Hold Me Close

by Rosalind James

  “Kayla!” He was shouting as soon as he walked inside. His voice came back to him, echoing against immaculately dusted modern furniture, metallic-framed prints, and pristine white carpeting. He strode from room to room, throwing open doors, for once not caring that they were closed after him as he preferred. He searched the entire house, checked the deck, but she wasn’t there.

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket, began to dial, then hesitated. Phone. He brought up the tracking program instead, but didn’t take in what he was seeing for a moment.

  721 Morrison, the display said, and the circle was blinking in the midst of a familiar pattern of winding streets.

  Her phone was here? It couldn’t be. He insisted that she carry it at all times. She knew better than to leave it behind.

  He didn’t have time to look for it, and there was no point anyway. He pulled up the photo of the sign from the Laundromat and dialed the number.

  “Yeah,” he said when a woman answered. “Hi.” He blew out a breath and began. Anxious, that was the tone. A concerned husband. Which was no more than the truth. He needed to know where she was. He needed it. “It’s my wife and son. I left them at the Laundromat this morning, and when I went back to pick them up, their supplies were still there, but they were gone. I’m so worried that they’ve met with some kind of accident. It’s not like her not to tell me if her plans change. I’m wondering, can I meet you there?”

  “What, because your wife went someplace without telling you?” It was a smoker’s rasp. “Dream on.”

  “I’ve got the police coming as well,” he lied. “I’m Alan Yeomans, I’m a county prosecutor, and there’s been a serious threat made against me recently. The police have been giving me extra protection, but I never dreamed that they’d go after my wife. I blame myself, and I’m so—so worried.” His voice came out choked. Pinched. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. I know you’ll want to cooperate.”

  She met him, of course. He’d known she would. “Police” had done it. She even, after some grumbling, backed up the security tape to eight o’clock and ran it.

  Alan stood, his hands gripping the edge of her ratty metal desk, and watched the grainy black-and-white figures, one small and one a bit bigger, coming through the door lugging their burdens. Saw her set down the basket and hug that sullen little prick for a minute, babying him the way she did. She pulled something out of her purse and tossed it into the basket, and then she’d picked up the laundry bag and walked out the door.

  “Looks like they left,” the woman, a cynical old bat with a frizzy mass of hair, said with a shrug. “Like I said. No business of mine.”

  He could barely speak through the familiar red mist. He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped the program. And there the white circle was, blinking on a new address this time.

  Her phone was in the car. She’d left it in the laundry basket. She’d known.

  “The outside,” he said. “You have a camera on the outside, too.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Show me.”

  She must have seen something in his face, because she bit back whatever she’d been going to say, shrugged, did some fiddling, and brought up another image.

  “Back it up,” he ordered. He saw a car pulling in, the figures getting out. Himself, and the two of them. They walked out of view of the camera, and then he got back into the car and left.

  “Time-lapse,” the woman said as the clock at the base of the picture ticked over five minutes. “Only photographs when something happens.”

  The two figures coming out, then. Visible for only seconds, and then . . . nothing.

  “Where did they go?” he asked.

  “Who knows? That’s all the camera we’ve got. The lot in front of the place. We ain’t exactly the vault of the Louvre Museum here.” She pronounced it like “Loove,” and he felt a flash of irritation even through the anger that was burning him now.

  She’d left him. She’d taken her clothes and her son, dumped her phone, and run. This wasn’t an impulse. This was a plan. A plan to make a fool of him, to disrupt his whole life. Exactly like his bitch of an ex-wife.

  Diana had put him through the same dance, just because he’d pushed her around a little—after she’d pushed him. She’d known it, too. She’d always apologized the next day, just like Kayla had, because she’d known—they’d known—that they’d been wrong, too, that they’d provoked him.

  And yet it was supposed to be his fault. A woman could tease and flirt with other men in front of you, could talk back when she knew you’d had a rough day, when she could see you were that close to snapping, and you were supposed to just stand there and take it? Well, that wasn’t how he’d been raised, and he wasn’t going to let some PC bullshit run his life.

  He hadn’t been able to find Diana, but after a while, it hadn’t mattered, because he’d found Kayla instead. Kayla was his, and he wasn’t letting her go.

  What if she’d run off with somebody?

  The rage rose at the thought of somebody else’s hands and mouth on her. But—no. Not possible. He’d checked her phone every day, had known exactly where she’d gone, and he’d had cameras in the house. He’d learned his lesson with Diana.

  He’d find her. There was no way she was going to be able to hide for long. He’d find her, and he’d bring her home.

  HEADED OUT

  They made the drive north in near silence, starting out in the backseat of Pam’s car. The back, so they could duck if they needed to. When a Highway Patrol cruiser had pulled out to pass them on the highway, she had ducked, and she’d pulled Eli down with her.

  After two hours, Kayla climbed out in the parking lot of a Chevron station in McCall, where Pam was turning them over to the woman who would take them the rest of the way. A hasty trip to the restrooms with Eli, and she was hefting Kurt’s saddle and the laundry bag into the bed of a pickup driven by a sturdy, red-haired woman.

  Time to go. More than time.

  “Good-bye,” Pam told her. “And good luck.”

  “Thank you,” Kayla managed to say. The back of her neck was prickling, and she wanted to get into the pickup and drive, but she had to say this first. “Thank you so much.” It wasn’t enough, but it was all she had right now.

  “It’ll get better,” Pam said, as if she knew. “They’ll get you set up on the other end. You’ll be all right.” She hesitated a moment. “I’d like to give you a hug, if that’s OK.”

  “Uh . . .” Kayla blinked.

  “We ask,” Pam said, “because the last thing you need right now is somebody touching you without your permission. That’s yours to give, or to withhold. Either way is fine.”

  She said it gently. Not blaming, not asking Kayla why she’d stayed, why she’d given somebody that kind of permission. Permission to hurt her.

  Maybe Pam knew that it hadn’t been a choice. Maybe she knew that it had started out good, that Alan had seemed like everything she needed, like her savior. Hers and Eli’s. Maybe she guessed that it had come on slowly, that he’d known how to make her feel like it was her fault when it happened, how to make her take the blame. That, by the time there’d been no denial possible, she’d been out of options.

  She spoke over the lump in her throat. “I’d like a—” She had to stop, breathe, and try again. “I’d like a hug.”

  Pam put gentle arms around her and squeezed briefly, and Kayla trembled a little with the effort not to cry. Pam must have felt the wince Kayla couldn’t quite suppress, too, because she stepped back and said, “If you need a doctor, ask for one.”

  “I don’t need a doctor.” Yesterday had been the worst, and it didn’t hurt to breathe anymore, which meant that Alan hadn’t broken a rib. It was only bruising, and it would get better.

  Pam turned to Eli and asked, “May I hug you, too?”

  “Uh . . . OK.”

>   He got his own brief squeeze, and then Pam got into her silver car and backed away. A Good Samaritan for her own reasons, reasons Kayla hadn’t asked about, because, to her shame, she couldn’t care about anybody else right now, and she definitely couldn’t hear anybody’s sad story. She was so close to the edge, the faintest nudge would have sent her all the way over into tears and panic, and she couldn’t afford either.

  “Time to go,” the red-haired woman said, and Kayla nodded.

  “I’m Trudy,” she said when they were in the truck and heading out of the parking lot. “I’ll be taking you the rest of the way. Be about three and a half hours, so we’ll need to stop for lunch. I’m guessing you two haven’t eaten.”

  Lunch. It was hard to think about anything as normal as lunch, and Kayla wasn’t hungry anyway. She hadn’t felt hungry for months, had rarely been able to settle down enough to eat a full meal, especially not with Alan’s eyes on her over dinner. Every mouthful had been an effort to chew and swallow, had seemed to stick in her throat on the way down.

  Both she and Eli were thin now. He hadn’t done too well on his own dinners. He hadn’t been buying enough lunch, either, because he’d been saving, one painfully hoarded dollar bill at a time. Another wave of guilt hit her at the thought. Eli needed to eat.

  “Is there someplace quiet?” she asked. “Someplace where . . .”

  The woman glanced at her. “You afraid he’s going to be looking?”

  “No. I know he’s going to be looking. And he’s a . . .” She had begun to shake again, and she wrapped her arms around herself to stop it. “He’s a prosecutor. He knows all the cops, and he told me . . . he told me they could find me, and that they would. Anytime, anywhere. And I know he’s right. It’s like a . . . a club. I have to be careful.”

  Trudy thought a minute. “OK, then. Plan B.” She took a left, away from the highway, and headed out of town. “My place. Lunch.”

  “Except,” Kayla said, “if there’s a thrift shop. I need some different clothes. That could be a boy’s, maybe.”

  Trudy glanced across at her. “I’ve got a fifteen-year-old son. Pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Safer than stopping in town.”

  “Yes,” Kayla said. “Yes, please.”

  So Trudy drove them to her modest house outside the city limits, where they ate canned tomato soup and tuna sandwiches, and she and Eli both finished everything on their plates. Then they climbed into the pickup truck with Trudy again and headed north.

  Not two women and a boy. A woman, a boy, and a skinny young teenager in oversized basketball shorts, a too-big T-shirt hanging loose and low, a baseball cap with the brim pulled down, and red plastic flip-flops. The three of them drove on, leaving Boise far behind, and at last, Kayla began to breathe again.

  IN PARADISE

  Luke stepped out onto the deck with his second cup of coffee and waited for Daisy to trot through the sliding-glass door before shutting it again. He set the cup down on the wooden patio table, bent to give the dog an absentminded pat, then stood and stretched his arms over his head, looking with satisfaction toward the hills to the north.

  Blue sky, warm sun, nothing much to do, and a whole long day to do it in. This was the upside of being a high school principal instead of a farmer like his brother. It wasn’t his harvest, and it wasn’t his job to get it in. Maybe he’d go out to Hayes Park and take a swim in the reservoir. He’d bet Daisy liked to swim.

  Somebody was moving in down in Frogtown. Into one of the crappy apartments in the shabby firetrap right below him, because there was a pickup pulled up outside with furniture in the back. August first, which made sense. Moving day. Too early in the year for students, though, who were the usual tenants down there.

  As he watched, a petite woman in shorts and a blue T-shirt came out of the front door, the sunlight glinting on her short, pale-blonde hair. She climbed into the bed of the pickup, and, with the help of an older woman on the ground, began to shove a twin mattress out of it. A kid was there, too, grabbing hold along with the older woman. The blonde climbed awkwardly down, and they started to carry the mattress into the building.

  He should probably go down there and give them a hand. Didn’t look like there was anybody else to do it.

  “Come on, girl,” he told Daisy. He left his coffee where it was, jumped the steps, and headed out the gate and down the dirt path to the bottom of the hill.

  By the time he got there, the three of them were at the pickup again. There was another mattress in there, and the older woman was on the ground, beginning to pull at it. He recognized her. Sarah Clark, the mother of a couple of former students. Not her place, obviously, because the Clarks lived over on Second Street, and the other woman wasn’t her kid. She wasn’t a former student, because Luke would have remembered her.

  He went to take the end of the mattress from Sarah. “Morning. Looks like you could use a hand.”

  “Hi, Luke.” Sarah surrendered the bulky thing to him and stood back to let the other woman climb down, then reached for a cardboard carton. “Yeah, moving’s always a job, even when you don’t have much.”

  She headed into the building, and Luke barely heard her anyway, because he was looking across the mattress at the blonde.

  Her hair was cut short and choppy, with bits of it sticking out at odd angles. It should have looked funny, but instead, it just looked cute. Charming, he’d call it. Must be some new style. He liked long hair on women, along with just about every other guy on the planet, but he liked this, too. Maybe because it went with her face, not to mention her pretty little body.

  Because she was just . . . adorable. No other word for it. A delicately drawn face, all broad cheekbones and wide-set gray eyes that made him want to keep looking into them. A nose dusted with just a few freckles, and the most kissable mouth he’d ever seen. Lush and generous, the upper lip curving up into a perfect bow, the lower one fuller, making you want to take a lick, and then a bite. Her T-shirt was tucked into baggy shorts cinched with a broad, battered leather belt that made her waist look even tinier, and her curves were delicate, too, but so pretty.

  She couldn’t be more than five-three. She was, in fact, about the most feminine thing he could imagine, and something ancient in him was responding to that call.

  She had some sort of mark on her cheek, though. Not a birthmark, not in those shades of black and brown. A bad bruise, he realized with shock.

  All of that went through his mind in an instant, while her gray eyes met his and widened.

  “Hi,” he managed to say. He remembered to breathe, and to smile. “Looks like you could use a hand.” And then he remembered that he’d already said that.

  “That’s OK. We’ve got it.” She nodded to the kid, and he stepped up next to Luke, took the end of the mattress, and began to heave it toward the door.

  He lost his grip halfway there, though. The heavy mattress thumped down onto dusty concrete, and the woman said, “Shoot.”

  Luke stepped forward and picked up his end again. “How about bringing in one of those chairs?” he asked the boy. “I can get this.”

  The boy’s gaze flew to his—mother? Sister? She didn’t look old enough to be anybody’s mother, let alone the mother of a kid of this age. The boy didn’t speak, but the woman did.

  “Go get the chair,” she told him, and he went. Could he even talk?

  Luke headed toward the building. Slowly, so she could manage her end. Through the open door of the ground-floor apartment on the left, and straight into the living room. A small space, and a dark one, with a couple of cheap aluminum-framed windows at the front and the outside wall hung with dented miniblinds. Ratty beige carpeting showed every stain left by years of students and years of parties, and the furniture wasn’t much better. A gaudy, yellow-flowered couch that they must have moved in on an earlier trip, and a cheap wooden coffee table marked with white rings left by long-ago dri
nks. A fairly sad sight, all in all.

  Sarah edged around the two of them and headed out to the truck again, and the woman on the other end of the mattress spoke. “In back,” she told Luke, nodding with her chin toward a door that must be the bedroom, because there weren’t too many other options.

  Luke led the way in there and helped her set the mattress on a box spring next to the other bed. It was a little tough to maneuver. Once you got the beds in there, there wasn’t much space.

  “Thank you,” the woman said when they’d set it down. Her voice was quiet, too. Soft and sweet, just like the rest of her. Oh, man.

  “No problem. Like I said, we’re neighbors.” Luke stepped back and let her lead the way out of the apartment.

  Petite, that was definitely the word. Pretty legs, although there was another bruise on the back of her right thigh, an ugly swath of black and blue. She’d been in a car accident, maybe. Something bad.

  They were out in the sunshine again, and the boy had found Daisy, or Daisy had found him. The dog did a play bow in front of him, uttered a couple of sharp barks, then ran a few steps away from him and turned back, barking again. The boy was smiling, although he looked like he didn’t know quite what to do with her.

  “She wants you to play chase with her,” Luke told him. “Or throw a ball for her.”

  “I don’t have a ball,” the boy said. So he could talk.

  “She’ll take a pat, too.” Luke snapped his fingers, and Daisy came over to him and sat at his feet. The boy reached out a tentative hand, and Daisy was right there, leaning into it.

  “I like her eye,” the boy said.

  “Yep. She’s got a clown face, doesn’t she?” Luke said. “Got a clown personality, too. Probably should’ve named her Bozo.”