent, like mildew waiting to happen.

  Spending countless hours in hundreds of houses over the years has apparently taught me a few things I never realized I’d learned.

  I pat my pockets, hoping to find the phone but knowing I won’t, and I’m right. It’s gone. I can’t see a thing, and I don’t hear a sound other than a very faint hum that could be anything, coming from anywhere. I push myself carefully into a seated position and sprawl out with my palms pressed to the floor, taking shallow breaths as dizziness threatens to overcome me. The feeling is slow to fade.

  Someone laughs in the darkness.

  “Jill?” I call out, suddenly feeling much more in control of myself. Fear and adrenaline has a tendency to drown out everything else. “Damn it, where is Alyssa?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  The mocking echo of the text she sent to me, one of the first ones, burns through my blood, and I’m up like a shot and swinging blindly in the dark. “I swear to God, I’ll kill you if she’s hurt,” I growl. “What’s wrong with you? How could you do this? You were my friend!”

  There’s a faint click, and a blinding flood of light fills the space around me. I gasp and squint as my head starts pounding again, and my vision gradually adjusts. This is definitely a basement. Poured concrete floor, cement block walls with bleach-white grout … a brass-lantern style glass light fixture in the center of the ceiling.

  I recognize that light fixture. I’ve seen it dozens of times over the two years I’d been trying to sell this place.

  Why am I in Hannah’s house?

  “Over here, Celine,” Jill calls.

  I swing my aching head toward her voice and blink her into focus. She’s standing in the entrance to this simple, square room, a ‘bonus room’ at the back of the expansive basement in the Quintaine property. She has something in her hand, something shiny and metallic and sharp.

  A butcher knife.

  “This is honestly a shame,” Jill says casually as I stand there staring at her. “I was getting better, I really was. I’d just about forgiven you for stealing Brad from me —”

  “From you?” I rasp, incredulous. “He wasn’t with you!”

  “Shut up and listen,” she snaps. “I was going to let it all go. You had Alyssa, and she’s part of Brad, but I was happy to let you raise her so I could be the fun one. The surrogate aunt.” She takes a menacing step forward. “But then Brad woke up … and I knew I had to have it all.”

  I shudder. “You killed Rosalie. And Teryn.”

  “Of course I did.” She grins and points the knife at me. “Your friends. I would’ve stopped with Rosalie if the cops had actually arrested you like I’d planned, but they didn’t. So I moved on to Teryn. And somehow, you weaseled out of that one, too.” She shakes her head and sucks her teeth. “I bet you slept with Detective Chambers, didn’t you? That’s why he let you go. So I had to frame someone else instead.”

  “He doesn’t believe it,” I say weakly. “It was too obvious. He’s going to keep looking into it.”

  Jill flaps a hand. “All part of the plan,” she says. “We did that on purpose. Soon enough, that detective will find out it was your stupid plan to plant the obvious evidence and make the murders look unconnected, to throw them off the trail.” Her smile returns, cold and calculating. “It’ll be in your suicide note. Then I can tell Alyssa that her mommy was a murderer, and she’s better off with me and her daddy.”

  Out of that whole insane, rambling mess, my mind seizes on a single word. “We?”

  “Oh, that’s right. Didn’t I tell you?” she laughs. “Me and Hannah.”

  My legs sag in shock, and it takes every ounce of my flagging strength to stay on my feet. At least that explains why I’m here.

  “It was brilliant, really, the two of us working together,” she says. “She took care of the technical stuff, and I took care of taking your life apart piece by piece. We both had you fooled.” She gestures with the knife, its flashing arc leaving a streak of light in the ai
r. “It was so easy to get Alyssa, too. Hannah visits Izzy at school and slips your daughter a snack with a little ipecac syrup in it, then texts you a picture with an attached virus that shuts down your phone’s call function. Alyssa gets sick, the school can’t reach Mommy dearest, so they call reliable Aunt Jill, who comes to pick her up. No questions, no suspicion.”

  I can’t bring myself to mention my daughter to this lunatic I thought was my friend, half afraid that just speaking her name will doom her. So I croak, “What about Brad?”

  “Oh, we’re just going to share. We each get a daughter, and we both get him.”

  Jesus. If they’d told Brad this insane plan of theirs, he was probably just as terrified as me right now.

  I’m trying desperately to figure out a way past Jill when another voice speaks from the gloom behind her. “You know, Jill, I’ve changed my mind,” Hannah says. “I’m not going to share Brad with you, after all.”

  Jill opens her mouth, starts to turn, and a deafening blast roars through the basement. A deep red stain blossoms at the front of Jill’s light blue shirt, spreading rapidly until it soaks her chest. She coughs, and blood foams and oozes from her mouth.

  Then she collapses to the ground with a sickening thud.

  Chapter 31

  Without giving myself time to think, I rush for the knife in Jill’s outstretched hand. But Hannah is there instantly, pointing the gun she’s just used to murder Jill at my head. “I wouldn’t do that,” she says. “I’m not opposed to killing you slowly.”

  I glare at her and raise my hands. “Brad was right about you. You’re psychotic.”

  She laughs hard enough to shake her shoulders. “Maybe I am,” she says. “And speaking of Brad, you’re so distraught over losing him that you’re going to kill yourself, after taking your friend with you. It’s going to be a murder-suicide.” A grin splits her face. “Of course, the police know that Jill took your daughter, and Brad. That’s why I sent her to the hospital. They’ll never find them where I’m going to stash them. And then once the heat dies down and they stop looking, I’ll just quietly leave town and join my family. Rich people do eccentric things all the time.”