“Because I’m afraid? I don’t know what you’re—”
“Stop it, James! Enough! You’re afraid people will think the same thing about you that you think about yourself. Well, enough! You did not kill Matthew, do you understand? You were just a kid, and your father made a mistake by putting his job above the safety of his son. It’s his fault.”
“My dad was a good cop!”
“Damn right! My son made a mistake, but he was an amazing cop.” Tears pooled in Pops’ eyes and his chin quivered. “And so are you. No more hiding—behind my Alzheimer’s, behind your job.”
“I’m not hiding, Pops. I like helping you.”
Pops squeezed his grandson’s shoulder. “I know you do, and I’m grateful. But it’s time you let yourself be happy. Now get downstairs and be the kind of man Elyse thinks you are.”
James squinted and shook his head. “What do you mean? What kind of man does she think I am?”
“The kind she can rely on.”
Pops’ words cut him like a knife. He’d spent so much time getting her to let her guard down, to trust him, and now that she had, he’d walked away when he knew she needed him. He’d used her past as another excuse to punish himself. He exhaled through his throat and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“She’s never going to trust me again.”
Pops looked him in the eye. “Go tell her you’re sorry.”
James bounded down the stairs and found Elyse still sitting on the couch, staring at the envelope she now held in her shaking hands, tears streaming down her face.
“Elyse, wait!”
She whipped her head around and her gaze met his, her eyes wide, her mouth slightly open.
“Elyse…that’s…that’s my name, isn’t it?”
He hadn’t meant to tell her like that. He sat beside her and tried to take her hands, but she pulled them away. He closed his eyes and sighed, then looked at her again, hoping she could see the regret he felt.
“Yes. Elyse Benson.”
“Elyse Benson.” She repeated it as if trying to make it fit the person she’d been calling Maggie for the past three weeks. “Is that all?”
“No.” He put his hands out, hoping she would take them, but she just stared at them. “Elyse, I’m sorry. I screwed up. There are things about this case that…look, the bottom line is I’m a cop, and you’re in my care. Bringing you here was a choice I made, and I have to deal with any repercussions that might arise.”
She looked at him, hurt and anger simmering in her eyes.
“You’re not the only one who has to deal with repercussions.”
He took a deep breath. “I didn’t mean…I’m sorry. Look, I just need you to know I’m here for you, that’s all. I’m not going anywhere.”
She pressed her lips together and shrugged. Her tough act wasn’t fooling him, though. He’d hurt her. She cleared her throat. “The DNA tests…did they show anything else?”
“Yeah. The DNA from your attacker came back with a match, too.”
Her eyes brightened. “That’s good, right? If you know his name, you can find him, and—”
“We don’t know his name. He didn’t match any known donors in the system.”
“Okay.” She twisted her face and shook her head. “So, if he’s not a match to anyone in the database, who is he a match to?”
She looked at him and held his gaze. She was giving him another chance to be there for her, and this time, he wasn’t going to blow it.
“You. Your attacker is a relative.”
She stood and looked at him, her eyes full of uncertainty.
“You’d better sit back down,” he said. “There’s more.”
There it was, on her face. The look he hadn’t seen for a while now. Fear. And he had put it there. She sat back down beside him.
“Go ahead,” she said. She lifted her head high, and sat tall, but her voice wavered.
“You were right about the dreams. Your father and sister were murdered, and your mother was the only survivor—except you, of course. You were away when it happened, but—”
“But I…I found them.” She gasped and brought her hand to her mouth. “I remember…calling for my mother.” She closed her eyes and more tears spilled from under the lids, tracing a path down her cheeks. “I heard her singing, so I went upstairs. I knew something was wrong. I opened the door and saw…”
Her eyes shot open and she gasped. “James, there was someone in the room. In my dreams, maybe in real life, too! There was someone else in that room!”
James shook his head. “There was no sign of anyone else in that room. I’m sorry, Elyse, but the evidence suggested your mother had a breakdown of some kind and killed your dad and sister. She confessed and was sent to a psychiatric hospital.”
“I…I’m not so sure, James. She wouldn’t…and the figure in my dreams…I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, anymore. I…” She began sobbing.
James gently pulled her closer, and she laid her head on his shoulder and cried. He could almost feel the breaking of her heart against his chest, and his heart broke for her. He wished that the results had been different. He wished he could take away her pain; tell her everything was going to be all right and that he was here for her. But how could he? Everything wasn’t all right. For either of them.
Pops and Helen came down the stairs, Helen rushing to the sofa.
“James? Maggie? Are you alright?”
“I got the DNA results,” James sighed. “Maggie…Her name is Elyse. Elyse Benson.”
Pops looked at Helen, his lips pursed. “She’s Margaret Benson’s daughter.”
Elyse snapped her head around to face Pops. “Margaret…Maggie is…my mother’s name? That’s why…wait.” She looked at James, wiping the tears from her face. “You said she went to a psychiatric hospital…do you know what happened to her? Do you know where she is?”
“She got a lot of threats,” Pops interrupted. “You know, because of the nature of the murders…a child, and all…”
James shook his head. “The state wouldn’t reveal where she was going in an effort to keep her safe. I’ll find her, though. I promise.”
Helen set a box of Kleenex on the coffee table, and James pulled one from the box and held it out to her.
She took it and wiped her face. “Thank you,” she stammered, tears still falling from her eyes. Her breath was quick and shallow. “I…it’s a lot…my name, and remembering…I…I don’t…” Her face whitened, her eyes rolled back in her head. She slumped forward, almost into James’ lap. He caught her and shifted so he could stand while laying her on the sofa.
“Poor thing,” Helen said. “I’ll go get her a glass of water.”
“Helen, wait.” James said. “Were the yard people here today?”
“Someone was here for a short time—twenty minutes or so. Barely long enough to mow the back and pull a few weeds. Why? Was there a problem?”
“No,” he lied. There was no point in causing a panic over the alarm. Especially if it turned out to be nothing more than a coincidence. “Our usual guys only mow, so I wondered who’d done the work. Looks nice—was it a team of guys?”
Helen shook her head. “Just one guy. I felt bad for him, too. He had on a baseball hat and one of those face masks like doctors wear—said his allergies were worse this year than they’ve ever been. I know mine’ve been acting up. Actually, he gave us a discount, because he got a call and had to leave…some kind of broken sprinkler line, or something.”
James followed Helen to the kitchen, the stepped out back under the guise of taking Oden out. He kneeled by the freshly weeded flowerbed and dug until he found the line to the alarm system. Cut. A clean cut, too. Given the depth at which he’d buried the line, this was no accident.
He hurried back inside and tried to conceal his concern.
“Hey, Pops, what was the name of the company that did the yard work?”
“I don’t remember. I don’t even remember calling them, b
ut here.” Pops reached into his pocket. “He left this card.”
James examined the business card. It looked like a professional card, but he’d need to call and do a little more investigating before he would decide if it was a legitimate business. Best case scenario, Pops had set up the service and forgotten, the cut line was just an accident, and the guy really did have allergies. But his gut told him otherwise.
“So,” Pops said, “what else was in that report?”
The report. The alarm. James’ head was starting to hurt, and he was ready for this day to be over. He took a deep breath and exhaled through his lips. “Her attacker is related to her. I don’t know how, yet. I’m going to have to order more tests.”
Pops cocked his head. “How do you intend to do that, since you’re not acting sheriff?”
James rubbed the back of his neck. “Denver Labs doesn’t know that. I don’t have to be in the office to put through a phone request.”
Pops smiled. “That’s my boy,” he said, patting him on the back. “Maybe Maggie can shed some light on what really happened that day. Since she was a minor at the time, we weren’t allowed to question her without a parent. Remember that?”
“Pops,” James pointed to Elyse, still passed out on the sofa. “That’s Elyse. Maggie was her mom. And I was still in high school when that happened. Dad worked the Benson case with you.” Pops got James and his father mixed up more and more often.
“Oh, right,” Pops nodded. “You know, your dad never believed Maggie Benson committed those crimes. Believed she was innocent right up to the day she killed him and—”
“Yeah, and then turned herself in. The scene was thoroughly investigated, right?”
“Of course.”
“And there wasn’t evidence of anyone else at the scene, was there?”
Pops stared into the distance, his eyes focused on something only he could see. James waved his hand in front of his face. “Pops?”
“I’m sorry,” he answered. “What did you say?”
“The Benson murders—there wasn’t any evidence of anyone else being at the scene was there?”
Pops shrugged. “Your dad never believed Maggie Benson committed those crimes. He should’ve left well enough alone.”
James’ heart sank. Occasions like this were more and more frequent. Pops was lucid and normal one minute, not so normal the next. He was glad he was here to help his grandfather, but it was hard to watch him disappear bit by bit.
James knew the rest of the story—it played in his head at least once every day.
His father thought he’d seen a young man running from the Benson home the day of the murders. He tried to follow him, but lost the trail early on. No evidence of another person was found at the scene, but his father was adamant there’d been another person. He followed every lead he got, reliable or not.
One afternoon, about a month after the murders, he received an anonymous call from a woman saying she had information about the other person at the Benson home that day. He was to meet the anonymous tipster at an old furniture warehouse on Seventeenth. James was at football practice and didn’t come home to watch Matthew, so his dad took him along. James’ dad was shot and killed the moment he stepped out of his squad car, and Matthew was killed immediately after.
Maggie Benson turned herself in later that evening. She waived her right to a trial and was sentenced to life in a psychiatric hospital.
“James,” Elyse said, her voice still faint.
“Yeah, I’m right here.” He sat on the sofa near her head and brushed the soft curls from her face.
“What happened?”
“You passed out.”
“Passed out?”
“You’re barely recovered from your injuries, and the information you just got…I think it was just too much to process.”
How could it not be? A half hour ago, she had no idea who she was. Now she knew her name, and she knew her family had been brutally murdered by her mother. Of course, it was a lot to process.
“I have so many questions, I don’t even know where to start.”
He couldn’t imagine the questions she must have. He had a million of his own.
“Start with the first question you think of.”
“What happened after I found them?”
“Police found you hiding in the woods behind your house, I think.”
He knew. His dad had found her while he was chasing the boy he’d claimed to have seen.
Elyse shook her head. “My mother…she told me to run.”
She squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them up again. “I can’t remember anything after that day. What happened after that?”
“The last record of you is when you were sent to foster care right after the crimes. You were with them until you were seventeen, then the records stop. They never reported you as a runaway.”
Her upper lip pulled up, her nostrils flared. “Of course. The broken bones. They didn’t report it because they’d have been found out if they had. Everyone would have known they were beating me. Where are they now?”
“They died, about six months after you ran away. Some kind of accidental lead poisoning or something.”
“They never got the justice they deserved,” she whispered, staring into the distance.
Another let down. James hoped it wouldn’t be one more reason for her to keep him out. He put his fingers under her chin and turned her face toward his.
“Don’t worry about that, Elyse. The important thing is they can’t hurt you anymore. No one will hurt you ever again.”
He couldn’t tell her why bad things happened; only that he would be there for her when they did. He wasn’t going to be able to convince her of that though, not after the way he’d acted today. It would take time, time he wasn’t sure they had.
Chapter 8
Birds singing outside the window woke Elyse. She sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. Sunlight beamed through her window, its rays reaching down and shining on Oden’s auburn coat.
She had spent most of the night trying to piece her memories together with her dreams, trying to figure out what was real and what wasn’t.
She had a lot of questions, but the biggest question now was who had tried to kill her and why? James had said it was a relative. Maybe there was an inheritance she didn’t know about, and she was targeted because of it. James would get to the bottom of it, she knew that. He was a brilliant detective, not to mention an amazing bodyguard. She never felt safer than when she was with him. She felt a lot of things when she was with him. Things she was afraid of. Even more so after last night.
She’d started trusting him, and he’d repaid her by walking away when she needed him. He’d come back, but there was something about the results he wasn’t telling her. He had to trust her if he wanted her to trust him. Until then, she needed to be careful.
“Come here, boy,” she patted the bed. Oden jumped onto the bed, his cold nose rubbed her cheek. He plopped down, lying almost in her lap. She sighed and leaned over her companion, hugging him. “Oh, Oden, what am I supposed to do?” She released her hold and looked at his face. “Maybe I should leave and try to figure this out on my own. James could get his job back if I left. He’s done so much for me…of course, where would I go? Should I leave? Stay?”
Oden’s forehead wrinkled like he was really thinking about what she’d said. “Yeah,” she sighed and rubbed his ears. “I don’t know either, buddy.” She knew. She wanted to stay.
Over the past few weeks, she had grown very fond of James. More than fond of him. She wanted to be near him, wanted to open her heart to him. But she was afraid to admit it. Even to the dog. Admitting it would make it real, and if it was real it could be taken away.
“What do you say you and I go down and get something to eat?”
Oden jumped off the bed, and Elyse swung her legs over the side. She opened the wardrobe to get something to wear and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Red, wavy hair stuck
this way and that, and her eyes were still puffy from crying yesterday. She didn’t want James to see her looking like this.
She looked at Oden and shook her head. “Sorry, buddy. Breakfast will have to wait just a few more minutes. I need a shower.”
By the time she finished, she was hungrier than ever. She threw on a pair of jeans and a green t-shirt. She opened her door, and she and Oden began heading down the stairs.
Click. Click. Click. Although Elyse tried not to make noise on the stairs, Oden’s nails tapped the wood with each step he took. She wanted to get to the bottom before anyone heard them coming. Before James heard them coming.
“I thought I heard you,” James bounded up and met them, stopping about halfway up the stairs.
He had dirt smeared on his face and shirt. He’d said he was going to get up early to work on the alarm, something about changing it over to wireless. Her pulse jumped. Even dirt made him attractive.
“Why didn’t you send Oden down to get me? I would have helped you.” His voice interrupted her thoughts, and she blinked, grateful he couldn’t read them.
This was why she hadn’t sent Oden down. The jump in her pulse. The faint scent of his masculinity. The way she felt when he touched her. The way her heart felt every time he told her it would be all right. The way his gaze almost made her believe everything would be all right. She was trying to avoid all of it.
“I can do the stairs by myself, really.”
“Okay,” he agreed, much to her surprise and slight disappointment. “How about I walk beside you, then? Deal?”
He smiled, making her body warm. He had been doing that a lot lately. Making her pulse race, her breathing change.
“Deal.” She hoped her face wasn’t revealing what she was feeling.
He held his hand out and looked her in the eye. She looked at it and raised her eyebrows.
“Most deals involve a handshake,” he said, answering the question she must have shown on her face. She hesitated, afraid of the electricity his touch sent through her.
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