Return to the Shadows (8 page)

“Listen, I need to make some calls in the
kitchen. Why don’t you wait here for a minute?”

“But—” she began to protest.

“You can leave the light on. Here, I’ll put
on your TV too, okay? I’ll be back in one sec.”

“I guess.” She still didn’t look convinced,
but apparently decided not to question it further. I walked calmly
into the hallway before my nerves got the best of me and I bolted
into the kitchen. Who to call first? I stared at the phone,
contemplating the deceptively mundane decision. It wasn’t a mundane
no-brainer at all. Who I called first would set the tone for how I
handled the situation and ultimately, for how it played out. I had
to choose wisely, because something about the situation didn’t add
up.

The police, I decided, reaching for the wall
phone before stopping to reconsider that move. Was calling the
police on a cop, on a decorated lieutenant, a wise move? No, I
decided. I could not take the chance of calling the Seattle police
department. I could call another police department or the state
police.

I could even try calling the FBI, although
admittedly, I hadn’t the first clue of how to actually contact the
FBI. I was pretty sure they weren’t listed in the yellow pages.
Either way, I had a feeling that calling the Seattle police
department would only put us in more danger. I would start with a
phone call to Mike. Tell him to get his ass over here, I decided. I
punched in number three on the speed dial and drummed my fingers on
the wall next to the phone.

“Come on, Mike, answer the phone,” I
muttered.

“Claire?” he mumbled groggily on the fifth
ring.

I paused at the sudden click and dead silence
that filled the line. “Mike?” I pressed the buttons on the phone,
hung it up, and quickly snatched it back up. Nothing. No dial tone
buzzed in my ear. Silence. I shivered. The line had been cut. I
whirled around and scanned the kitchen. The blinds were closed, the
curtains drawn tight. The kitchen was dark. I had not bothered with
the light on my mad dash to the phone.

There was a phone in the den. My cellular
phone was in the drawer of my nightstand. It seemed an odd
coincidence that my phone went dead right as I was trying to call
for help. And I didn’t much believe in coincidence.

The line had been cut and I knew it. The
timing strongly indicated that whoever cut the phone line was
watching and knew that I was attempting to use the telephone. But
how could anyone have seen me try to use the phone? And why now?
Why cut the lines right this minute? Unless…I hung my head and bit
back a curse. Unless they weren’t watching. What if they were
listening? It made perfect sense. Ashley’s dream, her drawing, me
running down the hallway in the middle of the night. They had heard
the entire thing. No, not they. Officer Lance Jones. It was the
most plausible explanation.

But how? I thought back to the night he’d
been here with his partner, the night he took our statements, and
walked through the house to make sure we were safe. I snorted. He
must have planted the bugs that night. I looked around sharply and
hoped like hell that bugs were the only thing he had planted in my
house. I had not seen any video surveillance cameras besides my
own. Although, some of them were so tiny, but no, I reasoned.

He hadn’t had time to set up video
surveillance. And even if he had somehow managed to bypass my
security system and reenter the house at some point, I would have
known about it. The private monitoring company for the system
always called the owner and mailed out a form whenever the alarm
signaled or the service was interrupted, tampered with, that sort
of thing. So I was ninety-nine percent sure that there were no
video cameras tucked away to carefully record our every move.

I took a deep breath and considered my next
move. I had to get Ashley and get out of the house.

Priority number one. The rest could be dealt
with later. I thought about the best way to get out safely and came
up woefully short. Although my first instinct was to grab Ashley
and get in the car, I rejected the idea immediately. It was
probably the worst thing that I could do. Lance Jones, not to
mention whoever else was waiting out there with him, would be
expecting that. I felt it was pretty safe to assume the men who
waited outside had guns. No, I could not risk either one of us
getting shot.

I shivered again and tried to think fast. The
bugs would probably pick up any sound I made. I didn’t even know
where they had been placed. Hopelessness washed over me in
sickening waves and I gripped the doorframe with white knuckles. We
were not going to die tonight. We were not trapped in the
house.

There was always a way out. Think, Claire, I
silently commanded. Step one, get Ashley and gather some supplies.
Quickly. I knew that we probably had no more than ten minutes
before they came in after us.

Fifteen if they waited for Mike to show up
and took care of him first, because he would surely be panicking
and on his way by now. I had to get out of the house. I had to warn
him.

I flipped the kitchen light on and went back
to Ashley’s room.

“Hey, peanut. You know what? How would you
like a quick snack? Then we can drive over to your uncle Mike’s
house or Grandma and Grandpa’s. Would you like that?” I smiled and
very quietly knelt down to pull her sketch pad toward me.

“Mom?”

I held a finger to my lips and motioned for
her to be quiet while I wrote a quick message on the pad.

“Would you like that?”

“Okay….” She squinted to read the message on
the pad.

There are men waiting outside. Don’t cry.
Don’t make a sound. Please. We are going to my bedroom. We have to
be very quiet.

Her eyes widened, but she made no sound.
Bless her, she caught on quick.

The bad men?
She scribbled.

Yes. But we won’t let them hurt us. I
promise. Let’s go.

What?

Go to my room. Put my gun and bullets in my
bag that’s in the nightstand. And our shoes. And one sweater. But
don’t make any noise. Can you do that for me?

Yes.

Good. Let’s go now. Hurry.

She nodded, slipped off of her bed, and
quietly down the hall. I forced myself to walk casually down the
hall to the kitchen while Ashley went the other way and slipped
into my bedroom without a hint of sound. Normally, the thought of
my first-grader handling a loaded gun would have been enough to
have me breaking out in hives, yet tonight it was wholly necessary
for her to do so. I needed to create a diversion in the
kitchen…bang pots and pans around and move about as if I were
fixing a snack. Ashley was not tall enough to trade places with me.
The lights would cast a silhouette in the window. If I wasn’t in
the kitchen, the entire plan would be thrown off. We would have
precious little time once everything was packed. The man—rather,
the men—outside would make their move, either before we left or as
soon as Mike showed up. They couldn’t afford not to.

Mike. I stopped suddenly and it hit me that I
still had to get a message to Mike. I was loathe to use a cell
phone…the call would be heard. But I could send a text message. I
walked calmly to the bedroom and slipped my cell phone out of the
bag, pausing to give Ashley a quick thumbs up and a reassuring
smile before returning to the kitchen.

Don’t come after us. We are leaving
tonight. I need to see him again. Under the light of the
Sycamores.
I hit send and slipped the phone into my pocket,
hoping my brother would be able to decipher the message. It was all
I could do. The last thing I needed was for anyone to think that
Mike knew what I knew. He would become just as much of a target as
Ashley and I were. Of course, I reminded myself grimly, that was
assuming we all managed to live through the night.

The clock on the wall stuck three. The
witching hour, how appropriate. And oddly enough, reassuring in its
own way. Mike would have been knocking on the door already if he
were coming, which meant he had understood my text message. One
hurdle down, I breathed. Getting out of the house was another
matter entirely, and it mostly depended on sheer luck. I was not
comforted by the knowledge.

Closing my eyes, I began to count. One, two,
three, four, five... The lights went out. Dead silence filled the
house…no whir of a ceiling fan, no hum of a refrigerator. It was
time.

“Oh, that damn breaker again,” I cursed
loudly. “Stay here, Ashley; I’m going to the basement to fix
it.”

I darted into the hallway and burst into the
bedroom, surprising Ashley.
Shh
, I motioned and quietly
locked the bedroom door. Sliding the dresser in front of it felt
like a nerve-wracking waste of time that we didn’t have, but it was
necessary. We needed every advantage we could create for ourselves.
I knew that the security system would be the next thing to be
disarmed. The police would be notified within minutes when the
security company failed to get me on the telephone. I quickly
turned off my cell phone and slipped it into the bag, then took out
the gun and twisted the silencer onto it. They would be fast. We
had to be faster. And very, very quiet.

The front door opened a second before the
basement window shattered; the sound was muffled by the neighbor’s
dog barking next door. You would think the dog would have reassured
us…that Fido’s canine antics would alert the entire neighborhood to
our plight. The big, burly guy on the corner would come rushing
over with his double barrel shotgun and save the day.

I wished. In truth, the dog next door wasn’t
named Fido. His name was Muffin and he was a five-pound Chihuahua
mix. He also had a tendency to bark all night long. No one would
pay the least bit of attention to Muffin’s shrill alarm. After a
while, it was barely noticeable. And my neighbor on the corner
wasn’t burly, although he was pretty tall. But he worked the
graveyard shift; and anyway, I was reasonably sure that he didn’t
own a sawed off shotgun. In short, we were screwed.

“Mom?” Ashley whispered brokenly.

“It’s okay, honey. Stay close to me.” The
window opened in one swift and smooth movement. Ditto for the
screen. I poked my head out and saw nothing on either side of the
house. Could it be so easy? I wondered. “One way to find out.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Me first, okay? Climb up here and
get ready to follow.”

Luck was on our side that night. We were out
the window and carefully concealed among Mrs. Flores’s evergreens a
full minute before three men crashed into my bedroom cursing and
muttering.

Ashley shrank deeper into the shadows, but
did not utter a sound. I motioned for her to stay silent one more
time, and then slid backward until we hit the gate that led to Mrs.
Flores’s back yard. Tall shrubs rimmed the fenced-in space. We
would be completely hidden from view back there.

I carried Ashley to the edge of the yard and
cut across the alley to Ridgeway Avenue. From there we stayed in
the shadows and made our way six blocks over into one of the older
neighborhoods of Seattle…a large cul de sac that was eerily quiet,
especially at such a late hour; or at such an early hour. I
supposed it depended on whether you were a night person or a
morning person. Now, me personally—

“Mom?”

“Sorry, here we are, peanut.”

“Here? Why?”

“Because your uncle Mike is going to pick us
up right here.”

“How do you know? I don’t see him.”

“When I grabbed my cell phone, I sent your
uncle a text message. A secret message to tell him to pick us up
right here in this very spot.”

“Why this spot?”

“Because this is far enough away from the bad
men, but still close enough for us to get to in a hurry.”

“Are the bad men gonna come looking for us?”
She sounded six years old right then, and scared. I knelt down to
hug her close.

“The bad men don’t know that we’re here.” I
shivered and looked around, wondering where the hell my brother
was, and what could have been taking him so long. Had I been too
vague?

“Look, Mama! There’s Uncle Mike’s truck!”

Sure enough, Mike was turning the corner and
speeding toward us. I breathed a sigh of relief as the Land Rover
skidded to a stop in front of us. I strapped Ashley into the back
passenger seat before hopping into the front next to Mike.

“I was afraid you hadn’t gotten my message,
or that you hadn’t understood what I was trying to tell you.”

“Message received loud and clear. Under the
Sycamores. The corner of Syracuse and Ridgemont.”

“Ted Matherson,” I confirmed.

“Nineteen-eighty-seven.” He nodded. “It took
me a minute, but I was pretty sure that’s where you wanted me to
go. The question is, where are we going now?”

“Back to your apartment,” I sighed, and
scrubbed a hand over my face.

“Mom, who is Ted Masserton?”

“Matherson. He was a boy I had a crush on in
junior high. We were going to meet one night at that corner back
there. The corner of Syracuse and Ridgemont. When I was little, I
called that street Sycamore because I couldn’t say Syracuse.”

“The name stuck and our family has always
called that street Sycamore instead of Syracuse,” Mike put in.

“At the time it was cute.” I shrugged.

“What happened to Ted?” Ashley wanted to
know.

“He never showed up, so we never ran away
together.” I smiled at the memory.

“And she was heartbroken.”

“That’s enough, Mike.”

“So. You want to tell me what that was all
about?”

“Who knows? I was fourteen.”

“I meant tonight. You call. You hang up on
me, then send me a cryptic message and show up on foot. Are you
guys okay?”

“More or less.” I rubbed my temple.

“He came after you, didn’t he?”