Quake

by Tracey Alvarez

  “Most rude,” he declared. “And I doubt he’ll have a job here after his behavior, though he may have been helping Theo reach his granddad’s, as you say.”

  Theo’s granddad. She swore, smacking herself on the forehead. “I’m so stupid.”

  “What?” Daniel said.

  “Theo’s last text to me said, ‘Going to Granddad’s house to check on him. Meet me there.’ Or something like that—but he definitely said granddad.” She could picture the text in her mind’s eye.

  “And?”

  She tried to just breathe, but her chest rattled with a shaky inhale. “Theo’s never called my dad Granddad. It’s been Pop ever since he was a baby.”

  They stood looking at each other, people brushing past them, children laughing, and the rhythmic squeak of a wheelbarrow trundling along the footpath.

  “Either Theo sent that text trying to tell me something or someone else sent it for him.” Her chest tightened under bands of constrictive fear. “Something’s not right. I need to go to the police.”

  Chapter 30

  Tuesday, July 27. 12:23 p.m. Seatoun, Wellington, New Zealand.

  * * *

  Sergeant Miller needed a solid eight-hour sleep or even a twenty-minute nap. That was Ana’s estimation soon after she finally reached the end of the line and approached the man hunched behind a makeshift desk. The police had set up a temporary headquarters at the local community center, transformed in the last few days into another emergency shelter. The man yawned again and tugged absently on his droopy mustache. His eyes, when they met hers after she’d blurted out her story, were rimmed red with fatigue.

  “Ms. Grace, in light of the extenuating circumstances and the vast number of displaced families in the immediate area, I think your worries that this teacher—Harrison Burbank, was it?”

  Ana nodded tersely.

  “That this teacher has harmed your son is perhaps a little…”

  Her eyes narrowed as she mentally supplied the next word for him. Crazy? Hysterical?

  “Premature, at this time.”

  Diplomatic as his words were, Ana knew when she was being humored. The constable they’d first spoken to had all but rolled his eyes at her story, and it was only by recognizing her name as a former criminal lawyer that she had been handed over to the weary Sergeant Miller.

  “What do you suggest I do, Sergeant?” Her voice could cut diamonds, but he affected not to notice.

  “You may want to wander over to your father’s house to see if he has actually ended up there.” He stared pointedly over her shoulder at the long line of people behind her waiting for their chance to talk to him. “Your son would’ve still been a bit shaken after his ordeal when he composed the text. It’s probably an innocent mistake.”

  A defensive flush heated her cheeks. When she’d informed him she hadn’t actually checked her father’s home yet, his tone had subtly changed to suggest that he thought her just another mother too frantic to think straight.

  She knew better. She knew her son.

  Ana braced her spine so straight she could feel every muscle and ligament tugging upward. “Thank you for your time, Sergeant Miller.”

  She stalked back through the rows of mattresses lining most of the available floor space. Daniel waited for her at the entrance doors, worry lines creasing his forehead. His eyes darkened when they connected with hers. She didn’t need to tell him things hadn’t gone well—he could read her expressions now.

  Pride cast aside, she stepped into his arms and clung to him.

  “We’ll find him,” he said simply.

  She believed him. Daniel Calder was a straightforward man who didn’t play power games and whom honesty appeared to be as much a part of him as his blue eyes. She’d no basis to question his integrity, so why couldn’t she trust the feelings of absolute rightness that surged through her as she pressed her face into his chest, absorbing his heartbeat?

  Tuesday, July 27. 12:46 p.m. Seatoun, Wellington, New Zealand.

  * * *

  “I’m pretty sure this street is less than a ten-minute walk from Dad’s place.” As they walked Ana glanced again at the scrap of paper the teacher had handed them. “Coincidence?”

  Ice pinged into his gut, sharp little shards that refused to melt. Though he didn’t want Ana’s imagination to kick into overdrive, he agreed with her. “Possibly.”

  Something didn’t feel right.

  “We’re playing connect the dots when we don’t know what half the dots are. If this teacher is the son of the woman who accused your dad of rape—and saying it sounds like something out of a bad made-for-TV movie—it doesn’t necessarily mean anything sinister.”

  But if Harrison was the kid she’d described from her past, Daniel wanted Ana well away from him. If it was the same kid he might know nothing about Ana’s father and what happened twenty-something years ago. On the flip side, if Patricia Burbank hadn’t kept the same code of silence as Ana’s family, how would Harrison feel about the man accused of raping his mother?

  Not too damn friendly, he suspected.

  It definitely wasn’t a situation he wanted Ana involved in.

  She huffed and quickening her stride to keep pace with his. “Why, if it’s all an innocent coincidence like Sergeant Miller suggested, don’t we check Dad’s house? I’m worried about him. Look, if this Harrison guy thinks my dad raped his mother…”

  She took a deep breath and he twitched. Could the woman read his mind now?

  A kaleidoscope of emotions swept across her face and he heard the dry click as she swallowed. “He could’ve gone with Theo to Dad’s house. Hell, if he’s been watching Dad, he already knew where to find him.”

  He skimmed his knuckles lightly down her cheek. “Since Harrison’s place is on the way to your dad’s, humor me, and let’s go there first. What’s the saying? Know thy enemy?”

  A short time later at the back door of the address noted on the scrap of paper, Daniel said, “This is called breaking and entering, isn’t it?”

  “Only if we get caught. I know a lot of lawyers.”

  He caught a glimmer of her smile from the shadows of the alcove they huddled in.

  Spiderwebs, strong enough to resist the earth’s violent shaking, spanned the corners between the veranda supports. The yard was unkempt, with weeds choking a few stunted fruit trees. Compared to the neatly mowed front yard, the neglect of the rear of the property was unsettling.

  Daniel’s internal radar gave a warning blip. He wants to keep the appearance of normality at the front; doesn’t care about the back where nosy neighbors can’t see.

  He’d been the one to approach the house first, in case Harrison had been at home, but no one answered the brittle shrill of the doorbell or his knocks on the front door. They’d cupped their hands against the window closest to the door, finding an empty living room. Nothing stirred inside and dust motes twisted and spun in the rays of sunlight drifting over an old velour La-Z-Boy, a big-screen television, and a coffee table with a few neatly stacked magazines.

  “I’ll go in first and check it out.” He kept his voice pitched low. “If you hear any sort of confrontation before I call you to come in—run—and this time don’t come back.” He cradled her jaw and studied her eyes. “I mean it.”

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  He tried the door handle and it squeaked under his fingers. Locked. He grabbed a seat cushion from an ancient deck chair, held it up to the frosted glass set into the back door, and punched it. A sharp crack sounded then glass shards tinkled onto the floor.

  “This is the breaking part of the exercise.” He reached through the gap and twisted the handle from the inside. The lock popped and the door swung open.

  The stench of rotting fruit smacked him like a physical barrier. He stepped inside and glanced around with a curled upper lip.

  “Guess he hasn’t been home in a while,” Ana murmured behind him.

  He stood in a small kitchen. The pitted linoleum below hi
s feet squeaked as he walked to a closed door on the other side of the kitchen.

  Daniel turned before he opened it, and cocked a gun-shaped finger at Ana. “Stay there,” he mouthed.

  The door led into a hallway with three closed rooms leading off it. The air had that claustrophobic closed-in smell, and sweat popped out on his forehead as he approached the first door. Odd creaks and ticks empty houses always made followed him down the hallway.

  His gut indicated he was alone in the house, but his heart rate still amped up a notch. Trespassing in a stranger’s home with no weapons other than his bare hands made him fidgety, but the thought that Harrison might somehow get past him to hurt Ana caused his adrenaline levels to spike even higher.

  Daniel turned the door handle to the first room and it swung open smoothly. Nothing adorned the wall except a large framed mirror. Exercise equipment and an array of dumbbells were evenly spaced around the room. He eased shut the door and moved onto the next, which turned out to be a bathroom, scrubbed clean and smelling faintly of pine disinfectant.

  The final door creaked open. The stench reached out and grabbed him around the throat. He recognized it instantly, wrenched back to his teenage years and the room he’d shared with his younger brother, Tony, who suffered from occasional night terrors. Daniel would jerk awake to the sounds of Tony thrashing and moaning, and the feral-smelling substance that poured off his brother during the attacks was more like squeezed-out fear than sweat.

  He backed away from the open door and strode back to the kitchen, the skin on his nape inching toward his scalp, hairs at rigid attention.

  Whoever slept in that room fought their demons during the night.

  Chapter 31

  Tuesday, July 27. 12:57 p.m. Seatoun, Wellington, New Zealand.

  * * *

  Ana had a wicked case of the heebie-jeebies.

  Aside from the obvious element of being in someone’s house without permission, a combination of things disturbed her.

  “I doubt he brings friends here to entertain,” she said, walking through the kitchen archway into the living room with the solo La-Z-Boy. “Does he consider this place home or just a place to stay?”

  Daniel followed her into the hallway and waited silently as she looked in the bathroom and the room with gym equipment.

  “He’s fastidiously clean for a man, that’s for sure,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “There’s nothing personal anywhere. No photos, books, or usual guy clutter.”

  “Guy clutter? Hey, guys don’t have clutter.”

  “Stuff, junk—whatever,” she argued. “Think about your home. I bet you’ve got family photos or art on your walls?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Junk mail on the counter? Sports gear, dirty washing, electronic gadgets, toolboxes, and half-finished projects left lying around?”

  “Also yeah. I get it.”

  “Wouldn’t a drama teacher have books on Shakespeare, heaps of theater posters and, I don’t know, at least this year’s school production of Les Misérables?”

  She wasn’t an expert on bachelors in their twenties by any means, but the ones she did know—her neighbors Jimmy and Adam were a case in point—exhibited aspects of their personality by the way they chose to decorate their homes.

  The owner of this home had all the personality of a beige wall.

  His bedroom revealed little more. A black comforter covered the bed, flanked by matching black nightstands and a solitary reading lamp. One chest of drawers sat in the corner, and a sliding mirrored door, half open, revealed closet space with a row of neatly pressed white shirts, black dress pants, and only a few more casual-looking items.

  “I bet you five bucks he irons his jeans, too,” she said wrinkling her nose at the stale, rank smell in the room.

  Ana headed toward a corner desk while Daniel slid open a nightstand drawer. God knew the thought of what the man kept beside his bed was enough to turn her stomach.

  The top of the desk was clear apart from a closed laptop. She pried the lid open, tapped the on button, and the computer whirred to life.

  “It’s probably password protected,” Daniel said behind her.

  “Probably.” While the laptop was booting up she flicked through the papers in an in-tray. Electric bill, cell phone account bill, council rates, a printed sheet of recycling pickup days, a paper flyer advertising a local teenager who’d mow lawns. Ordinary, everyday stuff. Somehow the simple task of running a household, the normality of it, gave her another dose of the heebie-jeebies.

  She glanced up at the laptop screen, the curser flicking, waiting for a password. Worth a crack. Grimacing, she slid open the desk’s top drawer. A bank-logoed checkbook sat on top of a hard-covered ledger. She shifted the checkbook aside and picked up the ledger, running her thumb over the leather cover. Expensive.

  She flipped it open to a random page in the middle. Cramped but painfully neat handwriting filled the page. There were no gaps or paragraph breaks, just an avalanche of words dumped line by line until there wasn’t any space left on the page. She narrowed her gaze and shifted the book closer then farther away from her face since she didn’t have her reading glasses with her. The tiny script blurred, and with a frustrated huff and a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure Daniel wasn’t watching her Mr. Magoo impression, she held the journal aloft and brought it in close until the letters clarified into words. Rage-filled words.

  Violent words.

  Words carved so harshly on the paper that many times the author’s pen had stabbed ink-bloody holes in the page.

  Ana’s gaze zeroed in on her father’s name and the journal fell from her fingers, landing facedown on the desk.

  * * *

  They were together today. Sitting in his pretty garden, the bitch lawyer sipping a glass of wine. He paid for her to go to law school so she could defend perverts like himself. Men who rape innocents and then pay a bitch lawyer like her to get them off. Fucking spoiled bitch.

  Ana’s throat locked down and Daniel squeezed her shoulder. She skimmed down the page, her name snagging her attention.

  My happy place, my utopia is to make that toxic old bastard suffer. Tie him up, force him to watch while I make Ana squeal and scream and weep. Then I’d strip her and fuck her without mercy like he did to my mother. Make him beg for her pathetic life then slice away every precious part of her and shove it down his lying throat. Payback.

  She slapped the book shut.

  Her eyes felt as if they were bulging out of her skull as blood pumped hotly behind her wide-open lids. This faceless man, this total stranger hated her and her father with a sick passion. Cold tendrils of nausea squirmed through her belly.

  “It’s him,” she whispered. “Oh God.”

  This time the book slipped from her numb fingers to the floor. Its pages splayed open and a solitary sheet of yellowed paper fluttered out. Robotically she bent down and picked up the book and the sheet of paper. The signature at the bottom caught her attention. She skimmed the page, bile rising in her throat as she read the scrawled writing.

  “What is it?”

  She couldn’t answer and instead allowed Daniel to take the page out of her hands. He read, his expression shifting from concern to cold fury as he, too, read the words.

  “Even in her suicide note Patricia Burbank was filling her son’s head with hatred toward us.” Ana couldn’t suppress a shudder as she looked up into Daniel’s eyes. “He blames my dad for everything.” Bitterness crept into her voice. “That woman’s put a target on my family again, this time aiming her son at us, rather than the law.”

  “I won’t let him hurt you.”

  Her heart lurched at the tenderness in his voice. “It’s not me I’m worried about. I think he’s taken advantage of this earthquake to go after Dad. And since he conveniently teaches at the same goddamned school as my son, I think Theo’s in his crosshairs, too.”

  “We’ll take this journal back to the sergeant. He’ll—”

 
“He’ll what?” she interrupted. “Assemble a task force in the midst of a national disaster on the basis that this man has written some insanely nasty stuff on paper?” She gentled her voice. “The legalities of how I even obtained Harrison’s journal aside, the red tape involved before anyone gets the ball rolling isn’t going to help Theo and Dad.”

  His gaze speared her to the spot with intensity. “I can go to his house, see if they’re there. If that son of a bitch has them, I’ll deal with it. With him.”

  “You can’t go after them alone. It’s my son we’re talking about.” Her voice cracked like cheap porcelain. “Harrison fantasizes about killing me in front of my father, so there’s hope that if he’s got Theo and Dad, they’re still okay. He’s waiting for me to arrive at Dad’s but if he sees you creeping around, he could kill them both.”

  Daniel paced, anger crackling off him like static electricity. He whipped around eyes glittering like frosted sapphires. “So what, you plan to hand yourself over to him tied up in a big red bow?”

  “No.” In frustration, she strode over to him and grabbed his forearm. Iron would have felt warmer and more pliable. “You said yourself we don’t know what we’re up against yet. If Harrison is holed up at Dad’s house then the only advantage we have is that there’s two of us and one of him—and he doesn’t know about you.”

  “I won’t lose you, Ana. I, ah…damn.” His jaw bunched and he raked his hair off his forehead, sending her a look that was part frustration and part something more. Something suspiciously like love.

  Don’t say it, she thought, pressing her fingertips to his lips. Don’t say it out loud and make it real, make me have to deal with it and say it, too.

  On tiptoe, she wrapped a hand around his neck and pulled his head down to her level, touching her lips to his.