Revenge is Sweet (A Samantha Church Mystery, Book 2)

by Betta Ferrendelli

  Jonathan and April kept the house and Sam had rented an apartment less than five miles away. Some nights following their divorce, Sam would drive by after work, but she wouldn’t go to the door. April had become so upset with her mother that it made Jonathan angry when Sam stopped by unannounced.

  Of course, she couldn’t blame them.

  Sam tried not to think of the night following the custody hearing when she stopped by without calling and managed to make a complete fool of herself. Sam stared at the new family’s moving boxes in her old garage, trying to keep her mind off that night, but she couldn’t help it, the scene played out vividly before her.

  Jonathan and April weren’t home when Sam arrived, so she parked on the street by the driveway and waited for them. She stayed in the car, a bottle of Jack Daniels nestled between her legs. She had a buzz as she drove to the house, and now, in the nearly hour that had passed, she was totally sloshed. She knew it, but kept drinking anyway. Sam sat up straight when she saw Jonathan and April pull into the driveway. She noticed that the neighbor girl from down the street was also with them.

  As soon as April got out of the backseat, Sam stumbled out of her Mustang, clutching the bottle in one hand, and a shopping bag in the other. She staggered toward them, trying to talk to April. “April … I love you … Mommie loves you, look what I got for you…” Sam tried not to stutter, but she couldn’t help it, the booze had full control of her now. She stopped and tried to pull something from the bag she carried. “Look, sweetie! Mommie bought you a pair of tennis shoes … your … fav-” Sam stumbled and began to lose her balance. She caught herself before she fell, but not before drenching April’s new shoes in whiskey.

  April and the neighbor girl turned to dash into the garage, but as April ran by Sam, she dropped the shoes and the bottle and grabbed her by the wrist. “Come home with me, sweetie! Mommie misses you so, so much!”

  “Leave me alone!” April yelled, and tears welled in her eyes as she tried to free herself from her mother’s grasp. Jonathan stepped in and pulled Sam’s hand off April’s wrist. “Will you please get a hold of yourself,” he asked in a voice that remained calm and collected, trying not to cause anymore of a scene than Sam had already created.

  Sam couldn’t help herself and, as if her actions were not her own, started slapping at Jonathan while screaming over and over, “I’m her mother! I love her and I have a right to be here, too!”

  The neighbor girl reached for April’s hand and they ran together through the garage and into the house. Sam stopped yelling at Jonathan as soon as the door to the house slammed shut.

  “Get your bottle and leave, please,” Jonathan said, as his shape retreated into the garage.

  Sam watched him disappear into the house. She stared numbly at the house for what seemed a long time, then she turned and started to walk toward her Mustang. She stumbled over the white tennis shoes stained the amber color of the whiskey. Sam looked at them for a moment before bending down to pick up the shoes and the now empty bottle of Jack Daniels, almost falling over in the process. As she stuffed both back in the bag, she felt someone watching her and knew immediately it was the busybody neighbor across the street. Sure enough, there she was, standing with her arms folded tightly across her chest, watching Sam, who felt a stinging heat of embarrassment begin to rise in her chest.

  “What the hell are you looking at?!” Sam yelled at the neighbor, who watched Sam a minute more, shaking her head in disgust before she went in her front door. Sam stood in silence until it was broken by the sounds of her garage door closing. She walked slowly to her car, the bag in her hand and her embarrassment turning to regret as she realized what she has just done.

  Sam closed her eyes, wondering if she would ever be able to erase that memory. She took one more long look at the house. There was no reason to come by here anymore. Jonathan was gone and Sam would have to do everything she could now to get her daughter back from his mother. She never liked calling that woman a grandmother to her daughter. Sam had, at least, taken the first step. The AA meetings were hard and an embarrassment to her, but she was going. And it would be a month soon since she had taken her last drink.

  She looked at her old house, watching as several people came and went from the garage into the house carrying boxes. It was 6:30 p.m. when Sam headed back to 20th Avenue and drove to Clancy’s Pub on West 38th Avenue, Wilson’s favorite hangout. He had first taken her there to celebrate after their big story hit the newsstand. She remembered that he ordered his favorite, a beef sausage sandwich (otherwise known as a Clancy’s Pride ‘N Joy) potato salad and an iced tea. Tonight, she downed a burger and fries with a cup of strong black coffee, trying not to think of those tennis shoes she had purchased for April, the ones she ended up throwing in the trash. And she couldn’t help feeling guilty every time she took a bite from her juicy burger. She wondered, hoped, that if Wilson was still alive, the kidnappers were feeding him.

  By the time Sam reached her apartment, clouds had covered the sky, light with the look of snow. The cold air felt thin against her skin as she trudged from the mailboxes to her front door. “Here Morrison, here kitty, kitty,” Sam called as soon as she stepped inside her apartment.

  A black ball of fur, tail high in the air, came trotting down the hallway toward her. She felt him softly rubbing against her ankles. She smiled and picked the cat up and gave him a vigorous scratch beneath his chin. He purred loudly, obviously content.

  Sam had never been big on cats, but when Robin died, she couldn’t let anything happen to Morrison, who Robin had named after her favorite Irish singer, Van Morrison. Sam took the cat home and she was surprised at how quickly he had grown on her.

  Sam checked his water bowl, still plenty there, but his food dish was empty. She hadn’t been in her apartment since being kidnapped. The first thing she had said to Howard when she woke in the hospital that morning was, “Morrison must be starving.” Howard came over the weekend and had been here again this morning, but Morrison had eaten every morsel.

  She retrieved a can of cat food from the cabinet. Morrison pressed himself in and around her legs, meowing with excitement as she prepared his dinner. With Morrison eating, Sam went to her bedroom and changed into blue jeans and a faded blue and green flannel shirt. She kept Robin’s favorite brown Izod sweater hanging on the doorknob to her closet. She picked it up, closed her eyes and held it to her face. Robin’s scent was fading now that Sam had been wearing it so much, but still of hint of her sister’s sweet fragrance lingered.

  She headed toward the bathroom and flicked on the light. She hesitated a moment before looking in the mirror. When she did, she saw that her blue eyes looked as flat as a gray November day. The dark circles beneath them reminded her of how little she slept at night. She rubbed at the circles as if that would make them disappear. She leaned a little closer turning her head this way and that. She had been trying to ignore the tiny traces of laugh lines starting to form around her eyes, but try as she might, they were there looking back at her. She felt every bit of her thirty-two years. Her blonde hair would be ash now had she not kept it colored. It had been that way since April was born.

  She had lost none of the weight she had gained since her divorce. It showed beneath her chin, a constant reminder. She pressed firmly a couple of times using the back of her hand, but it didn’t help. Sam remembered her promise to Robin shortly before her death that she would start getting in shape after the first of the year. It was her New Year’s Resolution. Robin was determined to help her lose weight. Sam knew that even if she had half her sister’s determination, she’d be able to shed these extra pounds. She splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth without looking at herself again in the mirror.

  Morrison was cleaning his paws happily when Sam returned to the kitchen. She scooped him into her arms and went to the big chair in the living room, trying to ignore the pangs of loneliness that had set in the moment she walked into her apartment.

  She looked aroun
d the room, feeling empty, feeling the room beginning to close in around her. She had been here just over a year, but had never done much to make the place her home.

  Sam had spent the last two nights at her grandmother’s ranch sitting with her in front of a roaring fire that Howard had built for them both evenings after dinner. They talked of the ‘Old Country’ and Feltre, a small mountain town in the Dolomites, a mountain range in the northern Italian Alps, where Nona was born. She arrived in America, the day of her seventh birthday and came to the two hundred and eighty acre ranch that her father had purchased on the west side of Interstate 25 just outside of Denver. The ranch, about twelve miles from where the pavement turns to gravel, at the end of a rugged county road, had been her home for the past seventy years.

  The memory warmed her and a small smile spread over her lips. The loneliness lifted slightly at the thought.

  She found herself desperately missing the smells of her grandmother’s cooking, standing next to her and watching her as she cooked. Yesterday, Nona had fixed her usual Sunday afternoon feast of polenta smothered with chicken and gravy and fresh spinach. Sam was full from dinner, but still her mouth watered. She glanced around her living room, thinking of the rent she had just paid for February. It still wasn’t too late to give notice that she would move out at the end of the month. Howard had asked her in the hospital what was taking so long to move to the ranch. She knew they both would be as happy to have her, as she would be to come.

  She would do that first thing in the morning. She smiled, the emptiness around her falling away. There is something about having a place to call home. Home-cooked meals and the comfort of having someone near.

  Nine

  Sam stared up into the darkness.

  The only light in her bedroom came from the illumination of her clock on the nightstand. She tried not to look at the numbers. It would only tell her how much of this night she had not slept. The minutes had been folding into hours since just after midnight.

  She had been thinking of movie plots where someone was kidnapped. How everything seemingly wrapped up in a nice, neat package in just two hours. How those waiting to hear from the kidnappers did, their demands met and the hostage released. Sam wondered why just this once it couldn’t be that easy in real life.

  Despite no word from the kidnappers, Sam had eliminated the idea that Wilson was being held anywhere but in a residential setting. Not in a cave. Not in a warehouse. Sam had made a visit to the warehouse that she and Rey Estrada had staked out one night while she worked the drug smuggling story. She remembered the chilly night she and Rey shared a thermos of coffee and a conversation about Robin as they waited for activity to occur at the warehouse. In the darkness of her bedroom, she could see herself as they stood in a nearby stairwell snapping countless photos of men dressed in black, taking drugs off the semi that had come from Mexico; photos that were published alongside her stories, which were picked up by newspapers across the country.

  Yesterday, she visited the building and talked with the manager. She told him the Perspective was doing a short follow up on her drug smuggling stories. He offered to give her a tour of the warehouse and she accepted.

  Frances and Howard, however, had insisted she not go alone.

  “I’ll be going in broad daylight. Nothing’s going to happen,” Sam said, sitting at Nona’s kitchen table and looking at them over her coffee.

  But they wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I’d feel so much better, Sammie, if Howard went with you,” Nona said.

  “Nona,” Sam said shaking her head. “Howard doesn’t always have to be my guardian angel.”

  The look, however, in Nona’s eyes, melted Sam into submission.

  “I sure couldn’t ask for a better angel,” Sam said to Howard as they waved goodbye to Nona and left the ranch in Howard’s car.

  The manager met Sam and Howard at the main doors of the warehouse. “We have nothing to hide, Ms. Marino and Mr. Skinner,” the manager had told them as they walked from floor to floor. “I have cooperated with the authorities fully on this matter.”

  Sam couldn’t put much else together because she had been unconscious most of the time, but when she was awake and talking with Wilson, he told her he was certain they were being held in a house-type setting. He kept talking about a peculiar odor. She knew Wilson wasn’t being held in the house in Grandview where the meth operation centered. It was still under police watch.

  It has to be a home, but where? In this big, big city, where?

  Sam rolled from one position to the next. When she wasn’t thinking about Wilson, her mind was a hodge-podge of other thoughts, from April to working on news stories for the next edition to wondering what she was going to do about a car. She wouldn’t be able to keep driving Wilson’s much longer. She wanted to think that soon he would be back to work and everything would be normal again.

  She desperately wanted to believe that.

  Sam knew it was going to be hard to get another classic Ford Mustang like her old one. Financially she knew she could afford it. But it wasn’t just that. She wasn’t sure she could drive another Mustang without being reminded of what had happened to her last one. Her mind drifted and she started to think of the force of the blast. How it knocked her off her feet. She had lost consciousness briefly and, when she came to, she was staring up into the faces of strangers, a couple standing over her. She could see their mouths moving, talking to her, their brows furrowed with worry, but she could not hear a word they were saying.

  Sam turned to look at the clock, three minutes before six. She groaned and threw the covers back. No more. She would not allow herself to think any longer of what had happened that January night. Morrison had been sleeping soundly at her feet, and he only stirred slightly as Sam got out of bed. She wanted to get to the office before eight, hoping that another day wouldn’t pass without word from Wilson’s kidnappers.

  One week today, she thought as she moved toward the bathroom.

  She showered and dressed quickly in a pair of black slacks, cream-colored silk blouse and matching heels. She fed Morrison and headed out to the Accord, wondering what she was going to do about getting another car.

  The Grandview Perspective was dark and the front parking lot empty when Sam arrived twenty minutes before eight. She let herself into the building and slipped quickly down the stairs into the newsroom. The large, open room was quiet and cast in its usual semi-darkness, the way it was before reporters started showing up for work.

  Sam was glad that Nick Weeks’ office was still dark. He wasn’t the first person she wanted to see when she arrived. She only glanced briefly toward Wilson’s office as she made her way to her desk and tried to ignore the pang in her heart.

  She checked the message light on her telephone first thing. No blinking red light. Sam turned on her computer. The quiet surrounding her made the soft humming noise from her computer seem louder than usual. She checked her e-mail. Nothing. She shook her head in disappointment. She wasn’t sure how the kidnappers would communicate with her. She was just certain that somehow they would soon contact her. It was the only reason they had let her go.

  She headed to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. She waited there for it to brew, enjoying the fresh aroma of coffee as it began to filter through the room. It made her think of the weekend at her grandmother’s ranch. Every morning she woke to the rich smell of coffee brewing and to the sounds and fresh inviting smells of Nona’s cooking coming from the kitchen. The rustle of pots and pans. The mixture of flour and butter. She was glad that she had slipped a notice to vacate her apartment at the end of the month in the manager’s mailbox before she left her complex this morning.

  She poured herself a cup of coffee knowing that moving to Nona’s ranch would be the only way she could get her life in order. She held the warm cup to her chest and closed her eyes thinking of her daughter, the only thought that seemed to warm her. It was the only certain way to get April home.

  Sam ret
urned to her desk and saw the e-mail even before she sat down.

  She set the coffee cup on her desk, keeping her eyes fixed on the subject line. It was illuminated in dark blue, signaling it had yet to be opened. She stared at her screen until she became aware that she had been holding her breath. She glanced around the room, still alone. She pulled out her chair and slowly sat down. The subject line contained a single word.

  Revenge

  “Finally,” Sam said the word as she exhaled deeply. It wouldn’t be hard to get her e-mail address at work, as it was listed at the bottom of every story she wrote.

  It was quiet enough that Sam jumped when she heard someone entering the building. She listened a moment before she recognized the voices of Anne Misner and Dee Schaffer. She heard them talking and laughing about baseball. They were Colorado Rockies fans and were excited that spring training would soon be under way.

  Sam turned her attention back to her computer screen. Her heart was beating fast and she tried to swallow over the dryness in her mouth. Sam put her hand over the mouse, and noticed it was shaking. She clicked on the word. The e-mail came from an undisclosed location. She knew it would be pointless to hit ‘reply all’ but she did anyway. It had been sent to no one else.

  Sam pressed her palms down firmly on her desk, bracing herself to read the message.

  Your suspicions about being followed were exactly correct, Samantha Christine.

  In fact, we have been following you for some time, waiting for the right moment to make our move.

  It is too bad that your foolish friend did not take you seriously.

  Sam frowned. How’d they know her middle name?

  Are you surprised we know your middle name? Shame on you if you were. It was my mother’s name and yours. Perhaps someday I will tell you about the old witch.

  I am pleased to see that you have not called the police. You continually surprise me, Christine.