Fight or Flight

by Natalie J. Damschroder

  “I think we’re still safe here, at least temporarily. We should stay tonight and get some more rest.” He didn’t say Regan was the one who needed it, but she knew that was what he meant. She tilted her head and closed her eyes, trying not to let relaxation become arousal under Tyler’s ministrations.

  “Tomorrow morning,” he continued, “we take Van and Tom to the train station and send them back to Whetstone. Then we head for my employer in California.”

  She tried hard not to tense, but Tyler either felt her reaction or realized his slip, because his hands paused. She didn’t say anything, because that would confirm she knew the significance of his words. He continued the massage, his knuckles gliding down her spine to the small of her back, where he spanned her hips and dug in his thumbs.

  Heat flared from deep in her center and burned her skin under his fingers. She drew in a quick breath, and before she could step away Tyler spun her. A matching heat blazed in his eyes. He held her gently by the shoulders, leaned in, eyelids dropping, until his mouth met hers.

  As diversionary tactics went this was a good one, Regan thought. She moved closer and lifted her right arm up around his neck. Her left shoulder protested, so she rested her hand and forearm on his chest, her fingertips tracing the cord at the side of his neck. Tyler’s mouth was firm on hers, his technique adequate, but his obvious distraction interfered with the effect he was going for.

  Still in full possession of her faculties, Regan opened her mouth and touched her tongue to his. That startled a grunt from him and his arms reflexively pulled her closer to his body.

  It was a good body. He was hard everywhere that mattered—and “everywhere” was an inclusive term. She rocked her hips once and he groaned, bracing the back of her head with his hand and diving in to kiss her with full involvement.

  Regan’s intentions went out the window. The heat in her belly flared into desire and she began to ache in places she hadn’t ached in years. Not even with Alan. Her bra suddenly felt too tight, her nipples contracting painfully. She lifted one leg to cradle Tyler more intimately, and he pulled back, gasping.

  “Holy hell, woman.” He stared down at her. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “Clearly.” She dropped her foot to the floor and her hands to the hem of her T-shirt to tug it down. She schooled her breathing and willed away the flush she knew stained her cheeks and chest. Absentmindedly, she put the back of her hand to the bruise on her left cheekbone. It hadn’t hurt while she was kissing him, but it pulsed now. “Next time you want to distract me, you might want to try a grenade or something else more potent.”

  He stroked his fingers gently across the bruise, but his eyes narrowed. “Nice try. My ego’s not that big. Besides, I know you were more into it than you’re showing.”

  She shrugged. At least it wasn’t showing. “All right, we’ll go with part of your plan. We’ll rest here tonight. Tomorrow you can go to California and I’ll take care of getting the kids back. You’re not coming with us.” She forestalled his protest by raising her hand in front of his face, and tried not to touch his open mouth. “I’m not arguing about it. I appreciate all you’ve done for us until now, but from this point on, it’s me and Kelsey. Like always.”

  “You can’t protect her forever,” Tyler said softly. The kids were coming back into the room.

  “I have for eighteen years.”

  She moved away before he could point out that if she’d done such a good job, they wouldn’t be where they were now. After announcing the plan, she asked to talk to Kelsey alone so Van and Tom wouldn’t argue again. Not that Tom looked like he was going to. So far he’d demonstrated a level head and plenty of concern for Kelsey.

  She led her daughter into one of the bedrooms and closed the door.

  “Mom, I’m not sure sending them back is a good idea,” Kelsey started.

  “We’ll talk about it in a minute. Sit down.” Regan waited until she joined her at the foot of the bed. She began to put her arm around her but stopped, not sure how it would be received and not up to rejection. “We should talk about what you just learned.”

  A curtain of soft brown hair shielded Kelsey’s face from her. She waited, letting Kelsey choose where to start. After a moment, she raised her head and slipped her hair behind her ear, looking, to Regan’s relief, like the steady, accepting girl she’d raised.

  “You think it’s my grandparents, don’t you?”

  Regan’s eyebrows shot up. That was the part prominent in Kelsey’s mind?

  “I don’t know. I have nothing to go on except that your father went to see them.”

  “So you think they’re after me for some reason.”

  Regan honestly didn’t know. She’d thought about it all this time, and had never come to any conclusions. “I would be surprised if the people I met would want to harm you.”

  “Which doesn’t answer my question.” Kelsey sighed and leaned her shoulder against her. “I wonder if they knew what happened to Daddy.”

  Regan’s heart spasmed at the word. Kelsey had never referred to him that way, on the rare occasions they had discussed him.

  “Was it in the papers?” Kelsey asked.

  “Some. It was hard to track newspaper reports when we were on the run. I was focused on getting away, being safe. On not being found. And the internet didn’t exist back then, not for people like me.”

  Kelsey stared at her. “But it does now. It has for, like, ever. You never looked? What if it was a random thing? If they caught his killer, we would have been safe.”

  Regan slanted a look at her. “We’re not safe. Obviously. So even if they ‘caught’ his killer, there was no guarantee someone wouldn’t still be after us. But—” she continued to keep Kelsey from arguing more, “—I did track down old articles and learned what I could. It wasn’t much, even once newspapers started putting their archives online. As far as I could tell, they never found out who did it. I don’t even know if they considered me a suspect.”

  “I want to see.”

  Regan huffed a laugh. “I don’t have them. I didn’t keep a portfolio.”

  Kelsey jumped up. “No, I mean, Tom has his laptop in his backpack. We can look them up now. And I bet he can find more than you did. He’s a whiz, and you’re—no offense—not that good at searching for stuff.”

  “Wait, Kels.” Regan caught her arm before she ran out of the room. “What about your father?”

  “What about him?”

  “I want to know how you feel about all this.”

  Kelsey rolled her eyes. “How do you think I feel, Mom? Gawd.”

  It was such a teenager response, and so not Kelsey, Regan dropped her arm. Her daughter walked out quickly, not looking back.

  “I’ll get the computer!”

  Regan sighed and followed her out.

  “We’re on,” Tom said once he got his laptop connected to the hotel’s WiFi and the main search window popped up on his screen.

  Kelsey bent over his shoulder while her mother paced on the other side of the table. She wished she’d stop. She was making her dizzy. She kind of understood, though. Her mother was used to being in control, and Tom wouldn’t let any of them use his laptop. He was protective, he’d told her once when she wanted to look up an assignment, because his roommate had crashed it and cost him hundreds in repairs. But it wasn’t easy to have to watch him log on to the hotel’s wireless connection and start surfing when her own fingers wanted to fly over the keys.

  “What town was the school in?” he asked her mother.

  “Westbrook.”

  He typed. “No newspaper for Westbrook.”

  “No, it was too small. It would have been the Fresno paper.”

  He typed again. “Here it is. Free archives, sweet. How do you spell the name of the school?”

  “B-L-A-Y-D-E-S.” She gave the date of Scott’s death before he asked. Tom finished typing and they waited, Kelsey holding her breath, while the page loaded with results.

  “Wi
nning essays, honor roll, fraternity party raids…let’s see.” He scrolled, reading the screen faster than Kelsey. “Soccer playoffs…a rape on campus… professors being honored…here.” He clicked a link, and for the first time Kelsey saw her father’s face.

  It was a football photo shot from the waist up, a scan of a black-and-white newspaper article. Since he wore his full uniform he looked enormous—tall and wide and muscular. But what riveted her was his smile, both his mouth and his eyes. He was happy.

  And he looked just like her.

  Her mother came around the table and was close enough Kelsey heard her gasp when she saw the picture. Her hand lifted to her mouth, and Kelsey felt a fine tremor go through her. But she couldn’t tell if she was crying because she couldn’t stop looking at her father.

  “I don’t have any pictures of him,” Regan said, her voice cracking. “When he called and told me to pack, I left all my school stuff behind, including the school directory where I kept his clippings. I didn’t have a camera and he didn’t care about taking pictures. It would have been too dangerous to keep around, anyway,” she finished softly.

  All of them were silent as they read the headline. Van crowded up on Kelsey’s other side to see, and she sensed Tyler behind them, looking over their heads.

  The headline read Blaydes Academy Football Star Murdered. Kelsey leaned on Tom to read the article below.

  Late Monday night freshmen students at Blaydes Academy, the exclusive private school in nearby Westbrook, were returning to their dormitory after an evening of study when they came across the body of Scott Harrison, senior captain and quarterback of the school’s football team.

  Shot twice—once in the shoulder, once in the lower back—Harrison didn’t have a chance, according to Lawrence Cardory, county coroner. “The shoulder wound was not fatal but bled profusely. The wound in his lower back damaged the right kidney and renal artery and would have been the cause of death.” Dr. Cardory went on to say that the wounds were inflicted long before death.

  That factor, combined with the blood in a vehicle registered to Mr. Harrison that was present in the parking lot where he was found, lead police to believe the injuries could have occurred anywhere.

  Anyone with information about this tragedy is encouraged to contact the Westbrook police department.

  Kelsey’s eyes kept reading, but her mind didn’t process the football statistics and Blaydes publicity crap in the rest of the article. It hardly seemed possible that her father’s death could be made more real—she’d lived with the knowledge of it her whole life—but it was. She found herself feeling sorry for her mother, who had been about Kelsey’s age when this happened. But she was also angry she’d kept the details from her, that she hadn’t given her a sense of where she came from and why they lived the way they did.

  Worse, she was suddenly filled with fear as she imagined the article being written about Tom.

  Her mom was right. They had to get him out of here. She bent back over his shoulder to look at the next article in the search results. And the next. For an hour they took turns reading the stuff they found. One article talked about her grandparents, their roles in the Sacramento community where her father had grown up, and their grief over the unsolved murder of their son. Another very short piece said the police department’s progress had stalled and the case was officially being remanded to the cold files. Blaydes had a school paper, but it wasn’t available online before 2000. The Sacramento paper had a few more stories and a little more depth, but they said essentially the same thing.

  Which was really nothing. Exactly what her mother had said.

  The final article they found was published ten years after Scott’s—her father’s—death, on his birthday. It was a tribute in the Sacramento paper, basically reiterating everything the old articles had said, but it contained an interview with the detective in Westbrook who had been in charge of the case.

  “You always hate to let ’em go,” he’d been quoted as saying. “But that one was particularly tough. We always thought there was more to it than the usual drive-by kind of thing, on account of the girlfriend being missing.”

  It was the only mention there ever was of her mother. Kelsey figured that was a good thing, but it made her feel like a non-entity in a weird way. Like if her mother didn’t exist, she didn’t, either.

  As if reading her mind, her mother squeezed her shoulder. “They probably did suspect me, and kept my name out of the papers to try to keep me from running too far.”

  They all sat in silence for a few minutes after reading the last article. Kelsey was sitting on Tom’s lap since he hadn’t been willing to move away from the computer while she scrolled, and her mother kept casting them inscrutable looks. She hated that. She’d always been able to read her mother, and now she had no clue what she was thinking.

  Van popped up from where she lay on the floor. “It’s ten-thirty. I’m gonna take a shower and hit the bed.”

  “You don’t strike me as the early-to-bed type,” Tyler observed from his perch on the arm of the chair, which had become his spot over the last several hours.

  Van grinned. “We’re getting out of here early tomorrow, right? Don’t linger too long in one spot. Now that we know, you know, nothing.” She grinned again. Kelsey loved her for finding this all a huge adventure and wished she didn’t have to go back to school. Man, she could barely remember what school was like, way back last week when she wasn’t running for her life. For a second, she was jealous of her friends for being able to just go back and forget all this, return to their normal lives. She’d only tasted that for a few weeks, barely two whole months.

  “We’re sending you and Tom back to school first thing,” Regan said.

  Van whirled on Kelsey, her eyes wide with significance.

  “It’s safest,” she apologized, amazed when Van’s face darkened.

  “After all that’s happened, you’re letting her send us back? Without even arguin’?”

  “It’s safest!” she repeated. Tom, who’d been rubbing her back the whole time she sat on him, now stopped to pull her fingers off the curve where his neck met his shoulder. She saw red marks where her nails had dug in. “Oh! I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” He folded her hands into his, where they wouldn’t hurt him. But Kelsey couldn’t talk without her hands when she was agitated, so she climbed off his lap and turned to face her roommate fully. All thoughts of adventure and jealousy had fled under the pressure of reality.

  “You saw those pictures!” She pointed at the laptop. “You read some of those articles to us. You know what these people are capable of. You saw what they’ve done to my mother, who was ready for them and knows how to kick ass.”

  “Kels,” Tom tried.

  Van grabbed her hockey stick from where it rested against the wall and brandished it. “You don’t think I can kick some ass? You haven’t seen me use this.”

  “Come on, girls.” Tom rose to stand between them, but he’d said the exact wrong thing. Both turned on him.

  “Back off!” growled Van.

  “Don’t call us girls!” yelled Kelsey.

  “You gonna do anything about this?” Tyler asked in the background, apparently of her mother.

  “Nope. If they’re mad at each other, it will make tomorrow easier.”

  That shut them up. Van dropped the end of the stick to the floor. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I can’t stand the thought of not knowing where you are, or what’s goin’ on. I might never see you again.” Her eyes shone with unshed tears and Kelsey rushed over to hug her.

  “I know. I don’t want you to go. But…” She trailed off, but Van finished for her.

  “It’s safest. You said that.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true,” Tom said. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking relaxed, but Kelsey recognized his determination. It was the same look he wore on the field when the team was losing.

  “Tom.” Her heart rate sped up and her brea
thing started to quicken.

  But he stepped closer to her mother and away from her. “Whoever these people are, they know Van and I were with Kelsey. We might not be safe at school, either.”

  “But you might be. And you’re definitely not safe with me.” Kelsey tried to counter her panic by breathing deeply, but all that did was put spots in her vision. “You’re a math whiz, Tom. Figure out those odds. It’s a better bet for you to go home.”

  “It’s not about odds.” He still didn’t look at her. Kelsey jerked her gaze to her mother, who watched Tom thoughtfully. Oh, God. She was listening to him. He explained, “Math doesn’t apply here. The variables are too many and too unquantifiable. If we don’t know how far these guys will go to get to Kelsey, or what they want with her, then we could be ideal targets for them.”

  “If you’re not with me, and I’m not at school, it will be obvious I wouldn’t even know if they did something to you.” Kelsey’s mind raced desperately and latched on to the only other thing Tom cared about more than her. “You’ll miss practice! And the game Saturday! And then—and then you won’t have play time, so the scouts won’t see you, so you won’t get drafted!” His look when he finally faced her was amused and affectionate, and she wanted to scream. “Mom, tell him. Tell him he can’t come.”

  “You have a point,” her mother said to him. Kelsey let out a low moan. Van came over and held her up when she would have sunk to the floor, but didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not trying to make a point, Ms. Miller. It’s important to me to stay with Kelsey, and evaluation of what we know supports that action.”

  “I don’t think it does. You’re not wrong, but we’ll alert the campus and town police to watch over you both, and I don’t think they’ll risk coming after you. Kelsey’s right. It’s safer there than here, even if it’s not completely safe.” She raised her eyebrows. “Or we could send you both home.”