by Ana Barrons
Hannah snorted. “My father? Broken up?”
Eleanor seemed taken aback by Hannah’s sarcasm but recovered quickly. “More angry, maybe. Like his whole life was ruined. Got a little snippy with me, if you want the truth.”
“That I can believe.”
“Let’s go on up,” John said, knowing Hannah was not in the mood to discuss her father and wanting to do something to get back in her good graces. He took her hand and pulled her gently up the steps. “Thanks, Eleanor.”
“I don’t think I ever caught your last name, John.”
“Uh, Emerson,” he said, pulling Hannah a little harder.
“Emerson. Hmm. Well, now, that’s a coincidence—”
“We’ll let you know when we’re done,” he called down.
The attic had dormer windows, which let in enough natural light for them to work their way through the boxes and trunks and odd pieces of furniture to the back corner where Eleanor had stowed the two medium-sized boxes holding all that remained of Sharon Duncan’s worldly possessions. As she stood there staring down at the boxes, Hannah started rubbing her arms. She was warmly dressed in jeans, running shoes and a sheepskin vest over a thick cotton turtleneck, but appeared to be freezing.
“Are you cold?” John asked.
“I remember coming up here. Around Christmas, I guess, because my father was carrying down boxes of ornaments.”
“Did you come up any other time?”
“I try to get away over the holidays.” As though she hadn’t heard the question. “If I stick around I get depressed.”
He wanted to tell her how hard Christmas was for him, too, but he didn’t think she’d want to hear it. “Where do you go?”
She shrugged. “Anyplace where it doesn’t seem like Christmas. Like Florida or New Mexico. Luckily I have friends in warm places.” She squatted in front of the boxes, but kept rubbing at her arms.
“How about Hawaii this year? I’ve wanted to go there for a long time. Or St. Lucia. I hear it’s beautiful in December.”
She answered without looking at him. “I’ve already got plans, thanks anyway.”
Jealousy speared through his chest. “With who?”
“With friends in Santa Fe. Want to pull open that other box?”
“You were living with someone there. Is that who you’re going to see?”
“What difference does it make? I’ve got my life, you’ve got yours.”
He squatted down beside her. “When are you going to figure out that my feelings for you are real, Hannah? What do I have to do?”
“You can pull open the other box.”
“Don’t give me that. Do you honestly believe I’m just going to walk away from you after this?”
“I don’t know what you’re going to do.” She tipped the box toward her and scanned the contents. “But right now, aren’t you supposed to be watching my reactions or something? I mean, we’re here to see if something will trigger a memory of the guy in my mother’s bedroom, right? Then we take my twenty-three-year-old memory to the FBI and they reopen the investigation into my mother’s murder. Oh, and somehow in the midst of all this, they start looking around for this guy in Virginia, because, let’s face it, the FBI is all about keeping me safe.”
“Hannah—”
“Hey, maybe they’ll assign Rita Santini to me. Talk about peace of mind, huh?”
“I’ll be the person keeping you safe. I won’t let anyone harm you.”
She glanced at him as she reached inside the box. “Yeah, well, who’s going to protect me from you?” She pulled out a stack of photo albums and set them on the floor between them, then pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs.
John was torn between his annoyance and his desire to pull her into his lap and hold her close. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, realizing it was time the psychologist took over from the lover. “Tell me how I can help. Do you want me to look through the other box or go through these albums or…” He trailed off, leaving an opening for her to answer. He waited.
After several moments she shrugged. “I don’t know.” She reached out with one finger and turned over the cover of the photo album on top, then grasped on to her opposite shoulder and rested her chin on her hand, her self-protective posture saying more about her state of mind than any words. “Oh God,” she whispered.
John scooted to her side and scanned the photos in their plastic covers. Photos of Sharon Duncan in her early twenties, her hair pulled back, a baby at her breast, took his breath away. They were both Hannah—the mother and the child. As though it had a mind of its own, his arm wrapped around Hannah’s shoulders. He could feel the tension in her muscles from holding herself together so tightly.
She flipped the page and tucked her chin between her knees. Her father was in these photos, holding her in his arms, gazing down at her with something that looked like adoration. Damn, these had to be tough for her to look at. Sure enough, she flipped forward a few pages to photos of her mother in jeans and a loose shirt, bathing her. The smile on Sharon Duncan’s beautiful face was so like Hannah’s John felt overcome with sadness. This woman was dead. This woman who looked so like his lover was dead and gone, leaving behind a child who’d been abandoned by her father and out of reach of the one man who probably would have loved her as his own, the man who had begged John not to hurt her.
Samuel John Daly.
“He would have loved you,” John said.
“Who?” Her voice was the barest whisper.
“My father. If he hadn’t gone to prison, he would have done anything in his power to be a part of your life.”
“Oh, yeah? If he was such a nice guy, why was he cheating on your mother? If he didn’t care enough about his son to keep his own marriage together, what makes you think he gave a damn about me?”
If she’d meant to hurt him, she’d succeeded. But he held his tongue. She was hurting today. The visit with her father had poured salt in a wound John had single-handedly torn open. If it helped her to claw at him, she had a right to it.
She flipped back a couple of pages and pointed to a photo of her father holding her. “If it hadn’t been for him, my parents probably would have stayed together, and maybe—”
“Maybe what? Maybe your father would still love you?”
“Do you find that so hard to believe?”
“Do I—Jesus, no, of course not.”
She gave a long sigh and got to her feet. “Let’s just take these boxes with us. I’d rather look through them with a glass of wine in my hand.”
John piled the boxes on top of one another and lifted them together. He followed her through the attic and down the steps. When they reached the bottom, she stopped suddenly and he knocked into her.
“I just want to look at them for a second,” she said.
He set them down and opened up one box while she opened the other. She peered inside each but didn’t touch anything.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
She frowned. “I don’t know. But I have this feeling…kind of like a memory…that I’m standing right here and I’m crying because there’s something I left behind.” She shook her head. “I’m holding my hands to my chest, and my arms feel empty.”
He knew the feeling.
Ty sat on the floor outside John’s office, hunched over while he wrote the letter on the back of a math test—on which he’d earned a stellar 65—with a nub of a pencil he’d dug out of his backpack. He kept forgetting it didn’t have an eraser, so there were tiny tears in the paper from the bent metal edge where the eraser was supposed to be. Every time it happened, he cursed a blue streak and then scratched out whatever it was. He was trying to be careful about the spelling, but hey, he didn’t have spell check, so what the hell? He looked over his description of Philip’s sicko shrine to Hannah.
Theres all these pictures cut out of magizines or someplace of chicks that look like Hannah. The one that really freaked me out was the
one of her and my dad in the Post. Because that one was definatly her and the other ones were definatly NOT her except for the old ones that look like her but just different.
Ty shivered, remembering his shock at seeing all the photos taped in a circle on a flimsy scarf Philip had wrapped around the towel bar on the wall of the shower. That was bad enough, but then he’d noticed the bear, perched on top of the pole.
Theres this raggedy little teddy bear with all these peaces of hair stuck on it’s head to make it a girl and you can see their from different people cuz some of them are curley and some are different colors but there all brown. It’s really sick. But the sickest thing about the bear is
He swallowed. Jesus. How was he supposed to write this without puking? He picked up the pencil and kept writing.
the hole in between its legs. You can tell he jerks off into it which is totally fucked up but the hole bathroom smells like cum so he must’ve just jerked off. The holes all stickey looking and shit. I think the guys a sereal killer or something. Maybe a sereal rapist. Whatever you want to call it he’s a sick fuck and I feel like SHIT for helping him. I was never so sorry about anything in my hole stupid goddamm life.
Ty reached into his pants pocket and checked the time on his cell phone. Twelve thirty. It would have to be an early-release day. Now he had even more time to hide until John came back from wherever he was shacked up with Hannah. He punched in the number of his house and waited until he heard Maria’s voice.
“Hey, Maria,” he said.
“Where’d you go this morning, Ty? I sent Philip for medicine and you go to school anyway. Why’d you do that?”
He coughed for effect. “I suddenly remembered I had a big math test today, so I got Angelo to take me. Is my father home yet?”
“No, he’s not home. He’s never home this early. Why you so anxious to talk to your father all the sudden?”
“I forgot his cell number. Can you give it to me?”
“Wait a minute.”
While she went to get the number, Ty bent over his letter again.
Philip made me tell him what she did all day and he asked about you and were you her boyfriend and stuff like that. I told him no but I gess I was wrong about that huh?
That didn’t look right. He crossed out the w in “rong”.
“Ty?”
“Yeah.” Maria read him the number, and he wrote it down at the bottom of the paper. “If you hear from my father, tell him to call me, okay? And tell him Philip is a wacko, and I think he should fire his ass.”
“You have to swear every time?” Maria asked, like that was the most important thing here. “You tell your father to fire the guy. Not me.”
“Hey, Maria.” Damn, why hadn’t he thought of this before? “Do me a favor. Send one of the suits out to the pool house and tell him to check Philip’s bathroom. Will you?”
“For what?”
“Just do it. Trust me, Maria. It’ll be worth it. My father will kiss you for it.”
“No offense, but your father ain’t my type.”
Yeah, right. His father was rich as shit, but it went without saying he’d never give a peasant like Maria the time of day. Probably the only woman his father couldn’t hold on to was Hannah.
Because, let’s face it, she’s too good for him.
He clicked off and punched in his father’s cell number. “Come on, answer,” he whispered.
“Thornton Bradshaw.”
Ty was so surprised to hear his father’s voice that he didn’t answer right away.
“Hello?”
“Dad?” He couldn’t ever remember being so happy to hear his old man’s voice. “Boy, am I glad I got you.”
“Ty? Why are you calling me now? I’m in a meeting.”
Ty’s joy faded. “This is super important or I wouldn’t call you.”
“Have you gotten yourself in trouble again?”
Ty flinched. “Uh, no, it’s about Philip. Listen, Dad, the guy’s a total—”
“I don’t have time to talk about the help right now.”
“No, you don’t understand—”
“I’ll be home for a while this evening before I pick up Hannah, so we can talk then.”
“But Hannah’s not even here.”
No answer.
“Dad?”
His father had hung up on him. Without even asking what was so important that Ty had called his cell phone in the middle of the day for the first time in months. Ty stared at the phone until his eyes went blurry with tears. If there had been any doubt before, there was none now.
He had no parents.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“I’m ready to go back,” Hannah announced at lunch after she’d knocked back a Bloody Mary with her crab cakes.
“Great,” John said. “I’m sure Eleanor wouldn’t mind letting us poke around some more.”
She shook her head. “No, John. I’m ready to go back home. To Virginia.”
“Oh.” Disappointment hit him hard, but he tried not to show it.
“Did you really expect me to remember the guy’s face? If I was under the bed, I wouldn’t have been able to see it. All I would have seen are his feet.”
John shifted in his chair, unsettled and a touch desperate. “Unless he bent over or something. When the ring fell, did he bend over to try to pick it up?”
“I don’t remember. I’m sorry, but I just don’t. Can’t you call one of your FBI friends and tell them about the stalker and kind of lay it out? I mean, isn’t there a chance they’d at least look into it even if you don’t have the evidence all nailed down?”
She obviously knew very little about law enforcement. “I was planning to make a couple of calls this evening. Maybe we can fly back tomorrow and—”
“You can fly back tomorrow. I need to get away from here.”
“You’re not going back without me.”
“I can stay with Larissa. I’ll just call her and tell her that I’m nervous about being alone in my house because of the stalker. I don’t have to tell her anything about my mother.”
“What about Bradshaw? He’ll be able to get to you at school.”
She shivered. “Will Santini keep you informed about him? And the others?”
He squeezed her hand. “Depends on how blackballed I am. But I think I know who to call.”
“Who?”
“A friend.”
Ty was starved by five o’clock. Everybody who would have lent him money had left while he was hanging around John’s office, and the other buildings were locked. He’d barely managed to avoid detection as it was, but when he heard Larissa’s crappy muffler he figured he was home free. He wandered through the unlocked areas and raided the teachers’ refrigerator, but all that was in there was cottage cheese and bean burritos and healthy shit like that. No fried chicken or pizza or anything good. And he was sick of Snickers bars.
It just made sense to go check out Hannah’s refrigerator. He was going to be on her shitlist as it was, so what difference did it make if he added one more thing he had to apologize for? And besides, Hannah was into feeding kids. She’d never let him starve. So what the hell had he been thinking, spying on her for that fucking freak?
He left through the door in the teachers’ lounge and crossed the field to Hannah’s house. Before going in, though, he stood in the trees, scoping it out, making sure no one was around. It suddenly occurred to him that Philip might hang around there, watching her. Maybe he was there right now. He hugged himself against a chill that had nothing to do with the cold.
The whole perimeter of the house was wooded, and Ty made his way as quietly as he could through the trees all the way around the house. There was a light on inside, but it was dim and he couldn’t tell through the shades where it was coming from. Maybe Hannah had left a lamp on, or had a nightlight that came on automatically in the dark like the ones they had at home. They’d come in handy more than once when he was stoned.
“Oh, what the hell,” h
e said. He climbed the stairs to the front porch and tried the knob. It wasn’t locked. “Thank you, God.” And thank you, Hannah, for being so trusting, even though it’s a big mistake. He stepped inside and pushed the door closed behind him. It was dark. Real dark. But just in case anyone came while he was in there, he wasn’t going to turn on any lights. He reached behind him and flipped the lock, so no one else could get in. Then he made his way toward the kitchen.
There was bread out on the counter. If he could find some peanut butter and jelly, he’d be all set. He opened the refrigerator and found jelly on the door, along with a half gallon of milk, which he pulled out, and a couple of plastic bowls with food in them. Leftover something. Knowing Hannah, they wouldn’t be fuzzy or anything. Oh, man, one of them looked like spaghetti! He set it all on the counter and reached into the cupboard above the sink for a glass.
“Hello there,” the voice said from the darkness.
Ronald Geer’s voice mail directed John to leave a message and promised he would get back to him as soon as possible. John flipped his phone shut. “No answer. Damn it.”
Hannah continued folding clothes and sticking them into their bags. She was doing it for both of them, which touched John in a very deep way. Wives packed for their husbands and their kids. He remembered his mother packing them all up to go to the beach, before the shit hit the fan. It didn’t seem like something guys did for anybody, including themselves.
“Thanks for doing that for me,” he said.
She looked up, glanced back at the bags on the bed and shrugged. “Oh. I’m just doing it without thinking.”
“It doesn’t surprise me that you’d automatically take care of someone that way without being asked.” He’d almost said me, but figured she’d stop doing it if she thought too hard about who was benefiting. “I put in a call to the sheriff’s office. If they can’t do anything else, at least they can scope out the area around your house to make sure nobody’s waiting for us when we get there.” But damn, he wanted to hear back from Ronald Geer.
