Only Ever You (32 page)

chapter thirty-six

DAY TWENTY-THREE

The dog didn’t bark his usual greeting when Bea got home. No sound came from the child’s room and Bea went straight upstairs, grateful for a reprieve. She poured a glass of wine, wishing she had something stronger, and collapsed on the couch, taking a healthy slug. It was cold inside. She rubbed her arms and pulled a blanket down around her. Was David Lassiter alive? Had they arrested him yet? The remote sat on top of the TV, but she was too tired to stand up and get it. She wanted nothing more than to sleep, but Avery would wake up soon and Bea would have to feed her and the dog. Why hadn’t he barked? He should have been barking by now, scratching and pawing at the door to be let out.

Bea forced herself up from the couch and went back down to the basement. The bolt wasn’t drawn across the door. Bea cursed. In her hurry to leave she’d obviously forgotten to lock it, but the child was still drugged, she couldn’t have gotten out. She pushed the door open, silence rushing at her instead of the dog. Bea cried out when she saw the empty room.

She ran to the bed, running her hands over the sheets as if she’d find the child hidden in the bedclothes, but what she felt was stickiness and she remembered the drug shooting from the needle, spilling out when Avery bumped her arm. She checked under the bed just in case, but the child was well and truly gone. And so was the dog.

Bea grabbed her coat and ran back upstairs. She spotted a chair pushed against the kitchen counter and an empty package of cookies left on the table, with crumbs smattering the surface and the floor. Maybe they were in the backyard. She opened the door and looked out, but she couldn’t see anything except falling snow. And then she thought of how cold the house had felt and ran to the front door. It stood ajar.

Bea shuddered from the cold, staring down at the front steps and beyond to the driveway disappearing beneath the canopy of trees. How far could the child have gotten? She couldn’t have been on the driveway when Bea came home or she would have seen her. Could she have gotten all the way down the dead-end street and on to the main road? “Avery?” she called as she hurried down the steps—called not screamed, nothing loud enough to make any inquisitive neighbor call the police.

Snow fell in small, hard flakes that blew in stinging bursts against Bea’s face. Already it coated the steps and gravel driveway and clung to the dead grass and dry leaves. There were no footprints, no sign that the child had come this way, but Bea started down the driveway anyway, diverting periodically into the woods on either side to search, stumbling over tree roots as she lost most of the light coming from the gray, cloud-heavy sky. Her pulse was erratic—pounding one moment, fluttering the next.

“Avery?” she called again, but the wind stifled her cries. Light sifting through the trees created shadows. She thought she saw the child up ahead and hurried down the hill toward her, but there was no one there. What if a car had stopped to pick the child up, or worse, hadn’t seen her in time to stop? Bea’s mind tormented her with images of the child’s bloody body lying on the road.

As she reached the end of the driveway, she saw something through the trees ahead. The yellow glow of a house light. The house down below, the one owned by the snowbird. No one was supposed to be there, but there was a light coming from an upstairs window. Had Avery seen the light, too?

Bea ran down the neighbor’s road, which curved like hers through trees. It ended sooner, opening up to a big circular driveway, a grand entrance for a large brick colonial. Parked out front was a white sedan that looked dingy next to the purer white of the snow piling up on the hood. Lights were on all over the house, spilling from the windows onto the snow-covered yard. As Bea watched, a man passed by a front window and paused to stare out at the driveway. It was the old man she’d seen out walking, the one she suspected of calling the police. She ducked back into the woods and that’s when she heard it. A bark. A single, short yip, but it was enough. She knew that sound. She stood still, listening hard. Another yip.

She scanned the property and spotted a shed tucked left of the house. Bea moved stealthily along the perimeter of the yard, staying close to the trees. The shed was large, but old, graying boards with traces of moss and algae around the rusted closure on the double doors. It wasn’t locked; one door stood slightly ajar. Bea pushed it open and the dog rushed her, barking a warning.

“Cosmo! Stop it, Cosmo, it’s me!” She hissed as she stepped inside, fending off the dog with her foot. The shed smelled of motor oil and fertilizer, the walls hung with garden tools surrounding a large riding lawn mower. Dim light poured through a cracked and rotting window frame that had long since lost its glass. Bea peered through the gloom. “Avery, where are you?” she called in a hushed singsong. Something moved in a corner and she spotted the child huddled near some bags of grass seed.

“There you are! Come here.” Bea took a step forward, but the child shrank back, shivering so hard that Bea could hear her teeth chattering. She wasn’t wearing a coat, but at least she’d managed to put on shoes. “Come on, now,” Bea urged, moving farther into the shed. “We need to get you home.”

She tried to smile, stretching out a hand, encouraged as Avery finally inched toward her. Just as Bea was about to grab her, the child darted left, clambering over the fat tire on the lawn mower to get out the other side of the shed’s double door. It burst open at her push and Bea sprang after her, but the dog was faster, darting between her legs to follow at the child’s heels, while wheeling back to bark at Bea.

She hissed, “Shush, Cosmo, stop barking!” But the dog wouldn’t cooperate, baring its teeth and barking like crazy as the child slipped on the frost-slicked ground, and Bea made a wild lunge for her, managing to catch the back of her sweater.

“No, no, no!” the child screamed. Bea wrapped a hand around the child’s mouth, but Avery bit her and she cursed, dropping her hand long enough for the child to scream again. Bea stifled her a second time, pulling her coat sleeve into the child’s mouth to block her teeth.

Cosmo barked frantically and Bea kicked out at him, trying to silence the damn dog.

A sudden loud noise came from the house, a whoosh of a well-insulated door opening, and she heard a male voice call, “Who’s out there?”

Bea ducked back inside the shed, pulling the child with her. “Who’s there?” the voice called again. “You’re trespassing!” The sound of gravel crunching. Bea brushed against a pair of wicked-looking pruning shears and caught them by the closed straight blades before they fell, still holding the child pressed tight against her chest. She could feel the small body convulsing, the tiny nostrils flaring, as the girl struggled to breathe. Bea held her own breath as the footsteps moved even closer.

“What the hell?” The door creaked. He’d found the open shed; he was right outside. Bea breathed shallowly. “If you’re in there, you’d better come out! I’ve got a gun!”

She pressed her back against the cold boards, heart thudding in her ears. What should she do? What
could
she do? She pictured Frank shaking his head, urging her to give up. Years of resentment spurred her on. There had to be another move. She set Avery on her feet, releasing her. The little girl ran forward, Cosmo running out after her.

“What on earth?” the man exclaimed.

“I wanna go home!” Avery cried.

“Where did you two come from?”

Bea crept to the edge of the door gripping the handle of the shears. She was less than five feet from him, close enough to see the stooped posture of old age, the liver spots on his bare, bald head. He didn’t notice her there in the shadows to his left; his focus was entirely on the child and the dog. He was quite old, with a tremor in his voice that suggested Parkinson’s, and the shuffling gait of someone worried about breaking a hip. She could see a glint of silver in his hand—the muzzle of a gun. “It’s okay,” he said to Avery, beckoning with his other hand, “I won’t hurt you.” But when Avery took his hand, Cosmo ran at the old man, barking aggressively.

Startled, he stepped sideways too fast and lost his balance. As he fell backward, the old man put his hands out to catch himself and the gun went off, a boom loud enough to make everyone flinch and stop the dog barking.

*   *   *

“Stop!” Ottilo’s surprised shout came as Jill reached the stairwell door. She pushed through it and hurtled down the stairs. She raced down three levels and burst through the door onto the second floor. Fortunately, nobody was in the corridor at that end. She walked quickly but quietly down the hall, smoothing her hair and trying to still her harsh breathing. The only thing she had with her was the bag with David’s things. She tucked it under her arm and tried to look as if she knew where she was going. Monitors chirped and she heard the quiet chatter of television. The sterile rooms seemed populated only by the elderly. She walked past a room where a nurse was checking a patient’s vital signs. The young woman looked up and her eyes narrowed. Jill quickly ducked around a corner just as the stairwell door banged open behind her.

“What is this?” a female voice demanded and Jill knew a doctor or nurse had stopped the police. Her heart raced. There was no time to get to the opposite stairwell and the police were probably already there. She passed a room where a tiny, ancient woman slept, seemingly swallowed up by the bed, an oxygen mask covering half her face. On impulse, Jill ducked inside and then into the bathroom, pulling the door until it was open just a crack. She stood there in the dark, heart racing, as heavy feet ran down the hall. “I’m sure she exited on this floor,” a male voice said. She couldn’t hear the reply.

Silence again. She pushed open the door a crack. Nothing. She slipped out and crept toward the door.

“Who are you?” A querulous voice from the bed. Jill whirled around to see enormous cloudy eyes open in a tiny prune-like face.

“Volunteer.” She pointed at a withering bouquet on the windowsill. “I brought you flowers.”

There was no sign of police in the corridor. Jill saw a nurses’ station up ahead, but there were women and men milling about. How was she going to get out of there?

She ducked back into the room and pulled the string, to set off the alarm. “Don’t tell,” she whispered to the elderly woman who solemnly nodded her head.

Jill dashed into the vacant room across the hall as nurses came at a run. She waited until they were occupied to hurry down the corridor. Only one nurse remained at the station, her back to Jill, engrossed in a large slice of the sheet cake splayed across a table. Someone named Nicki was having a birthday. A spare lab coat had been tossed over the back of a chair. Jill swiped it, slipping it on without stopping. She shoved the plastic bag in a pocket and lifted a chart off a patient’s door while heading rapidly toward the elevators. A middle-aged man and his teary wife stood waiting, their backs to her. The down button had already been pushed. The man had hold of the woman’s hand, patting it ineffectually. “She’ll be okay,” he said in a low voice, glancing at Jill. She flipped open the chart and pretended to be absorbed by it, really only reading the same sentence over and over again: “Prognosis poor; palliative care recommended.” She tried not to think of it as a bad omen.

The elevator pinged and the doors slid open. “After you, doctor,” the man said, and it took Jill a second to realize he was talking to her. She gave him a terse smile and stepped on ahead of the couple. The woman’s sniffles increased during the short ride down. The doors slid back and Jill felt like crying herself when she saw the lobby filled with police. Through the large plate-glass windows beyond them she could see patrol cars, top lights spinning, parked around the perimeter of the building. There was no way out. Her pulse increased when she spotted Ottilo standing near the main doors. He glanced her way and Jill turned left, bent over the chart, heading down a hallway that led back into the maze of hospital corridors. A police officer and a hospital security guard came walking down the hall toward her. Jill kept her eyes on the chart, feeling their eyes come to rest on her. She wanted to run, but there was nowhere else to go. Closer, closer; they were going to pass one another. She flipped a paper on the chart as she passed them, pursing her lips to keep them from trembling. They passed by without saying a word and nobody shouted after her.

The hallway divided, splitting into left and right corridors. Jill picked the left one, hoping that this led to the back of the building. She needed to get out of there, but how? She kept moving, clutching the metal patient’s chart as if it were a winning lottery ticket.

Three more turns in the labyrinth and it suddenly felt steamy; even the walls seemed to be sweating. An overpowering smell of bleach assaulted the air just before she saw double doors with
LAUNDRY
stenciled in white across them. Jill stepped to the side as one door swung open to let out a man in coveralls pushing a rolling plastic bin overflowing with bed linens. He gave her a curious glance, but she barely noticed, fixed instead on what she’d spotted at the end of the hall. Another exit, and this one led outside.

She pushed through the stairwell doors and had just taken a step down to the door that led outside when a voice barked, “Stop! Police!” Jill froze, scared more by the unmistakable click that followed than by the command. The metal patient’s file dropped from her hand, clattering down the steps.

“Hands in the air where I can see them!”

Jill raised her arms, trying not to shake. The bark again: “Turn around!” She started to pivot and the male voice yelled, “Slowly! And keep your hands up!”

She swung around on the step, trying not to lose her balance. The first and only thing she could focus on was the barrel of the handgun pointing straight at her. Then it lowered. She blinked in surprise as she recognized the young officer staring back at her.

“Tom Dilby?”

The man nodded, somewhat sheepishly. “I didn’t realize you were the one they’re looking for.”