Keeping the Peace (28 page)

Finally, the girl stepped forward out of the corner. “I want to leave. I want to go home now.” Her hand wavered, and she raised the gun, pointing it at her own head.

Suddenly, the window behind the girl exploded, and everything happened at once. Shattered glass sprayed everywhere. The girl shrieked and raised both arms. The gun went off, but the bullet buried itself harmlessly in the ceiling.

When his children were very small, John had always found it a challenge to dress them. Inside or outside, they never seemed to want to wear clothes. John would stand in front of them, holding the offending article of clothing—a T-shirt, a snowsuit, boots. They would look at him with wide eyes and then whirl and try to make their escape on tiny, bare fat feet. John became very adept at scooping them up with one arm and holding them against his body until they stopped struggling and accepted their fate.

He did this now, instinctively, as the girl recoiled from the flying glass. Normally a slow-moving man, John moved quick as lightning, ducking under the gun and scooping the girl up with his right arm. The gun discharged and then clattered to the floor. He held tight. He prepared for the inevitable struggle, but there was no fight left in her. She hung like a rag doll in his arms.

Caleb rushed into the room. “John!”

“I’m all right.”

“Is she hit?”

“She’s okay.” John scooped up her legs with his other arm. “I think she might have fainted.”

“Let’s get her downstairs where we can check her out. What happened? Did she shoot?”

The two men were hurrying down the stairs, John bearing the burden of the girl. He shook his head. “Not intentionally. The gun went off, but the bullet went into the ceiling. I don’t know how the window broke.”

“That gave you your chance.”

Cully came running up to them as they stepped into the lobby. They laid the girl on the couch. She was crying silently, tears streaking down her face, but she lay quietly.

“Get the stretcher, Cully,” John said softly. “You’ll have to take her to the hospital.” He bent down close to the pitiful, emaciated figure on the couch. The father in him, never too far from the surface, rose. He smoothed the lank hair back from her forehead, which was beaded with cold sweat. “Shh,” he soothed. “Shh. You’ll be better. We’ll see to it. Just rest, if you can. Let somebody else do the worrying.”

The girl nodded and turned her face away from him.

Caleb lifted the girl gently onto the stretcher. Cully secured the ties around her and covered her with a blanket. They prepared to carry her out to the waiting ambulance.

“Cully,” said John, “as your chief, I have to tell you it was too dangerous, shooting that window out, but no one was hurt, so as a man, I want to thank you. It opened the opportunity for me to grab her. That was good thinking. Thanks.”

Cully looked at the floor and then directly at John. John had known this young man for years. He saw something he couldn’t quite identify. It wasn’t defiance. It wasn’t pride. He didn’t know what it was. It was something like surprise, maybe satisfaction. Cully said, “It wasn’t me, Chief. My weapon has not been discharged. You can check. Ask Mia about it.”

“Cully!” The exclamation came from Mia, who stood off to the side behind him. “You promised me! You promised!”

“I didn’t promise you, Mia,” the young officer said. “I have to do my job. I have to tell my chief.” He was as professional as John had ever seen him.

The chief kept his cool. “It’s okay, Cully. Go with Caleb and get this poor girl to the hospital. Find out what you can. I’ll talk with Mia. Thanks for the backup.”

Cully and Caleb both nodded. “Okay,” Caleb said. “Let’s get going.” They hoisted the stretcher and carried it from the building.

John turned to his daughter. “I need an explanation of your involvement in this.”

Mia looked at her father defiantly. “I followed Cully when he went out to the pergola to keep watch,” she said. “I could make out the silhouette of the girl against the window. Then I could see your shadow when you came in. Cully was watching through the binoculars.” She stopped.

“Go on,” John commanded.

They were alone in the big lobby now. Bill Noyes had retired to his office, and Susan had gone upstairs to assess the damage to the room.

“I could see your shadow,” Mia repeated. “And when you came into the room, the light changed, and I saw that she had a gun. I told Cully to shoot out the window, to cause a diversion, you know. It would give you a chance to disarm her. I was afraid if we waited, she might really be crazy and shoot you. Cully said he couldn’t do that. He said it was too dangerous and he didn’t have reasonable cause. I didn’t argue with him, Dad. I broke some of the lattice work on the base of the pergola and got a stone from underneath. Cully didn’t see me. When I saw her start to move toward you, when I saw her raise the gun, I threw the stone with all my might. I broke the window.”

They stood facing each other silently. Then John sighed. “I can’t have vigilantes running wild and disrupting police business. And you’re a minor, Mia, a child. You might have been hurt.” He wiped his hand across his face.

“I am not a vigilante. I’ll be eighteen in the spring. I’m a citizen. I wasn’t taking the law into my own hands. I was helping my father.”

John and Melanie Giamo had brought their children up hoping that each one of them, as different as they were from each other, would develop the same qualities of intellectual curiosity, the ability to think for themselves, to ask the right questions, and defend the defenseless. They hoped to instill in their children courage, kindness, and social responsibility.

And here was his daughter standing before him, tall and straight, clear-eyed and strong, her head slightly cocked, partly defiant, partly beseeching. He saw that she was all of those things, and beautiful besides. He bit his lip to keep back the tears. He walked toward her, his hands palms up. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her. “It was a brave thing to do,” he said into her hair. “That’s quite an arm you have.” He released her and took her hand. “Let’s go now. I’ve got to get back to the station and find out what Cully’s up to at the hospital. I’ve got to catch up with Jason and Steve. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

“So you don’t think she’s the one who killed Bruce Blake?”

“No, Mouse, I don’t. I think it was this Richard Seeley. I want to find him.”

“You can just take me back with you, Dad. Debbie will pick me up,” Mia said as she climbed into the police vehicle.

He smiled at her and pulled out into the road.

Chapter Nineteen

A
T
T
HE
P
OLICE
S
TATION
, Becky sat at her desk, writing furiously on a pad of paper, the telephone tucked under her chin. “Okay, all right. Get back here as soon as you can.” She hung up the phone. She punched a button and said, “Mrs. Lewis? Mrs. Lewis, are you still there? Yes, yes, I know, but I don’t have a single officer I can deploy right now. Yes, they can be a nuisance. Well, why don’t I just call the school, and they can inform their parents? Yes, yes I will. Nice talking to you, too. Goodbye.” Becky hung up the phone again and looked up at John. “Boys are running through Mrs. Lewis’s yard again.”

“Any word from Cully?”

“Yes, I just got off the phone with him a minute ago. The girl is a real train wreck. Cully spoke with the physician’s assistant there. He said she was seriously anorexic and dehydrated on top of that. They’re trying to notify next-of-kin now. Evidently she threw some kind of fit or had a seizure or something after they brought her into the emergency room. They won’t let anyone talk to her until tomorrow, so Cully’s on his way back here.”

“Good. Where’re Mike and Peter? Mike’s car’s still outside.”

“I’m in here on the computer, Dad,” his older son called out.

John peered around the corner to see Michael sitting at Jason Patterson’s computer.

He held up a bunch of papers. “I’ve been tracking down all those e-mails and blogs, the message boards, too,” he said. “I’ve created quite a paper trail. It’ll come in handy, I think.”

“It’s valuable evidence, Mike. Thanks.”

“Peter’s in helping Irene. Some new contractor or architect or somebody was in looking at the tax maps and messed everything up. He’s helping her get those big books straightened out.”

“Irene’s getting too old to handle those anymore,” John said.

“Don’t tell her that,” warned Becky.

Peter came into the office. “What an idiot!” he exclaimed. “That guy made a mess. He just made a mess. Poor old Irene. She couldn’t even lift the book, and he had left them all over the floor. It was cool, though. I saw the tax map of Mom’s office building. Irene said he wanted to know who owned that piece of property. Maybe he wants to offer her a million dollars for it or something.”

“In your dreams.” Mia snorted and leaned back against the wall. “He wanted to know who owned Mom’s building? That’s weird. Who’d want Mom’s building?”

Becky said, “He sounded like a new developer in town. I think he was just looking randomly for properties he found interesting.”

“Hey,” said Peter. “Maybe he does like Mom’s place. There’s a lot more land with that than I thought.”

“That’s because you only go into her office, rob the candy jar, and leave,” Michael said.

“That building is worth a lot more to this family than you kids realize,” John said as he riffled through papers on the corner of Becky’s desk.

The building at the center of their conversation was the large, brick Federal-style house built in 1847, at the south end of town where Melanie had her offices for
The Town Crier
. It was a beautiful house, facing east toward the river. Four large windows, two on either side of the great front door, graced the face of the house. A carriage wing extended from the rear north side, and a charming, white-columned covered porch embraced the south and west sides. There were four fireplaces in the house, as evidenced by the two large chimneys on each end of the roof peak. There had been a barn, too, long ago, but it had fallen in, leaving its skeleton of a stone foundation. John had reason to be sentimental about the place. Melanie’s grandfather, Tom Dearborne, had acquired the run-down building just before World War II, and he’d spent more time and money than his wife would have liked improving it. It was rumored that this was where he’d carried on his life-long affair with Mia Maronetti Giamo, meeting her here for clandestine trysts. Melanie thought it was romantic. John maintained the whole affair thing was probably hearsay, but secretly, he could not forget finding his grandmother crying alone in her bedroom the day Tom died.

Be that as it may, when old Tom Dearborne died, he willed the building to Melanie. She was twelve years old at the time, and her father, also Tom Dearborne, was named trustee to maintain the building and its grounds for her until she came of age. Melanie’s father grumbled, but he kept the taxes paid and the roof and foundation in good repair. Her grandfather had left some money for the building’s upkeep, but he could not have anticipated the inflation of taxes and maintenance costs. By the time Melanie came into her inheritance at age twenty-one, the house was run-down once again. Her father paid the taxes on it for one more year, until Melanie graduated from college. Then he told her, “It’s yours now and your responsibility. You have the upkeep and the taxes. You can sell it, or you can keep it as long as you can afford it.”

Luckily she did keep it, because the next year, she eloped with John Giamo. John could smile about it now, thinking back. The memories made John smile triumphantly. The Dearbornes could never quite understand from whence their only child came. She was nothing like her mother in looks or demeanor. While Catherine Dearborne’s style was old-fashioned, Melanie wasn’t afraid to show some cleavage. Where Catherine only smiled genteelly at the funniest of situations, Melanie laughed out loud—and often.

“What are you smiling like that for, Dad?” asked Mia.

“Oh, I was just remembering when your mother and I moved into that house just after we were married.”

“Because Grammie and Grandpa wouldn’t let you live with them,” Peter said. They had all heard the story many times before.

“A married couple should live on their own,” John said in defense.

“Why didn’t your Nona let you live with her?”

“She would have, but she thought it was important for us to make our own life. She loaned us the money to fix the place up so we could live there.”

The phone rang on Becky’s desk. After a quick greeting, she said, “Okay, he’s right here.” She handed the phone to John. “It’s Cully.”

John took the telephone, not bothering to go back into his office. “What are you finding out, Cully?”

“I think you better get down here, Chief.”

“Yeah? What’s going on?”

“She’s still in the ER. She’s with the PA. They put a drip on her. The PA told me she was severely anorexic and the stress she’d been through could be dangerous. Anyway, while I was waiting there with her for somebody to see her, she started babbling away to me. At first I thought she might be hallucinating or something.”