Live to Tell (49 page)

For one second, I’m tempted to leave him. He’s better off unconscious, not knowing what’s happening to his wife and child, never seeing the bullet coming.

A glow appears in the hallway. Flashlight, coming toward the living room, on course to pass directly by me.

I bolt, racing to the other side of the entertainment unit, where I cover myself with the curtains. One of Evan’s favorite hiding spaces.

“Danny boy,”
Andrew is crooning as he appears in the living room.
“Oh Danny boy.”

He stops, studying Michael’s prone body on the floor. When Michael doesn’t move, Andrew continues on to the foyer. “Time’s up,” he calls out. “Know where the gun is yet, Danielle? Because I do.”

Andrew starts to climb the stairs, carrying something down by his right leg. A knife, I realize. A very large butcher knife.

And he’s heading straight for my child.

I rush into the living room, collapse on my knees beside my husband, and quickly cut the zip ties. He moans again. I kiss him once. A foolish notion from a foolish woman still learning to let go. Then I slap him, hard.

“Dammit, Michael, wake up. Our son
needs
you.”

CHAPTER
FORTY-FOUR

“Victoria’s not here,” Greg reported ten minutes later, gasping slightly from his run around the hospital. Alex was three beats behind the MC and breathing harder.

“Nurse says Victoria must have left her room shortly after midnight,” he filled in. “They haven’t seen her since.”

“A woman who was stabbed disappeared from her room and they did nothing about it?”

“The nurse found the hospital gown on a chair, and noticed that the fresh set of clothes brought by Victoria’s ex-husband was gone. She assumed Victoria checked herself out against doctor’s orders. They put in a call to her ex, who I guess was handling everything, but they haven’t heard back from him yet.”

“Her ex was here?”

Alex nodded. “Michael dropped off some stuff, spoke with the doctors, yeah.”

D.D. scowled, turned instinctively back to the nearest bush, which was now filled with five hyperactive boys. Another MC—Ed—had come over to assist. It was possible that D.D. wasn’t prepared to
handle three crazy boys. It was possible no one was prepared to handle these three boys.

“So Evan, his mother, Danielle, and Andrew have all disappeared from this hospital in the past two hours,” D.D. summarized. “Did you speak to the attendants who took Andrew to the emergency room?”

“Victor and Noam,” Greg said. “They said Lightfoot’s condition appeared to stabilize in the elevator. They got him to the ER, left him for just a second to file paperwork. When the nurse appeared with the first dose of medication, Lightfoot was gone. Hospital security was notified, but hasn’t spotted him.”

“Hospital security,” D.D. mused, then perked up. “Security cameras. We’re going to need access to them.”

Alex nodded, but glanced pointedly at his watch. Viewing security footage could be arranged, but would take hours to execute. And in the meantime …

“It’s a reenactment,” Alex told them. “Andrew’s going family by family, following some agenda only he understands. Assuming he’s abducted Evan and Evan’s mother, he will look to staging next.”

“The boat?” D.D. wondered. “Very private.”

“Not the right feel. It needs to be domestic.”

“His house?” That didn’t sound right to her. Lightfoot’s house was an architectural marvel, not a suburban daydream.

“Why not the Olivers’ house?” Greg suggested. “Evan and his mom live in Cambridge, no more than ten, fifteen minutes from here. Andrew would know where it is; he worked for them.”

“Shit. You and me,” D.D. said to Alex, “to Evan’s house. I’ll call for backup along the way.”

She and Alex took a step forward. Greg caught her shoulder.

“I want to go,” he started, then waved to the screaming kids behind him. “Obviously, I can’t. But you’ll find Danielle, right? You’ll keep her safe. Return her to us. She’s … she’s special to me.”

“Give me an hour or two,” D.D. said with forced optimism, “and hopefully you can tell her that yourself.”

CHAPTER
FORTY-FIVE

DANIELLE

“It’s dark.”

“The electricity’s out. Evan, my name’s Danielle, I met you earlier this evening. I’m a friend of Greg’s.”

I eased into Evan’s bedroom, mindful of shadowed corners and Andrew’s unknown location. Victoria thought he was downstairs, but neither of us was certain. She was going to try to free Michael, one more foot soldier to join the war. I was supposed to ask Evan to surf the mumbo-jumbo superhighway on our behalf. Find an angel, locate a gun. What the hell.

“It’s dark,” Evan said again, sounding more petulant than frightened. I made it to his bed, where I saw he was lying on his side, hands and ankles captured in zip ties.

“I can cut you loose,” I offered. “Do you have scissors anywhere?”

“Not allowed sharp objects,” Evan said.

On second thought, that made sense. Not sure how to proceed, I sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, trying to find Evan’s face in the early-morning gloom.

“It’s dark,” he said for the third time.

“The sun will be up soon.”

Somberly, he shook his head. “That won’t help you.”

I wondered if Andrew had told him something. Warned him, or tried to win him over to his side. Maybe it was just as well that Evan was tied up. Clearly, he was a kid capable of doing damage.

“Your mom says you’ve been working with Andrew,” I started. “She says he’s been teaching you how to control the energies around you.”

“The dark,” the kid insisted again. “You must learn to control the dark.”

“The dark? Is that how you refer to the negative energies?”

“They’re all around you.”

“Yes, the power is out.”

“No,” he said, “they’re all around
you.”

It took me a second, then I finally got it. Evan wasn’t talking about the lack of overhead lighting. He was talking about
me
. Apparently,
I
was the source of negative energy, a walking, talking black hole.

Given how tired and scared I currently was, that made perfect sense.

“Evan, can you tell me how you fight the dark?”

“Call upon the angels,” he reported. “Close your eyes. Picture a white light. Call it to you. Seven hugs from seven angels. They will help you.”

“Can you do that for me? Call the angels? Then, when you feel the light, can you ask the angels a question?”

In the gloom, Evan blinked at me, curiously.

“Andrew has hidden a gun,” I said quietly. “The angels know where it is. We need to find that gun, Evan. Can you ask the angels to help us?”

“Guns are bad,” said Evan.

“So is Andrew. Help us, Evan. Your mommy and daddy need you.”

Evan’s chin came up. He regarded at me solemnly. “I will help you.”

I hid Evan, still bound, inside his closet, beneath a pile of pillows and clothes. Ten minutes had to be up. Andrew was coming. With the gun. Without the gun. I scoured Evan’s room for possible weapons. Maybe a lamp, clock radio, or a framed picture. Victoria ran a tight ship. No feasible weapons in her violent child’s room.

Think, think, think
.

My heart was beating too hard. I felt a dull roaring in my ears, becoming hyperaware of too many things at once: Evan’s low whisper, “Breathe in, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven…. Exhale, one, two, three, four, five….” Myself, standing unarmed in the middle of his darkened bedroom.

Then another sound, farther down the hall. The creak of a floorboard.

Andrew, coming up the stairs.

My father, singing as he approached my room. My father, blood spattered across his cheeks—my mother’s, my sister’s, my brother’s.

I wouldn’t curl up under the covers this time. I wouldn’t hide in a bedroom.

I wanted to fight.

I
needed
to fight.

If I just had the damn gun …

Then, in the next heartbeat, it came to me. I didn’t need Evan. I didn’t need to visit the celestial superhighway. This was all about my father, right?

I knew exactly where the gun was.

I’d dumped my father into the damn sewer system, and the son of a bitch had been trying to escape ever since.

When Andrew topped the stairs, I was waiting for him in the hallway. I sat cross-legged on the floor, hands quiet on my lap. I had my eyes closed, listening to the low murmur of Evan’s voice from the neighboring bedroom. I could feel currents of air whispering against my cheeks. Cold and warm. Light and dark.

I felt different. Tingling. Flushed. Powerful. As if maybe I was in the company of angels. The memories, I realized. I’d finally opened my
mind. Allowed myself to know everything that I knew, and now it was as if I were back in the house that night, except this time my mother and siblings were beside me. We were united. Four against one.

And the images that filled my mind were both violent and painful.

“You don’t have the gun,” Andrew stated. “You failed.”

He took the first step forward, and I finally opened my eyes.

“Sheriff Wayne saved me,” I said, my voice strong. “My father didn’t kill himself that night. Sheriff Wayne killed him.”

“You … you spoke to him?” Andrew sounded bewildered. He paused, six steps away, knife pressed against his pant leg.

“My mother loved him. Have you seen her on the interplanes? Have you asked her about that? Sheriff Wayne was a good man, and she cherished him for that.”

Andrew became immediately agitated. It proved what I was beginning to suspect.

“She called the sheriff after I spoke to her, after my father came home. She wanted to kick my father out. But my father refused to go. So she called your father—her lover, Sheriff Wayne—to assist.”

“He shouldn’t have left his family,” Andrew snapped.

“Even a good man can be tempted,” I answered. “Even a good man can want something he shouldn’t have. Wayne came over as a man, not an officer of the law. He hoped to reason with my father, convince him to leave the property. Bullies crack under pressure, right? And everyone knew my father was a first-class bully.”

More agitation. The
whap whap
of the blade against Andrew’s pant leg.

“It didn’t go the way anyone planned. My father refused to budge from the bedroom, so Sheriff Wayne went upstairs to fetch him. They started to yell. Then my father spotted his gun, resting on the nightstand. He grabbed it, pointed it at Sheriff Wayne, just as my mother got between them. She took the bullet meant for her lover, dead before she hit the floor.”

Pictures again, like an old home movie streaming through my head. Had I crept out of my room that night, seen more than I’d
known I’d seen? Or were the images from something else? The warmth caressing my cheek. The feel again—my mother, Natalie, Johnny. Four against one. The way it should’ve been that night, twenty-five years ago.

“My dad hesitated,” I whispered now, “shocked by my mother’s death. It gave Sheriff Wayne the time he needed to bolt from the house to his car. Service firearm, locked in the glove compartment. He had to work the key, hands trembling. Get the door open. Retrieve the nine-millimeter. Check the chamber.”

More images. A fourth presence, joining me in the hall.

“While he was gone, Natalie stuck her head out of her room. Johnny made a mad dash for the stairs. And my father started walking down the hall toward my bedroom.”

The air currents again, shifting. Hot and cold. Light and dark. Swelling.

“Sheriff Wayne saved my life,” I said loudly. “He shot my father. He carried me from the carnage. Then he called for backup, never telling anyone what really brought him to the house that night. No point in harming his family with his dirty secret, now that my family was dead. As the officer in charge, he controlled the crime scene. That made it easy for him to write it up as a one-man rampage—my father killing most of his family before turning his gun on himself.

“Sheriff Wayne carried his guilt to his deathbed, where he finally confessed to his son. Is that what brought you to find me? Is that what convinced you I had to face my past, Andrew?”