Orchids and Stone

by Lisa Preston

  “In the area,” he said. “What can I do for you? You’ve had a suspicious telephone call?”

  “Dad, what’s going on?”

  “Jed, go grab the registration to Daphne’s truck out of the glove box for me.” Vic opened the door and shooed his son outside again. Then he turned to Daphne and stroked her shoulder. “Begin at the beginning?”

  The cop eyed them in turn. “A threat on the phone? Is this related to the little pickup outside?”

  “Threat on the phone, yes,” Daphne said.

  “Related to the truck, no,” Vic said, sliding his arm all the way across her shoulders.

  She felt herself relax into the warmth of his chest, told herself she’d had the third worst day of her life and that’s why nothing clicked, but it felt good to have Vic’s body against hers. She played the message for the officer several times, confirming for him she had no idea who the caller was or what the reference to ten years ago could be about. Then she told him about the woman in the park and the claims of kidnapping and robbery, about seeing the couple take Minerva Watts to a car, about reporting it to the police yesterday. Then she told him about going to the address Thea found today, and what the couple said, and all about the grabbing and chasing and hiding. About chasing them with Vic’s car, the wreck, and the arrest for reckless driving. And coming home to this threat.

  The crew cut officer never interrupted, never looked lost. Vic nodded all the way through her careful story.

  “So, let’s hit star sixty-nine and find out who called you last,” the cop said.

  “Great,” Daphne agreed. And then he did and they all crowded around the speakerphone. A recorded operator’s voice announced the last number that phoned the house. Daphne and Vic sagged together.

  “It’s Cassandra’s number,” Vic said, his voice dull.

  “And Cassandra is?” the officer asked.

  Daphne looked away. “His ex-wife.”

  “Ah, so this is an ex thing. Sounds like you know the drill? All about restraining orders to deal with harassing phone calls and such?”

  “No,” Daphne said. “I do not know the drill.” She went to the front door, opening it just as Jed came inside with a paper in his hand.

  “Your glove box is a mess. Is this the right thing? Your registration?” He handed it to his father and stalked off to the living room.

  “Jed?” Daphne called after him, cutting off her annoyance with a deep breath when he ignored her. Then she threw the cop and Vic a glance and pursued the boy.

  The living room was empty. She pushed open the kid’s bedroom door.

  “Jed?” Louder, going into the room calling him, Daphne made sure she produced enough volume for the cop and Vic to hear.

  “What!” The boy’s shot-back answer belied his pretense of not knowing Daphne had been calling for him. He sat on the floor leaning against his bed. Daphne felt a hand on her shoulder and wanted to shrug out from under it. Instead she shot Vic a look and he pushed his hands deep into his front pockets, exhaling.

  Daphne rushed to speak first. “Jed, did your mom call since you’ve been home?”

  “Nope.”

  “And you haven’t answered the phone, right?” Making sure she missed nothing this time. “We didn’t get a phone call that you know of? Not when your dad and I were outside after you walked Grazie?”

  Jed shook his head but hesitated, openmouthed and silent.

  “What?” Daphne demanded, trying to keep her voice measured.

  He shrugged. “Josie called me.”

  “Jed! We’ve got the police here.”

  “But why? Why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on?”

  “Someone threatened me or us or something,” Daphne told him and shook her head, realizing how nutty and inadequate she sounded. She turned her back on the boy and stood puffing in the living room. “So after some guy left that message, Josie called. She’s the last caller. She called while we were outside, Vic. Now we’ll never know who that guy was. We’ll never get to know why he threatened us, what he meant.”

  “Someone’s threatening you?” Jed asked. “Who?”

  The cop held up a hand. “Ma’am, generally when someone’s being threatened, they know what they’re being threatened about and they know who’s making threats.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Any significance about ten years ago at all? For either of you?”

  He eyed Daphne and Vic in turns. Daphne was sure he noticed the look Vic shot her, the blink of an acknowledgment of what happened ten years ago in her life.

  When neither Vic nor Daphne said anything, the cop continued. “You know, it could just be a wrong number, too. Whoever the caller is, he could have just dialed the wrong number, left the wrong person this odd …”

  “Threat,” Daphne said.

  “Message,” the policeman said.

  “I have to take Jed home,” Vic said. “I’ll be back soon. Come on, buddy.” He walked away without kissing her good-bye.

  Daphne wished the world weren’t a place where a father drove his son away to his ex-wife’s house and called that his son’s home. She wished so very many things were different.

  “Dad?” Jed called, hurrying after him. “Dad, what happened? Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Let’s go take a peek at the address on the other side of the park, shall we?” The officer stood on the threshold and beckoned her to come with him.

  Daphne sucked in a great lungful and stepped one foot across the doorway, looked back at Grazie still on the floor. She addressed the cop while eyeing the dog. “Do you believe me?”

  He reached for her arm. “I believe something may be a bit off. I’d like to take a look at the woman’s residence on Eastpark. You can come and point out to me the route you ran. Maybe a neighbor or someone saw something.”

  Daphne shivered at the words and followed him outside, not wanting to lose this official person to talk to, this person who let her begin at the beginning. If she had more time, she decided, she’d even tell him about ten years ago and her dad, even about twenty years ago and her sister. Someone would know everything and could tell her what made sense and what didn’t. “I don’t have a car here,” she explained. “My boyfriend had to take mine since I got his impounded.”

  “I’ll take you with me. Let’s zip around the park and check out the Minerva Watts place.” They were within feet of his marked police car now.

  Daphne took a breath, eyeing the back seat of the squad car as he jingled his keys. “Seriously, I … mm, don’t have to go with you. I just …”

  He opened his front passenger door and held it, looking back at her with a bland expression.

  She smiled. “My parents told me never to get in a car with a man I didn’t know.”

  “Your parents were right. Hop in.”

  Hop in, Daphne thought. The same words the other officer said after he’d arrested her.

  Crackling police radio accompanied their drive. Her body trembled. “I got arrested because this guy stole my ID.” Her tiny try for sympathy wasn’t enough to make sense. She told him more details about the chase, the two chases.

  “Sounds like you got arrested for driving reckless, blowing a light, and causing an accident, but hey, I wasn’t there.”

  She looked at him sideways. “Okay, here’s the one thing from ten years ago that stands out in my world.” And she told him about her father.

  “Who would call you and say that can come back and bite you in the butt?”

  “No one!” Daphne’s frustration bubbled out. “I mean, who? Why? It doesn’t even make sense. But why would that message be directed at Vic? The only person in the world who doesn’t like Vic is his ex-wife …” And my best friend, Thea, she amended in her head.

  The officer nodded. “The caller didn’t address either of you. The message may not have been intended for either of you. It may have been a misdial.”

  And then they were at Minerva Watts’s vacant house at 1124
3 Eastpark Avenue, and Daphne imagined she could look right into and through the Peace Park and see herself in the middle of the greenbelt just yesterday, see Vic’s dad’s old house on Westpark Avenue bordering the far side of the park.

  The officer told her to wait in his car. Her mind ran on and on while the officer knocked, waited, then walked around Minerva’s house. When he knocked on neighbors’ doors, she wished he’d left the patrol car’s windows down farther, so she might overhear something. The woman who lived across the street was talking to the officer now, gesturing with the cop at the Watts house, the alley, down the road.

  “She saw a dark blue car,” the cop told Daphne when he returned to his patrol car. “Said the old lady’s car’s silver, that this wasn’t the car that’s normally there—”

  “It wasn’t?” Daphne chewed on this nugget, then shook her head in defeat. Every scrap was fallow, meaningless without illumination.

  The cop shrugged. “Maybe family, a visitor.”

  “That couple. The dark blue Town Car must be theirs.” Daphne stopped as the officer made a cryptic request into his shoulder microphone, asking for some kind of reverse check. The car’s dashboard radio squelched the same voice from the officer’s portable radio. Daphne looked from the cop to his dashboard and back again, not understanding the dispatcher’s response. Something about a transfer pending. She trained her perplexed look on the officer.

  He squinted at the house. “A check of all vehicles registered to a Minerva Watts at this address shows none. She had a 2012 Ford Crown Vic, silver in color, but just sold it to Fremont Ford.”

  “Just sold it?” Daphne looked at the house, too, wondering what, if anything, was in Minerva Watts’s garage.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Records show a transfer pending as of yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? She sold her car, her Crown Vic, to a Ford dealership yesterday?” Daphne shook her head and looked back across the street. “How long has the Town Car been hanging around Minerva Watts’s house?”

  He shook his head. “The neighbor didn’t say.”

  “Ask her. Oh, please? Will you ask the neighbor how long the car’s been around here?” Daphne’s urgency came from her soul. “Can I go ask?”

  The officer made a tight-lipped smile, then walked back to the neighbor’s house. It was brown with a red door. No one answered his knock for some minutes; then he spoke to the neighbor lady again. Then he tried her neighbors, rapping on doors with his nightstick.

  “Well, we don’t know how long it had been there,” he reported, “but the neighbor lady just noticed it a day or so ago.”

  At the house on the next block, Daphne pointed out the rhododendrons where she’d hidden, and the officer rapped on the door with a small flashlight, the metal making a ringing ping against a brass doorplate, but no one answered.

  Moving across one yard to another, the cop lingered before he went next door to the house where she had seen someone in the upstairs window when she’d been hiding. The cop holstered the flashlight and drew his baton.

  Daphne waited it out in the car, thinking and watching and reliving while the front door opened and the officer exchanged low words with occupants she could not see. And she wanted out, out of this car, this life. She wanted, craved, peace.

  When he came back, she decided it was worth it, seeing things through. It would all be worth it if she got to understand. She didn’t want to miss a thing, not anything, so she asked, “Why do you beat on people’s doors like that?”

  “Ever tried knocking on a lot of doors?”

  “No.” She made herself not ask if he’d ever tried roofing a six-plex, or a dozen of them.

  He grinned and started the patrol car. “Hard on the knuckles.” All the way around the park, he said no more.

  “What happens now?” she asked as he pulled up at Vic’s house. Her truck sat in the driveway.

  “I write a little report and go to my next call.” He tapped the radio on his dashboard then scribbled on a business card and handed it to her. “There’s a bunch of calls holding in my area. I need to move on. Here’s my card and the case number. Call if anything happens. And if nothing happens, you move on, too.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Abandoned at the curb in front of her house—it wasn’t hers, it was Vic’s, no, Vic’s father’s house—Daphne blinked in disappointment as the police officer drove off. Then she saw Vic standing in the front doorway with a huge bouquet of roses and wasn’t at all sure how she felt about him.

  He waited for her to admire the red petals, looked undecided about something, then launched into, “So Thea was in the house, here by herself, looking for your ID.”

  “Vic, what was I supposed to do? I needed identification. I needed someone to get it for me from the house. What in the world was I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know. Sorry. I’m just tired. I got up early this afternoon so I could get Jed’s bike before I took him to soccer and …”

  She sniffed when he didn’t finish his thought. “Well, you’ll sleep well tonight.”

  He reached for her. “With you. I can sleep with my arms around you all night. I love those nights.”

  She did, too, when life wasn’t crazy and when his kids weren’t around.

  In the bedroom, both ready to call it a night though it was mid-evening, he stroked her left shoulder when she pulled her shirt off. “You’re bruised. Is that from the guy grabbing you?”

  Twisting to look at her shoulder in the mirror, Daphne prodded the purple blotch. “No, he grabbed my other arm—”

  “God, I wish I’d been there!”

  Pleased with Vic’s sudden explosion, Daphne straightened as she rubbed her arm. “This bruise must be from the crash. The side-impact and steering wheel airbags went off. The car spun a full circle.”

  He shook his head. “The airbags went off? I think I was picturing closer to a fender bender, but something that still meant the car had to be towed. Quite a day. I’m just glad no one was … I mean, no one was hurt, were they? Anyone else?”

  She told him then about the other two cars, the guy with the bloody knuckles and the woman taken away by ambulance.

  “Yikes. I guess I had the impression you hit a power pole or something. I don’t know why.”

  “I never said I hit a power pole. I got hit by a car from each side and it spun the Honda around in the middle of the intersection.”

  “The guy wasn’t badly hurt though?” He waited for her head shake before continuing, “And you’re comfortably sure the other woman is going to be all right?”

  “Yeah. She said she was glad her kids—”

  “She had kids with her?”

  “Not with her. But she said she’d just dropped them off or something like that. She was glad they weren’t with her.”

  Vic’s shoulders sagged. “Picture what you did, Daph. You blew a light. You hit a woman.”

  She felt the stresses of the day and the last two decades break her open. When she opened her mouth to respond, she laughed, a great guffawing cackle. “Hey, I hit a guy, too.” Daphne tugged at his sleeve.

  “This isn’t funny. Suppose her kids had been with her. Picture it. Picture them scared and crying.” He shook his head. “I suppose it’s because you’re not a parent that you can make fun of potentially putting a kid in danger.”

  She clenched her teeth. “It’s not because I’m not a parent, a mother. It’s because it’s over. There’s nothing I can do about it. I wish it hadn’t happened, but it did. In hindsight, yes, I should have slowed down, made sure it was clear before—”

  “Before you ran a red light?”

  “Remind me not to have you on my jury or defense team or whatever.”

  His eyebrows pitched up. “Does that mean you’re going to contest your ticket?” He dropped his question when he saw her expression and raised his hands to stop the cycle of contention. “Can we just go to bed? Can I give you a rose massage?”

  It had been his best move, she�
�d told him, the first time they’d slept together. A rose massage. He’d brought her a bouquet and startled her by tearing it up. Then he’d sprinkled the petals of twenty-three roses over her nude body, stroked and kneaded her skin, every muscle and curve. And he’d repeated every languid motion, stroking her with the last whole rose. It had taken hours. It had taken her to new heights of enjoyment, of seeing tenderness and affection in a man who professed pride in being with her.

  Sinking onto the bed, Daphne asked him, “Do people seriously just go to bed like it’s a normal night when something like this has happened?”

  “Something like getting arrested?”

  “No,” she snapped, “something like seeing an old lady get kidnapped. Again.”

  “Daph, you really don’t know what’s going on with that lady, in her life, in those other people’s lives. And I think you should face facts. Face the reality.”

  “Which is?”

  “That you never will know, okay? You will never know. Some things, we just don’t get to know. But those people, the lady, they’re probably okay.”

  “You weren’t there. I know what I saw. Something was going on.” Daphne spread her fingers against his chest. “What gives with you? You wave off my concerns, but then when the cop shows up, you’re Mr. Supportive, like you’re playing a part.”

  He blew out a hard breath and took her hand in his. “You are tenacious and it’s admirable, but once in a while, it would be good to let things go.”

  “How often has something like this happened?”

  “Maybe once in a lifetime,” Vic said, his voice beleaguered.

  Once in a lifetime. The words echoed in her mind, lost from long ago. Once in a lifetime … what? Not helping someone?

  Not helping because of not knowing was so much more excusable than not helping due to an apathetic lack of effort. A murder was once in a lifetime and most people didn’t have murder in their families. A hanging? Once in a lifetime.

  A girl like Suzanne, someone had said, she was once-in-a-lifetime special.