The Midnight Hour

by Karen Robards

  “Okay.”

  Peters and Stein left the room, heading downstairs. Tony and Dominick entered the bathroom. Jessica was reluctant to go back inside her bathroom, so she sat down in her chair to wait. Grace stood in the doorway between the bedroom and bathroom so she could watch both Jessica and the men.

  Using a towel and very gingerly gripping the edge of the mirror, Dominick opened the medicine cabinet and extracted the clear plastic container of brightly colored bath oil beads that Jessica had found in her stocking at Christmas.

  Tony, meanwhile, touched the message, then sniffed the oil on his fingers and rubbed his fingers together to test the texture. Dominick crushed a bath oil bead between his fingers, and both men grimaced at the strong floral scent that resulted.

  “That’s not it,” Tony said positively. “We would have smelled that a mile away.” Then, to Grace, “Let’s see what you have.”

  Grace handed over the cumbersome collection of objects she had retrieved from her bathroom.

  Carefully pulling the stopper from the smoky-rose glass bottle of bath oil that Grace rarely used, Tony poured a little on his fingers. The resulting smell of lavender was less overpowering than Jessica’s floral, but unmistakable nonetheless.

  “Nope,” Dominick said.

  Tony then dribbled a little baby oil on the back of his hand, sniffed it, then tested its texture with a finger.

  “This is it,” he said. “Or something real similar. We’ll need to run tests to be positive. Check this out, Dom, and see what you think.”

  Dominick touched the oil on the mirror, smelled it, then touched and smelled the oil on Tony’s hand.

  “Yeah, I agree,” he said. “We need to have this bottle fingerprinted.”

  “It could have come from another bottle. One the perp brought. Or it might be something else altogether.”

  “You’re right.”

  As they spoke, both Marinos wiped their hands on the towel Dominick had used to open the medicine cabinet and headed for the bathroom door. Grace stepped out of their way.

  “You realize,” Tony said, stopping just inside the bedroom and looking at Grace, “that there is another possibility.”

  “Such as?” She crossed her arms over her chest, her brows lifting.

  “That this wasn’t done while you two were out jogging. That it was done earlier.”

  “We would have noticed it, surely,” Grace said.

  “Would you? Jessica, when was the last time you took a shower in your bathroom?”

  “This morning. Before school.”

  “You obviously didn’t notice anything on the mirror then.”

  “No.”

  “Did you look in the mirror after you got out of the shower this morning so you would have noticed?”

  “I . . . I don’t remember, but I’m sure I did.”

  “Believe me, she did. She always looks in the mirror,” Grace supplied dryly.

  “Shut up, Mom,” Jessica muttered in an aside.

  “Then this could have been done any time today. Who has had access to your house today?”

  Grace frowned. “Well, let’s see. Linda. Jackie and her children. You. That’s it, I think, except for Jessica and me.” She looked inquiringly at Jessica.

  “That’s everybody I can think of,” her daughter corroborated.

  “Is it possible that one of your cousins wrote that as a joke?” Tony asked, looking at Jessica. “I’ve met them, remember. They look like they might think that kind of thing is funny.”

  Struck by the possibility, Grace and Jessica exchanged glances. Then Grace looked back at Tony.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head. “They’re too young. Paul is only six, and Courtney’s four. I don’t think they can write that well, either one of them, even if they wanted to.”

  “You sure? My little girl’s in first grade and she can write real good,” Dominick put in.

  “I’ll call Jackie and have her ask them.” Grace moved toward the door. She knew it wasn’t possible, knew Paul couldn’t write that well, but it was such a neat, unfrightening solution. . ..

  “Mom!” Jessica broke into her thoughts. “Godzilla’s gone!”

  “What?” Grace looked toward the bookshelf where his cage was kept. Jessica was already out of her chair and heading around the foot of her bed toward it.

  “The door’s open.” Jessica lifted the door in the top of the hamster’s cage easily, without have to unlatch the spring hook that usually held it shut, making it obvious that the cage was unlocked. “He’s gone.”

  Grace moved to stand beside her daughter, looking down at the double-decker wire cage that was Godzilla’s home. The exercise wheel was there. The red-tinted but still transparent plastic house that he loved to sleep in was there. His wooden chews were there, his food dish was there, his water bottle was there.

  Grace reached down and poked the nest of paper towels that he sometimes hid beneath.

  Everything in the cage was where it should be, except the hamster.

  Godzilla was definitely gone.

  Chapter

  19

  “OH, DEAR, YOU MUST HAVE FORGOTTEN and left his cage unlocked,” Grace said.

  “I didn’t! I know I didn’t! I never leave Godzilla’s cage unlocked.” Jessica’s lips trembled and her eyes filled. This, coming on the heels of the fright she had experienced, was too much for her composure.

  “Godzilla?” In the background, Dominick’s low-voiced question sounded mystified.

  “Her hamster.” Equally low-voiced, Tony filled him in.

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll find him.” Ignoring the sotto voce conversation behind them, Grace put a soothing arm around her daughter’s thin shoulders. Jessica was already visually scanning the floor, paying particular attention to the shadowy angles where floor and walls joined, blinking back tears. “He has to be here somewhere.”

  “He could be anywhere in the house!” Jessica looked at Grace despairingly. “My bedroom door has been open this whole time!”

  “We’ll find him,” Grace repeated, then glanced up as a hand curled insistently around her arm just above the elbow.

  It belonged to Tony Marino. With a jerk of his head he indicated that he would like to speak to her privately, in the hall.

  Message delivered, he let his hand fall away from her arm, and she followed him out of the room. As Grace left, Jessica was dropping to her knees beside the bed, getting ready to look beneath it. Clearly not particularly concerned about the case of the missing hamster, Dominick had disappeared into the bathroom again.

  Once in the hall, Tony stopped walking and turned to face her. Grace stopped, too, frowning up at him. They stood several feet away from Jessica’s doorway, with Grace’s back to the door so that her daughter could not read anything untoward in her face. If he had bad news to impart, she wanted to keep it away from Jessica for as long as possible.

  “I don’t want to make your daughter mad at her cousin again, but it seems fairly likely to me that your nephew is our culprit.” As he spoke, his gaze slid past her toward the bedroom, as if, like Grace, he was concerned that Jessica might overhear.

  “Paul?” Grace’s frown deepened. She crossed her arms over her chest. She still wore the same gray fleece sweat suit with the OSU logo on the front that she had worn to run in. It was a warm outfit, too warm for the house really, but she felt chilled. “What makes you think so?”

  “Leaving a message like that on your daughter’s mirror is something a kid would do.” The small, many-faceted chandelier that illuminated the upstairs hallway picked up silver threads in his black hair, Grace noticed. It also emphasized with shadows the tiny lines that radiated out from the corners of his eyes and the deeper ones that bracketed his mouth. “And now with the hamster missing—I’d say that makes a pretty strong case against your nephew.”

  “Why would Paul do such a thing?”

  He shrugged. “To get revenge because you
r daughter took the hamster away from him? As payback because he got in trouble? Just to tease? Who knows? Before we go any farther with this, why don’t you call your sister and have her ask him?”

  Grace looked at him for a moment without replying, while she turned the possibilities over in her mind. It was just possible that Paul might have . . . Oh, she hoped so!

  “I will,” she said and, walking around Marino, headed toward the phone in her bedroom. Marino followed her. While she talked to Jackie, explaining the situation as well as she could without revealing the pivotal fact that a drunken Jessica had been caught buying marijuana, she saw him look around her bedroom.

  While Jackie went to question Paul, Grace, on hold, surveyed the room through Tony Marino’s eyes. As she did, she felt increasingly self-conscious. A bedroom was very personal, after all, revealing much about the person who slept there.

  The ornate mahogany four-poster was queen-size, with a scallop-edged rose-and-green floral spread and a cream lace skirt. The dresser, night table, and lingerie chest were, like the bed, crafted of elaborately carved mahogany. The walls were painted soft green. The brass lamps, two on the dresser, one on the bedside table, had dark green shades and provided soft pools of illumination. Celery-striped curtains were drawn over the large window behind the bed and the even larger bay window at the far end of the room. Two armchairs covered in the same floral print as the bedspread stood before the bay window, with a small table bearing a bowl of deep pink silk roses between them. Silver-framed family pictures stood on her bedside table. Three books that she was currently reading, her place in each marked by turned-down corners, were stacked beside the pictures. One was a heavy-duty biography of LBJ (for help when she couldn’t go to sleep), one was a thriller by a popular author, and one was a parenting tome entitled The Chronically Ill Child. The navy pumps she had taken off earlier and neglected to put away stood at the foot of the bed; one had fallen over on its side on the dark green carpet. A tuft of lace from a nightgown peeked out of one improperly closed dresser drawer. The pearl earrings she had worn earlier lay atop the dresser, along with her hair brush.

  A gilt-framed oval mirror hung above the dresser, flinging her own stressed-out looking image back at her. She stood with one arm clamped tightly across her chest, her head tilted slightly over the white plastic receiver that she held to her ear. She was pale, with dark shadows under her eyes and cheekbones so sharp she looked almost gaunt. Her lips, devoid of lipstick or any softening hint of color, were clamped tightly together, revealing a trio of C-shaped lines on either side of her mouth that she had never noticed before. Another line, a small vertical one, snaked between her eyebrows. Shocked at how old she looked, she immediately relaxed her face. The lines disappeared, but that was the only improvement. She was still, she acknowledged to herself with some chagrin, a not particularly pretty woman of thirty-something, dressed in ancient, unbecoming sweats—too tall, too thin, with a too-long nose and short, untidy hair. In short, no sex goddess she.

  Since there was nothing to be done about that, Grace quit looking at herself and continued her inspection of the room, still attempting to view it through Marino’s eyes. The door to her bathroom was ajar, revealing her cream quilted robe hanging on a hook inside the door, her toothbrush in its holder, and her night cream on the edge of the sink. A fluted blue lipstick tube lay on its side next to the pink jar of night cream. There was the faint smell of flowers and fruit in the air, which Grace had become accustomed to and usually did not notice. It came from the small china dish of fancy soaps that she kept—just because she liked them—on the other side of the sink.

  She noticed the smell tonight because Tony Marino was in her bedroom, standing at the foot of her bed near her discarded pumps, his nostrils slightly distended as he seemed to sniff the air, his eyes hooded as he looked slowly around.

  In his charcoal sweat suit, with the lamplight bronzing his skin and throwing an intimidatingly tall and broad-shouldered shadow against the far wall, he looked big and tough and out of place amidst her belongings.

  As if sensing her eyes on him, he looked at her then and met her gaze. In that split second of eye contact, Grace felt a shaft of sexual attraction to him that set her insides quivering. A split second after that, when she realized to her horror what she was feeling, she very casually pivoted, breaking eye contact and turning her back to him. At that moment, thankfully, Jackie came back on the line. Concentrating fiercely, she was able to finish her conversation.

  Then she had to hang up the phone and face him again.

  “Paul says he didn’t do it,” she said crisply, her gaze meeting his as coolly as if she had never felt that sudden, sizzling bolt of awareness.

  His brows lifted. “Is he telling the truth, do you think?”

  Grace shrugged, walking toward him and the door. Her aplomb returned as she realized that of course he had no way of knowing what she had been thinking—or feeling. And anyway, she told herself, she was allowed to indulge in little spurts of sexual desire toward hunky men. She was a woman, after all, and single, and her senses were not dead even if she was not stupid enough to constantly indulge them.

  The head-to-toe tingle she had felt, looking at him, was harmless. It was even kind of fun.

  As long as she recognized it for the purely instinctive thing it was and left it at that.

  “Jackie thinks he is. To tell you the truth, I don’t think Paul did it, either. He’s too young, for one thing. He can’t write that well. It wouldn’t occur to him. It’s just not something he would do.”

  “Somebody did it.”

  He stepped out of her way as she approached him, and followed her out the door. Once in the hallway, without the intimacy of his presence in her bedroom to distract her, she was able to turn and confront him with more force.

  “Look, Detective, I don’t think this is a prank. Not by Paul. Not by anybody. I think somebody is trying to intimidate Jessica. I think this whole thing has something to do with your drug investigation at Hebron High School. I think somebody thinks Jessica is endangering them by talking to you, and this is their way of warning her to shut up.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Officers Peters and Stein, armed with equipment she couldn’t identify from that distance, entering Jessica’s bedroom. Marino must have seen the same thing, because his gaze flickered past her for an instant before returning.

  “It’s possible, I guess,” he said slowly. “But I don’t think so. Jessica doesn’t know that much, to begin with. At this point, she’s not a real player. If this is not a prank, which I have to tell you I’m inclined to think it is, then we have to start looking at other possibilities. You said you had a break-in here, the night Dom and I picked Jessica up. Tell me about it.”

  “I . . .” Grace began just as Jessica emerged from her bedroom.

  “Mom, Godzilla’s not in my room anywhere!” Sounding distraught, Jessica spotted her mother and Marino and came toward them. Her face was flushed now instead of pale, and her eyes were red-rimmed and teary.

  “Did you remember to take your last insulin shot?” Grace was sidetracked by the telltale flushed cheeks. In all the excitement, it would not be surprising if Jessica had forgotten to give herself the injection.

  “Yes, Mother.” Jessica’s eyes grew stormy, and her voice sharp. “And yes, I ate when I was supposed to, and yes, I tested my blood. I’m fine. Would you just please leave me alone about the damned diabetes and help me find Godzilla?”

  “Jessica Lee!” Grace exclaimed, protesting both swear word and attitude, but her daughter had already stormed past her and was stomping down the stairs.

  Grace’s expression, as she looked back at Marino, dared him to comment. He didn’t, merely meeting her gaze for a pregnant instant before harking back to their interrupted conversation.

  “So tell me about the break-in.”

  Grace sighed. And answered the question. Reprimanding Jessica for her rudeness and helping in the search for Godzilla
would both just have to wait.

  “. . . and so I picked Mr. Bear up and carried him into the house and called the police,” Grace concluded, feeling cold all over again at the memory.

  Marino seemed to ponder for a moment. “You know,” he said slowly, “stealing a teddy bear from a little girl’s bedroom doesn’t sound like something a drug dealer bent on intimidation would do.”

  “Then what else could it be?” Grace sounded angry. She realized that as she heard the words come out of her mouth. But she wasn’t angry, not really. She was growing increasingly frightened.

  “The time line’s not right, for one thing. Dom and I hadn’t even picked her up yet that night while you were running around outside chasing mystery burglars from your yard. Why would anyone want to intimidate Jessica before we had even picked her up?”

  “I don’t know. How could I possibly know? But she was already involved with these kids by then. She was already out buying marijuana, and maybe she already knew something she shouldn’t, or they thought she did. Maybe whoever it was that night just wanted to show Jessica that she was vulnerable, that they could get into her house and into her bedroom any time they wanted. Maybe whoever it was meant to harm her; maybe they didn’t know she wasn’t there. Or maybe they did know, and they were just checking out where she lived for some reason or another. I don’t know what the motivation was, exactly. How could I know? All I know is that on the same night Jessica snuck out, got drunk, bought marijuana, and was picked up by you, someone broke into my house and took her teddy bear from the table beside her bed. And earlier today, she thought someone followed her home from school. And tonight, when we got back from running, there was a tombstone with rest in peace and my daughter’s name inside it drawn on her bathroom mirror. And all that’s changed in our lives since this stuff started happening is that she’s gotten involved with some druggie kids at school, and you.”

  Marino held up both hands as if to ward her off as she glared at him. “You know, everything that’s happened could easily fall under the heading of pranks,” he said gently.