Now You See Him

by Stella Cameron

  Wazoo unhooked Zipper from Ellie’s shoulders and gave the cat a sound kiss on the nose. “It is upsettin’, baby,” she said in the animal’s ear. “But your Daisy gonna be all right. Quit bein’ mad, it’ll make your head ache ‘cause your blood pressure will get high.” She put Zipper down. “Now, you go on in there and keep the bed warm for the invalid when she come home.”

  Joe covered his mouth. Nothing was ever dull around Wazoo.

  “Off you go.” Wazoo flapped her hands at Zipper.

  The cat turned away and strolled off into the second bedroom.

  Deputy Lori giggled.

  “You laughin’ cause you don’t think Zipper really did what I said? You think it a coincidence? That’s fine. You know if you have a boy or a girl yet?”

  Lori said, “No. We decided we’ll be tickled whatever we get.”

  “It’s gonna be a boy,” Wazoo told her. “A big boy and he gonna come early. Prob’ly in a week.”

  “I’ve still got three weeks to go,” Lori said. “And Reb says first babies are usually late.”

  “One week,” Wazoo said, wiggling her fingers all around then sweeping from the room, closing the door behind her.

  “Where’s Spike?” Joe asked. He didn’t feel so good about Lori being sent. Didn’t sit quite right.

  Lori made to stand up.

  “Please don’t,” Ellie said. “You…well, I was going to say you look comfortable, but you don’t.” She gave a bashful smile.

  “You’ve got that right,” Lori said. “But I’ll sit if you’re all right with that. Spike got called away late this afternoon. By the boss. He’s still there but he called to ask if I could come see you. I guess the boss is on the warpath. Seems somethin’ big’s goin’ down.”

  Joe kept his mouth shut, but he wanted to ask what the “something big” might be.

  “It’s okay with me,” Ellie said, and sat on the edge of the couch.

  Rain splotches hadn’t quite dried on her blue shirt. She wore pants again, which made him a happy man. The trend toward clothes that didn’t hide her figure meant something had changed the way she viewed herself and he was just pigheaded enough to hope it was him.

  “I’m Ellie’s attorney,” Joe said. If Ellie said otherwise he’d look the fool.

  Ellie didn’t contradict him. “Joe’s my rock,” she said. “Ask away.”

  “I haven’t been told why yet, but they want to know more about your background.”

  The worst thing he could do would be to react to the very line of questioning Ellie feared. He walked into the kitchen, poured two glasses of ice water and added a piece of lemon to each.

  “My background was checked after Stephanie Gray died,” he heard Ellie say. “I’m boring. No father, no mother, nobody.”

  She took the glass of water when he offered it to her and he admired her steady hand and relaxed expression. Then she ground her back teeth and blew her image as far as he was concerned.

  With notebook in hand, Lori scribbled. “We pretty much know about the past few years, or from when you entered college and so forth. I can tell you’ve had some hardships and I don’t like digging them up, but it seems we have to look farther back. Fill in the holes.”

  “I was born in California, but I don’t know where and there isn’t anyone left there to tell me. My daddy died, then my mother got sick and had to go into a hospital. She never got well enough to take us back. We were with an aunt and uncle—that was my mother’s sister—and their four kids.”

  More scribbling.

  Rather than watch her struggle, Joe turned away from Ellie and went to stand in the window.

  “How long were you with them?”

  “Until I was ten.”

  “Then what?”

  “I ran away.”

  Lori said, “Lordy. Where did you go?”

  “I told anyone who wanted to know that I’d been abandoned. I went into foster care.”

  A sniff made Joe look back. Lori fumbled for a handkerchief and wiped the corners of her eyes. “I guess you were okay there,” she said. “They sent you to school and made sure you got some skills to work with.”

  “No. I was moved several times. I was lucky they sent me to school at all but that stopped when I was fifteen. That’s when I ran away again.”

  Joe’s back ached from holding it stiff. How much would Ellie tell Lori? He stared at the dark square but rain slanting past street lamps glazed before his eyes. Ellie at fifteen would already have been lovely. Lovely and alone on the streets.

  “Tell me what happened after that?” Lori sounded as if she had a cold.

  “If the transcripts from the first interrogation are checked you’ll see the name, Alice Clark. Mrs. Clark saved me. She stopped someone from beating me to a pulp and took me home with her. I stayed with her until I was over eighteen then she made sure I had enough money and I left to go to school.”

  “Did she adopt you?”

  “No.”

  “She was just your foster mother.”

  “No. She thought she was too old and too inexperienced for them to let her do that so she just kept me. She couldn’t figure out how to send me to high school without someone getting suspicious. I learned at home. And I know she kept checking to see if someone was looking for me but they weren’t.”

  “She sounds so kind,” Lori said. “I expect you’re still in close touch with her.”

  “We’re not in touch at all. She was always afraid she’d get into trouble for having no right to let me live there so we agreed I shouldn’t contact her again. She did speak to the police after Stephanie died and let them know I had been with her, though.”

  “So at eighteen you were on your own. That’s terrible. How did you make the money last? Did you work?”

  “I worked while I was in school because I wanted to help my future. Mrs. Clark was a rich woman, I wouldn’t have had to work if I didn’t want to.”

  “She gave you that much?” Lori said.

  “Yes.”

  Joe returned to the two of them and took a seat on the couch. “You’ve done well,” he told Ellie. “A lot of people wouldn’t have survived all that.”

  “I was lucky,” she said in a monotone.

  The deputy slowly closed her notebook. “I’m sorry to bring all that up. It must be very hard for you.”

  “I was lucky,” Ellie said again, staring at the floor.

  Lori looked at her quickly, then at Joe. The look was hard and loaded with meaning. He nodded. She was trying to convey that she was worried about Ellie.

  “Thank you,” Lori said, and pushed her way out of the chair. Her oversize khaki shirt barely buttoned over her tummy. Joe decided he liked that tummy.

  She took up her hat and put it on, tucked the notebook into a breast pocket and went to Ellie with outstretched hands. “You came to the right place,” she said, holding Ellie’s fingers. “And you don’t deserve what’s been happenin’ here. We’ll get to the bottom of it. I’ve got a feelin’ a lot’s goin’ down and soon.”

  22

  “Let’s watch the news.”

  Ellie snatched up the remote and turned on the TV. She had to have time to think, time before Joe began discussing what had just happened. Would the authorities be satisfied with her story? Or would they have more questions?

  She found the news and turned up the volume.

  The attacks had stopped. Why not let it alone? She had told Lori the truth—even if she had left out most of what happened in the last two years at Mrs. Clark’s house.

  The weather seemed the main news topic. After veering away, the hurricane had reversed its course and once more headed for the Gulf. There was talk of it coming inland. The radar didn’t reassure her. They’d be on watch now, waiting for instructions to get ready if the time came.

  The weather report finished and the anchor returned. “Let me introduce you to our next guest. Ms. Sonja Elliot, bestselling author, is experiencing a storm in her own life. Welcome, Ms. Elli
ot.”

  “Please call me Sonja.”

  Ellie started to turn off the TV but Joe put a hand out to stop her.

  “I thought she was young,” Joe said. “She writes edgy stuff.”

  “She doesn’t look the part,” Ellie said, swallowing and feeling sick.

  Sonja Elliot, a tiny woman with gray hair that fell untidily around her shoulders, looked as though she had spent a lifetime in the sun. Her wrinkles reminded Ellie of an apple carving and her large dark glasses added a clownish impression.

  “What do you think?” Joe said. “She could be sixty but she looks eighty.”

  “Sixty would be my guess. She’s arrogant.”

  “I owe it to my readers to make sure the series continues,” Elliot said, flipping back her hair as if practicing to be a Victoria’s Secret model in a future life. “I don’t like being in the public eye, but it’s my duty to reassure my many fans that they shouldn’t worry about what’s happening. A writer becomes the property of her readers, she writes for them alone, and she has a responsibility to ensure their happiness. Let me tell you a little secret. The next book will be out sooner than expected. Any talk of a connection between my work and these crimes is completely bogus.”

  “Idiot,” Joe muttered.

  “Is she doing this because she’s afraid her publisher will stop the series—because of all the fuss?” Ellie asked.

  “Uh-huh, I’d say so.”

  “Is there any truth to the rumor that you have no respect for today’s young women?” the interviewer asked. Elliot gave a short, high laugh. “Our young people are our future and I love them all.” Her mouth came together in a straight line.

  “Admirable,” the interviewer said. “We’re all—your fans, that is—grateful for the comeback you made some years ago. Ten or more, is it? What should we have done without you?”

  Elliot sat straighter. “Hardly a comeback. I never went away. It was around then that I started a new series. Perhaps that’s what you mean.”

  The interview finished but immediately afterward the interviewer looked into the camera and said, “So there you have it, folks. The show…or the books must go on. Evidently there’s no truth to the rumors that Miss Elliot’s sales have ever slipped.” He leered conspiratorially.

  Ellie turned the set off. “I could have done without hearing that,” she said. “She didn’t even say she regretted the murders.”

  Joe was quiet before he said, “I’m relieved Daisy is going to be fine. She’s got courage.”

  “Yes, she does.” And you’re just making noise to fill up space. You don’t know what to say or do next, any more than I do.

  “I’d better go across the hall and shower,” he said, smiling at her. He touched her cheek. “You’re something else, cher, but if I could make it not have happened I would.”

  She believed him and she loved him for caring about her. He set a hand on her thigh, palm up, and she put hers on top. Taking his time, he brought the back of her hand to his mouth and let his lips rest there, warming her and making her tingle as if he touched her all over rather than just her hand.

  “You’ll probably be in bed by the time I get back, so sleep well.”

  Urgency shortened her breath. She felt hot. “Stay a bit,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers and holding on tight. “This is the right time. If I’m wrong about that, there never will be a right time. I’m not picking apart the details but I want you to know what I’m afraid of. From before.”

  Joe looked uncertain.

  “It’ll be okay,” she told him. “Unless you’re too tired for this now.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “But I’m worried for you.”

  She needed to put space between them and got up. Walking slowly back and forth in front of him, she ordered her thoughts, decided what to say and how to say it.

  “My brother would know where I was born,” she said. “One of these days—when things settle down for me—I’ll try to get in touch with him.”

  “Might be a good idea.”

  In other words, Joe didn’t think it a good idea. She wouldn’t ask now but she wanted to know why. “What I said about being at Mrs. Clark’s was true, only I left out a lot.”

  “I expected you to tell me this,” Joe said.

  Why would someone build their house so far off the beaten track? Ellie remembered her first thought when Mrs. Clark had driven directly into the four-car garage of a creamy stucco spread with dark wood trim and a tall iron fence surrounding the property. Ellie’s benefactor had keyed in a code to open the gate.

  “Her home was a long way south of San Francisco,” Ellie said. “Really remote, and big. It had this complicated alarm system.”

  “Really rich people have to do that sometimes,” Joe said.

  “She wouldn’t let strangers in the house so she never had anything delivered. The furniture was expensive but worn, as if she’d had it for years and years.”

  Now who was skirting the main issues?

  Joe spread his arms along the back of the couch and looked up at her. Each time she glanced at him he smiled. He didn’t really want to know all the sleazy horror she’d been through, not really. Like most smart men he knew it was important to women that the men in their lives listened to them, so he’d listen and hope she got through it fast.

  “She kept a lot of the house closed off because she did her own cleaning and liked to keep the work down. Not a soul ever came there.” How could she tell him the rest?

  “What happened to you in that house, cher?” Joe asked. “Your Mrs. Clark didn’t just give you a lot of money, did she? She paid you off and you decided you didn’t want to push things further afterward.”

  “I was too scared,” she blurted out. “An awful accident happened and she said I could take the money and run or get blamed. It was my money, really. It had been given to me.”

  “By whom?”

  “I’m good to you, Ellie, just you remember that. You do as I tell you and I’ll build you a nest egg to take care of you if you ever need it. Quit sniveling!”

  “Jason,” she told Joe. “Jason had put the money into an account for me, and when I left, his mother took me and closed it out. She had me take everything with me and I put it in the bank in New Orleans.”

  “You forgot to say who Jason is?”

  Her heart took off and beat unnaturally fast. “Mrs. Clark’s son.”

  “He lived with his mother, too?”

  “In the basement.”

  Joe got up and pulled her down beside him. “Don’t go on. You don’t need to.”

  Yes she did. “Everything Mrs. Clark did was for Jason. I think he’d been in some sort of trouble and she was hiding him down there. He went outside to swim in the pool and do work around the place but she kept watch all the time until he went back inside.”

  “How old—”

  “In his thirties.”

  “And he didn’t work other than around his mother’s house.”

  “He…he wasn’t like most people. He didn’t trust people. But he worked on things, invented them, I think. I heard them mention royalties. I know his mother brought letters from a post office box and when he opened them there would be lots of cash inside. He’d give me…” Honesty meant you told the whole story. “He gave me cash to keep for myself, for later, he said.”

  “But he had an account opened for you, too.”

  “Yes.” She heard her voice start to rise. “I said he did. But he liked to look at money and touch it so he must have thought I’d like it, too. He had an account for me and he gave me cash. There was nothing to spend it on so I put it on a table in my room at first, then the dresser. In the end it was piled up everywhere.”

  Joe sat square on the couch but looked sideways at her. His eyes could be too blue, she thought, too all-seeing, as if they looked inside her head.

  “Why did he give it to me? Isn’t that what you want to ask?”

  “You said it was because he liked havin
g it around and thought you might, too.”

  “Yes. You keep me in line, Joe. Make sure I don’t fib about anything. That night when Mrs. Clark found me, she was looking for a girl, for a girl in trouble who would be grateful for her help. She wanted me for Jason—to live in the basement with him so he…” Tears streamed and she could do nothing to stop them.

  Joe bent forward and put his face in his hands. He was disgusted by it all just as she’d known he would be.

  “Jason didn’t know how to be around other people. It was a year before his mother took me into the basement to see everything down there. I never got to go up again after that, not till I—left.”

  “You lived in a basement for two years?”

  “A bit longer. I had a room of my own and plenty to eat—and books. What I said about learning there was true. Jason told his mother what books I should have and she got them. He looked them up on the Internet but never ordered them from there in case they got traced to him. That’s what he said, anyway.”

  Strangled noises squeezed from her throat. She breathed only into the tops of her lungs and gasped as if she’d been running a long time.

  “Ellie, did you try to get away?”

  Of course, he thought she should have escaped. “Every night I got locked in my room. I was locked in there during the day a lot, too. Jason let me out to eat the meals his mother brought. He made sure I couldn’t get out.”

  Joe ground his thumb joints into his eyes.

  “Once I was moved down there he didn’t go outside as much, but there were no windows and he bolted the door from the outside.” Why had she thought she’d feel better if she opened up to Joe? “They put me on the pill. He watched when I took them.” Her voice assaulted her ears. “You know why he did that, don’t you?”

  “I know,” Joe told her. He attempted to pull her into his arms but she pushed away. “Let me hold you,” he said, and the pain she heard in him hurt her even more.

  Her forearms, held tightly in his, burned when she fought to get away. Joe wouldn’t let go.