A Box Full of Trouble

by Carolyn Haines

  Abby rings the doorbell. Nothing happens. She knocks. Nobody comes. I prick my ears up, on edge.

  Something is not right. Even Abby appears to know this and takes a step backwards from the door and stares up at the windows on the second floor.

  I sniff at the double front doors, catching a faint scent of spice and flowers. The Phillip scent. But I also pick up something else, and it only takes me a split second before I recognize the smell.

  Gasoline.

  I cry out a warning and press against Abby. Call 9-1-1 I meow, but she is shushing me. I yowl louder.

  Frantic to warn Abby, I thump against the double front doors. As I do, one of them opens a crack.

  Abby steps forward.

  And then to my ever-living horror, she pushes the door open and steps into the house.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Abby tiptoed into the front foyer of the Drapers’ home. Once inside, she hesitated, wondering exactly what she was doing in the house. Searching for Jennifer, or confronting her, had seemed like such a good idea back at her house, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  As upset as Abby was with Victor, she knew there was no getting any sleep. She figured she might as well put the time to good use—or that’s what she’d been thinking when she rushed to her car. Abby wanted to confront Jennifer and demand answers over her mysterious conversation with Layla the night she disappeared. Those two had a secret that might have something to do with the kidnapping. The detectives were wasting valuable time focused on Phillip. Since Victor was a creep, it was up to her to make Jennifer tell her what was going on between her and Layla.

  Abby took a tentative step further inside and looked down at Trouble, who was hissing and spitting at the air in front of him. She wondered what he was seeing. Maybe she should just leave. Jennifer would surely be at Phillip’s hearing in the morning and she could confront her then. After all, breaking and entering into her boss’s house in the wee hours of the morning was a not a traditionally positive career move.

  But the lawyer in her quickly corrected that thought. The door was open. Technically, she wasn’t breaking and entering.

  Still, this was not nearly as good an idea as it had seemed when she jumped in her car and drove over here, fired up by her new suspicions.

  She turned and retreated toward the front door, but Trouble hissed like an inner tube going flat in a hurry and shot forward deeper into the house. Abby wasn’t about to leave Trouble inside the house, so she sprinted after him. Running in the dark, she tripped over something in a hallway and tumbled to the floor with a resounding crash. Sprawled out flat, her chin smarting from being smacked on the hardwood floor, Abby lay still, stunned and breathless. Trouble jumped on her, meowing insistently.

  If Jennifer was in the house, she was awake by now. Abby pushed herself off the floor and stood, wildly hoping Jennifer didn’t own a gun and wouldn’t shoot her as an intruder. Cautiously Abby edged forward, running her fingers along the wall, looking for a light switch. No point in pretending she wasn’t here anymore. Finally, she found a switch and flipped it on. Light flooded the room, nearly blinding Abby. Trouble kept yowling.

  “Jennifer,” Abby shouted. “It’s me. Abby. We need to talk.”

  Nobody answered.

  Trouble poked Abby hard in the leg and twitched his tail. Unhappy cat, Abby thought, and headed toward the stairs. She’d been in the house for several of the Drapers’ soirees and knew her way around. If Jennifer were home, she’d surely be in an upstairs bedroom. But with every step Abby tried to take, Trouble bumped her and wove between her feet, nearly tripping her.

  “What?” Abby shouted, and immediately felt ashamed. Trouble was trying to tell her something. Again. She shouldn’t take out her anger at Victor on Trouble. “What?” This time when she spoke, it was softer.

  Trouble arched his tail and took off toward the kitchen. Abby followed.

  As she neared the kitchen, she began to sniff the air. At first she was too tired to recognize the smell. Her normally alert and cautious brain was obviously off kilter with fatigue and worry or she’d never have entered uninvited into an unlocked, dark house before dawn so she could have a chat with the wife of a man in jail on kidnapping charges.

  When Abby stepped into the industrial-sized kitchen and switched on the light, she cried out. The scent of gasoline was overpowering, and, on the stove, an iron skillet reeking of burning oil was giving off smoke. She ran forward and snatched the skillet off the hot eye of the stove, burning her fingers as she did. She dropped the skillet on the floor and heard the tell-tale cracking noise as it hit the tile.

  A busted tile was nothing, not compared to a burned down house.

  Abby switched the stove off, grabbed her cell phone out of her pocket, and hit 9-1-1. “House on fire.” Close enough, she thought, and surely that would get a quicker response than “gasoline smell in the kitchen.” She gave the address in a rush, but didn’t stay on the line despite the operator’s insistence she do so.

  “I have to find Jennifer if she’s here and get her outside in case something explodes.” Abby poked at Trouble with her toe. “Find Jennifer. Please.”

  Trouble twitched his tail, sniffed the air, and started for the hallway. Abby glanced around the kitchen, making sure there were no lit candles or other sources that might ignite the gasoline. Seeing none, she followed after Trouble.

  Once in the hallway, she spotted Trouble half way up the wide, circling staircase. From outside, Abby heard what sounded like a vehicle driving up. She wondered how a first responder could get there so quickly.

  Trouble took off running and there was nothing for Abby to do but run after him. If it were first responders, they’d find the front door open without her help. If it was the arsonist returning, meeting him at the door wouldn’t be any more helpful than running away from him. Meanwhile, Trouble seemed to be on to something.

  Abby took the stairs as fast as she could, but Trouble got to the second floor long before her and disappeared into a doorway. His meowing led her into Jennifer’s room.

  Jennifer Draper was stretched out on her bed, her eyes closed but her lips were parted. Snores in little bursts of noise like engine backfires came out of her mouth. She was wearing black jeans, a long-sleeve black T-shirt, flat black boots, bangle bracelets, earrings, and a gold choker necklace. Dressed like a spy but with sparkle.

  Abby leaned over closer, inspecting Jennifer. One of Jennifer’s hands was thrown over her chest with the fingers closed over something. The other hand dangled off the bed.

  Trouble jumped on Jennifer and started licking her face. Abby shouted her name. The woman didn’t stir.

  “Jennifer, wake up.” Abby shook her, shouting into her face again.

  But Jennifer didn’t wake up.

  Abby shook her again. Trouble meowed. Abby kept waiting for the first responders to call out, but nobody did.

  Suddenly the bedroom door slammed shut. Abby spun around and started toward the door to check this out, but Jennifer moaned on the bed. Abby whirled back toward Jennifer.

  Trouble meowed and butted Jennifer’s stomach.

  “Damn it, wake up.” Abby wondered if she should slap the woman. That would have worked in a movie, but somehow slapping her boss’s wife didn’t seem like the right move. Yet Jennifer had to be drunk or drugged or sick to sleep through the racket she and Trouble had just made.

  Trouble, persistent in his efforts, rubbed Jennifer’s face with his own, purring like a small engine as he did.

  This time both of Jennifer’s eyes came open. And stayed that way.

  “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.” Abby tugged Jennifer’s arms, trying to pull her into a sitting position and momentarily ignoring the slammed door. “The kitchen is on fire.” Another small exaggeration, but one appropriate to the circumstances in Abby’s mind.

  “Fire.” Jennifer slurred the word.

  Trouble arched his back and sniffed the air. Abby was too busy with Jennifer to pay h
im much mind, but then he squalled like a banshee, leapt off the bed, and knocked the receiver out of the base of the bedside phone. He pawed at the numbers as Abby yanked Jennifer into a sitting position. As Abby pulled Jennifer to her feet, a brown plastic RX bottle rolled out of her hand onto the floor.

  Abby stooped over and picked it up.

  Valium. The ten milligram dosage.

  In a flash, she suspected Phillip’s Valium found in the library was something prescribed for him, but actually meant as extras for Jennifer. That explained her eternal and unnatural calmness.

  But now wasn’t the time to contemplate any addiction issues. Now was the time to get the hell out of the house before some kind of spontaneous combustion set the kitchen on fire for real.

  After dragging Jennifer to the bedroom door, Abby paused to strengthen her grip on Jennifer before she reached to open it. Trouble yowled into the phone receiver, jumped down, and ran to the bedroom door.

  Abby sniffed, smelling something foul and acrid. Jennifer began to slide to the floor in Abby’s arms. Trouble was prancing around, his eyes wide and something like a snarl coming from deep inside him.

  Abby wrestled Jennifer up from the floor, swung the door open, and cried out.

  The hallway was on fire. The carpet runner danced with flames.

  And, strain though Abby might for the sound of sirens, she didn’t hear a hint of any fire trucks on the way.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  For the life of him, Victor couldn’t understand what had just happened at Abby’s. After he and Lucas explained that he and Layla were not lovers, Abby had practically melted against him. One minute she was close to kissing him and running her hand gently over his bandage. Then wham. She was yelling at him to leave.

  Was the girl bipolar?

  Okay, he told himself, forget the redhead and concentrate on finding Layla—which is what he should have been doing in the first place, not trying to kiss Abby on her couch while the cops plundered her kitchen.

  But as he drove his pickup toward his house, he couldn’t get the scene at Abby’s out of his head. He gripped the steering wheel tightly and went back over it in his mind, step by step.

  “Rizzo.” Victor shouted it in the empty cab of his pickup. The man had asked to speak to Abby, they went off together, and when they returned, Abby ordered Victor out of her house.

  Obviously, Rizzo had done some background digging on Victor and must have reported what he’d found out to Abby.

  How much longer was his rash decision to be a gentleman toward his ex-wife going to haunt him? Why hadn’t he fought back against her and the accusations?

  He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Nothing to do now except go home, shower, take a nap, and then start looking for Layla.

  As Victor drove the pickup into his parking spot and crawled out, he inhaled the damp, warm night air around him. He caught a whiff of some kind of night blooming flowers. Abby probably could have named them. What a beautiful night. Too bad Layla wasn’t able to enjoy it.

  Once inside his house, Victor showered in a hurry and pulled a frayed robe around him. But he didn’t crash in bed like he had first planned to do. Instead, he pulled out the file he had taken from Layla’s law review office. He’d glanced through it once before—just as he had looked through all the flash drives he had taken out of her gym bag at Abby’s. But nothing had struck him as anything that could possibly be related to her kidnapping. It was just these endless, endless notes, statutes, regulations, and ramblings on off-shore oil drilling, and a rough draft of a law review article with her byline.

  Yet, somewhere in all this, there had to be a connection with her kidnapping—and the trashing of Abby’s house.

  Victor got up to put a pot of coffee on. His head pounded from where he’d been hit, and he decided to indulge in a rare aspirin or two.

  While the coffee brewed, he ate a couple of granola bars and swigged down a multivitamin and three aspirin with orange juice. Normally, when he was this confused, he’d go for a run, but tonight he was skipping that. He was also going to skip school later too. The most important thing he could do was find Layla.

  With that goal firmly in mind, once he had his mug of black coffee, he sat down at his PC and pulled out the plastic bag of flash drives he had taken from Layla’s bag. He intended to go through them again.

  The materials on them were repetitious or similar to the items in the law review file he’d taken from Layla’s office, although in far greater detail. One flash drive had about ten drafts of a law review article on off-shore drilling in Florida, similar to the one in the paper file, with Layla’s name on them all as the author. Yet nothing gave him a hint about where Layla might be.

  Could she have uncovered some kind of secret information that one side or the other in the continuing struggle between the environmentalists and the oil companies didn’t want her to publicize? Or had she learned something that might jeopardize whatever deal it was that Phillip was working on with the governor and the state attorney?

  Unable to come up with any answer that made sense, Phillip put the flash drives back in the plastic bag and tossed them on his desk. He stood, stretched, and headed to the bathroom.

  After he brushed his teeth, he pulled on a plaid button-down shirt, and stepped into a clean pair of khaki pants. He wasn’t at all sure where he was going, but he had to do something. As he slipped his cell phone in the front pocket of his shirt, he remembered Trouble nudging his shirt pocket as if trying to tell him something.

  Running his hands through his hair, he frowned, thinking hard.

  Trouble had practically shoved that lone earring at him from Layla’s travel bag when he searched the guest room at Abby’s. And the cat had patted the pocket where he’d put the earring.

  What the hell could an earring have to do with anything?

  How could a cat know much about anything except food and soft laps?

  Yet, Abby was convinced the cat was some kind of detective.

  Crazy as that seemed, he had to admit at times Trouble did know things the rest of them didn’t. Victor stepped over to the wooden box on his chest of drawers where he had dropped the earring and pulled it out. He studied it under the bright bedside lamp. The earring was elegant and expensive if he didn’t miss his guess, and appeared to be something an older, conservative woman might wear. The pearl looked luminous and he figured it was real. The gold definitely was. The single word engraved on the back—love—must have been done by an expert as the lettering was a beautiful cursive with a flare.

  Who did Layla know who would wear such an earring?

  Her mother? Given the way Layla’s parents had rebuffed her, he doubted Layla would have kept one of her mother’s earrings. Yet, Layla had several photos of her parents displayed in her apartment, so maybe she did treasure an earring of her mom’s as a keepsake?

  But why hide it?

  Thinking about Layla’s parents made Victor think about Phillip and Jennifer. Both couples had the same kind of old-money style. Definitely not the Boho, nouveau-hippie look Layla affected, or the casual, comfortable plaid shirt and khakis he wore.

  “Like Phillip and Jennifer,” he said into the quiet of the early morning.

  Though Victor could not begin to imagine why Layla would have any of Jennifer’s jewelry, the notion that the lone gold earring with the pearl was Jennifer’s took hold in his mind. He pulled up the Architectural Digest magazine with the photo spread on the Drapers’ house and flipped to the photos. There, in a picture spread across the entire page, Jennifer and Phillip smiled in front of their elaborate fireplace.

  Jennifer was wearing small gold earrings with pearls in them.

  Victor couldn’t make out if they were exactly the same as the one he now held, but if not, they were certainly similar.

  Suddenly he wasn’t tired anymore.

  Shoving the earring into his pocket, Victor rushed toward his pickup. He needed to confront Jennifer and find out why Layla had on
e of her earrings. No sense in calling first and giving her a heads-up to concoct an answer. No sir, he’d deal with Jennifer now and he didn’t care what time it was. Layla needed him.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  My first instinct is to find a window and leap. Abby could jump too. This is only the second floor after all. But I glance back at Jennifer, conked out on the bed. She’s going to be a problem.

  Abby whirls around in the bedroom, her eyes big in her face. She doesn’t even look at me as she says out loud, “The first thing is not to panic.”

  A good rule, no doubt, but escape is the urgent matter at hand, not slogans.

  I run toward the floor-length draperies on the wall that faces the front yard, looking for a window. Ducking my way behind them, I see the curtains cover two French doors. I press my nose against the window pane in one and discover that there is a small balcony off the bedroom.

  Backing out of the drapes, I meow at Abby, trying to tell her what I’ve found. She gives me a quick, wild-eyed look, and then runs into the bathroom that adjoins the bedroom. In a moment, I hear her running water and dash into the small room with her.

  “Wetting towels to put against the door to block smoke.” Abby says it as if reading a script for a documentary. She is definitely not panicking. But I want her to see the French doors and the balcony. If I have judged correctly, we both could jump to the lush green grass. Even a biped should survive without serious injury. Though it would be more problematic, maybe Abby can slide Jennifer off the balcony too. As limp as Jennifer is, I doubt she’d be hurt by a fall.