In Plain View (32 page)

In sixteen-inch softball, the balls aren’t the only things that run bigger.

Jenny appeared suitably impressed.

“Stay behind me,” I said. “But watch my bat.”

The main rooms of the house made a loop—entrance area to living room, family room, kitchen, dining room and back to the front. A hall off the living room led to the bedrooms. The garage led straight into the kitchen eating space. We walked all the way around the house once, turning on all the lights, before I said, “All clear.”

“Let’s check the bedrooms,” she whispered. “Just in case.”

Right. We walked up the hall and checked the bedrooms, too. Nothing.

Jenny tried a smile and took a big, deep breath. “Could we check the basement, too?”

I hoisted the wood onto my shoulder. “You bet. Let’s go.”

Basements can be creepy on the best of days, but ours was definitely intruder free. Jenny looked slightly embarrassed, but she was speaking to me in full sentences now, so I didn’t mind.

We stopped in front of the spare fridge and I pulled out a frozen pizza.

“Would you take this up and turn the oven on, kiddo? I’m going to throw in a load of wash, before I throw myself in the shower.”

I was still wearing the clothes I’d started with on Monday. Even black jeans can only take so much. I dropped my pants and stuffed them into the washer.

“Double-check I didn’t leave anything in the oven,” I called.

Jenny remained where I’d left her, right at the bottom of the steps. “Go upstairs…by myself?”

“I’ll be less than two minutes. You want to take this with you?” I held out the bat.

Her mouth twisted in a rising grimace. That smile of hers needed work.

“It’s heavy.” She put the pizza box under one arm and carried the bat in front of her with both hands.

“Darn right it’s heavy. What should we do tonight?” I kept talking as she went up the stairway, giving her a voice to hang on to as well. After I tossed my shirt in the washer, I dug through the hamper for other stuff that could stand a double wash. “Want to watch a movie? After Sheriff Curzon leaves, maybe we could watch some cartoons…Jen?” There were no sound effects upstairs—oven door squeaking, gas clicking as the oven fired—so I called louder, “Jenny?”

No answer.

A giant thud rocked the ceiling above my head.

My first thought was that she’d seized again and pitched a header on the kitchen floor.

I sprinted for the stairs, throwing on some old bathrobe hanging near the dryer, pounding up two at a time. As I rounded the top step, I hollered, “Jenny! What the hell was that?”

“Hello, Maddy.”

Pat the fireman was standing in our kitchen. I caught him in the act of picking up the fallen bat. He let it swing from his fingers by the cap end. “Did you send her up here to club me with a baseball bat?”

“Softball,” I corrected. Under duress, my primal nature reverts to know-it-all. “What are you doing here, Pat?”

Recognition took the edge off my shock and sharpened my anxiety until I tasted sour metal at the back of my tongue. He was wearing jeans, a leather jacket and a baseball cap—White Sox. Figures. My grandfather always said don’t trust a White Sox fan.

His eyes were glassy. The unblinking stare curdled my stomach.

“Where’s Jenny?”

“She dropped the bat and ran.” He seemed embarrassed by that thought. “I guess I scared her. I didn’t mean to. Everything’s gotten so complicated.”

“Uh-huh. How’d you get in here, Pat?”

City girls always lock the door. In the back of my mind, I figured if he broke a window to get in, he was definitely dangerous. If he got in through some other means, he might still only qualify as an idiot with really bad boundaries.

When resisting the urge to panic, go with whatever rationale works.

Pat juggled the bat to his other hand and reached down into the pocket of his jeans. As he shifted, I realized the right-hand pocket of his jacket was bulging with something large and heavy.

“I have a key.” He tossed it on the kitchen counter. It was a twin to the one I carried.

“Oh. How’d you get a key?”

“Your sister gave it to me.”

“She did?”
You smell like her.
“You knew Angelina.”

Pat huffed, a sad, ironic sort of laugh. The bat swung from his fingertips, side to side like a pendulum. “Jenny didn’t tell. What a kid. What an amazing kid.”

Jenny.
Pat’s intrigue went right out of my head. Where was Jenny? There were four ways out of the room: past me, past Pat, out the door or up the hall. I hadn’t heard a door open or close and my ears had been primed. She must have run up the bedroom hallway. I stepped that direction.

“The wacky-intruder thing is getting old. You and my sister were friends—I get it.” My sister’s taste in men sucked. “What do you want?”

“How did your TV story turn out? What did you say about Tom and everything?” He perked up as he said it, sounded more like the Mr. Vegas I’d met before.

“Good. It turned out good.” I eased another step toward the hall.

“I heard about that fire. Heard you had your camera there. Did you put that in there? About the fire at the Jost farm?”

“Some. Yeah. Where were you that night?”

“I wasn’t on call. I was busy. Somewhere else.” He stacked the denials one on top of another.

“You know Rachel? Or her dad—Tom’s dad?”

“No. Not really. A little. She’s the one who got all Tom’s stuff.”

So much for my Tom-Rachel-Pat love triangle theory.

“Hey, did they ever find a note?” he rambled on. “A note from Tom? I was just wondering.”

“No. No note. Were you hoping they would?”

It would be hard to swing the bat in the narrow width of the hall. I took a giant step back, into the hall so Pat had to pass me to get to Jenny. He followed.

“What exactly did you say about Tom on that TV show?”

“You’ll have to wait until next Monday. Seven o’clock central time. Why don’t you watch? See for yourself.”

“Can’t wait that long.”

“Why not?” I asked.

The outer layer of my skin began to tingle with the rush of adrenaline. I backed into the hall. It was dark. Had Jenny hit the lights as she ran by? There was indirect light from the other room, but the black-and-white photos of ancestors my sister had hung along the hall—Momma, Daddy, Papa, Gran, all dead, all gone—darkened the passage with the fierce faces of family ghosts.

Pat followed me, step for step, into the hall. “I’ve got to go now. Jenny’s coming with me this time.”

The words
this time
rolled through my head crushing all other thoughts.

“Don’t worry. I’ll watch out for her.” He stopped advancing on me. Took off his baseball cap and rubbed a palm over his scalp. Hat in hand, he added, “I won’t put her out on the road side again, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Hat went back on, backward. There was nothing shading those glassy eyes now. He was hopped up on something.

“You took Jenny off the playground.” Everything clicked. “She knew you, because you’d been dating her mom. That’s why she went with you.”

His words popped into my head,
Jenny didn’t tell.

“You threatened her, didn’t you?” I swallowed the
you son of a bitch.
The guy was still gripping my Louisville slugger by the cap end.

We were halfway down the hall and running out of real estate. There were three bedrooms at the end. I had a good idea which one Jenny had chosen to hide in.

“You threatened a little eight-year-old girl. What happened to ‘prevent and protect’?”

Pat propped the bat in the notch of the bathroom door molding. Big, strong firefighter didn’t need a softball bat to get what he wanted from a woman in a bathrobe.

“Don’t shout,” he cautioned me. “You’ll scare her.”

“I’m not the one she ran away from.”

“Aren’t you?”

The flip side of knowing how to charm someone was knowing how to crush them. His words closed my throat. It felt like I’d fallen from a great height and landed flat on my back.

“Aunt Maddy?” a small voice called behind me. Jenny’s bedroom was on my left, which meant she was either in my room or her mother’s old bedroom.

“Jenny?” Pat called. “It’s me. I’m sorry I scared you, honey. Will you come out so we can talk?”

“No!” I found my voice with a shout. “Stay where you are, Jenny. Don’t come out.”

“That doesn’t help.” Pat jabbed his finger at me, less than three feet from my face.

I lost it. I backhanded him at the wrist, knocking his arm into the wall. His jacket was swinging heavily on that side, and the over-burdened pocket of his coat hit the wall half a second after his hand. There was a tearing shriek as the lining of his pocket split on impact. A large halogen flashlight dropped to the ground.

It was a Scooby-Doo moment: everybody looks down, everybody looks up. Maddy looks surprised. Pat looks guilty. Oh, those meddlesome kids.

“Ainsley told me he saw a light in the farmhouse the night of the fire.” The words popped right out of my mouth. “That
was
you.”

“I had to know if Tom left anything else.” Pat grabbed the flashlight and stuffed it back in the opposite jacket pocket. “Any more surprises. Your camera boy came to the firehouse and told us all about the bank manager’s visit to the farm, all about the papers being delivered. I thought maybe Tom left a note. That’s all. Shit’s sake, he left enough phone messages. The stupid ass.”

“The fire?”

Pat looked disgusted. His Sox cap came off again; he was sweating now. He wiped his face with the inside of his elbow and propped his butt against the wall as if he needed to rest before putting his hat back on. I couldn’t tell if he was tired, weak or strung out.

“It was an accident,” Pat said. “Simple as that. How was I supposed to know the guy was making coffee in the middle of the night? I’ll tell you something—six months ago, I never could have believed Tom could be such a selfish asshole. Mr. Holier-than-Thou. Those magazines I put in his car were nothing. So what? He could have passed them around at the station and been a hero. No, not Tom! Here I am, busting my ass trying to improve the situation for everybody and all he does is fuck the whole thing up.” He rolled his eyes drama-queen style.

“You burned the Jost farm down—by accident?”

“Try and stay on track here, would you? Jenny and I are going someplace safe while you do something for me.”

“What?”

“You’re the one who likes finding shit. Find the bag that Gina hid from me.”

“What bag?”

He leaned toward me and smiled. “Like you don’t know. I promised I would make it right. But I’m not having a lot a luck here, so I think Jenny and I will take a little vaca-time and you can do the looking.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He nodded like I’d agreed. “Gina found that out how serious I can be. I tried to tell her to leave it alone but no, she’s on a mission.” His voice cracked. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Nobody wanted it to end like that.”

Conspiraces and madness, barely tinted by facts. “End like what?”

“Tom was good about it at first. He knew what it felt like to lose somebody. But when he found out—”

“What?”

“I didn’t want it to go that way. It really was an accident. But she was going to the police. I had to stop her.”

“You stopped her?”

“I had to!” He smashed his fist against the wall. All the family photos banged and tilted.

I felt just as off-balance. “You were driving the car that killed my sister?”

“Tom went totally insane when he found out. Said we’d both go to hell if I didn’t make a public confession. He would find a way to bring us into the light. Like I had anything to do with his family problems.” Pat put his back to the wall. Confessing drained the little bit of spine he had. “When I saw how he’d done himself, I knew. I knew he was going to try and take me down, too.

“And then you showed up!” He pointed at me with both hands and laughed. “What are the chances? I thought for sure Tom had set it up. I thought you were after me.”

My brain continued to process. The rest of me was numb. I think I slurred my next words.

“You saw me at the tree, the day Tom died.”

Pat waved his hands like a professor repeating the facts for the slow kid. “Sure. Standing there with your camera, I recognized you right away. Gina had pictures. But there’s a family resemblance, too.”

The word
family
hit me like a shot to the head. Could Jenny hear him? If she made any noise, Pat would know where she was.

“You’ve been following me. You ran me off the road.”

“Oh for God’s sake, I did not.” A hand on each knee, he pushed himself upright. “I was miles away when I passed you. You slipped on the gravel. You weren’t hurt.”

“Only twelve stitches.” Pat the fireman was the fucking Moriarty of the Western Wasteland. “Jenny got the pills from you—that’s what this bag business is all about.”

“I didn’t give that stuff to her.” He seemed appalled at the suggestion. “She stole them from my car. Jenny?” he called out to her. “Tell your aunt how you took that medicine without asking.”

“Don’t answer him,” I shouted. “Jenny ended up in the hospital. Same hospital Tom Jost’s father is in. The old man saw your flashlight and thought Rachel was still in the house. Went searching for her and the smoke got him. If he dies, that’ll make you a double murderer, won’t it?”

“Shut up!” he screamed. “Shut up, shut up!” He pounded his fists against his forehead, and then squeezed them into his eye sockets. When he raised his head, he looked at me with wide, wild eyes. “I never meant for anyone to get hurt. That’s why you’ve got to help me and Jenny get out of here, right away. Right now.”

“Jenny is not going with you,” I said slow and clear.

“She has to.” He stepped forward and I stepped back, synchronized like Fred and Ginger, until we both stood in the center of my bedroom. “Nobody would want to hurt Jenny. Jenny is just a kid. If something happened to her, there’d be a lot of fuss.”

He wanted Jenny as a shield.

“Who’s after you, Pat?”