by Aimee Hix
When she perked up, I shook my head.
“When I was nine, I was negotiating with landlords to try to keep us from getting evicted. I finally told her I wanted to live with my dad. So I get it.”
She was shocked. You always think you’re the only one.
“There are more of us than you’d ever think possible, Aja. And you know, they’re not all bad people. Leila is a good person, but she’s not exactly built for motherhood. Some people are just … not ready to be parents and don’t learn it until after they have a kid.”
She turned away swiping her sleeve over the flood of black eye makeup coursing down her face. “Why are you making excuses for them?”
I sat gingerly on the couch and put my hand on the arm not covering her face. “I’m not. There’s no excuse. My attitude is you have a kid, you get your shit together. But that’s not reality sometimes. Even with my dad and my stepmom it took me a long … Jesus, such a long damn time to get on with my life. I don’t trust people like I should. Still. But, Aja, even if they came through that door and everything was the complete opposite from this moment on, the past happened. You don’t have to like it or even understand it. But you have to accept that it is.”
“At least you got to have your dad.”
She sniffled, still feeling sorry for herself. I didn’t blame her. Something scary was happening to her and her parents were not helping her. Hell, they weren’t even around.
“I did. And he taught me how to do what I do.”
Aja looked over her arm, one eyebrow raised.
“Okay, is teaching me,” I conceded.
She sat up and rubbed her hands, ineffectively, over her cheeks. The makeup smeared more and cleared at the same time.
“Why don’t you go wash your face and think about what you want to tell me about this person you’re afraid of?”
She started to protest and then looked at her hands covered in black smudges. While she wandered off to what was likely an all-black bathroom, I looked around the room. The dark expanse of wall was broken up with movie and rock concert posters. The kid had amazing taste even if there were no Coen Brothers movies represented. Which made me think.
“Yo, Benj. I found you a new friend. One your own age. Call me back.” My brother hated it when I called and even more when I left voicemail messages. I just couldn’t text as fast as he did. And I so enjoyed hearing him sputter and whine about it. It gave me older-sister warm fuzzies.
I was trying to calculate the dimensions of the humongous television when Aja returned. Her face absent any makeup, she looked much younger than her chronological age. I doubted she would appreciate the observation so I kept it to myself.
“I didn’t realize they made TVs this big. It looks like something you’d see in an action movie when all the spy guys have to have covert discussion with their counterparts in the enemy state.”
“I spend a lot of time down here lately. My parents don’t even pay attention to the credit card bills so I figured … .” She shrugged again.
I squashed down the uncharitable poor-little-rich-girl thought that popped into my head. I knew my life wouldn’t have been better with Leila even if we’d had this kind of money. Plus, it’s not as if Aja had chosen her life.
“So you spend a lot of time by yourself or is anyone joining you?”
The thumb popped back into her mouth as her eyes sidled away. It made me wonder if she was even as old as I assumed she was. Seventeen was okay to leave alone for a bit. Fourteen? Not so much.
“Alone. Mostly since I broke up with Damian. He’s the one … he’s kind of not letting go.”
“Damian is who you thought I might have seen when I arrived?”
She nodded.
Okay, I’d been here twenty minutes and we’d finally gotten somewhere. Aside from the shit ton of money her grandfather made and that she had flighty, irresponsible parents.
“You broke up with Damian because?”
She shrugged again.
“Aja, listen. I want to help you. I told you I would and I’m here when you called, but you need to do your part. Did he cheat on you? Did you get underwater with schoolwork? Did you just change your mind and decide ‘nope, not the guy for me’? What happened?”
“He got weird. He started hanging out with some new people. We’re both seniors, but he dropped all his old friends at school. Then he stopped coming to school. He ignored my texts.”
I nodded. Okay, we were making progress. Teen boy acts like teen boy. Teen girl gets sick of his shit.
“Had you two, you know … ?”
Her eyes got wide. “Why would you ask that?”
“Sometimes when guys get what they want, they take off. Which is stupid to me because if you’ve gotten it once, your odds of continuing to get it only increase,” I rambled.
“Okay, no. And ew.” She pulled her hands up inside the sleeves. “It’s weird that you’d even ask.”
“It seemed germane to the topic. I’m sorry if I offended you.”
“I’m not offended. It’s just weird talking to a stranger about sex.”
A stranger? I’d come when she asked me to without asking why, but I was a stranger? I mean, yeah, I was, but still, I was here.
“You’ve heard the two worst things that have happened to me. I shared that with a room full of strangers. We may not know each other well, but I think I’ve earned some trust by sharing my own personal and embarrassing stories.”
She smiled for the first time since I’d arrived. “Yeah, you were kind of a dork giving your testimony or whatever it’s called.”
Ouch. This girl had no idea how to relate to people. Or Ben was just really well-versed in social niceties.
“Okay, so he started acting weird and you broke up with him.”
She flopped back down on the football field of dark fabric and jammed a faux fur pillow under her head. Good thing she’d scrubbed all the makeup off or I would have lost sight of her in the black void.
“And then weird stuff started happening. The doorbell would ring in the middle of the night. The phone would ring an hour later.”
Immature but nothing too scary.
“Someone wrote bitch on my locker.”
Could be labeled a prank but vandalism nonetheless.
“Then I found the garage door open one morning when I know I had shut it.”
That was a little more troubling.
“Then one day I came home from school and all the pillows on my bed had been cut open and there were feathers everywhere.”
And we have a crazy-ass stalker move for the win.
“Did you call the cops?”
“What would I tell them?”
“That someone had broken into your house and gone into the room you sleep and destroyed the pillows you sleep on.”
She made a face. “That’s when I decided to go to the class.”
I had the urge to shake her. “Aja, someone breaking in is serious enough, but cutting up pillows … your pillows … is a threat. You’re alone here. In this giant house. I don’t want to scare you … except I really do. Anything could happen to you. There could be someone in this house right now.”
I couldn’t tell if she got paler but she looked freaked out. I mean, hell, I was freaked out and I was armed. That pillow thing was some obsessive horror movie shit.
“Here’s what I am going to do. I’m going to search the whole house. You’re going to come with me to direct me. If we don’t see anything, we call a locksmith and get every lock in this place changed today. We’ll light up your parents’ credit card good. Okay?”
She nodded, eyes glassy and wider than I would have guessed they could have gotten.
“Are you freaked out?” I knew she was, but I needed her to take this seriously. “Do you think if we called your parents, they’d come h
ome?”
I could see her calculating. Jesus, she didn’t know. She wasn’t sure if a PI called her parents and told them their daughter was being harassed if they’d come to her rescue. That truly sucked. Leila was a flake but she’d be stalking through the house with a baseball bat behind Dad and have to be pulled off anybody who hurt me.
“Okay, let’s worry about that later.”
I could tell by the look on her face she’d decided they would not and that meant if I wanted to call the cops in officially, Aja would fight me. Despite them not having her back, she’d have theirs. Dammit, being a kid was not like on TV.
“Let’s go look around. We got this, kid.” I’d switched from treating her (mostly) like Nancy would have and gone straight into Dad.
I needed that in case we did stumble across this ex who had some spectacularly bad decision-making skills.
I tried to walk up the stairs normally but with Aja pressed up against my back we were in Scooby Doo territory before we even left the basement.
“Why aren’t we starting in the basement since we’re already here?” she whispered.
“A top-down approach is best. We don’t want to drive anyone to the top floor where there’s no escape. People tend to get panicked when they’re trapped. Panicky people do stupid, dangerous things.”
“But what if he’s already upstairs?”
And that was the rub, but you had to start somewhere and I was trained to start top down so that’s what we were doing.
“Then he can run downstairs and leave and hopefully he’s smart enough to stop the crap he’s pulling.”
We crept through the door to the foyer and circled up the stairs to the main hall. I reached back and pulled the snap free on the holster pocket. I wasn’t about to search gun in hand. That was an unnecessary escalation. I was damn well going to have the weapon available though.
Aja gasped. “Are you going to shoot him?”
“Only if I have to. Worst-case scenario.”
She pondered that for a minute. “How do you know if it’s worst case?”
Oh, sweetie, I thought. You know.
“If someone’s trying to kill you. Or me.”
She didn’t seem to have any more questions but she pressed up against me a little tighter. I didn’t think the dumbass kid was here and maybe I should have done a better job of downplaying that situation, but I was gratified that she finally seemed to be taking it seriously. A little guilt crept in that I was causing her more emotional trauma—she was already dealing with being neglected by her parents—but if it saved her life, I was willing to deal with a little guilt.
We took the final step up the main hall and I looked at it stretched toward a large picture window that provided a view of the sea of grass that comprised the front lawn. The hall turned and continued to the right of the expanse of glass. Another giant window behind us gave a view of the even larger backyard and the next house over. I’d need to interview the neighbors but knew no one saw anything. The people who lived in these kinds of houses paid the price for comfort, privacy, and the illusion of safety. And a good school for their neglected kids.
There were half a dozen doors spaced out evenly. There were probably an even number down the next hallway.
“Are these all bedrooms?” I asked Aja, quietly.
“No, those two are bathrooms and that one is a laundry closet.” She pointed out the doors.
“Okay, you said this is the main hall. There’s another floor above? Bathrooms, closets up there too?”
She nodded. “One of each. The closet’s really more of a storage room.”
There were dozens of places for someone to hide. Between ensuite bathrooms and walk-in closets, it was going to take me at least an hour to work my way down from the attic to the basement. And Aja spending the majority of her time in the basement meant a family of psychos could have set up in the attic and she’d never even have heard them. I wasn’t about to walk her up there and trap us both.
I opened the door to the laundry closet and cleared the space. I shoved her inside, ignoring the shock on her face. I held my finger up to my lips. I took my phone out and waggled it. She pulled hers out of one voluminous hoodie pocket and showing it to me, nodded.
I leaned in, whispering. “If you hear anything that sounds like a commotion, you hustle your ass out of this house and call 911. Out first then call. From the middle of the street.”
I dug into my pocket and pulled out my keys. “Better yet, get in my truck, lock the doors, start it, and then call.”
She nodded again. I shut the door. I had slipped back into cop mode. I wondered, as I walked toward the window and around the corner to see the stairs up to the attic space, if I was ever going to lose that situational awareness that clicked on when I needed it most. I hoped not. It came in handy.
The door to the attic stairs was slightly ajar. Out of Aja’s sightline, I took the Glock out and swung the door open. It was an awkward set up with the door open, it blocked the hallway. Good.
The staircase was longer than I’d expected. When I got to the top I saw why: the stairs ended directly under the peak of the roof. The ceiling sloped down at intervals giving the room what I was sure the salesperson called a “cozy esthetic,” as if a house finishing at more than five thousand square feet was capable of being cozy, but really made it look as if a drunk had designed the floor plan. The room was sparsely and oddly furnished, given the style and quantity in other rooms. A daybed was pushed up against the wall in between two windows and there was a small, almost child-sized nightstand with a lamp on it. The bed was covered with a quilt and it wasn’t rumpled.
There were cushions in the narrow dormer windows on either side of the daybed. They made the room feel even more designed for elves because there was no way a normal person was climbing up in one of those things to do anything. Except maybe clean them—they were in desperate need. That was also odd because the rest of the house that I’d seen was spotless, including the basement. In absence of any color variations down there though, the room could have been swathed in buckets of blood and even a forensic team would miss the signs.
The room seemed like half the size it should have been. Aja had told me there was a storage closet so I poked my head around the half wall guarding against a fall down the stairs and saw the door. I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly as I tried to slow my heartbeat. It had begun racing without me noticing it.
There was likely nothing out of the ordinary in the storage room. Boxes, maybe some of those plastic containers full of holiday decorations, a garment rack or two storing out-of-season clothing. I put my hand on the knob. Another few breaths, slow and deliberate. My heartbeat was a loud thump in my ears. At least it wasn’t a frantic whoosh but I had to get it under control. If I didn’t, I wasn’t safe with a gun.
The knob turned easily and I gently pulled the door open. I stopped and stepped to the left. Flicking the light switch up and flattening myself against the wall, I anticipated a rush from the storage room. Nothing. I counted to five and pushed the door open with my foot. Nothing. I gave it another five count before I craned my neck to look in the room. Empty. No lunatic with bloodlust in his eyes. No nothing. The room was completely devoid of anything. I thought back. Had Aja said anything about there being anything stored in the closet or had I assumed? I was startled out of my thoughts by a thump. Aja’s scream followed a second later and stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
Chapter
8
I pounded down the stairs and thumbed off the safety. I hit the hall with my right foot and planted to pivot and take the corner when I saw a flicker of motion out the picture window. Someone had just been in the driveway. Someone who had attacked the door and then heaved something through my windshield. Sonofabitch.
I didn’t have time to worry about who was outside. “Aja?”
I wasn�
�t relieved to see the door to the laundry room still shut. The thump I’d heard could have been the door slamming shut after someone grabbed her. My heart stuttered.
“Willa?” Aja’s voice, shaking and weak, came through the door just as my hand closed on the knob. I pulled it off and transferred the Glock to my left hand, sliding the safety back into place.
“It’s okay, Aja.” I was reassuring myself as much as her. I opened the right-side door, keeping the gun concealed by the left. “Are you okay?”
She was seated on the floor with the dryer door open blocking much of her body. Clever. Her terrified eyes peered over the top. “What was that noise?”
“Okay, from now on we stick together. You stay behind me while we go check the front door.” I had reasoned that the only thing capable of making a noise loud enough that it scared Aja into screaming two floors away and I could feel it three floors away was the front door. The thing was made of something impossibly heavy and thick, like redwood or unobtanium.
She shut the dryer and crawled out toward me. I kept an eye on the stair landing as I helped her up. She seemed smaller and shrank even further into herself when she saw the gun in my hand.
“We’re okay, Aja. I just want to make sure we stay that way.” Even if she didn’t agree, I wasn’t holstering it.
She pressed up against me even tighter than she had when we’d come up the stairs, and this time I was grateful for it. If I had to let her out of my sight being able to feel her, still alive, still breathing, making tiny whimpering sounds that flipped my stomach and reminded me how young and alone she was, eased my stress level.
We slipped down the stairs on proverbial little cat feet, our steps in sync. If we’d had music, we would have gotten tens from the celebrity judges.
The front door was shut but I could see the frame had bulged above the lock. The handle sticking out through my windshield had to be a mini sledge. A full one would have done more damage to the door and an axe would have gone right through the cheap wood of the decorative molding.