Dear Santa

by Alice Orr

  Lacey Harbison paused, her deep red, only slightly glossed lips parted. She was putting together some pieces of her own. Katherine could almost hear her doing it.

  “I’ll only be a moment,” Katherine said.

  She was out from behind her desk and through the office door in seconds, smiling widely all the way. She waited till she was just out of sight before she began sprinting down the hallway toward the gym. Vic had changed into gray athletic shorts, a T-shirt and sneakers. She registered the tense, long muscles of his upper thighs and the round curve of his biceps somewhere in her consciousness, but she didn’t let herself think about them. Instead, she grabbed his arm and was towing him back toward her office before she could even begin her breathless explanation.

  He followed her more readily than she would have thought. They hurried along so fast she barely had time to blurt out her suspicions regarding the too-coincidental similarity between Coyote and Sprite Bellaway and the plan that had been described to her by the woman sitting beside Katherine’s desk. Unfortunately, when Katherine and Vic got to her office, it was as empty as she had feared it would be. They made a quick search of the rooms at that end of the building and a dash to the parking lot. But the woman was gone, along with any trace of who she was or why she might be trying to get to the Bellaway children.

  “SHE KNOWS who you are and that you’re connected with the Bellaway kids.”

  Vic had been trying to make a point to Katherine for nearly half an hour, but she’d made it clear she wasn’t paying much attention.

  “I think you should listen to him, Katherine,” Megan Moran said.

  Vic didn’t usually look for support from anyone. Still, he was glad to have it now, especially since he could feel the leash he tried to keep on his temper wearing thinner by the second. Obviously, Katherine Fairchild possessed the ability to aggravate him as much as she did the ability to attract him.

  “I’ve listened to both of you,” Katherine said, “and I don’t agree. I’m not the target, the children are. Not even both of them, either, just Coyote.”

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this whole deal,” Vic said. “Tooley seemed to think Coyote could handle himself out on the street, even though she had no idea where he might be. But I think there’s a lot more to what’s going on than any of us can even guess at. We could be up against some very bad people here.”

  “What makes you think so, Vic?” Megan asked.

  He shrugged. He didn’t like to be an alarmist. He especially didn’t like to be seen as one. He knew his statements were reinforcing that image, but Katherine’s safety was more important than what anybody might think about him right now.

  “Call it a sixth sense,” he said, and he could tell Katherine picked up on his reference to their earlier conversation. “I’ve been out here long enough to sense dangerous situations, too.”

  “I didn’t claim to have a monopoly on the ability.”

  Katherine sounded pretty aggravated herself.

  “Something besides just instinct is bothering me here,” he went on. “I got a closer look at Tooley’s place than you did, Katherine, and I didn’t like it.”

  “What exactly did you see?” Megan asked.

  He searched for the right word. The one that came to mind struck him as too far out, but he decided to pass it on anyway.

  “Rage,” he said, “and I didn’t only see it. I felt it. Whoever tore that place up was angry enough to…”

  He hesitated. Once again, he didn’t want to cause alarm, except what he was thinking had him most alarmed of all.

  “Angry enough to do what, Vic?” Megan pressed.

  “Angry enough to kill.”

  The word echoed in the silence that followed his saying it, as if that one syllable had the power to strike everybody dumb.

  “Well, nobody’s going to kill me,” Katherine said finally, breaking the spell. “In fact, if you want to know what I think, we’re all more likely to drown in this flood of melodrama that you’ve both got gushing over us than at the hand of some evil villain.”

  Vic opened his mouth to fire back an answer in a tone at least as sarcastic as hers. He clamped his lips together instead. Nothing he really wanted to say to her was either sharp or sarcastic. Only tender words of concern and protection came to mind when he thought about Katherine. He knew she wouldn’t care to hear those things from him now, maybe not ever. So he said nothing at all.

  KATHERINE COULD HAVE kicked herself for the ludicrous statement she’d thrown at Vic in her office. She disliked deceit above all things, but she’d had a good reason for violating that rule. If he had found out about the arrangement she’d made with Tooley Pennebaker—that she was going to pick Sprite up at school and take her home with her—he’d have tried to stop her. Katherine was certain of that. Yet, her apartment was a much safer place than Tooley’s for the little girl right now. Besides, the vandals, whoever they might be, had broken Sprite’s bed and sliced her mattress open. Tooley, who had her hands full just figuring out what to do about the mess that had been made of her life, was very happy to have Katherine take over where Sprite was concerned.

  Katherine tried not to think about how the stuffing from the child’s mattress had been ripped out in huge chunks or about the amount of physical force and determination it must have taken to do that. Most of all, she didn’t think about those chunks of stuffing as possible confirmation of Vic’s theory of an enraged and lethal, maybe desperate, attacker. Yet, it was precisely that scenario which made Katherine so intent upon acting as Sprite’s protector. Katherine had been compelled to watch helplessly while Daniel suffered and struggled and was eventually taken away from her. There’d been nothing at all she could do to stop that. “Make him as comfortable as you can” was all the doctors could say. She’d never felt so totally without personal power in her life.

  She wasn’t going to let that happen again. She wasn’t going to sit idly by while another innocent child suffered. Instead, she had offered her apartment as refuge for Sprite instead of a public facility. Tooley was offered the same alternative for herself but chose to stay at her home and keep watch over the few belongings the intruder had left intact.

  Sprite and Katherine would be on their own for the night. Katherine had been on her way to Arbor Hill School to meet Sprite when Vic burst in with Megan in tow, both of them insisting that she should stay at Megan’s for a few days, or however long it would take to find out who was after the Bellaway children. If she went along with that arrangement, she’d have to tell them she had volunteered to take Sprite home for the night. Katherine was fairly certain Vic would object to that, and insist on the children’s shelter alternative, and that Megan would agree with him. They would have the law on their side as well.

  Social Services Department statutes and child-custody codes were clear. Sprite’s natural mother was incapacitated. Tooley had no legal guardianship status and, therefore, no legal authority to assign Katherine to take care of the child. Sprite would be considered a temporary ward of the state until a judge could rule on the case. Katherine could petition for guardianship and, with Mrs. Bellaway’s approval, might even be awarded custody, at least for a while. Unfortunately, that was a time-consuming process. Katherine wasn’t about to wait for the wheels of family-court justice to grind slowly toward a conclusion. She’d done enough waiting with Daniel. Now, she intended to act.

  Consequently, she had extricated herself from Vic and Megan’s overprotective clutches as soon as that was possible and headed for the Arbor Hill School. Tooley had called to inform the school that Katherine would meet Sprite at the end of the day. The little girl waited in the vice principal’s office, her eyes wide and fearful above the small fist with its thumb shoved into her mouth. Katherine understood immediately that being abandoned had to be one of this child’s greatest fears. Abandonment had been a recurring experience of her young life. First her father had left, then her mother, now Coyote. Whatever their reasons for going, they had all
deserted little Sprite at one time or another. Katherine didn’t want her to feel that Tooley was abandoning her as well. Katherine dropped to her knees next to the couch where Sprite was huddled, her frail body almost hidden among the cushions.

  “Hello, Sprite. Do you remember me?”

  She spoke slowly and kept her voice soft as she smiled with what she hoped the child would recognize as reassurance. Sprite sucked audibly at her thumb, her eyes more round and huge than ever.

  “I came here this morning to talk to you and you told me all about your brother, Coyote,” Katherine went on.

  Sprite stopped sucking and pulled her thumb partway out of her mouth.

  “Did Coyote come home yet?” she asked.

  “He’ll be back soon,” Katherine said, not exactly answering.

  The thumb shoved in again, and the sucking sound resumed as Sprite heaved a small but deep sigh.

  “I have a surprise for you,” Katherine said gently. She had to steer the conversation away from Coyote and the other distressing elements of Sprite’s situation. “Do you like surprises?”

  Sprite hesitated a moment before nodding her head once only.

  “I was thinking we could go to my house and have a party, just the two of us. Do you like parties?”

  The nod came a little more readily this time.

  “What do you like best for a party? Cake, or ice cream?”

  The thumb came out almost all the way.

  “Cake and ice cream,” Sprite said.

  “Cake and ice cream it will be.”

  Katherine held out her hand. Sprite stared at it for a moment without moving, but the sucking had been suspended, at least temporarily.

  “We’d better hurry up before the cake-and-ice-cream store closes,” Katherine said.

  Sprite pulled her thumb all the way out of her mouth and slid to the edge of the couch cushion.

  “You have a cake-and-ice-cream store?” she asked, sounding a little incredulous and almost happy.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Their conversation continued out of the schoolyard, up and down the aisles of Price Chopper Supermarket, and all the way to Katherine’s apartment building on State Street across from Washington Park.

  “You’ve got a snowman place right in front of your house,” Sprite exclaimed, indicating the expanse of snow-covered park on the opposite side of State Street from Katherine’s wrought-iron railed stoop. “Can we make a snowman tomorrow?”

  “After school, we could do just that,” Katherine said smiling.

  Sprite had already wheedled one agreement out of Katherine to return to Price Chopper, for apple pie this time. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day. Katherine felt her heart bubble with laughter at the thought, in the special way her heart hadn’t done since before Daniel got sick. She reminded herself that somewhere between those excursions tomorrow she would have to fit in some shopping for Christmas decorations. She was entertaining herself with the fantasy of teaching Sprite to frost windows with finger paint and spray-on sparkles when Katherine opened her apartment door and snapped on the light.

  The scene in her living room was nowhere near as blatant in its carnage as what had been done to Tooley’s house. There were no broken furniture pieces or jagged windows, no pile of ravaged belongings on the floor. Yet, what Katherine saw now was as devastating to her as if the entire building had been set on fire and burned to the ground. The damage was slight and subtle, but she noticed it immediately, probably because it had been done to the object her eyes automatically sought out whenever she entered this room.

  A small portrait of Daniel, painted in the days before they’d learned of his illness, sat on Katherine’s mantelpiece in a stand that matched the portrait frame. The portrait had been slashed, just once diagonally, from corner to corner. Katherine hurried to the fireplace with tears already in her eyes. She loved this portrait. How could anyone have known how much she loved this portrait? She picked up the ruined likeness and pressed it to her heart. She felt the urge to rock and keen just as she had done so many times in the months after Daniel’s death.

  “What’s wrong?” the small voice asked from the doorway. “Did you break your picture?”

  Katherine turned quickly. She’d forgotten Sprite for a moment. She hung back now from entering the room, her large eyes frightened again. If her thumb hadn’t been encased in a mitten, it without doubt would have been in her mouth.

  “Nothing’s wrong, Sprite,” Katherine said forcing cheer and her former reassurance back into her voice.

  She laid the small portrait facedown on the mantelpiece. That was when she saw the note that had been left there. It was typewritten and read:

  We know you are holding out on us about the boy. We will find him anyway. If you want to keep the little girl alive, you’d better not try to stop us.

  Katherine grabbed the note and crumpled it in her fist.

  “Nothing’s wrong at all, Sprite,” Katherine fibbed yet again. “But I almost forgot that Mr. Maltese likes cake and ice cream, too. Let’s have our party at his house.”

  Katherine was careful not to latch onto Sprite’s hand too hard or too quickly while hustling her back out the door as fast as was possible without startling her.

  “Does he have a Christmas tree?” Sprite asked as Katherine glanced furtively up and down State Street before hurrying them down her front steps to the sidewalk.

  “What was that, Sprite?”

  “Does Mr. Mowtese have a Christmas tree?”

  “I don’t know,” Katherine said, her mind far away from thoughts of the holiday decorations. She was too concerned with keeping Sprite safe.

  Chapter Nine

  Vic was startled by the flurry of knocks at the door of his restored, nineteenth-century row house on Livingston Avenue. Several sharp, persistent raps in quick succession were followed by just as insistent pressure on the doorbell. Someone really wanted to get in. His immediate impression was of a person in trouble, maybe a kid from the center. This wouldn’t be the only time one of them had shown up here with a crisis on his hands. That thought set Vic moving fast into the front entryway. His next thought stopped him in his tracks. Most of all, this assault on his door sounded desperate, and desperate people can be dangerous. Vic had learned that lesson long ago.

  He hurried to the small, three-drawer stand in the hallway. He pulled out the bottom drawer and snapped open a compartment at the back. No one but Vic knew it was there. This hidden niche, a practical departure from the original design, was an example of his talent with tools and wood.

  The object he pulled out of that secret space cast off a reflection of the light from the living room. He moved cautiously along his entryway wall, carrying the cold gleam of steel in his hand. A gun was a necessity for someone with his history. Still, he had never liked guns and couldn’t imagine that he ever would.

  He thought he could hear his name being called from the other side of the door, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d bought that sturdy door at the demolition sale of an eighteenthcentury farmhouse near Coeymans, and had planed it down to fit his doorjamb like a hand in a glove. Not much seeped through that tight framing. Besides, a storm had blown up in the past hour, gusting snow in front of a howling wind. He usually liked that sound. Right now, though, he would have liked this storm to quiet down enough to let him listen for clues to the identity of his visitor—or visitors.

  Vic settled the grip of the gun firmly into the palm of his hand. The barrage at his door began again. He reached for the doorknob. On a silent count of three, he took a deep breath, tripped the latch on the door and pulled it open. He kept the door in front of him like a shield and his pistol poised. Still, he was all but knocked over as the door was shoved open and someone—or something—rushed through into the hallway with a gust of wind-swirled snow in its wake.

  “Stop where you are,” Vic commanded. “Put your hands above your head right now, or I’ll shoot.”

  Everything in him prayed shooting woul
dn’t be necessary. Everything in him had also been expecting for years that a moment like this would come someday. Then he heard what sounded like a child’s small whimper.

  “Please, mister, don’t shoot us,” it said.

  “Vic, it’s Katherine.”

  Her voice was so shaky he barely recognized it. His left hand had been halfway to the light switch when she spoke. He flipped that switch now. The soft light from an overhead globe fell on the snow-covered bulk of Katherine in her long, dark coat. A small child peered out from behind her. The large, terrified eyes told him at once that the child was Sprite Bellaway. Those eyes were staring straight at the firearm Vic still held suspended in midair. He dropped the gun instantly to his side, snapping the safety on as he did.

  “Katherine, what are you doing here?” was all he could think of to say.

  “Sprite and I thought we’d come over and see if you’ve put up your Christmas tree yet.”

  She followed that bewildering statement by glancing pointedly down at the little girl then back toward Vic. It was then that he realized Katherine’s eyes were almost as big as the child’s and that they were filled with the same fear. That realization brought his fuzzy thoughts into perfect focus in a flash, and he recognized the Christmas-tree story as a cover-up to keep Sprite from guessing what was really going on. Vic wanted more than anything in the world to find that out himself, but he knew he had to go along with the cover story, at least for now.

  “I put it up last weekend,” he said.

  If it hadn’t been for the fact that he was pretty sure something very unfunny was happening here, he would have laughed at the expression on Katherine’s face, momentarily changing from terror to amazement. Obviously, she hadn’t expected to hear he had a Christmas tree. Her look told him she wouldn’t have been any more amazed if he’d said this was the three bears’ cottage and they were all eating oatmeal in the kitchen.