The Big Keep: A Lena Dane Mystery (Lena Dane Mysteries)

by Melissa F. Olson

  “What do you mean?”

  My voice shook, and I fought a losing battle for control of it. “I can’t keep it safe. Safe from armed robbers or, or child molesters or city buses or– or–” I sobbed, “or growing up without a mom. I can’t promise a child safety from any of those things.” The dam went from a steady leak to an all-out burst, and I cried openly, harder than I had in years. Tears rained down my face and slid into my the neck of my hospital gown, making me shiver.

  “Oh, Selena.” He reached across so he could take both of my hands, warming them up. “What happened to Amanda and Carrie and those teenage girls, and you, when Cleary came after you—that won’t happen to our baby.”

  “No?” I suddenly needed space more than anything, so I disentangled myself and carefully stood up on the other side of the bed, trying to get my anger back, trying to feel anything but this desperate fear for our baby. Toby watched me struggle to rise and didn’t try to stop me. Bully for him. “You don’t know that. We can’t promise it. And now wherever I go, whatever I do, I’ll be vulnerable. People can hurt the baby to get to me, and hurting me will always hurt the baby. When it’s born my heart will be out there, for the taking. How can I live like that and be who I am?”

  “Maybe you can’t,” he conceded. “Maybe you’re going to have to...evolve.”

  I looked away, out the window. My hospital room was probably on the sixth or seventh floor. I could see a busy intersection below me, bathed in sunlight and framed by palm trees. What a strange city.

  “I don’t know if I want to evolve,” I said softly. “I don’t know if I’m ready.”

  Behind me I heard Toby circle the bed so he could stand next to me, not touching me yet. He really did know me. “We’re pregnant right now, Selena,” he said, not unkindly. “Ready doesn’t matter anymore.”

  I sniffled and nodded. Very gently, he came up behind me and wrapped an arm around my good shoulder, kissing my hair. “Between the two of us, we will keep this baby safe,” Toby said, his free hand playing with my matted hair. “After all, I’m not entirely useless myself.”

  I sniffled again, wiping the sleeve of my hospital gown across my beat-up face. Classy. I turned around to face him, putting my back to the city. “Well, I don’t know that I’d go that far,” I said gravely.

  He smiled as if he was surfacing from deep underwater, a smile of relief. “See, that’s the abusive wife I know and love.”

  “Shut up.”

  Toby threw his head back and laughed, and when he was done his face turned serious. “I know you’re scared. I’m scared, too. But we will figure out how to do this, Selena, I promise you. First, though,” he dropped to his knees, kneeling in front of me, “I want to say hello to my kid.”

  He smoothed out my hospital gown, and laid his warm head against my belly. My fingers tangled into his hair, and we stayed like that, him listening to the mystery inside my body, until I remembered how to breathe.

  22. It’s Good News This Time

  Toby asked me for a promise, too. Two, actually: he wanted me to stay on desk duty until the baby arrived, and to stay away from Jason Anderson’s murder case. Neither promise was easy. The guy had attacked me, attacked our baby, and he was just out there now. How could I let that stand? At the same time, though, I knew that both of Toby’s requests were completely reasonable. So I gave him the right answer, even if I wasn’t sure I believed it. I owed him and the baby at least that much.

  “I promise,” I whispered.

  A few hours after our fight, I sent Toby to the cafeteria for dinner so I could call Nate Christianti in private. No one had told him about Jason Anderson while I was unconscious, and despite my earlier cowardice I thought I should be the one to break the news about his biological father.

  It was eight o’clock in Chicago, so I dialed Nate at home. “Lena?” Nate said immediately.

  “Hey, Nate.”

  “What happened? Peter said you got beat up, but who was it? It wasn’t Jason, was it?”

  I exhaled. “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Is the baby okay?”

  I smiled into the phone. “Yeah, honey, the baby’s fine. Probably thanks to you.” I paused, but there was just no good way to say this. “Nate, listen, I have to tell you something, and it’s not good.”

  “Um, okay...” His voice was guarded again, the tone he’d used when we first met.

  “Jason Anderson is dead, Nate. I’m so sorry.”

  There was a long silence. “Are you still there?” I said.

  “Are you sure it’s him?” The kid’s voice was barely more than a whisper.

  “Yes, I am. I saw his body myself.”

  Another pause, so long that I checked my phone’s screen to make sure the connection was still good. “Nate?”

  “Can we...can we talk about this later?” he managed to say.

  I could tell he was holding back tears. My heart twisted. “Of course. I’ll come see you as soon as we get home, okay?”

  The phone clicked off.

  I spent two more days in the hospital for observation, partly because of the baby, and partly because I’d been hit a bunch of times in the head. It gave me a lot of time to play cards with Toby or Cristina, read a trashy novel from the gift shop, and think about the promise I’d made to my husband.

  The irony of the whole thing was, before I was attacked at the restaurant, it hadn’t even occurred to me to keep digging into what had happened to Jason Anderson. I was supposed to find him so he could be a guardian for Nate. Now that that was off the table, my part in the case had felt like it was over.

  However, now that I’d had my pregnant ass handed to me by, presumably, the guy who’d killed Jason, I was pissed. Pissed enough to pull the IV out of my arm, find my shoes, and go kick the shit out of that guy. I was not, however, stubborn enough to trade my marriage for revenge.

  I just had to keep reminding myself of that, over and over.

  Toby was wary of me for the rest of my hospital stay, as though he suspected I might be waiting for him to look away so I could sneak out and solve the case. And it was hard to be offended about that, partly since I was the one who’d screwed up, and partly because under all the emotional turmoil and worry about my –our– health, anyone could see that Toby was crazy, over-the-moon thrilled about the baby. He tried to contain it, but I caught the little smiles he would direct at my stomach whenever he thought I wasn’t looking. Unlike me, Toby was thinking ahead, and he liked what he saw. I knew I needed to make peace with my promise to him.

  On Friday morning I finally got a clean bill of health from the doctors, and we took a cab straight to LAX. My face looked like a tenderized beef roast, and I walked stiffly from the broken ribs, but I managed to keep it together, thanks to the Vicadin that the doctor had allowed me to take in spite of the pregnancy.

  I hung out in the home office for much of Saturday, catching up on paperwork and writing up a report for Nate. After lunch I called his house, and Tom told me he’d gone to the comic book shop to hang out with my dad for a couple of hours, which made me smile. I printed out my final page, gathered a little stack, and told Toby I needed to run to Great Dane. It was time to close up business with my current lead client. Toby would have preferred I stay in bed all weekend, but we’d had several long talks, both in the hospital and on the plane, and he’d agreed not to treat me like a china doll as long as I agreed to be careful with myself. And visiting a comic book store wasn’t exactly a dangerous undertaking, even in my condition. Conditions, plural, if you counted my recent injuries.

  Chicago was being tormented that afternoon by a freezing wind and overcast skies which threatened an early-spring thunderstorm, so I was clutching a blue rain slicker to my chest as I jogged from Rory’s parking spot around to the front door of Great Dane. The familiar old bell jangled as I opened the door, and I saw a huge crowd of people packing the store’s aisles. Saturdays could get busy.

  “Firecracker!” my dad called from his position b
ehind the register. He asked a customer to hang on for a moment, and circled the counter to give me a careful hug. The customers near the front of the store all stared at me. My bruises were in full Technicolor bloom, and there was no mistaking them for anything but serious injuries.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I said, accepting the hug even though it made my shoulder ache. “It’s good to see you, but I need to talk to Nate.”

  “He offered to restock the Marvel wall for me,” my dad replied. “Check the back room.”

  I trudged down the aisle, waving at Aaron, who was helping an older man with a bad toupee, and dodging several engrossed customers who were focused on their books. Right in front of the store room door there was a plump teenager toting a small five year-old boy – probably her brother. She was paging through Alan Moore’s “From Hell,” and I hoped the little boy couldn’t read yet. Or, you know, understand pictures.

  I murmured an “excuse me” and went into the back room, enjoying the immediate calm. “Nate?”

  He was in the far back of the store, piling graphic novels onto a wheelie cart. “Lena!” he yelped, abandoning the project to race over. He pulled up short in front of me, all but dancing in place.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, smiling. “You can hug me, just not too tight.” His face stretched into a shy grin and he reached his arms carefully around me. “I’m glad to see you, too,” I said into his hair.

  He finally pulled back to see my face. “You look...are you okay? Can I get you anything? Water? Ice pack?” His words sparked out of his mouth so fast that I actually took a step back.

  “I’m fine,” I assured him. “Can we sit down for a second?”

  “Oh, yeah, of course.” He went over to a stack of folding chairs my father keeps for when he has readings and opened up two of them.

  “Thanks,” I said, sitting down in relief. Moving around was a pain, literally. “I just wanted to come check on you, and see how you’re handling things.” I pulled a file out of my big carryall bag. “I also have your paperwork: a case summary and bill, although there’s no rush.”

  “Uh...thanks,” he said, taking the file gingerly, like I’d handed him a dead hamster.

  “Do you want to talk about the case, or do you just want to look at that later?” I asked gently.

  Nate tilted his head, thinking it over. It was my father’s gesture, and I suppressed a smile. “I guess I want to know what happened to him,” Nate said softly.

  I nodded. “I can’t answer that with any certainty, but it looks like your father was working on a screenplay about some very dangerous people. He wanted it to be as realistic as possible, I guess, so he started asking questions that were not so smart to ask. And the dangerous people found out. He was murdered, Nate.”

  “When?”

  I hesitated. I did not want Nate hating himself for not hiring a PI sooner, but I couldn’t really lie to him, either. “A couple of weeks ago,” I said vaguely.

  “Oh.”

  A long minute ticked by while I waited for Nate to speak again. He didn’t move, just sort of stared off at a spot on the floor like he was waiting for someone to shoot him in the back of the head.

  When I was sure he was at least remembering to blink, I added, “Nate, there’s more.” He looked up. “It’s good news this time, I think. Your father, he had a girlfriend when he died. They had two kids together, twins, a boy and a girl.”

  I reached into my purse and pulled out a picture of Starla and the kids. I’d called her from the hospital, and she’d brought the kids to see me. To thank me, she said, for finding out for her. Tristan had knocked my lunch tray off a table, and Annie had clocked him in the head with my Jell-O. It had been a little bit awesome.

  Nate took the picture, wonder on his face. “I have a brother and sister?” he said disbelievingly.

  “You do.”

  I held my breath as I watched him run his fingers over their faces, Starla and Annie and Tristan. “Wow,” he said, awestruck. “Wow.”

  “Starla has a lot on her plate right now, and she’s not going to be able to take care of you,” I told him gently, before he could get his hopes up. “But when you’re ready, she said you guys should talk. She’d like you to meet the twins.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He looked up at me, and I saw just the smallest glimmer of hope in his eyes. “Can you tell me about them?”

  So I did.

  23. Why Isn’t It Over?

  One of the unfortunate side effects of owning your own business (and making up roughly 50% of the work force) is that it’s pretty hard, if not impossible, to call in sick. On Monday morning I had to drag my black-and-blue self into the office, where I thought Bryce would have some kind of seizure when he saw me. My assistant stood up so fast he actually knocked his desk chair over in an effort to reach my side. And it was a rolling chair. I told him the story, and he made a big point to tell me how great it was that I’d gotten Nate some closure, and found him some family. But I saw him scrutinizing me as he spoke, worried that I’d give away some flicker of dissatisfaction and run off to find the bad guy.

  It was insulting, but also kind of fair.

  Ruby stopped in later the same day to collect her check for the surveillance case—the client had decided to terminate my services. Her bruises had faded, or were at least hidden by the pancake makeup she insisted on wearing, and her neon-green cast had cheerful messages from Bryce and her co-workers at the hotel. But she still looked...broken. I tried to ask her how she was holding up, but she just shrugged, unwilling or unable to talk about it. So I signed her cast instead, writing my name in loopy silver marker. After a moment’s thought, I added underneath, “and company.”

  The harassment from Matt Cleary’s cronies had ended, at least for another year, and I was bizarrely excited to see the Jeep again. After work that day I drove it home and slept for twelve hours. The next day, I did pretty much the same thing. And the day after that.

  As an apology to my husband, I put on my best mommy-track behavior whenever I was around him, participating in endless conversations with him about names, genders, nursery design, and baby furniture. Rory and Mark and the kids came over for dinner the following week, and when she saw how hard I was trying, Rory forgave me for both the hotel rescue and the incident in LA. Cassie and Logan started getting excited about getting a new cousin.

  My bruises disappeared, and I began to get used to my new circumstances. My morning sickness got steadily worse—there was a memorable incident involving buttered popcorn, nachos, and a movie theater in Oak Park where I was not welcome to return ever—and then slowly got better. I learned to smile and un-glaze my eyes while Toby and Rory talked baby stuff, even if I still felt like it was happening to someone else.

  Although I was done investigating his case, I was still seeing a lot of Nate: he started spending every Wednesday night and Saturday morning at the comics shop as my dad’s unofficial intern. Dad paid him in comics, which I thought was adorable, and Nate was amassing quite the collection after a few weeks. We worked out a system where I would drive over to the store at closing time to give Nate a ride home, a 45-minute round trip that I enjoyed every time. Once or twice I even brought Nate home for dinner with Toby and me, and it was nice seeing the two of them talk about the Cubs and Nate’s civics class and dog training. Nate’s eyes would get bright and animated, and he would talk with his hands, as if his words just couldn’t keep up with the ideas he wanted to express. The interest always faded out of his eyes when I dropped him off at home later, though, and my heart always broke for him. In those moments I would feel so totally, insurmountably inadequate that I was half-afraid to speak to him. I would just sit there and say a silent prayer that Nate’s future foster parents would be more competent.

  Although I was back at work and in my normal routine—I was even back to the gym, minus the boxing—as time passed part of me felt like I was in stasis, floating through my own life as if it was someone else’s. I felt disconnected. Jason Anders
on’s death kept nagging at me, a dark thought worming around in the back of my mind. I started waking up in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep, feeling like there was something I needed to be doing. I didn’t know if it was part of the pregnancy or if I was just starting to lose it. Toby noticed that I was off, but he blamed it on the pregnancy hormones, metaphorically patted my head, and went about his day.

  After a couple of weeks of this weird insomnia, I started sneaking out of bed and padding quietly into the study. I logged onto the laptop and searched news sites, looking for murders that were similar to Jason Anderson’s. Cristina and I chatted online, and I learned that the cameras in the restaurant hadn’t been any help, though a little mug book had been made of the people in the restaurant last night, which she emailed me. I went through the photos over and over, looking for the ski mask guy, but an ID was impossible, given how little I knew about his face. Cristina even broke some rules to send me Jason’s murder file, and I spent hours looking for something in the physical evidence that could serve as some sort of trademark. I turned up nothing, but I kept the file going, building it up while Toby slept. I told myself it was just an insomniac diversion, and that I was staying at my desk just like I’d promised. But every night, before I went back to bed, I erased the web history on the computer and hid the file in my carryall bag.

  Oddly enough, the baby kind of covered for me: my tired appearance and odd sleep habits made perfect sense in an expecting mother, and no one suspected that the circles under my eyes had anything to do with the Jason Anderson case.

  Everything would have probably gone on like that, until the moment Tom Christianti died and Nate went into foster care. But one bright Wednesday morning at the end of May, Starla waltzed into the office and insisted, in her sweet hesitant way, that she needed to see me.