For the Sake of Their Baby (13 page)

The fact was that, thanks to the tree, the living room had assumed a magical radiance. Looking up at the star
on the very top, Liz realized the warm glow of hope had replaced the icy despair she’d been feeling for days.

But it was late and she was tired and she didn’t know what Alex had meant when he said joined at the hip. He cleared that up as he locked doors, turned off the lights and started down the hall.

“I’m sleeping in our bedroom,” he said firmly, almost backing her against the wall. “I can bunk out on the floor or in a chair, that’s up to you, and I don’t expect anything from you, but I am going to be in the same room with you. Someone tried to kill you yesterday.”

She said, “Okay.”

He seemed surprised by her submission.

“Don’t look so stunned. I’m not a complete idiot. Someone tried to kill me yesterday. I think sleeping with a big, strong fireman sounds like a great idea.”

“So, all I am to you is Mr. Fireman?”

“Yep,” she lied.

He kissed her forehead. “It’s a start,” he said.

A
LEX WATCHED
Liz demurely take her nightgown into the bathroom to change. She looked as nervous as a new bride.

By the time she emerged, swathed from throat to ankle in pink flannel, he had bunked out on the chair in the corner, fully dressed, his booted feet up on a stool he’d brought from her office, an afghan thrown over his legs.

Mr. Fireman, safe in his corner…

“You can sleep in the bed,” she said softly.

And how he yearned to do so. But not like this. A man had his pride. He wanted her to want him. She’d refused him earlier and nothing had changed except her fatigue level. He said, “I don’t plan on sleeping much.”

She came to his side and he took her outstretched
hand. Resisting the urge to tug her onto his lap, he kissed her palm. She smelled like roses and looked like a pink angel with tousled hair. She brought his hand to her lips and kissed his fingers, then released him.

She moved to her side of the bed, her movements so different than before and yet so familiar. As she settled under the blankets and turned off the light, he realized he loved her with a ferocity that almost scared him. He kept seeing the flames in her drawings juxtaposed on top of the image of her clinging to the cliff wall. It was all he could do not to bundle her away to safety.

But they couldn’t leave unless they were willing to spend the rest of their lives running, and he wasn’t. There was a time and a place to make a stand and if it wasn’t here and now for their baby’s sake, then when? So he stayed in his chair and planned on keeping his eyes open.

H
E AWOKE
sometime later and lay in the dark, listening. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked.

He got up slowly and quietly, checking on Liz whose regular, deep breathing reassured him. He heard another noise and more barking and took off down the hall. Additional sounds came from outside, footsteps, something else. Without pausing to grab a weapon, he pulled open the front door as headlights across the road blazed on. Blinded momentarily by the lights, he heard the gunning of an engine, the spinning of tires. He ran toward the road as a car took off toward town.

His first thought was to follow the car. Yanking the keys out of his pocket, he climbed into the truck and started the engine, whipping out of the driveway, just missing the mailbox. Red taillights were visible on top
of the hill and he pushed down on the accelerator, determined to catch up with that car.

Another thought struck him as he crested the hill.

Was this a diversion to get Liz alone in the house?

He pulled over to the side of the road, watched for a second as the taillights disappeared around a bend, pounded the steering wheel with a fist. Then he turned the truck around. He was back in his own driveway in record time.

He unlocked the front door. The trip down the hall seemed endless. He threw on the bedroom light.

The bed was empty. His heart stopped.

The bathroom door opened and his beautiful wife stood blinking at him, rubbing her tummy, half-asleep.

“What’s going on?” she said drowsily.

Alex’s heart jump-started back into action, skittering around in his chest like a drop of cold water in a hot pan, bouncing and dancing and damn near evaporating. He managed to say, “Nothing, honey, go back to bed.”

She smiled and nodded and hit the sheets again, never fully awake. He checked to make sure the window was locked, then turned off the light and went back outside.

Okay, the car had pulled away from in front of Harry Idle’s house in such a way that suggested it was up to no good. A late-night visitor? But he’d heard footsteps. Could he have heard them from all the way over at Harry’s house?

Doubtful.

He finally noticed the rain had stopped. There was no moon to speak of, but a bevy of stars glittered in the night sky. As he walked along his own front path, he thought that his footfalls on the gravel encrusted redwood duff produced a sound similar to one he’d heard.
He thought back and recalled another sound before the footsteps. Not the dog, something else.

He went back for a flashlight, then returned outside. The garage door was closed but not locked. Had they left it open again? He raised it now and then closed it, pretty sure the sound he’d heard had been the muffled thud of the heavy wooden door hitting the cement. Opening it again, he shined the flashlight over the contents of the garage. Everything looked just as it had earlier that night. Liz’s uncle’s boxes in one corner, old furniture in the other, newly cleaned saw hanging in its proper place over the workbench.

The workbench. Here too, nothing looked any different, though the cluttered condition of the surface made certainty a dicey issue at best. Nevertheless, his gaze drifted over the cans of spray paint and the row of old coffee cans used for storing nails and screws. Curled pieces of sandpaper vied for space with soft red rags and scraps of wood. The leather gloves lay on top of it all.

The gloves.

He propped the flashlight on top of the vise and tugged on the left glove.

It fit. Not tight, just right, a good fit for a man with big hands. The right one was a perfect fit as well. And even more telling, there was a narrow brown tag sewn into the seam on both gloves. Of course, the brand he bought always had that tag, he just hadn’t remembered it until that moment.

“They’re not the same gloves as earlier today, are they?” Liz asked from the open door.

She’d put on a robe and slipped her feet into moccasins. Her hands were clasped together under her chin. Even in the semidark, her eyes looked huge.

“No,” he said, putting the gloves down. “No, they’re not the same.”

“Someone was in our garage.”

“Yes.”

She looked like she might faint. In a heartbeat, he was at her side.

“I’m okay,” she said. “It’s just the thought of someone coming in the dark, sneaking around in our garage. It makes me feel…”

“Let’s go back to bed.”

As he followed her inside, locking doors as he went, he thought about the gloves and the anonymous trespasser. It had to be the same person who had sabotaged the stairs and so cruelly broken Sinbad’s leg. It seemed to Alex that this nameless monster was taking increasingly dangerous chances—he or she had left their own gloves behind and then he or she had almost been caught exchanging them.

He had to be ready to pounce at the next mistake.

“Don’t leave me,” Liz said as she climbed into bed, reaching out with pleading eyes.

“No chance of that,” he said, and grabbed the afghan. He stretched out next to her, on top of the comforter, flinging the afghan over him. He had no intention of undressing and snuggling beneath warm blankets with his very desirable wife. If anything else was going to happen tonight, he wanted to be ready.

Besides, she hadn’t invited him to snuggle. Instead, she reached for his hand and held onto him as though she was dangerously afloat and he was the only tether that kept her from drifting away.

He told the parts of his body that spontaneously reacted to the warmth of her nearby body, the softness of
her hand, the sweetness of her expelled breath, to take a hike. He lay awake with eyes wide open for hours.

“I
CAN’T EXPLAIN
the mix-up the other day,” Roger Kapp said as Liz invited him inside. While Alex and she had rehearsed what she’d say, she knew there was no way she could actually control the conversation with the sheriff. He was a strong-willed man and wouldn’t take direction from her.

“It must have been somebody’s idea of a joke,” Kapp added. He took up an inordinate amount of room. Not as tall or broad shouldered as Alex, he had an imposing way of standing.

“It would seem so,” she said uneasily. “I made coffee, Sheriff. Would you like a cup?”

Two mugs sat on the table in front of the chair she chose, the one across from the Christmas tree. He took the proffered cup. She didn’t intend to drink hers. The last thing in the world she needed was caffeine.

“Sit down, please,” she said.

He stood for a second, as though trying to decide if he wanted to sit. Liz knew him well enough to know he coveted authority and she reasoned that he was probably a little uncomfortable interviewing her on her own turf. Too many variables, too many unknowns.

Alex had said the sheriff would notice every detail of the room and he was right about that. It seemed the sheriff’s gaze never stopped moving and that he took in every little thing, including the new chain on the front door, the stack of cardboard boxes Alex had piled near the Christmas tree and his work boots lined up carefully by the front door.

“So, Chase is living with you,” Kapp said as he finally decided to sit down. His voice held a note of scorn.

“He’s my husband,” she said softly.

Kapp shook his head. “You’re a brave woman, Elizabeth. A man like that can’t be trusted. I take it he’s around here somewhere.”

“He’s in the office, working.”

“And where’s that Siamese cat of yours?”

She felt her throat constrict. Was mentioning Sinbad’s absence a threat? Was Alex right, had Roger Kapp set the trap on the stairs? She said, “He’s at the vet’s.”

“Hope he’s okay.”

“He’s fine,” she said, heart racing. She took a deep breath and pushed away the fear she recognized as a knee-jerk reaction to her own imagination. Roger Kapp wasn’t going to hurt her with Alex in the next room and, for that matter, perhaps he was just making polite chit-chat. The key to this situation was self-control. She added, “He broke his leg.”

Kapp furrowed his brow. He’d taken his hat off when he entered the house and she noticed his sandy hair lay flat against his skull. Still, he had a large head and dark gray eyes and he looked at her now as though divining the truth from the recesses of her mind.

“Sorry to hear that. We need to go over the night Devon was killed. If you’d feel more comfortable doing this away from your…house…I’d be happy to drive you into my office.”

“I’m fine right here,” she said, adding, “I have to warn you that I don’t have anything new to add to my original statement.”

He produced a notepad. “Just tell it all to me again.”

She launched into her story, again omitting her late-night visit, not mentioning the scarf, still uncertain that it wouldn’t be wise to do both.

It occurred to her how she could broach the subject
of her uncle’s boxes. “Go ahead and set your cup on one of those cardboard boxes right there beside you,” she said. “You can’t hurt them. They’re Uncle Devon’s.”

He looked at the boxes and then at her, then at the boxes again. “I didn’t think his possessions had been released yet,” he said slowly. “I thought his estate was still tied up.”

“It is, but he gave me these boxes a month or so before he was killed,” she said. “They’re full of correspondence.” She didn’t add that all of it seemed to be over twenty years old. Instead, she watched his eyes like Alex had cautioned her to do, and sure enough, the sheriff did look uneasy.

“Funny he’d give that kind of stuff to you,” Kapp said.

She shrugged. “I was his only relative, Sheriff. Eventually I’ll see everything he owned, won’t I? There’s the wall safe in his home office and all his safety deposit boxes. The man never threw a thing away. I’ve just started going through these boxes. They’re full of some very interesting documents.”

He said, “Documents?”

Deciding on a forthright approach, she said, “It appears you were blackmailing him.”

His glance darted back to the boxes, then he stood abruptly. The cup flew from his knee and shattered on the floor. He knelt at once. “I’m sorry—” he began, but stopped. Standing up, the broken china and puddle of coffee still at his feet, he said, “What did you say?”

“You were blackmailing him,” she repeated, nodding discreetly at the boxes. “You blackmailed him into supporting your run for sheriff.”

She waited for his protest. After all, it wasn’t as
though she had any real proof and it wasn’t as though a huge part of her didn’t suspect Kapp’s guilt existed solely in Alex’s head. But the sheriff stood there nervously rubbing his forehead, seemingly speechless, apparently unable to dissemble, to deny, to evade.

She found herself thinking,
Alex and his friends are right: Roger Kapp is—was—a blackmailer!

Equally stunning was the realization that her uncle had been susceptible to coercion, he’d had something to hide.

The next thought left her reeling.
What?
What had Uncle Devon had to hide?

Kapp finally said, “That’s ridiculous.”

It was too late. With a burst of anger, she stood. “Did you hurt my cat, too? Did you try to hurt me? Did you break into my house last night?” Suddenly remembering to check his hands, she glanced down and saw that he had ordinary sized hands for a man, smaller than Alex’s, bigger than hers.

The gloves that had inadvertently been left behind, then stolen back in the dead of the night would fit this man.

He backed toward the door. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “If you’re in the middle of a crime wave, ask yourself when it started. I bet everything was fine until you invited Alex Chase back into your house, right? He’s after something and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what. Watch your step, be careful.”