The Ones We Trust

by Kimberly Belle

  I hold out my hand for hers, but Mike stops us. No, he stops me. “She can’t go out like that, Abby. Jesus. What is the matter with you?” He snatches a navy peacoat off a chair by the door and punches the air with it.

  “Nothing’s the matter with me,” I say pointedly, swiping the coat from his outstretched hand. Mike is the king of passive-aggressive jabs, but he and I lived under the same roof long enough for me to have picked up a trick or two. “You, however, might want to remove that giant stick from your A-S-S.” I soften my tone and turn to Rose. “But your father’s right. It’s cold out, and you need a coat.”

  Rose looks down at her costume, essentially flimsy green chiffon over thin white tights. “But Tinker Bell doesn’t wear a coat.”

  “Then Tinker Bell doesn’t go trick-or-treating,” Mike says, in an and-that’s-final-young-lady tone.

  Rose doesn’t move, except to jut her bottom lip out a little farther.

  But now I’m in even more of a hurry to get out of here, and Mike to have me gone. While I prod Rose into wearing the wings on the outside of her coat, he gives me a short and short-fused discussion of logistics. At the end of the driveway, Rose and I are to turn left and follow the road toward the golf course. On the way, we will stop at all the lit houses on the right side of the street, leaving the left side for the trip back. And no matter what, I must, must, must have her home by eight o’clock sharp. His instructions are classic Mike. Even when he’s not in control, he tries to be.

  “Okay, Tink,” I say as soon as he’s done. “You got your pumpkin basket?”

  She holds it high so I can see.

  “Your pixie dust?”

  She shakes her head, giggling behind her free hand.

  “Let’s go get that candy!”

  Outside, a quiet twilight is settling over the neighborhood, bathing the streets in a hazy, purple glow. There are few people out this early, mostly parents with young children with bedtimes as early as Rose’s. I grasp her tiny hand in mine as we cross the street, kicking up leaves and pulling to a stop at the first house we come to.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” I ask. “Or would you rather I wait here?”

  Rose eyes the house, an imposing structure of brownish-gray stucco under a canopy of giant trees. There’s a smoke machine somewhere by the door, spewing a white mist over the entire front porch. Fake tombstones litter the yard, planted askew amid skeleton hands and feet clawing their escape from the grass.

  Silently, she yanks on my hand, and I follow her past a ghost, its eyes glowing a bright, evil red, hanging from a tree by the stone walkway. Quite frankly, I can’t say that I blame her for preferring an escort.

  After the first house, our rhythm is established. I begin by punching the doorbell while Rose bounces on the mat in anticipation. Once the door swings wide, she squeals, “trick or treat!” loudly enough for all of Maryland to hear and then spends a few minutes eyeballing a giant bowl of candy. Once she’s satisfied she’s found the very best treat, I prod a “thank you” out of her and we head to the next house. We do this three more times, and then she stops in the middle of the road.

  “This is the scary dark part,” Rose informs me, except with her articulation, it comes out sounding more like “scawy dahk paht.”

  Regardless, I see her point. To our left is a wilderness of shrubs and tall weeds, and to our right, a partially built home, its doors and windows yawning black holes on a tall wooden frame. The road ahead is the length of half a football field with no streetlights, fine for now, in this in-between stretch of dusky twilight. On the way back, however, it will be blanketed in pitch-black darkness.

  We cross through it and Rose grows quiet, and I can see she’s nervous. I distract her with light, mindless chatter.

  “Tinker Bell is my favorite Disney character, did you know that? And you, my dear, make a very fine Tinker Bell. You saw the movie, right?”

  Rose stops her wide-eyed staring at the tree line and nods.

  “Well, then. Do you remember what you have to do to prove you believe in fairies?”

  Her lips lift in a tiny smile. “Clap.”

  “That’s right!” I clap my hands in front of me. “Let’s clap, so the real Tinker Bell knows we believe in her.”

  Rose drapes the plastic pumpkin strap over her wrist and claps her pudgy hands. Together, the two of us giggle and clap until we’re well past the scary dark part.

  “See?” I point to the road behind us, now bathed in dark shadows. “Not scary at all.”

  Rose grins and reaches for my hand.

  By the time we make it to the end of the street forty minutes later, the sidewalks are overflowing with both children and adults, and Rose’s plastic pumpkin is brimming with designer candy. Rose and I collapse onto a low stone wall to split a Snickers bar, while a constant stream of costumed children runs past us toward the golf course.

  “What’s down there?” I ask Rose, pointing after them.

  She shrugs, hardly pausing in her chewing to check. When she’s done inhaling her candy, I wipe her mouth with my skirt and suggest we go check.

  Less than ten seconds later, Rose and I gasp when we see what all the fuss was about. An entire double lot, every inch of grass and stone and concrete covered with about a thousand Halloween-themed yard inflatables. We are hypnotized by its tackiness. We join the group of children we just watched stream past us, gaping and squealing in delight at the spectacle.

  We spend some time moving through the blowups and studying each one up close. Grinning jack-o’-lanterns and an animated black cat and a host of spookier types—skulls, ghouls and monsters who, cast as plastic inflatable creatures, are not scary at all. Frankenstein has an impish grin, the grim reaper looks positively cuddly, and the giant bloody eyeball is simply laughable. Rose is mesmerized by every single one.

  “It’s Cinderella’s castle!” she squeals and takes off running, weaving her way through a group of animated witches toward a pink princess castle on the edge of the lot.

  I’m rounding the corner to follow when I notice a man ducking behind a skeleton poised at an organ. He doesn’t fit the bill of the yard filled with children in costume, their watchful parents and the slew of mingling neighbors, sipping what I suspect to be adult beverages from red plastic cups. This man, by contrast, is alone and trying very hard not to be conspicuous. An uneasy tingle clenches my insides.

  Instinctively, I move to where Rose is standing, snatch up her hand and hold on tight. Out of the corner of my eye, I keep a careful watch on the man. He pauses, too, pretending to inspect a dancing Garfield on a witch’s broom.

  For a moment I’m uncertain. Am I imagining things? Am I paranoid? Maybe he’s the father of one of the fifty kids running around the lot. But why, then, is he not chasing after a child?

  And then I recognize his coat, a beige Members Only jacket with a grease stain on the right-hand cuff, and my heart rides into my throat. I’ve seen it, and on him, before. I look again, and now I’m positive. It is the pumpkin-inspecting man from Handyman Market.

  I keep a careful distance. Close enough to not show fear, far enough to be prudent. How long has he been following me? How many times have I not noticed him? I think back to the first time I saw him, a week or so ago, and a jolt of fire explodes up my torso, straightening my spine and bathing everything around me in a red haze. I don’t know who he is, what he thinks he’s accomplishing by trailing me and my four-year-old niece—my niece!—around a neighborhood, but I do know one thing.

  I know who sent him.

  I dig my phone from my pocket and stab at the screen until I’ve found the right number. My father picks up with a distracted, “Wolff.”

  “Call him off, Dad.”

  “I’m gonna need a little more to go on here, darlin’. Call who off?”

  “Your tail.�
� I look over and there he is, watching from behind a juggling Snoopy. I give him a look that tells him I’m onto him, right before Rose grabs my skirt and drags me over to the next blowup. “The stocky guy with the comb-over. Tell him to back the hell off.”

  “Darlin’, he’s not—”

  “Did you send him into my house, too?” Rose lurches to the next blowup, and I follow closely behind. “Did he pinch my copy of the medic’s transcript, because—”

  “Abigail.” Dad’s voice snaps an order, and it’s for me to shut up and listen. “I need you to stop moving around so much. Grab on to Rose and stand still until I tell you otherwise. Can you do that for me?”

  Something dense and deadly has slid into my father’s voice, something that sucks the steam right out of me and sends a million tiny pinpricks of fear crawling like electrodes over my skin. Because his words aside—he knows I’m with Rose, and that we’re moving around—I know my father well enough to know what that warning in his voice means.

  It means it’s not my father’s tail.

  I whip my head around, searching for the man in the crowd, but now either he’s ducked behind a blowup, or he’s gone. After my obvious taunt, my money’s on the former. Why did I have to provoke him? Why couldn’t I have just kept pretending he wasn’t there?

  My father’s voice booms down the line. “Abigail, you still with me, darlin’? Talk to me.”

  I open my mouth to answer when Rose takes off running across the yard. “Rose!” I scream, but she doesn’t look back. Two seconds later she’s swallowed up into the crowd.

  For a single, hysterical second, I’m frozen.

  “Rose!” I scan the crowd for a little green fairy in a navy peacoat, but there are too many people, too many blowups blocking my view. I spin around, my heart lurching into my throat. Nothing. I zigzag through the blowups, screeching her name over and over. “Rose!”

  A couple of mothers recognize my look of frantic terror for what it is, and they huddle around me, peppering me with questions. What does she look like? What’s she wearing? How old?

  I stop long enough to give them a hasty description, then take off through the blowups again.

  “Rose!”

  What if he has her? The thought slices through my mind, and tears prick at my eyes. I picture him snatching her up, one hand clamped over her mouth, and carrying her kicking and screaming to some beat-up van. Surely Mike’s given her the stranger-danger talk, but Jesus! What if he’s got her?

  Oh, God. My breathing accelerates, my stomach plummets, and my vision begins to swim. I’m walking the edge of an anxiety attack. The shakes are rolling up my muscles, and I can’t seem to get enough air.

  “Rose!”

  “What’s wrong?” a little voice says from right behind me.

  Relief turns my bones to slush. I spin around, fall to my knees and pull Rose into a titanic hug. “Omigod, I thought I lost you. I thought—”

  She tries to wriggle out of my arms. “Leggo. You’re squishing my wings.”

  I’m also scaring her. Her eyes are wide, and there’s a distraught edge to her voice. I loosen my hold and haul a couple of deep breaths, trying to get a handle on my hysteria, but I still don’t know who the man is or where he went. I haven’t seen him since he disappeared behind Snoopy.

  Even though I can still feel him watching me.

  I feel around in my pockets for my cell phone, thinking I’ll call my father or maybe even 9-1-1, but it’s not there. I must have dropped it in my frantic search for Rose. The thought of combing the yard while the Members Only man smirks behind a blowup makes me feel both vulnerable and foolish for losing it in the first place, and I resign myself to forking over the cash for a new one.

  Because beyond finding my cell, what I really want more than anything is to get the hell out of here.

  In the span of a couple of shaky breaths, I run through my options. First and foremost, I can’t enlist Mike’s help. Our relationship is on shaky enough ground as it is. What will he say when I tell him I may have put his daughter in real, physical danger? I can’t take her back the way we came, either, not without leading my tail right back to my brother’s house. And I don’t even want to think about what could happen when we come to the scary dark part.

  As far as I can tell, there’s only one option, but it will have to be subtle.

  I snatch Rose’s hand, pull her in the direction of the front door and stab the bell with a shaking finger. After the extravaganza in the front yard, I’m a little surprised at the well-dressed, fortysomething man who answers. He doesn’t look like the type to coat every inch of his property in plastic blowup toys, but then again, who am I to say? I haven’t exactly been the best judge of character lately.

  Rose stabs her pumpkin in the air. “Trick or treat!”

  As he’s dropping a handful of candy into her basket, I use my superhuman powers to get us inside. “I’m really very sorry to ask, but do you think I could use your phone? I lost my cell, and I need to check in with home.”

  “Of course.” He waves us inside without hesitation, parks us in the foyer as if we’re completely trustworthy. “I’ll just go get the handheld. I think I left it somewhere upstairs.”

  And then he disappears up the stairs, leaving us alone in his foyer.

  I can barely believe my luck. As soon as he’s gone, I put my fingers to my lips, grab Rose’s hand and sneak us down a rose-papered hallway. Muffled music and squeals from the front lawn push through the windows, and a TV news program floats on the air from another room, but otherwise the house is quiet. No other people as far as I can tell.

  I crane my neck around the corner, peeking into the empty kitchen. Just as I hoped, at the far end is a back door.

  “Found it,” the man calls out from somewhere deep in the house, and heavy footsteps hit the stairs.

  I hurry Rose through the kitchen and out the back door, emerging onto a wooden patio overlooking a yard, and beyond it, the golf course veiled in misty moonlight. We scurry down the stairs and onto the grass.

  “Where are we going?” Rose asks, and I shush her.

  “I want to see the golf course,” I whisper, which is so ridiculous an excuse—it currently resembles an empty black hole of shadows and eerie mist—that even she, a four-year-old child, calls me out on it. “Just for a minute, okay?”

  I don’t wait for her response, just pull her reluctant figure behind me, crossing over three backyards in the general direction of Rose’s house. I just pray that by the time we reemerge on the street a good block down, we will have lost our tail.

  Rose and I hotfoot it home, weaving back and forth between the shadows, and I listen and watch for the man following behind us. She’s tiring, her gait slowing to a weary crawl, and I feed her a handful of Gummi Bears to perk her up. She seems unaware of any danger, but I’m not taking chances. I need her to be able to run.

  As far as I can tell, though, no one is following. I can’t spot our tail lurking in the shadows of the trees and bushes or anywhere in the gaggles of trick-or-treaters we meet along the way. There’s only an eerie silence from the darkness behind us that’s almost worse.

  As we approach the scary dark part, by now a tunnel of empty blackness, I glance over my shoulder, picking up movement in the shadow of an elm tree. The shape of a body poking out from behind a thick trunk.

  My heart climbs into my throat.

  I hoist Rose onto my hip and swing the overflowing pumpkin over an arm. As I’m getting her situated, I sneak a look at the tree line and there he is, frozen in the shadows.

  It’s all I needed to know.

  “Hold on,” I whisper, and a yawning Rose wraps her arms around my neck.

  I lift my skirt with my free hand and take off at a dead run.

  19

  Rose and I slip into the
tunnel of darkness.

  She clenches her eyes and buries her head in my neck, which is uncomfortable as I tear down the road, but it doesn’t slow me down. The thin soles of my ballet slippers clack against the pavement in time to my heartbeat, pounding more from fear than from exertion. As the adult in this scenario, I’m pretty sure my frenzied sprint is doing nothing to calm Rose’s nerves, but I don’t have time to care.

  Because heavy footsteps are gaining in the darkness behind me.

  I speed up, ducking my head and powering for the glow of a street lamp on the other end. My thighs are screaming and my feet are throbbing and my arms are burning by the time we emerge into the light, and I hate to tell Rose, but we lost almost half her candy in the commotion.

  I tear to the first brightly lit front door we come to and punch the doorbell, sucking air and casting panicked glances over my shoulder into the shadows. I wait, listening. At first it’s quiet.

  And then...footsteps.

  I start shivering. I’m freezing cold, aching all over. Terrified all the way down into my bones but trying not to let on to Rose. I lift a fist to beat the door down when a man dressed as a pirate opens it. Relief turns my knees to sponges, wet and squishy, and I want to kiss him, eye patch and all.

  “Arrg, who do we have here?” he says in a heavy French accent.

  I almost laugh. Almost. Because a French pirate with an eye patch? Hilarious.

  Rose, however, does not see an ounce of humor in the situation. She’s still got me in a stranglehold, her little body convulsing in terrified sobs. My arms give out, and I slide her down my legs until she’s standing, wet face buried in my scratchy skirts, on the front porch step.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Mike’s surprised neighbor. “We got a little spooked by the last block.”

  He squats down and puts a hand on Rose’s shoulder. “Rose, chérie? Is that you?”

  She wipes her eyes on the itchy fabric and peeks at him, nodding once. He lifts his eye patch, and her face registers recognition, and yet she clings to my leg. Poor thing. I hope I didn’t scar her for life.