The Puppeteer (39 page)

He must have made a sound because her head shot up. He saw her blink a few times and then she reached out with a strangled noise. In a flash he was beside her, gathering her in his arms. More for him, than for her, he picked her up and carried her to the bench swing his parents loved so much. He held her so close he couldn't see if she was conscious or not and so, fearing for the baby, his baby, he pulled back enough to see her face. Enough to feel her hands grip him and hold him, enough to see the silent tears streaming down her cheeks.

He buried his face in her hair and held her, whispering words to soothe and love her. Words to reassure them both that everything would be okay.

Finally Dani pulled back and looked at his face. She raised a hand and touched his cheek. Her eyes closed and she sighed.

“Ty?” she managed to speak. He took her hand in his and kissed the palm.

“I'm okay,” he answered the question in her eyes. “I was rescued by some local fishermen. They took good care of me. I was pretty banged up and out of it for a long time. When I started to pull through, I realized I was in a village that had no phone, no satellite, no lines of communication. I needed a long time to heal and then I had to walk to the nearest city. They were in the middle of a civil war so, between that and my legs, the walk took longer than expected. I made it to the Ivory Coast and called Drew yesterday.” He needed to get it all out. There was so much more than the bare bones he was telling her now, but he needed her to know, more than anything, that he was okay.

“He got me home, but didn't know where you were. I came here to see my parents and was going to have Cameron start to find you,” his voice gave out, choked on emotion.

“Oh god, Ty,” she whispered and then raised her head to brush her lips against his. It was the sweetest kiss he'd ever experienced.
When it ended her face had more color and he could see the edges of happiness creeping into her eyes. She was starting to believe he was really there, with her.

He smiled and placed his hand on her belly. “Is this why you came to my parents?”

She placed her hand over his and gave him a watery smile. She moved it to the side and he felt the baby kick. He swallowed hard.

“His name is going to be Tyler, after his father.”

He stared at her belly, wondering what he ever did in life to be this lucky. “A boy.” He repeated, rolling the words around his mind.

“Due in a month,” she added.

He looked at his hand, resting on Dani, covering their baby and then looked at the woman resting in his arms. He raised his eyes to meet hers and then smiled a smile full of hope. A smile full of promises for their future. A smile full of love.

“Then I guess I got back just in time.”

The End

Preview of

A Tainted Mind

by Tamsen Schultz

Vivienne DeMarco guided her car onto the shoulder of the country road and peered out through the windshield into the black night. Her eyes skirted to the side windows as she tried to see something, anything. When that failed, she turned her gaze to the rearview mirror, then let out a long, slow breath. There was nothing. Nothing but the darkness and the deafening sound of rain hammering her car.

It was a dark and stormy night
, she thought to herself with a rueful sort of inevitability as she loosened her grip on the steering wheel. Here she was alone, in the dark, on a deserted road, and in the middle of a torrential spring downpour. Her life had become a series of clichés lately and tonight was no different. Like in a bad movie, she'd been felled by a simple flat tire.

She craned her head forward and looked up through the windshield again as she debated whether to risk the pelting rain. She knew storms like this moved on as fast as they came in. And so, after listening to rain drops the size of New Hampshire lash at her car, Vivi put her faith in experience and opted to wait.

Still, as she sat listening to the metallic sound of her roof taking a beating, the cliché-ness of the situation—of the past year—did not escape her. She was just a woman who'd thrown herself into her job after a searing loss—a job that propelled her to the brink and finally catalyzed into a meltdown of epic proportions. A meltdown that drove her away from everything she knew in an effort to find herself again. Honestly, all she needed now was the urban legend hitchhiker
scratching his hook along her window. But at least the hitchhiker would make a good story. As it was, her life was all so prosaic that if it were a book, it would never make it past an agent's slush pile.

With a sigh, she pulled her mind from her uninspiring existence and glanced at her GPS. Judging by the tiny map, she wasn't all that far from her destination, a place she'd been hearing about for years from her aunt. Windsor, New York was a small town in the Hudson Valley and, having been in her fair share of small towns, she figured if she saw anyone on this night he or she was more likely to stop and help than stop and slit her throat. But, either way, the storm was letting up and she wasn't going to sit around and wait for help—or anything else—that may or may not come. She knew how to change her own tire.

But, in the dark and wet, what should have taken her no more than twenty minutes took forty and, after tightening the last bolt, she needed to stand and stretch out the kinks in her back and shoulders. The now gentle rainfall had soaked her clothes and water was running under her jacket's hood, down her neck, and onto her back. But at least the job was done.

With the smell of wet earth hanging in the humidity, Vivi paused. Taking a deep breath of the heavy air, she inhaled the cleanliness of it, the purity of the scent. No pollution, no smells of the dead and decomposing. And knowing Windsor would have somewhere she could stay for the night, Vivi ignored how uncomfortable she was for a moment and savored the peace as a sense of calm settled over her.

But, as if to object to her enjoying such a small luxury, an owl screeched in the night, jarring Vivi back to the here and now. Gathering her flashlight and tools, she tossed the jack into the car, wiped the grease from her hands with a wet rag, and shut the trunk. She turned toward the driver's door as a sound behind her, muffled by the dense air, caught her attention. Vivi stilled and cocked her head. It wasn't a car and it hadn't sounded like footsteps either.

There
, she heard it again. Vivi frowned. Judging by the gentle thuds and cracks, it was nothing but a few rocks tumbling down the shoulder behind her. But there wasn't much wind to speak of now that the storm had reduced to a drizzle, nothing strong enough to
move rocks around. Shining her flashlight onto the water-soaked road, she realized that it was possible the runoff from the storm was stronger than she thought and the rain had dumped enough water to loosen the soil under the asphalt. Or maybe there was something else causing the disruption.

This thought came out of nowhere and disturbed her more than the sound itself. Despite her experiences, despite her job, she was
not
one of those people who saw danger or evil everywhere she looked. And, more to the point, she didn't ever
want
to be one of them. So, forcing herself to come up with some alternate logic for her errant thought, she remembered her aunt telling her that bears were endemic to the area. Maybe one had come out for the night, dislodging the earth as it made its way into the field across the road?

Yes, bears, or maybe even a deer or fox. That made more sense than anything else out here on this quiet road. That option gave her a small sense of relief until she realized that, while she might know how to change a tire, she knew nothing about bears. What did someone do when encountering a bear? Run? Stay still? Her mind had just started spinning when she brought it to a purposeful halt. She was getting ahead of herself. She had no idea what, if anything, was out there. And so, with some trepidation, she made a half turn and swept her flashlight across the road. Nothing.

She glanced to her left. A forest of elm and birch trees lined the road. Even if she shined her flashlight in that direction, which she did, she wouldn't see more than a few feet into the dense woods, which she didn't. To her right, and steeper than she had originally thought, the side of the road dropped down about ten feet before leveling out onto a corn field filled with stalks about two feet high. Curiosity got the better of her and she moved a step away from her car. She'd seen lots of deer in her time, but she had never seen a bear, or even a fox, in the wild. As long as she knew an animal wasn't right next to her, she wouldn't mind catching a glimpse of one moving about in nature.

She pointed her light along the line of corn at the edge of the field looking for some sign an animal had disturbed the crops. After two passes, the only thing she saw were neat rows of baby stalks, their tops and leaves battered by the heavy rain. She should have felt comforted by the lack of wildlife, but she didn't.

As she took another step away from her car, the night encompassed her. Steamy fog was rising from the road, casting eerie shadows that drifted in the weighty air and made the hairs on her neck stand up. She thought about getting in her car and driving away—she hadn't gathered up the courage a few weeks ago to take a much-needed leave of absence from all the violence of her work only to step right back into the thing she was trying to get away from.

But it wasn't in her makeup to let fear guide her response, so Vivi took a deep breath, moved away from her car toward where she thought the sound originated from, and stopped. Standing silent and still, she let the night become familiar. After a few moments of hearing nothing but cicadas and frogs, Vivi directed her beam down the edge of the road as far as the light would go. But the fog and shadows blended with the black of the night and the darkened roadway, and it was hard to see much of anything.

Rather than move further along the road, she redirected the light down the side of the slope to the field's edge, the contrast of the lighter dirt making it easier, just a bit, to see any anomalies. Starting below where she stood, she swept an area in a straight line away from her as far as the beam would go. Then, shifting it up a foot or two, she brought it back toward her, searching the area in a grid-like way. Looking for what might have made the noise.

Standing on the side of the road, wet and exposed, combing the area for something unknown, she couldn't ignore the reality that, to her dismay, she
had
become one of those people—one of those people she never wanted to be. She no more expected to find a simple little rock slide than she expected to see Santa Claus. The pain and death and evil she worked with every day had filtered into her life, colored her experiences.

The irony of her situation did not escape her. Whatever was compelling her to stay and find answers on the side of this country road was the same thing that had gotten her here in the first place. She didn't like to let things go and, because she couldn't let things go, she had almost destroyed herself with her last case. She'd taken to the road to escape, to maybe find some balance. If she were to hazard a guess, though, she'd say that whatever balance she'd found in the past few weeks was about to be tipped.

And, as if to give weight to the direction of her thoughts, about fifteen feet away from her position and about halfway up the embankment, the light landed on a small collection of rocks. No, not rocks, pieces of road that had broken away from the winter-weakened, rain-pummeled lane and tumbled down to rest a few feet away.

Vivi kept her light trained on the pile as she walked closer. Tracing a line up the embankment, she could see about a two-foot by one-foot section of the road cracked and starting to cave in, the edge beginning to break away.

As she contemplated the small sinkhole illuminated in her beam, a gust of wind picked up. Her wet jeans pressed against her legs, her ponytail lifted, and her skin broke out in bumps from the sudden chill. Another piece of the road cracked and tumbled down the slope.

And there, at that crumbling edge, barely visible in the dark and shadows, was the unmistakable form of a human hand.

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