Lisa Lutz Spellman Series E-Book Box Set: The Spellman Files, Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again

by Lutz, Lisa

  In my mid-twenties, I eventually came to realize that my behavior was the formative example to an impressionable pre-teen; because of this and a few other mitigating factors, I grew up. My transformation was quick. To the untrained eye it would appear that I fell asleep a delinquent and woke up a somewhat responsible member of society.

  It was then that my family experienced its longest spate of normalcy, which lasted approximately four years. Then two years ago, after my Uncle Ray2 moved into the Spellman home, battles began to simmer between me, my parents, my sister, my uncle Ray, and my brother. And then we went to war.

  The war began when I started dating a dentist behind my mother’s back. My mother hates dentists, you see. Or she did, back when the wounds were fresh from her undercover work in a sexual assault case involving a dentist who felt up his patients while they were under anesthesia. I still say Mom and Dad fired the first shots. They hired my sister Rae (fourteen at the time) to follow me. That’s how they discovered I was dating Daniel Castillo, DDS (Ex-boyfriend #9—see appendix). After a humiliating meeting between Ex #9 and my family, I decided that I had to get out of the family business.

  That is when our war escalated. My parents commenced twenty-four-hour surveillance on me (using my sister as their primary operative), and just when we thought this game of cat and mouse couldn’t get any worse, my sister disappeared.

  It was later discovered that Rae kidnapped herself in a preemptive strike to end the war. And she got exactly what she wanted: the war ended and my family returned to its previous state of normalcy. Although my sister’s dramatic play did not go unpunished.

  It was during Rae’s six-month probation that she began visiting Henry Stone—the primary officer on her own missing person case. What began as weekly visits to the oddly well-groomed, highly ethical inspector in the San Francisco Police Department’s Bryant Street headquarters would end eighteen months later when my sister almost murdered him with his own car.

  SAN FRANCISCO GENERAL HOSPITAL

  Sunday, January 8

  1005 hrs

  My mother would have murdered me if she knew how long I had been in the hospital room without turning on the tape recorder.1 Before another word was uttered, I slipped my hand into my pocket and switched on my palm-sized digital recorder.

  The transcript reads as follows:

  [Rae reenters the room as Nurse Stinson finishes filling out Inspector Stone’s medical chart. The nurse smiles professionally and goes to the door.]

  NURSE: If you need anything, Inspector, please use the call button. [She turns to me and Rae.]

  NURSE: Ladies, visiting hours will be over in two hours.

  HENRY: I’m very tired. I think they should leave now.

  ISABEL: We’ll leave in a few minutes.

  HENRY: No. Leave now. Please. Nurse?

  RAE: His pulse just went up by two beats. Now it’s seventy-four.

  NURSE: He’s fine. I’ll check on you in an hour. [Nurse Stinson exits the room.]

  ISABEL: Henry, we’ll be out of here in a minute. But Mom wants a complete rundown of the events, which means she needs to hear it from you. Oh, and I’m recording this. Tell me exactly what happened.

  HENRY: Your sister ran me over—

  RAE: Accidentally!

  ISABEL: The “accidentally” is implied, Rae. What I’d like to know is how. You have a learner’s permit, not a license. You’re not supposed to be in the driver’s seat of a car without a licensed driver with you at all times. If you ran Henry over, clearly he was outside of the car.

  HENRY: Please keep it down. My head hurts.

  ISABEL: Sorry. [to Rae] Talk.

  RAE: We were leaving the police station for my driving lesson.

  HENRY: I hope you enjoyed it, because that was the last driving lesson I will ever give you.

  RAE: I think that’s the head injury talking.

  HENRY: Mark my words.

  ISABEL: Can we get on with the story?

  RAE: Henry was carrying a box and then he stopped to talk to that guy who smells like fish.

  HENRY: Captain Greely.

  ISABEL: Why does he smell like fish?

  RAE: I have no idea.

  ISABEL: So he just smells like fish all the time?

  RAE: Every time I’ve smelled him he’s smelled like fish.

  HENRY: [snappishly] He takes fish oil supplements for his heart. Can we get on with this?

  ISABEL: Right. Okay, then what happened?

  RAE: I ran ahead to the car, got in the driver’s seat, and waited for Henry. But he was still holding the box and talking to the fish guy.

  HENRY: Captain Greely.

  RAE: [snotty] Captain Greely.

  HENRY: Young lady, on the day you run me over—

  RAE: Accidentally!

  HENRY:—you don’t get to talk to me like that.

  RAE: I think you need to calm down. Your heart rate is up to eighty beats per minute.

  HENRY: Isabel, I want you to get her out of here.

  ISABEL: In a minute. I promise. Can I please hear the end of the story? Rae, hurry up and talk.

  RAE: So he had this heavy box and he was talking to the—Captain Greely, and I just thought if I drove the car twenty feet that wouldn’t be a big deal and he wouldn’t have to carry the box to the car. I was trying to be nice. So I turned on the engine and started to drive and then I saw Henry and he looked so mad and he stepped out in front of the car and shouted for me to stop and I got scared and I meant to hit the brakes, but I hit the gas. [Tears of guilt have formed in Rae’s eyes.]

  ISABEL: Are you crying?

  RAE: I almost accidentally murdered my best friend today.

  HENRY AND ISABEL: Stop saying that!

  Although Morty had not interrupted my story for further exposition on the bizarre relationship between my fifteen-and-a-half-year-old sister and the forty-four-year-old inspector, I think further background information will help illuminate this moment in the hospital room and many of the events that will follow.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF HENRY AND RAE

  Remember the wars I mentioned earlier? They were not exclusive to me and my parents. My sister, Rae, was a party in her own conflict against Uncle Ray. Uncle Ray was my father’s older brother. Almost seventeen years ago, within the span of six months, he got cancer, his wife left him, he almost died, and then he recovered. The once clean-living/responsible/much-admired police inspector uncle then became a slovenly shadow of his former well-scrubbed self. New Uncle Ray would often disappear on benders that my family dubbed “Lost Weekends.” Every time he disappeared, we would retrieve him, pay off his gambling debts, sober him up enough to maintain civilized grooming standards, and keep as watchful an eye on him as we could until the next Lost Weekend.

  My sister’s age and high work ethic made her initial relationship with her namesake hostile at best, but eventually, when Rae realized that her uncle was not a selfish old fool but a lonely man who got dealt a hand of cards that he didn’t know how to play, she softened her opinion of him and they eventually made peace.

  However, as soon as my sister had grown accustomed to her regular television-watching/sugar-consuming/card-playing companion, Uncle Ray passed out in a bathtub in a casino hotel in Reno, Nevada, after a long day of poker losses and binge drinking.

  My sister took Uncle Ray’s death harder than anyone, and soon her bimonthly visits to Henry Stone turned into biweekly drop-ins to his station office. Henry tried to turn her away, but she came back again and again, despite his repeated requests for her to make friends her own age. Eventually Stone would reluctantly accept my sister as a constant in his life, and I suspect he decided that if he couldn’t get rid of her, at least he could make her do her homework.

  At first I considered the casting of the clean-living, buttoned-up inspector as an Uncle Ray surrogate quite odd. But my mother explained that he was the perfect replacement: he was like Uncle Ray before he was
broken. Uncle Ray would pass out in the bathtub; Henry Stone would find the body. My sister’s early visits to the inspector (which commenced approximately two years ago) typically involved her sitting in the leather chair across from his desk doing homework. The dialogue that would pass between them would fill no more than five minutes, but the time they shared in the same room could be hours. Since my mother has very few official sightings of Rae actually doing homework, Mom in no way discouraged these visits, even after Henry called her and pled his own case. My mom, in turn, responded that so long as Rae made it home by curfew, she could not justify grounding her for visiting a friend, especially when that friend worked in a place as safe as a police precinct.

  I, on the other hand, was not without some sympathy for the hassled inspector and would often pick Rae up from his office when he called. Unfortunately for Henry, depending on the job I was working, he’d often have to wait hours for her removal.

  The primary conflict between Henry and my sister was how they should go about defining their relationship—not to each other, but to other people. The first time this problem arose was when Henry’s boss, Lieutenant Osborn, entered Stone’s office shortly after Rae’s arrival.

  “Henry,” the lieutenant said pleasantly, “is this nice young lady an informant?”

  To which Rae, genuinely flattered, replied, “No. We’re just good friends.”

  The lieutenant gave Inspector Stone a double-take, handed him a case file, and left the office with a cordial nod of the head.

  “In the future, Rae, it’s probably best if you don’t refer to me as your friend.”

  “But we are friends, right?”

  “I guess so,” Stone reluctantly replied, unable to come up with another definition. “But just don’t say it out loud.”

  Approximately six months after Rae’s office visits commenced, my sister decided to take their relationship to a different level. She asked Henry for a ride home from school after a two-hour detention, in the midst of a violent downpour. She called Stone’s cell phone number, which he gave to her in a moment of weakness, I suspect. After three messages and a series of negotiations,1 Henry agreed to pick Rae up from school. Stone arrived in Rae’s homeroom forty-five minutes later, carrying an extra police-issue raincoat.

  “Finally,” Rae said as she haphazardly tossed her belongings into her schoolbag.

  Mrs. Collins, Rae’s homeroom instructor, English teacher, and punisher, approached the odd pair, her curiosity and suspicion genuinely piqued.

  “Rae, introduce me to this nice young man who was kind enough to pick you up from school.”

  “This is my…colleague, Henry Stone.”

  Henry smiled uncomfortably and shook Mrs. Collins’s hand.

  “We’re not colleagues, Rae.”

  “Associates?” my sister asked.

  “No.”

  “Then we’re friends, like I said before.”

  “I’m a friend of the family,” Stone said to Mrs. Collins, sensing her suspicion. “Inspector Henry Stone.”

  “A new friend?” the older woman asked, her eyes narrowing.

  “I guess so,” Stone replied, and then turned to my sister. “Are you ready?”

  “Let’s blow this joint,” Rae said, heading for the door.

  “Don’t say that,” Henry cautioned as he waved to Mrs. Collins and followed Rae to his car.

  HOW I BECAME HENRY STONE’S “FIANCÉE”

  Mrs. Collins’s radar went up the moment she met the inspector. A non-family member of the opposite sex picking up an impressionable adolescent girl was like a flashlight in a blackout for the seasoned educator. However, as Rae’s English teacher, she had further evidence to fuel her wariness. Mrs. Collins had recently assigned her students a five-page essay on a person whom they admired. Rae predictably wrote about Henry Stone. That in itself was not incriminating, but the fact that she referred to this man as her best friend did. Shortly after Rae turned in that essay, Mrs. Collins came upon Henry and Rae in the parking lot when he was picking her up yet again from school. Rae was introducing the inspector to a few of her classmates as her “uncle Henry.”

  What Mrs. Collins didn’t hear was the argument that ensued on the car ride home, which went something like this:

  “Why did you call me your uncle? I’m not your uncle.”

  “You already said I can’t call you my colleague, associate, or friend. So what’s left?”

  “Just say I’m a friend of the family.”

  “But you’re more my friend than my family’s friend.”

  “Rae, most people would find a forty-four-year-old man being friends with a fifteen-year-old girl inappropriate.”

  “So what? I mean if Mom and Dad don’t care, what difference does it make?”

  Henry chose not to pursue this line of conversation with Rae. Instead, he dropped Rae off at the Spellman house and pursued it with my mom. There he got precisely the same response.

  “If I’m comfortable with you and Albert’s comfortable, then I don’t care what anybody else thinks,” said my mother.

  Unfortunately, what other people thought did matter. Mrs. Collins called Mom and Dad to the school for a parent-teacher conference the following week. My mother, always on guard with school administrators,1 recorded the entire conversation.

  The transcript reads as follows:

  MRS. COLLINS: I’ve asked you here, Mr. and Mrs. Spellman, to discuss your daughter’s unusual relationship with an older gentleman named Henry Stone.

  OLIVIA: Inspector Henry Stone.

  ALBERT: What about it?

  MRS. COLLINS: I think you might want to rethink the company you allow your daughter to keep.

  OLIVIA: Excuse me?

  MRS. COLLINS: I have on more than one occasion overheard Rae refer to Inspector Stone as her quote-unquote best friend. I find their relationship highly inappropriate.

  OLIVIA: Respectfully, Mrs. Collins, if anything inappropriate were going on, I would know about it long before you. I assure you, Henry Stone is not a predator.

  MRS. COLLINS: So you approve of their relationship?

  OLIVIA: He’s clearly a good influence on my daughter.

  ALBERT: Undeniably.

  MRS. COLLINS: How so?

  OLIVIA: I can’t even remember the last time Rae asked me if I was on crack. It has to be at least three months ago.

  ALBERT: More like six.

  MRS. COLLINS: She treats him as her equal. I consider their relationship highly unorthodox.

  OLIVIA: Do you have my daughter’s transcripts in front of you?

  MRS. COLLINS: Yes, I do.

  OLIVIA: What was Rae’s GPA two years ago? [Mrs. Collins consults her file.]

  MRS. COLLINS: It was two-point-seven.

  OLIVIA: What was her GPA last semester?

  MRS. COLLINS: Three-point-four.

  OLIVIA: Mrs. Collins, I raised two children before Rae, neither of whom have fallen victim to a child predator. I assure you I know the signs and I know what’s best for my daughter. I appreciate your concern, but I hope this is the last I hear on this topic. [End of tape.]

  This was, in fact, not the last my mother heard on the topic. Two weeks later, Mom received an at-home visit from a social worker. Mrs. Collins, unconvinced after my parents’ meeting, had filed a report with Child Protective Services and requested a full investigation.

  My mother, cornered by state authority and concerned that the investigation would cast suspicion on Henry Stone’s reputation, promptly brought their meeting to a close with the following statement.

  “Henry Stone is engaged to my older daughter, Isabel, who happens to be thirty years old. I don’t know what Mrs. Collins’s problem is, but Henry is like a son to me and soon enough he will be my son. And if my future son-in-law is willing to pick up his future sister-in-law from school now and again and help her with her homework, I think that is the epitome of family values, don’t you?”
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  The social worker checked her file, perplexed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s nothing in here about Henry Stone being engaged to your oldest daughter. That’s very curious. Well, I apologize for the inconvenience. We may have to do a follow-up visit. It’s procedure. But otherwise, I think we can put this matter to rest.”

  “Thank you,” my mother replied. “And I might add that I’d like a tiny complaint to go in the file against Mrs. Collins. She could have destroyed a man’s career and reputation with her ungrounded accusations.”

  Mom told this story over dinner with a shorter than usual guest list—Henry, Dad, and me. Rae was sent to David and Petra’s house under the ruse of helping them erase their hard drive.2

  Henry and I were on guard from the start, the limited guest list lending itself to suspicion. I recorded the proceedings.

  The transcript reads as follows:

  OLIVIA: You’re probably wondering why I brought us all together.

  ALBERT: I assumed it was to eat dinner. Pass the steak.

  OLIVIA: No, Al. Start with the salad like a civilized person.

  ALBERT: In France, they eat the salad last.

  OLIVIA: When you’re fluent in French, you can save the salad for dessert. Until then—

  ALBERT: Henry, pass the steak.

  OLIVIA: Henry, don’t pass the steak. [Henry obeys my mother. Albert serves himself salad and passes the bowl around the table.]

  OLIVIA: Before I was interrupted by cholesterol number two hundred twenty-seven—

  ALBERT: Two hundred twenty-three.

  OLIVIA: That’s something to be proud of?

  ISABEL: Mom, Dad. It’s one thing to do this in front of family members, but maybe Henry doesn’t need to listen to a two-decade-old argument.

  OLIVIA: Thank you. Now there’s a reason I brought us all together. I—um—had a situation with Rae’s English teacher. Mrs. Collins. I believe you’ve met her, Henry.

  HENRY: Yes, I have.