HIS BABY’S KEEPER

by Evelyn Glass

  “When he was sixteen,” Scott replied. “He stole a car and drove off with her, but they managed to catch him pretty quick. He was arrested for that and charged, and then on an assault charge for attacking the mother of the child as well, trying to scare her off, I guess.”

  “And then what?” I found myself glued to every word that was coming out of his mouth, but he seemed hesitant—worried, even, as though he didn’t want us to know the full story. I mean, I wasn’t sure I could blame him—so far, it had been pretty fucking disturbing, and I doubted we’d even got to the worst of it yet.

  “I found out that he didn’t grow up in the house Addison lives in,” he went on. “He grew up in the house next door to Jazz’s.”

  Mary sucked in a sharp breath, shocked—Paul was silent, but I could see the horror written on his face.

  “He grew up there and inherited it after the parents passed away,” Scott explained, shooting Mary and Paul a sympathetic look as he did so. “He was obsessed with it. In his psychiatrist’s report, it said that he seemed to be trying to rebuild his life with his family by staying there. By finding a replacement.”

  “And that was Ella?” Declan filled in the blanks.

  Scott nodded. “As far as we can tell, Ella and Jazz fit the bill for the kind of people he was looking for. I think he started to obsess over them not long after they moved into the house next door.”

  “Five years ago?” Jazz shook his head. “How did no one…how did no one do anything?”

  “Well, he’d managed to wipe himself off the map by then. He’d dropped out of his psychiatry appointments and he wasn’t required to check in with the police anymore.”

  “So people just let him carry on like that?” Jazz replied, his hands shaking. I could hear the rage in his voice, reflecting the anger that burned inside my head. How could they have let this happen? It just didn’t seem right. He was clearly dangerous, clearly a concern. How did he get away with it for as long as he did?

  “He did his best to get away from the system.” Scott seemed apologetic, as if he knew that he was part of the system in question and had, by proxy, fucked up. “He knew he had to wriggle out of being observed if he wanted to get everything he thought he needed to make it all better again.”

  “Us?”

  “Yep.” Scott nodded. “He changed his last name, and I think he would have gotten away with it too if one of the neighbors hadn’t reported him for hanging around her daughter too much. The guy reported for that had a different surname, but the physical description matched.”

  “And that’s when he left? When we got the house?” Mary asked. Her face was white, as though she already knew the answer to the question she had posed him. Scott glanced up at her and paused for a second, as though he didn’t want to have to admit the next part.

  “We have every reason to think that he didn’t leave,” he replied. Mary clapped a hand over her mouth and looked over at Paul. His face had gone almost grey in tone, and his eyes looked glassy. I couldn’t imagine how they felt, knowing that all this time they had been harboring some kind of criminal without even being aware of it.

  “I think, based on everything we’ve found out, that he was staying in the attic after it was boarded up and would come down in the middle of the night from the roof in search of food and what have you,” Scott said. “He was probably up there from the day you moved in to…well, the day of the fire.”

  “Did he do it?” Paul demanded. There was that anger again, similar to the rage that Jazz displayed earlier. I wondered if we just set Paul after Ian at that second if he would make it out alive. Judging by the flash of rage in his eyes, I wouldn’t fancy his chances.

  “Very probably, in an attempt to cover his tracks.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Mary muttered—and hearing the curse words come out of her mouth was so dissonant that I almost laughed. Until, of course, I remembered where I was and swiftly swallowed any amusement on my part.

  “So, now what?” Jazz placed his hands on the table. “I mean, now that we know that…what do we do with it?”

  “I think I can help you get in touch with him,” Scott finally announced, pulling his phone from his pocket. “When we had him in custody, we managed to get his cell and his number; he took it back, for some reason, presumably so he could get hold of whoever he’s working with.”

  “Idiot.” Declan rolled his eyes, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many encounters he’d had with the cops over the years. Probably more than I would care to think about, considering that we were trusting him with all this information. Still, if he was Jazz’s second in command then I would have to trust that he had a good heart even if the rest of him seemed like kind of an asshole.

  “We got the number, though, and I called it,” Scott went on hesitantly.

  My eyebrows shot up. “Jesus Christ, Scott! Do you know how much danger you could have put yourself in?”

  “Of course I do.” He dismissed me with a wave of the hand. “I’m not an idiot. But it’s worth it, if I can take down the guy…”

  He trailed off—I knew he was thinking about Elijah, and that it wasn’t going to do anyone any good to get hung up on stuff we couldn’t change now. He shook his head and seemed to center himself again.

  “It was worth it,” he finished up, and pulled his phone from his pocket. “I called it, and he answered.”

  “Did you get them to track the call?” I leaned forward, using what little knowledge I had from watching police procedurals and hoping that it was enough to actually do some good given our current situation.

  Scott shook his head. “Number was scrambled. And besides, he hung up way too quickly for me to do anything of use. But I recognized the voice.”

  “So what do we do with just his number?” Jazz wondered aloud, asking the question we were all thinking.

  “You can do whatever you want with it.” Scott handed his phone over to Jazz. “It’s not a lot, but it’s something. It’s a start.”

  Jazz looked around the table and let out a long breath. “So, any suggestions? What do I do with the number of the guy who kidnapped my daughter?”

  There was a silence around the table—no one had an answer for him, or at least one that felt as though it would be any good given the current circumstance. What were we meant to say to this guy, what were we meant to do? He was a psychopath, and we didn’t know that anything we would think up wouldn’t push him towards harming Ella at the end of the day. That was the scariest thing—the thought that if we fucked this up we might be doing more harm than good towards the one person we were trying to keep alive.

  “Call him.” Lucy trailed her fingers over the table, in the direction of the phone. Jazz pulled it towards him defensively, as though concerned she might snatch it up and ring him right there and then.

  “What the hell good is that going to do?” he snapped, then his face softened at once. “Sorry, sorry. I’m just…wound up.”

  “You could try reasoning with him,” she suggested, ignoring his little outburst with a practiced grace. “Seriously. If what he wants is a family, then maybe you could find some way to convince him that that’s what you’ll give him if he just delivers your daughter back to you safe and sound.”

  “Or…” Mary jumped in but trailed off, then shook her head. “No. I’m being sentimental.”

  “Any idea is a good one right now, Mary,” I assured her gently. She paused for a moment before she went on, as though trying to pluck up the courage to say what was on her mind. She had been shaken by everything that had been revealed thus far, I could tell that much, but she was still here—and that was the most important thing.

  “You could try calling him, and all of us, we could tell him how much we want Ella back,” she suggested. “Try to …I don’t know, thaw him a little. Show her how much she’s loved.”

  “And show him too.” I nodded. I knew what she was trying to say. It sounded crazy but it wasn’t the worst idea in the world. This had al
l been about making a family, hadn’t it? Maybe if we could coax him into believing that maybe he would find one if he just brought her back to us. We just needed to get in the same room as him and her—hell, he had made it clear before that he very much considered Jazz and I a part of his dream family as much as Ella was. If we could offer ourselves up too…

  “We need to put ourselves out there.” Jazz took my hand again and squeezed—tighter than before, as though acknowledging the danger of the situation we were about to put ourselves in.

  “What do you mean?” Lucy furrowed her brow and glanced at me—I knew she wouldn’t be happy with the thought of me putting myself in danger, but that was the only way we were going to convince him to come out.

  “We need to get him face-to-face,” Jazz went on. “And I don’t think he’s going to do that for the promise of anything less than finishing off his little dream family.”

  “So…the two of you are going to just go offer yourselves up to him?” Scott frowned. “Doesn’t that seem a little dangerous?”

  “I can’t see any other way we’re going to get him to take us seriously,” I murmured.

  “Won’t that seem a little convenient?” Declan pointed out. “Him, just getting everything that he wants handed to him on a platter?”

  “Do you have any better ideas?” Jazz raised his eyebrows at his second-in-command. Like Lucy, I could see that Declan was already crunching the numbers for the kind of danger we were going to put ourselves sin, and he didn’t like the odds any more than she did. They were more alike than Lucy would have imagined. Declan fell silent as he tried to come up with something more convincing than what we had, but he didn’t speak again. The entire table fell silent, in fact, as everyone seemed to come to the same conclusion—that the only way to get around this was for Jazz and I to get in touch with him and hope that he would take our bait. And then what? Use everyone else as backup to prove that she would be better off with us? Hope that he handed her over without a fight? The chances of it going down as we wanted it to seemed slim, but it was the best chance we had now.

  “What about the baby?” Lucy blurted, and the entire table seemed to turn to me in the same second. There was a pause as Jazz and I exchanged a look and tried to figure out how to field the inevitable question.

  “The baby’s going to be fine,” I assured her.

  Mary leaned across the table and took my hand. “Honey, you can’t put yourself under so much stress when you’re pregnant—”

  “If I don’t, then our kid might not have the big sister it deserves,” I cut across her, not meaning to sound rude but desperate to articulate just how much this meant to me. “I’m having this baby regardless, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t fight for the rest of our family, too.”

  It was the first time I’d thought of us like that, as a family of four—my heart swelled with the image of it, the picture of Jazz, Ella, the baby, and I living together as one unit. I needed to get her back. There was never any doubt in that, but now I needed her viscerally. The thought of raising this baby without her there didn’t just hurt; it felt wrong, off, as though something profound and important was missing.

  “Well, you can’t go alone,” Declan huffed. “I’ll get hold of the Marauders. Get them stationed around us. Make sure you don’t get hurt.”

  “The Marauders…?” Mary looked confused, but Jazz was already shaking his head.

  “We’ll take only who we need.” He glared at Declan intensely. “I don’t want any of them getting into trouble on my behalf.”

  “But they—”

  “I’m the leader and I think I’m making myself pretty clear,” Jazz spoke over him firmly. “It’s just us. We’ll call the police when and if we need to. Capiche?”

  “Fine,” Declan conceded, and slumped back in his chair, looking like a kid who hadn’t got what he wanted. I almost smirked at the petulance of his gesture, until Jazz reached for the phone and took it in his hand. He clicked it on, and was faced with a number—the number of the man who had a member of our family.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “I think we’re going to get a little privacy.” Jazz got to his feet and proffered a hand out to me. I took it and he pulled me upright, tugging me close. I could feel his heart beating through his shirt, and wondered if he was as scared as I was in that moment. Lucy stood up too, and pulled me into a tight hug. She didn’t need to say anything else—I knew she was imploring me not to get hurt, begging me to take care of myself. She’d probably be Aunt Lucy to whatever kid I had, and the thought of losing that made me hold her even tighter. She let go, stepped back, and watched as we made our way outside again.

  The rain had calmed down, but the street was still slick with water. Jazz stared down at the phone in his hand, and then up at me.

  “Are you sure we want to do this?” he asked, but his voice seemed to lean more towards wanting encouragement than confirmation. I nodded, and he pulled the phone to his ear, tapping the call button at last.

  I heard the phone buzz, and held my breath as I waited for an answer—but it went to the automated voicemail machine, a cool, collected woman’s voice asking him to leave a message. He let out a breath and spoke.

  “Ian, it’s me, Jazz. If you’ve still got my daughter, we need to talk. Call me back.”

  He hung up and pressed his fingers into his temples; he screwed up his face in anger and I could tell that this had pissed him off even more. He ran a hand through his hair, a tip-off that he was stressed as hell, and stared off down the street as though he half-expected Ian to come roaring around the corner at any second.

  “It’s okay.” I caught his hand and clasped it between my own. “Hey, hey. We’ll get hold of him.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have used my name,” he lamented. “Maybe I should have…I don’t know, told him that I was the cops or something.”

  “What good would that have done? He’s already gotten away from them once.”

  “Good point,” he sighed. “I just want this—Jesus, I just want to see her again.”

  “I know, I know.” I smoothed his hair back from his head—it was still damp from the rain from earlier, and slicked back against his skull. It made his eyes look even wide, his face appearing even more gaunt than it had before.

  “Do you think we will?” he asked, his voice suddenly small. “Honestly? Do you think it’ll happen?”

  “Of course I do,” I assured him, even though doubt was swirling around my mind like a drift of snow. “We’ll see her.”

  “I just…” He came to a halt in the middle of his sentence, still unable to look me in the eye. “I should have done more. Sooner. If I hadn’t left it this long, maybe—”

  “Maybe nothing,” I cut across him firmly. “There’s no reason to think you left this too long.”

  “But what if this is my fault?” He looked at me, pained, the veneer he’d managed to hold up for the last few hours cracking and dropping away to reveal the terrified father beneath. I knew that this had always been here, but that didn’t make it any easier to see when it happened. Fear flashed in his eyes, and I could tell that the barriers he’d put up between himself and what could already have happened were dropping away.

  I reached for him, catching his hand and hoping that it was enough to pull him out of his stupor. He turned to me, eyes bugging out of his head; it was the most emotion I’d seen from him since we’d met again that morning, and it scared me. It scared me because as long as he was strong then I could be too but as soon as his resolve gave out, I felt mine crumbling uselessly beneath me too. I set my jaw straight and tried to put on a game face, tried to convince both of us that there was still a chance that all of this would turn out okay.

  I pulled him down the alley next to the diner, giving us some privacy—he was heaving in breath at that moment, his eyes closed as though he could block out the world. I caught his face in my hands.

  “Hey, hey,” I called to him softly, pulling him back to Earth. “
Even if something has happened…” I paused, forcing myself to consider the possibility—to face it head on and not to run or hide from it. It hurt, but there was more than that now. More than we had to think about. “We still have each other. And our baby,” I reminded him. “And that’s not something to turn away from. We’ll get through it, won’t we? No matter what?”

  I was less reassuring him than asking him to reassure me, and it took a second for him to open his eyes, as if he was only just then making out the desperation in my voice. He covered my hands with his own, drew them to his mouth, and kissed my fingertips—it was a small gesture, but it was manageable, something that we could both cling to as everything came to a head around us.

  “We will,” he promised, and his eyes finally met mine. He came back to Earth with a thud, the glassiness disappearing from his gaze in an instant. He reached down to put a hand on my stomach, and even mustered up a smile—it wasn’t much, but it was enough.