The Midnight Hour

by Karen Robards

  “I take it you’re not going to be asking me in,” John said with a rueful smile.

  “Jessica . . .” Grace explained with pseudo-regretfulness. If she was being strictly honest, she would have to admit that she would not ask him in even if Jessica did not exist. She liked him well enough, but she was not attracted to him.

  “Maybe we can go out again,” he said, catching her by her arm as she walked near him and drawing her close. He was going to kiss her, Grace knew. Not that she minded, not really. A kiss was small change in the currency of male-female relations, after all.

  He did kiss her, holding her tight against him and invading her mouth with his tongue. As kisses went, it was perfectly pleasant. His lips were warm and soft, his tongue performed the obligatory maneuvers without being offensive, and his breath tasted faintly of Scotch, which he had been drinking. He was taller than her, though not by much, and his body was pleasantly firm. Grace kissed him back in an easy, relaxed fashion that said volumes about the lack of passion she was experiencing, then as soon as she decently could, eased herself out of his arms.

  “How about lunch next week?” he asked, his voice slightly thickened.

  Grace was already moving away from him. “I’ll have to check the calendar in my office. Call me and I’ll let you know,” she said with a wave and a friendly smile thrown over her shoulder. “Good night.”

  “Good night.” John got back in his car. As Grace went up the steps, he reversed down the driveway, his headlights cutting bright swaths through the darkness.

  Grace was grimacing, faintly, as she stepped onto the porch. She was tired, and her feet hurt in the high-heeled shoes, and the waistband on her pantyhose was chafing her waist. She wouldn’t go out with John again, she thought, fumbling in her purse for the key. He was a nice enough guy, but . . .

  A slight creak brought her gaze around to the deep shadows at the far end of the porch where the swing hung.

  She gasped, her hand flying to her throat as her heart skipped a beat.

  A man was sitting on the swing, legs spread, smoking a cigarette and watching her. She could just make out the bulky shape of his shoulders above the back of the swing, and the outline of his head. The tip of the cigarette glowed brightly as he brought it to his mouth, then dimmed as it fell again.

  Chapter

  27

  “YOU SCARED THE LIFE OUT OF ME,” Grace said furiously, recognizing Marino.

  “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.” It was an idle observation. He took another drag on his cigarette, making the tip glow bright red again.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” she retaliated, walking toward him. He was wearing his leather bomber jacket, she saw, which was zipped almost all the way up to his throat, and jeans. Cigarette smoke, white and wispy, curled around his head. Its acrid smell was in the air.

  “Seems like there’s a lot we don’t know about each other, then, doesn’t it?” He eyed her and put the cigarette to his mouth again. “Nice outfit, by the way.”

  “What are you doing here?” A thought seized Grace by the heart. “Jessica . . .”

  “She’s fine.” He took a final drag on the cigarette and then flipped it over the railing, into the big snowball bush by the steps.

  “You shouldn’t do that. You could start a fire,” Grace protested, distracted.

  “It’s too wet. Anyway, you probably should know that the cigarette wasn’t mine. I used to smoke, a long time ago, but I quit. I found a pack with two cigarettes and a lighter in it hidden under the cushion here when I sat down. I decided to smoke ‘em for the hell of it, to see if they tasted as good as I remembered. They didn’t.”

  “Whose? . . .” Grace began, but the snorting sound he made told her his opinion as eloquently as if he’d put it into words. “You think they’re Jessica’s?”

  “Unless you sit out here on the porch and smoke.”

  “Oh, she doesn’t . . .” Grace began, then broke off under the weight of that derisive look. He was right, she realized, however much she hated to admit it. If cigarettes and a lighter had been hidden on the porch, their most likely owner was Jessica.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked again, abandoning the topic of Jessica and the cigarettes for the moment. After everything she had been through with her daughter lately, discovering that she snuck cigarettes was almost small potatoes.

  “I promised you I’d take this seriously, didn’t I? It occurred to me that if someone really is stalking Jessica, or you, they have to be hanging around your house a lot. I thought I’d sit out here in the dark awhile and see what I could see.”

  That made sense. It made such dazzlingly good sense that Grace was surprised she hadn’t thought of it herself. For someone to have done the things that had been done, whoever it was had to be watching the house pretty closely. It should not be all that difficult to catch them in the act.

  “Have you seen anything?” she asked, suddenly feeling much better.

  “Not a creature’s stirred,” he said. “That is, until your boyfriend pulled up.”

  At the thought that he had witnessed that kiss—Grace snuck a quick look over the porch rail, trying to gauge exactly how much he could see, and decided that, as the kiss had taken place right in the pool of lamplight, he could see plenty—she felt a squirmy kind of embarrassment. Which was silly, she told herself firmly. She was a grown woman, and she had a perfect right to kiss whomever she wished.

  “John’s a fellow judge, not my boyfriend,” she said, then realized that she shouldn’t be explaining things to him at all.

  “Oh. I guess I didn’t realize that judges go around kissing each other good night. Cops don’t, as a general rule, but then, judges may be different.”

  “Funny,” Grace said, with an intonation that meant the opposite.

  “I try.”

  “How was your niece’s christening, by the way?”

  “Good. The whole family turned out for it, twenty-seven strong. The baby cried all the way through it. The rest of us were properly reverential, though.”

  “There are twenty-seven people in your family?”

  He shrugged. “I’m one of six brothers, all cops, all Catholic. What can I say?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “That about sums it up.”

  “Are your parents still living?”

  “My mother is. My dad died twelve years ago. He was a cop, too.”

  “Does your family all live here in town? Your mother and brothers?” Grace was fascinated by the idea of a family that large, and close enough that all would turn out to attend an infant’s christening. And all boys who grew up to be cops. His poor mother, was her crowning thought.

  “Robby, the youngest, lives in Dayton, but he and his family drove up for the occasion.”

  “Where are you in the group?” Grace asked.

  “Number two. After Dom.”

  “He’s three years older than you. I remember.” Grace smiled faintly.

  “Do you, now?”

  “So how old is he?”

  “Dom? He’s forty-two. That makes me thirty-nine, if you were wondering.”

  That was precisely what Grace had been wondering, but she wasn’t going to admit it.

  “You want to come in and have a cup of coffee?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Nah.” The swing creaked again as he moved it slowly back and forth. The wind chimes tinkled briefly, and then fell silent. It was not a windy night, just damp and not quite cold.

  “I’ve got to go in and let Linda go.”

  “Fine.”

  Grace hesitated, then turned and walked away. Extracting her key from her purse, she let herself into the house. Warmth greeted her, and the familiar smell of home. The downstairs lights were off except for the ones in the family room, at the very back of the house, where Linda was curled cozily on the couch watching a movie on HBO.

  “Oh, hi, Judge Hart,” Linda said, uncurling herself and standing up when she saw Grace in
the doorway. “I didn’t expect you this early.”

  Grace smiled. “I was tired. Where’s Jessica?”

  “She went to bed right before ten.”

  “Everything go okay?” Grace walked back into the kitchen, where she had left her purse on the counter. Linda followed her, yawning and nodding at the same time. As Grace made fresh coffee, then paid her, they chatted. When Linda left, she used the kitchen door, and Grace doubted that she was even aware of Marino sitting on the front porch, keeping watch.

  She went upstairs to change clothes and check on Jessica. Jessica’s door was locked, Grace discovered as she turned the knob, then knocked softly with no result. She could hear the bass beat of a rock band thumping from inside the bedroom. From that Grace deduced that her daughter had fallen asleep while listening to her stereo. It wasn’t like Jessica to lock her bedroom door, but then, she herself had locked her bedroom door earlier this afternoon.

  This thing was spooking them both.

  Grace changed her dinner suit for the navy sweats she had worn earlier, went down to the kitchen, poured coffee into two mugs, and added to one of them the spoonful of sugar that she remembered Marino preferred. Grabbing a brown wool jacket from the coatrack, she pulled it on and returned to the front porch. Marino still sat on the swing, she saw, his head resting back against the cushion, his face turned so that he had a clear view of the yard.

  He looked around as she stepped out onto the porch. It was about a quarter after twelve now, Grace guessed, and the air was definitely cold. The wind had picked up, and the wind chimes tinkled in perfect, mournful accompaniment to the ghostly sounds of rustling leaves and rubbing branches and dripping eaves.

  “I brought you some coffee.” Grace held the mug out to him.

  “Thanks.” He sat up, taking it from her.

  “I appreciate this,” she said quietly, still standing in front of him. “You coming out here like this, I mean. I know you have better things to do.”

  “No problem.” He took a sip of coffee, then looked up at her. “I’m a cop, remember? That’s what we do.”

  Grace sat down in the rocker closest to the swing, so close that his knee fell just short of brushing her thigh when the swing moved. She cradled the coffee cup in both hands, savoring its warmth and fragrance.

  “You’re not planning to sit out here all night, are you?” she asked, sipping.

  “Whatever it takes,” he said.

  “It’s cold. You’ll freeze.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Where’s your car?” She suddenly realized that the driveway was empty. Her Volvo was in the garage.

  “A couple of blocks over, parked on the street. I wanted it to look like you and Jessica were here alone.”

  “What if whoever it is comes tomorrow night instead of tonight?”

  “I plan to be out here tomorrow night, too.”

  “You can’t spend the rest of your life sitting up nights on my porch!”

  “I don’t intend to. You get your locks changed and that security system put in on Monday, right?”

  Grace stared at him through the darkness. And she realized something. He wasn’t sitting on her porch thinking he would catch anyone. He probably didn’t believe that anyone was even out there to catch. He was sitting on her porch in the wee hours of a cold, damp Saturday night simply because he knew that she and Jessica were afraid to sleep in the house alone.

  “Sometimes you’re actually a pretty good guy, Detective, you know that?” Grace sent him a singularly sweet smile, the type that was seldom seen on her face anymore.

  He met her gaze for a moment, then responded with a crooked smile of his own. “You want to put that in writing, Your Honor, I’ll frame it and hang it on my wall. It’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  For a moment they sat there smiling at each other. Then Grace remembered something and mentioned it almost reluctantly, regretting having to spoil the mood. “After you left today, I discovered that there was a picture missing from the arrangement on the wall going up the stairs. A picture of Jessica and me.”

  He took a sip of coffee and looked at her meditatively. “So what are you trying to tell me?”

  “I think he took it. The same person who left the cake and wrote on the mirror. I think he took the picture.”

  The sound Marino made was very much like a not-quite-perfectly muffled, long-suffering sigh. Grace bristled, then decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was, after all, sitting on her porch in the middle of the night, when he didn’t have to be.

  “You want to show me?”

  Grace put her coffee cup down on the table between the rockers and stood up. Marino did the same thing, then followed her inside. Grace was very conscious of his presence behind her as she led the way to the stairwell. Only a small amount of light from the kitchen reached the hallway. With a quick flick she turned on the chandelier that hung above the stairs, and blinked for a moment at the sudden brightness. She then climbed the stairs to the place where the bare nail stuck out from the wall.

  “It was here,” she said, touching the nail’s small flat head as she turned to look at him. The side of her hand accidentally brushed his chest. The leather of his jacket felt slick and cool, the body beneath reassuringly solid. She was surprised to find that he was so close, close enough to allow her to see every individual whisker in what must be, when he forgot to shave, a heavy beard, close enough for her to feel the heat of his body and smell the aroma of leather and cigarette smoke that clung to him. With that single glance she took in the small vee of black chest hair just visible at the base of his throat, the fullness of his lower hp compared to his upper one, the slant of his thick black eyebrows as the inside corners were drawn toward his nose in a faint frown. Though he was two steps below her, their eyes were almost on a level. His were faintly bloodshot, as if he needed more sleep than he was accustomed to getting, and slightly narrowed as they stared at the place she indicated.

  Grace was conscious, suddenly, of a strong desire to touch him, to place her hands on those broad shoulders and lean forward and . . .

  Then he was looking directly into her eyes, instead of at the nail as he had been. His gaze dropped, and Grace realized that his focus had shifted to her mouth. Had something in her expression revealed what she was thinking? she wondered, embarrassed at the thought. Flustered, she turned quickly back to the wall and prayed her face wouldn’t turn red.

  “It was one of three,” she said, conscious that she was babbling a little but unable to help it. “See, the other two are still here. They were a series of the two of us together, taken about three years apart. The one that’s missing is about a year old. You can see from the nail that it really was here.”

  “Grace . . .” He drew her name out in a way that was pained and exasperated in equal measure.

  She looked at him again, recognizing from his tone that he considered the missing picture meaningless, and felt herself start to get mad.

  “I think whoever left the cake took the picture away with him,” she said firmly.

  He glanced from her to the nail and back.

  “I’m not saying it’s not possible, but . . .”

  “I thought you said you were going to take this seriously, Detective!” Mindful of Jessica asleep upstairs, her voice was low but fierce.

  He sighed and met her gaze with a slight but unmistakable twinkle in his eyes. “There you go trying to bully me again.”

  His amusement was too much. Grace sucked in her breath and glared at him. “Forget it. This is useless. You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you? None of this is happening. It’s all just a figment of my overactive imagination!”

  “I’ll add the missing picture to the case file, okay?” His voice was soothing, and that was almost more maddening than anything else.

  “Forget it! Just forget it!” Brushing past him, nearly knocking him down the stairs in her anger and not much caring if she did, Grace stalked to the light sw
itch and flicked it off. “Go back out on the porch!” she snapped over her shoulder. “Better yet, go home! If none of this is happening, I certainly don’t need you hanging around playing bodyguard, do I? You . . .”

  “Hush!”

  Two bounds brought him to the foot of the stairs. Grabbing her from behind, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her tightly against him as he clapped a hand over her mouth. His action was so urgent, so unexpected, that Grace did exactly as he ordered: She hushed, hanging in his arms with the limp lack of resistance of a bean-bag toy.

  “Look there!” He whispered the words into her ear as he lifted her clean off her feet and turned her around to face the living room. Clutching the hard, leather-clad arm around her waist for balance, she could feel the faint sharp stubble of five o’clock shadow scratching her skin as his jaw pressed close against her cheek. “Look at the window on the right!”

  For a moment Grace was bewildered. Then she saw it. The glowing lamplight outside had caught someone in the act of walking between the lamppost and the house. Thrown in sharp relief against the closed curtain, the shadow was visible for only a few seconds before it vanished from sight.

  Chapter

  28

  “STAY HERE!” Marino let her go, pulled a gun from the back waistband of his jeans and ran on silent feet for the front door.

  Stay here nothing! Grace ran, too, for the kitchen, and her own gun. She would go out the kitchen door, and they would have him trapped between them.

  The idea of catching the criminal who had been preying on her daughter filled Grace with a kind of savage triumph. She had always wondered if she would be capable of shooting someone if she had to. Now she had the answer, she thought as, pistol in hand, she slipped out the back door. She could.

  The kitchen door opened onto a cement-floored, covered walkway that led to the door to the garage. The walkway was about twelve feet long by five feet wide, and it was wet and slippery. Roof-high verbena grew the length of it on both sides, so that the passage itself formed a kind of sheltered tunnel. There was an opening on either side just wide enough to permit a person to pass through, to the front and back yards. Grace stepped cautiously through the opening onto the flagstone path that led around to the driveway, unmindful of the shower of icy raindrops she dislodged or the rush of cold air that hit her in the face. She held the pistol stiffly in her right hand, and her glance darted all around.