Don't Be Afraid

by Rebecca Drake

  “It’s a dream house,” he corrected her. “A palace fit for a king and queen.” He moved off her legs and began taping them together at the ankle. “But it wasn’t enough for you, was it, Violet? Always wanting more, more, more!”

  “Violet didn’t want the house?”

  He stopped cutting the tape and blinked at Amy, as if he suddenly remembered who she was. “She wanted it until Sheila. It was Sheila’s fault. Violet changed because Sheila told her to change. Sheila was a dangerous bitch!”

  “So you killed her?”

  He laughed. “Yes, I killed her. But you’re like rats, you realtors. For every one I kill there are a thousand more waiting.”

  “Why did you kill Meredith?”

  “Meredith?”

  “The woman in the tub.”

  He laughed. “That bitch. That was for you, Amy. She was giving you such a hard time. I killed her for you and you didn’t say thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  He backhanded her again. Amy felt Emma’s muffled scream and tried not to let the pain show so she wouldn’t cause Emma additional stress.

  “Don’t be insincere, Amy. It doesn’t suit you. You had such promise.” He shook his head. “I warned you with that Braxton bitch, but you weren’t paying attention. I worked so hard to get her on that surfboard. You wouldn’t think a little whore like that would be so heavy, but then dead weight is dead weight.”

  He chortled suddenly, slapping his knee with glee. “Did you know she liked to watch herself fucking? She had these mirrors set up around her room. Not on the ceiling. Nothing so lowbrow for her. But I knew what they were there for. She was quite the little cunt. I enjoyed shoving the statue up her twat.”

  All at once there were other sounds. Crunching. A motor. A car door slamming.

  “Amy?”

  The voice was right outside. It sounded like Douglas. Paul hastily slapped a piece of tape over Amy’s mouth and rummaged in a backpack she hadn’t noticed behind the lantern.

  A door creaked open below them, then slammed closed. “Amy?” This time the voice was inside.

  Paul stood up, but it wasn’t him anymore. He had a gray beard now, tortoiseshell glasses and a knit hat. She stared, shocked, at the old man from the open house.

  Chapter 44

  “Any sound and I’ll kill you!” Paul who wasn’t Paul hissed, tucking the gun in his pocket before running from the room. She heard his footsteps light in the hall and then the sound of him launching down the stairs.

  The box cutter had been forgotten near the lantern. Amy inched her way across the floor as fast as she could. She scrambled with her fingers, cutting herself as she struggled to get the blade upright and against the tape.

  It cut and she pulled and then one hand was loose. She struggled out of the tape and ripped it quickly off her ankles and face, ignoring the stinging pain. Then she turned to Emma.

  As she cut her free, she could hear snatches of conversation Paul was having with Douglas. It sounded like he was claiming to be a client.

  “This is going to hurt, baby,” Amy whispered when she’d released Emma’s arms and legs and was about to take the tape off her mouth. “Not a sound, though, okay?”

  Emma nodded. Amy pulled the tape and immediately clapped her hand over Emma’s mouth. Her daughter’s head reared back, her eyes squeezed shut and nostrils flared with the pain but any words she said were muffled against her mother’s hand.

  The little girl threw her arms around her mother, tears spilling from her eyes, her body shaking, but Amy brushed them away and gently detached her. Emma’s breathing was ragged.

  “Do you have your inhaler, baby?” Amy said, checking her daughter’s sweatshirt pocket, so incredibly grateful as her hand closed around the plastic. “Good girl. Here. Take a puff.”

  She gave her one shot and hoped it would help. That was all they had time for. “We’re going to play hide-and-seek, baby. You’re so good at that, Em. I want you to play it just like we do at home. I want you to hide and don’t come out. Whatever you do, don’t come out.”

  She brushed her daughter’s hair back from her face.

  “But what about you, Mommy,” Emma said, whispering too, her little voice bringing tears to Amy’s eyes that she quickly blinked back.

  Amy put her finger to Emma’s lips. “Ssh, baby. Mommy’s going to hide, too. But not together, Em. Remember? It never works when you hide together.” She pulled her daughter to her and kissed her forehead, taking in her smell, her feel, crushing the little body into hers for as long as she dared, which wasn’t nearly enough for a good-bye.

  “You go first,” she whispered, letting her go. “Stay away from the stairs, Em, and find a good hiding spot. Go now.”

  She gave Emma a little push and her daughter gave her one more glance and then she was out the door. Gone. Amy turned off the lantern. She slid out the door with the box cutter in her hand and moved as stealthily as she could. She had to get downstairs, but she wasn’t sure how. With any luck Paul wasn’t on the stairs. She inched closer. Their voices were getting louder.

  “I insisted she take my car to pick up Betty and the kids. The cost of gas, you know—plus, it’s just safer to have one of these big cars. People don’t like to hear that, but it’s true. They should be back any second.”

  She moved closer. She could see them now. Paul had his back to her and Douglas was looking at him. She took another step. Then another. The stairs were going to be tricky. There was a little light in the hall from a streetlamp, but most of the room was in shadow. If she stayed against the wall surely she couldn’t be seen. She took one step down. Then the next. The third step creaked and Douglas looked up and spotted her.

  His mouth was forming her name, but before he could utter it, Paul had the gun out and shot him point-blank in the head. Douglas dropped like a stone.

  “I didn’t kill my own mother!” Ryan repeated for the hundredth time. “I’ve been out all day on calls—check with my partner, check with everybody. I just got off shift!”

  The pudgy sergeant wasn’t listening to him. He just moved him through the procedures—fingerprinting, mug shot, plunk him down in a room and tell him that things will go easier if he just tells them everything.

  “I want a lawyer.” Ryan knew that much from watching TV. At which point he was left alone in the room with two cops to watch over him.

  “I’ve just lost my mother,” he said to one of them, who stared blank-faced at him. Tears of grief and frustration threatened to spill out and he settled for punching the table, hard.

  “Settle down!” the older cop said.

  He let his head fall into his hands. And then there was nothing but silence and his own muffled sobs

  Amy screamed and fled back up the stairs, hearing Paul running behind her. She ducked through one room and found a door that opened into another. She stood in a dark alcove and heard his heavy footsteps run past. Slipping out the other door, she listened. No sound for a moment. Then she heard his footsteps in another room and she ran as quietly as possible in the other direction.

  There was room after room and in the dark it was impossible to get a sense of where she was. Some rooms had doorways blocked with plastic sheets coated in plaster dust and she fought the urge to sneeze in those rooms, wondering where Emma was, ears straining to hear not just Paul but her daughter’s wheezing.

  She almost fell down a flight of stairs, but caught the banister in time, and took them carefully, not sure where they led. She came to a landing and turned down another flight into some open space. Her eye was caught by plastic billowing and her foot landed heavily.

  Something whizzed past her and then Paul came out through the plastic, following the bullet he’d shot at her. She ran, biting back a scream, and stomped loudly up the first few steps in the front hallway before ducking into a storage space under them.

  She heard Paul pounding past and up the steps and she ran away, painfully aware of her own ragged breathing and wondering h
ow Emma was fairing.

  “Emma? Emma, where are you? Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  His voice was a croon, a spooky high-pitched tone in the empty house. Amy clutched a hand to her own mouth to prevent herself from warning her daughter not to answer him. Emma was smart. Emma wouldn’t do that.

  “I’ve got ice cream, Em. It’s your favorite. Chocolate chunk. C’mon, Em. I can’t eat it all by myself.”

  Amy felt her way through a freestanding doorway into the incomplete kitchen. This wasn’t a safe place to hide, there was light coming in through a corner window. She was turning to leave when she saw the coil of thick wire left by contractors on top of unfinished cabinets. A sawed-off two-by-four lay nearby.

  She looked at the wire, thinking something could be done with that, and then she saw the doorframe.

  Chapter 45

  Moving as fast as she could, Amy wound the wire just above ground level around one plywood post and then pulled it across and secured it tautly around the other. Then she picked up the two-by-four and, summoning all her courage, slammed it as hard as she could against the floor.

  In an instant there was clattering on the steps and Amy scooped up the two-by-four and crouched behind the counter, waiting. She heard Paul running in the direction of the kitchen and then a loud whomp and a startled exclamation as he tripped over the wire and landed flat on the floor within her reach, gun still grasped in his right hand.

  Rising up, the board raised high, she whacked him across the head once and then again. He made a sound after the first blow and no sound after the second. She stepped on his right hand, keeping his other arm pinned with the board just in case, and kicked the gun clear of him. She stooped to pick it up and paused to look at him for a moment. There was blood distorting his forehead and trickling from his mouth. She looked at it and felt nothing.

  Juarez got there first, his car screeching to a stop along the gravel. He got out of the car in defensive position, low and with his gun drawn, as he heard the others pull in behind him.

  There was the SUV they’d been searching for. Juarez approached it, shining his flashlight. He smashed open the driver’s side door and released the trunk.

  “That goddamned bastard,” he heard Black exclaim. He joined him and saw a girl’s body folded neatly into the small space behind the seats. There was a small bit of dried blood visible around her ear and a dark matted patch in the long blond hair, but otherwise she looked quite peaceful, as if she were sleeping.

  The swat team was filing around them like an army of trained robots, ignoring what they were looking at, their eyes focused only on the house. Black and Juarez joined them, their weapons drawn.

  There was a silent count and then they entered the house from all sides, Juarez and Black going in the front behind one of the SWAT men. A scream from the left had them running in that direction and they found Amy Moran in the kitchen with Paul Marsh at her feet.

  There was blood on her face and bruises, and her eyes were huge in the light from their flashlights, looking from one to the other, only resting when she spotted Juarez.

  “It was him,” she said in a shaky voice, pointing at the body on the floor. “I’ve got to find Emma. Emma’s here. Emma’s hiding.”

  Chapter 46

  “She plays hide-and-seek,” Amy said. “It’s her favorite game. She’s really good at hiding. Really good.” She was babbling, she knew, and she could see the disbelief on their faces.

  “Emma!” Detective Juarez called, but even he had a pitying look in his eyes.

  “Em! It’s Mommy! Come out now, baby!”

  She was searching every room, every corner. They’d searched the first floor and now were on the second.

  “I told her not to come out,” she said, explaining it to them, wanting those looks off their faces. There was no way they would find a body. No way. “She’s very good at hiding.”

  Her voice was shaking, her hands were shaking. She moved faster, in and out of rooms, behind doors, in closets. Every corner available. They were no longer helping, just accompanying.

  They moved into a bigger room, maybe the master bedroom, and she searched the walk-in closet, but it was empty of everything.

  She was desperate. This was one of the last rooms. She had to be here. “Emma! Baby!”

  Juarez put a hand on her arm. “Amy,” he said, his voice gentle, and she wouldn’t take that voice, no, she wouldn’t accept it. She shook her head, she pulled away from him. And in that moment of silence she heard it.

  The faintest of sounds, it could have been mistaken for something else, the humming of an insect, the buzz of an electric saw. But Amy knew that sound for what it was and ran toward it.

  There was a little door in the wall. A laundry chute. She opened it and the wheezing grew louder. Suddenly the cops were around her, using their flashlights to illuminate the space.

  Emma was peering up at her, wedged like a little tree frog to the walls. “I’m not a baby,” she croaked.

  Amy laughed, a little hiccupping laugh that turned into a sob. She reached into the column and under her daughter’s shoulders. “You’re right,” she said and pulled Emma out.

  One of the cops had an inhaler and they used that. And then the paramedics had arrived and they gave her oxygen. Amy wouldn’t leave her side while she had it, making them wait for the details she knew they would demand. It would wait. It could all wait.

  When Emma was pronounced fit, Amy took her hand and led her outside.

  “What about Paul? Where is he?” Emma said as they walked down the steps, away from the light and noise.

  “Don’t worry about him anymore,” Amy said. “He’s gone.” She looked back at the house and then forward to the car that Juarez was leading them toward. “C’mon,” she said, giving Emma’s hand another squeeze. “We’re going home.”

  Epilogue

  Six Months Later

  The body of Rachel Norman, aka Violet Marsh, was found on the first really warm day of spring. The man who’d bought the Toolman’s house in Bellamy Estates, at a price far less than the original value, was starting over and a workman dismantling the walls found the body nailed into a crawl space. It was exactly one month to the day after her husband and killer had been sentenced to life in prison.

  The story made the front page of the Steerforth Herald and Amy quickly folded it over, but not before Emma caught a glimpse of the headline: TOOLMAN’S WIFE FOUND DEAD.

  “Was that about the bad man, Mommy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he back?”

  “No, Em. Absolutely not. He’s in prison.”

  “And he’s never coming back?”

  “That’s right.”

  Emma nodded and turned her attention back to her bowl of Cheerios. For the first few weeks after their ordeal and during the month-long trauma of the trial, she’d asked Amy about Paul every day. Hearing her mother tell her that the bad man wasn’t coming back had become like a mantra.

  She’d only recently begun sleeping in her own bed again. Amy hoped this wasn’t going to set things back.

  “Go get dressed, Em,” she said, pulling back her chair. “You don’t want to be late for school.”

  “Yeah,” Emma said. “Mrs. Strohmeyer is bringing her pet rabbit to show the class.”

  She ran for the stairs, the news apparently forgotten. Amy scanned the story quickly and buried the paper in the recycling bin.

  Rachel’s body was identified by a sister from a neighboring town, who’d apparently believed Paul’s story that his wife had left him for another man. “She was like that,” the woman said to a reporter. “No one man or one place could hold her interest for long.”

  If Paul Marsh had any reaction to the discovery of his wife’s body, it wasn’t mentioned. They wouldn’t bother to prosecute him for her death. He’d recovered from the skull fracture he sustained after Amy clubbed him and was declared competent and legally sane to stand trial for the murders of Sheila Sylvester, Me
redith Chomsky, Poppy Braxton, Officer Feeney, Louise Grogan, Chloe Newman and Douglas Myers. He’d also been charged with the attempted murders of Amy and Emma, who were both star witnesses for the prosecution at his trial.

  Emma held up well under the pressure. The only time she broke down was in describing the death of Chloe, who’d attempted to escape from Paul’s car with Emma and was battered in front of the little girl.

  Outside of the courtroom was a different story. Emma barely slept at night. She woke up screaming from terrible nightmares. Sometimes Amy did, too. They slept with lights on in the house and Amy installed a top-of-the-line security system.

  The day Paul was sentenced to three consecutive life terms, Amy laid flowers on Sheila and Chloe’s graves.

  Braxton Realty passed to Poppy’s younger brother, Peter, who took down the painting of poppies in the field and replaced it with a photo of an America’s Cup yacht. Another realtor took over Sheila’s desk. Amy limited her showings to daytime or took Emma with her. Most evenings, once Emma was in bed, she worked on her photography. In May she was having her second show in SoHo. This time, she didn’t bother to send an invitation to Chris. She did, however, invite Ryan.

  The news of the discovery of Violet’s body made it into the New York Times Metro section, but Ash spotted it before Mark. “Hey, isn’t that the guy’s wife? Yeah, it is, read this!”

  He passed the newspaper across the breakfast table and shoveled another strip of bacon into his mouth.

  “I don’t know how you can eat that junk and remain so thin,” Mark said, putting down his piece of whole-grain toast to take the paper.

  “I’m younger,” Ash said with a grin. “Faster metabolism.”

  “Ruder, too.”

  “What? You are older.”

  “Wiser.”

  “Keep telling yourself that,” Ash said, rolling his eyes. Mark smiled and looked down at the paper. He’d wondered when he resigned from the force if he’d miss the job, but reading about the discovery of this poor woman’s body, he realized that he felt nothing beyond a certain satisfaction that they’d caught this guy.