by Amelia Rose
“How does this work?” Woody asked, speaking up for the first time since they walked into the building. Claudia turned and lavished him with a very welcoming smile. Alyssa felt her ears heat up, and it took her a moment to realize that the anger she was feeling was directly tied to jealousy. It was a fairly foreign concept to her after all these years, but it flared back up just the same.
“I will bring out the appetizers and salad options first, followed by the main course and side dish options,” Claudia explained as part of her repetitive speech. “Each portion will be a small size, just enough for a taste really. You will have a scorecard sheet in which to label where you rank the dish in the lineup.”
“That’s interesting,” Alyssa commented.
Claudia looked at her briefly and then turned back to Woody. “I’ll be out with the first round, if you need anything, just let me know,” she told him, her voice dripping with false sweetness.
Woody looked over at Alyssa and smiled one of those soft, lazy smiles that lit up his eyes with amusement.
“Thank you,” Alyssa managed through partially gritted teeth. Part of her wanted to smack this woman for daring to hit on someone who was obviously there with a date, but the rest of her wanted to shake Woody for finding this so amusing.
Claudia sighed and walked off when Woody didn’t respond.
“The nerve...” Alyssa muttered under her breath as she watched her leave. A bark of laughter from Woody’s side of the table caused her to jump in her chair. “I’m glad someone thinks it’s funny.” She scolded him, but he only continued to chuckle, his laughter softening her anger until she finally conceded and began laughing with him.
After that she began to relax and the menu tasting actually went fairly smoothly for the first few samples. However, when they brought out the tray for the main menu items, Alyssa felt her stomach beginning to churn.
“I’m sorry. Where’s the restroom?” she asked Claudia.
“Just by the front door on your left,” Claudia told her as she set down the tray.
“Thanks.” Alyssa managed to say before turning and heading toward the bathroom as quickly as possible. She hoped that she wasn’t drawing too much attention, but suddenly it felt as if she was going to be sick.
Probably all of those spices in the bell pepper bisque, she thought. She had never been good with spicy food.
When she got to the bathroom, she splashed some water on her face and took a few deep breaths. A few moments later the feeling passed and her stomach quieted its grumble and settled completely. Taking a couple of paper towels from the dispenser, she patted her face dry and went back to the table.
“Sorry about that. The spices from the soup got to me,” Alyssa said when she got back to the table.
“Not a problem, just be sure to mark it off the menu,” Woody told her smiling weakly. “Actually, I wanted to talk with you about something else while we were here,” he confessed, his tone taking on a slightly more serious note.
“Oh, yeah?” she asked, her curiosity piqued.
“Yeah,” he responded as he sat his glass down and looked at her. “I’ve been spending an awful lot of time at Shad’s in that makeshift apartment.”
“I’ve noticed,” She said, struggling to keep her voice from cracking. Was he trying to say that he wanted some space? Was he tired of being with her all the time? Her insecurities were suddenly struggling to overtake her normally calm demeanor. In just a few short weeks, this man had come to mean so much to her. Surely he wasn’t pulling away now.
“No, I didn’t mean that,” he said, reaching across the table and taking her hand in his as he realized her interpretation. “What I meant was what if you spent a lot more time at my house?”
Alyssa could feel her eyes widen, and her chest heaved a small sigh of relief. “You mean, you want to upgrade from the small apartment to a whole house?” she asked, her voice still a little shaky.
“I know we both have our own ghosts to deal with and this is new territory for us, but I would love it if you would stay with me for at least a little while,” he responded. “Clara said you weren’t in any hurry to go home.”
It was true. She hadn’t felt as alive and connected to anyone as she had in the last month, and she knew that if she were to go home now it would be devastatingly lonely. She’d even looked into renting out the property until she was certain she wanted to sell.
She took a deep breath as he looked at her. “Of course.”
“Good,” he smiled, “because I was thinking that we could move your stuff over there tomorrow. Shad and Clara are supposed to be back in town the day after so...”
She joined in on his smile. “So when they come back they should have a house to themselves,” she finished.
*
Alyssa was folding the last bag of clean laundry and putting it into the bag when she fell sideways. She reached out an arm and steadied herself against the dresser, but it took her several seconds to catch her breath.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she tried to remember where she had packed up her medicine bag. When she felt a little steadier on her feet, she made her way over to the red bag on the counter and opened it, pulling out a black satchel. Inside was a digital thermometer that she set and placed under her tongue to check her temperature.
She’d been feeling a little under the weather for a few days now, headaches, tension, the upset stomach yesterday, and the almost fainting today. It felt like she was coming down with something, but even as she wondered what was wrong, the thermometer beeped. She did a double take a moment later when she looked at the readout and realized that she was actually a little below normal.
Just in case, she decided to go to the pharmacy and get some cold medicine. Her mother had always insisted that it was better to get out in front of the illness, and that was exactly what she intended to do.
Thirty minutes later she set the bags down on the counter next to the medicine satchel and pulled out a series of boxes. The last box she pulled out was a purple and white EPT box. Her hands shook a little as she lifted it out of the plastic. She’d been told by several doctors that she could never get pregnant, and although she and Kyle had tried for years her dream had never come to fruition.
But in her gut she knew that something wasn’t right, and she knew that those symptoms could add up to pregnancy. She’d been denying it for a couple of days now but the truth was she couldn’t even remember her last period. It had been a month since she and Woody had first been together.
She acknowledged that two and two equaled four. But if she was pregnant that could very well signal the end of her relationship with Woody. She knew exactly how he felt about kids. For a moment she continued to stare at the box not sure if she actually wanted to know the answer.
Before she could over think it, she tore into the wrapping and pulled the test out. A few moments later she set the test on the counter in the bathroom. It said that there would not be results for at least five minutes, and she didn’t want to be one of those women who paced around the bathroom waiting. Instead she decided to go to the kitchen and get something to drink.
She walked into the large kitchen and went directly to the refrigerator. She had seen some juice in there earlier. As she bent into the coolness of the fridge, she noticed the movement from the corner of her eye and she pulled back just as the door swung shut.
“Hey! What the hell!” she exclaimed as she jumped back. That was when she realized that it was Charles Sanders standing there. Without pausing a moment longer she stumbled back against the counter and grabbed for a knife, lunging out blindly as he advanced on her.
The knife was short, nothing more than a paring knife really, but it managed to clip his shirt and sink lightly into his side. Blood covered her hand, and made the knife slip out of her hand and clatter across the tiled floor.
She turned and started to run back down the hallway, but a searing pain shot through her side, and she collapsed on the floor. The last image sh
e saw was Charles standing over her smiling, and then the world faded down into darkness.
Chapter 8
The phone rang out across the shop. At first Woody ignored it, but after ten continuous rings he climbed out from under the green Tahoe he was working on and went to the phone.
“What’s the emergency?” he asked, his voice spiking with frustration at the unknown caller. He’d been trying to get the engine put back together on that thing for an hour and the frustration was driving him crazy.
“Thank God I finally got a hold of you!” Melinda’s voice rang out clearly on the other line. “Charles escaped from his psych evaluation earlier today. I called and gave Shad a head’s up but right now I’m headed to the farm. I don’t think he’ll come after you. Clara was his obsession after all, but I wanted to warn you. Alyssa is staying with you, right?”
For a moment Woody couldn’t speak. He tried to force out words, but there was nothing but a dry crack where his voice would have been. “Alyssa’s at the farm, packing up the last of her stuff.”
There was a brief silence on the other end, and then Melinda spoke up. “I’m sure she’s fine,” she told him, trying to keep her voice calm. But after all of these years of her working as mother hen to the brothers, he recognized when she thought that it was going to be something bad and tried to change the outcome for them. This was definitely one of those times.
He dropped the phone on the desk and ran to the car. If Melinda was driving from town it would take her longer to get to the farm than it would him. He started the car and stomped on the gas simultaneously. In less than a minute, he was barreling down the road towards the farm.
Please be okay, please be okay.
He kept chanting it to himself over and over again as he sped up the farm’s driveway. As soon as the car was in park, he jumped out and ran into the house not even taking the time to shut the car door.
“Alyssa!” Woody yelled, flinging open the kitchen door. His shoe slipped on something, and it took him a moment to process that there was a good amount of blood on the floor. It was smeared and halfway across the room on the floor was a small knife.
Frantic thoughts started to race through his mind, but he pushed them aside and ran down the hall to her apartment. “Alyssa, are you here?!” he called out into the empty room, waiting for a response. Everything within him prayed that she would answer him.
But after a couple of moments of frantic searching throughout the house without a response, he began to experience a heavy sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Something was not right. He walked carefully from room to room, looking for a clue as to what might have happened.
When he went into the bathroom, he noticed a pregnancy test lying on the counter. Confused, he picked it up.
Why would Alyssa be running a pregnancy test if she wasn’t able to get pregnant he asked himself. However when he looked down at the test he saw that it was one of the digital readouts, and the word PREGNANT was flashing across the screen in large bold letters.
He coughed, blinked, and then looked at the test again, his mind trying desperately to wrap itself around everything that had just happened. If this test was in fact Alyssa’s, then that meant that she was pregnant and possibly kidnapped. For a moment the world stopped and he could hear nothing but the whooshing of his heart. He shook his head and looked back down at the test again, unsure as to what he had just seen but the readout was still the same.
“Where are you?” he asked the stale air of the apartment. He might not have been sure of what happened, but he knew one thing with absolute certainty, he was going to get her back.
“It’s looking very much like she might have been here when Charles Sanders came by,” a voice behind him startled him. “There are signs of a struggle and we can’t find Alyssa at all.”
Melinda’s voice had caught him off guard. He turned to face her while at the same time shoving the test into his pocket. The last thing he needed right now was for Melinda to question him about the possibility of Alyssa being pregnant.
“And the blood in the kitchen…?” his voice trailed off.
“We’re testing it. We’ll know soon enough whether or not it’s hers.” Woody nodded his head, but his train of thought was already ten steps ahead. The knife that was in the kitchen was still there, which meant that it was most likely used for self-defense. That was the rationale he was going to cling to.
Melinda was still talking, but Woody’s brain had turned what she was saying into background noise. The only thing he could hear now was the roar of his blood racing through his veins. He was already trying to think of places in the area he would go if he were injured and on the run.
“Since we can’t find Alyssa’s car, we’re assuming that he took it and left the other car here. But you need to go home and check to see, if you don’t hear from her. Let me worry about everything else,” Melinda finished and touched his arm.
“What about Shad and Clara?” he asked.
“As soon as I let them know that Sanders had escaped Shad said that they were dropping off the grid. I don’t expect to hear from them for the immediate future. As soon as I do, I’ll let them know about Alyssa.”
Woody felt his head nod in agreement, but it was as if he were watching it from outside his body. As he walked to the car, the other deputies and crime scene people gave him a wide berth. He could feel them staring at him but he didn’t care. It took every bit of energy to put one foot in front of the other as he walked to his car.
He climbed in and Melinda rounded the driver’s side door. It wasn’t until he was sitting in the driver’s seat that he realized the key was in the ignition and the car was still running. He had been in such a state when he got there that he hadn’t even bothered to turn it off. Turning his head, he realized that Melinda was saying something to him.
“…stop by the house later and give you an update.”
“What?” he asked not having heard what she said.
“I said that I would come by later and fill you in on the case,” Melinda repeated. She paused and studied him closely, her eyes squinting against the sun. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive home?”
“I’m not sure of anything right now,” he said as he shifted the Thing into reverse and backed away from Melinda. She stood there for a moment staring as he backed out before she turned and marched back into the house.
Woody breathed a sigh of relief. He had been worried that she would try to stop him or put him under watch by one of the deputies. There was too much he had to do and Melinda would have taken exception to most of it.
I’m coming, Alyssa. Just hang on.
*
The dull thud of the pain was a constant one that flared rhythmically with each heartbeat causing brilliant flashes of red and orange to pop behind her eyelids. Alyssa could hear movement but she was afraid to open her eyes to alert him that she was awake.
As she lay there she tried to assess her surroundings through closed eyes. Her hands were bound behind her back and so were her feet. The floor was solid, cool and gritty so she guessed that she was on concrete somewhere. For a moment she thought the overwhelming odour of musty hay and mildew was going to make her sneeze but she managed to quiet the urge. Straining against the darkness of her eyelids, she struggled to find any other clues that might help her piece everything together but for a long while she could not hear anything. Just as she had settled back down and given up on hearing anything else, a chair scraped across the floor right next to her head and she jumped.
“I thought you were faking it,” Sander’s voice cut through the darkness. A moment later Alyssa felt him grab her wrists and yank her up into the air. A scream was torn from her mouth as her arms were wrenched backwards in their sockets and the resulting pain flared bright white hot against her eyelids.
When she did open them, all she could see was his face leering down into hers. That look of hatred and contempt that she had first seen in the courtroom wasn’t masked at al
l now, and she felt the panic welling up within her, threatening to drown out everything else.
“Now see here, its better when we aren’t playing games, isn’t it?” he laughed and pulled back, walking across the room.
Alyssa looked around and noticed that they were in some kind of old barn, but it wasn’t one she was familiar with. The hay she had smelled before, seemed to be strewn throughout the barn in small random stacks, as if someone had started to sweep it into piles and then forgot to pick it up. The room they were in had different cinderblock wall dividers that formed some kind of makeshift stalls.
Against the wall was a small table and it appeared that there was a series of instruments and other items, but they were just out of the reach of her sight. When she tried to turn her neck a little more to get a glimpse at it, a shot of pain coursed through her neck muscles and up into her head, causing her to wince and groan out loud.
“Does it hurt?” he asked, mocking. His face pulled together in an awkward motion as his half smile crept onto his face like a stain. She flinched as he walked towards her. When he saw her pull away the smile spread across his face. “I hope so because that is just going to be the beginning of our fun together.”
He laughed but then abruptly grimaced at the pain, holding a hand up to his bloodied side. For the first time, Alyssa looked down at the blood stained shirt and saw that a strip of silver duct tape was peeking out from underneath the tear in the fabric. A few pieces of paper towel were underneath the tape, and those paper towels were already saturated with blood.
At that moment, Sanders noticed her looking at the cut. “Don’t worry,” he said confidently, “we’re going to get you caught back up in the game.”
When he leaned over her she could feel his breath hot and sour on her face. She turned her head away from him in disgust. The rejection enraged Sanders. In response, he reached down and slapped her so hard against her left cheek that her jaw hurt and tears welled up in her eye socket. She didn’t want him to have the pleasure of seeing her in pain so she tried to blink them back.
