Trouble Magnet

by DelSheree Gladden

  “Are you okay?” Baxter asked, his voice rough, equally concerned and annoyed.

  I nodded.

  “Are you sure?”

  “He hit me,” I finally managed to say, “but I’ll be fine.”

  I didn’t think I would be fine, but not because of getting punched in the head.

  Baxter’s fingers gently probed what was probably a nasty bruise forming on my cheekbone. “What made you think you could trick him into thinking you had the diamond? Lying to him wasn’t going to save Maggie.”

  “I wasn’t lying,” I said. Baxter’s grip lessened and I looked up at him. “I found it, after you fell asleep. It was inside the bell on Mouser’s collar. I was about to wake you and tell you, but I got the text from Williams, and I knew you’d try to stop me, so I snuck out.”

  “You have the diamond?” Baxter asked in amazement.

  “Well, not on me,” I said. “I hid it in that mailbox over there. Which, I guess, someone should probably go get for evidence before someone else finds it.” I frowned, wondering how much trouble I’d be in if the homeowner of that mailbox—or a mail carrier—found the diamond and quietly carried it off. Probably a lot. Grimacing, I looked back at Baxter, but he was already directing an officer to go collect the diamond. When he turned back to me he was shaking his head.

  “Maybe that wasn’t the best place to hide it,” I admitted, but too spent to really care by that point.

  Dragging a hand down his face, Baxter surprised me by laughing. “I can’t believe you texted Williams asking him how to get down from the fire escape.” He started laughing harder. “And that you forgot to take any cash for a taxi. What if the address had been further away?”

  I pushed back and stared up at him. “What? How do you know about that?” Embarrassment burned through me, settling on my cheeks as a fiery red.

  Baxter laughed harder. I’d never seen him laugh like that, and frankly, it pissed me off that he was directing it at me. “Stringer had your phone tapped, remember? And they were tracking it. They knew about the text about ten minutes after you got it and started monitoring your movements. They should have seen it earlier, but the tech watching your phone had stepped away to use the restroom.”

  “What?” I shrieked. “They knew about Maggie and didn’t do anything? They knew I was going to meet Williams and…and they let me?”

  Baxter’s expression darkened. “Believe me, that wasn’t my decision.”

  His gaze shifted to where Detective Stringer and Detective Hollister were standing. Judging by the murderous look he was giving them, they might want to keep their distance for a while.

  “The delay in getting the info about the text, and your rash decision to run, made it difficult for them to find someone who could stand in for you quickly enough. They didn’t have a decoy diamond ready to make the exchange a real possibility, either. Nobody guessed you had the real one,” Baxter said. “They mobilized SWAT and got them in place before you were even close to this building, but they couldn’t get clean shot on Williams and they had no idea where Maggie was and didn’t want to risk catching her in the crossfire. They hoped to catch him when he opened the door to you, but he had you inside too quickly for them to make a move.”

  “What changed?” I asked, still pissed off, but grateful they had acted so quickly to get to Maggie’s house, at least.

  Baxter sighed and leaned against a nearby police cruiser. “After you went in, Williams moved you both into the living room. He’d shut all the blinds, but they were able to use body heat sensors and sound equipment to pinpoint where everyone was and get a couple of sharpshooters into place. When it looked and sounded like he was getting ready to kill you both, they decided to risk the shot.”

  “They shot him without knowing for sure it was him?” I asked, shocked.

  “It wasn’t an easy call, but there were two heat signatures that seemed to be restrained, and one that looked like it was about to take a shot. They were afraid he was about to kill you both,” Baxter said, “and with as many people as we suspect he had already killed, they didn’t want to risk letting him add you two to his list.”

  I swallowed hard, knowing exactly what would have happened if they had waited a second longer or took the seemingly safer option. Feeling shaky, I took a few short steps and leaned against the car with Baxter. “Don’t tell Bernadette about all of this, please?”

  Sighing, Baxter gestured at the news vans already surrounding the scene. “If she doesn’t already know, she will soon enough.”

  My shoulders fell. She was going to be furious. As angry as Baxter had been when they first brought me out, that was nothing compared to what I knew my sister was going to throw at me. When I first approached her with my plan to come to New York and enroll in culinary school, she’d been excited and supportive of me moving on with my life. Her enthusiasm had been tempered with an understandable amount of fear. She’d made me promise her something, that I’d stay safe, out of the spotlight, away from anything that could expose me and reopen past chapters of my life no one wanted to revisit.

  It hit me then, and I doubled over as a wave of panic seized me. The cameras, the frenzy finding a ten million dollar diamond that had been missing for fifty years, the fact that I had been a victim of a madman…Bernadette wouldn’t be angry just because I’d put myself in danger and she worried about me like a good big sister did. I’d broken my promise to her.

  “He going to find me,” I whispered over and over again as I slid down the car and buried my head against my knees. “He’s going to find me.”

  “Eliza, he’s dead,” Baxter said and he squatted in front of me and gripped my shoulders. “Williams is dead. He’s not going to come after you again.”

  I shook my head, sobbing even though I wouldn’t have done a single thing different. Maggie deserved to be saved. My friends shouldn’t have been targets. All the victims, fifty years ago and now, deserved to know the truth and have justice, closure. I did the right thing. Yet I was still crying hysterically as Baxter called over paramedics saying something about shock. I didn’t resist when someone picked me up and carried me to an ambulance. The oxygen mask they put over my face felt like a disguise, one I needed desperately to hide behind. Either the extra oxygen or the slight degree of anonymity helped. Slowly, it began to calm me and I started to breathe again.

  It took a while before my mind cleared and I found Baxter at my side, holding my hand as I lay on the gurney. A paramedic was with us. He monitored the thing clipped to my finger and the blood pressure cuff around my arm. He didn’t stop until he was completely satisfied I wasn’t going to have another panic attack, though he likely thought my meltdown had to do with what I’d just been through. Baxter wasn’t so easily fooled.

  “Can we have a minute alone,” he asked the man.

  “Sure, I’ll be just outside,” he said before handing me a chemical icepack for my head and jumping down from the back of the vehicle and disappearing.

  Baxter was silent for a long time. He took in a deep breath, then asked, “You weren’t talking about Williams, were you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then who?”

  It was difficult to answer that question. I came to Manhattan to be anonymous, so I could get lost in a big city where no one knew me or my past. I didn’t think that was possible anymore, but it still hurt to admit it.

  “What has Bernadette told you?”

  “About what?”

  “About me,” I said. “About my past.”

  Baxter shrugged. “Nothing. I mean, she talked about you on occasion, but not many details, just how much she missed you and how proud she was of you. I wondered why she didn’t say more, but I didn’t press her about it. People have a right to keep their personal lives personal.”

  “So, she didn’t tell you about Ben?” I asked.

  Bernadette was good at keeping secrets, and she would never betray my trust, but I had wondered over the past few weeks if she had told the man
she’d asked to watch out for me what he might really be up against. I still hadn’t figured out why Baxter had, at one time, slept on my sister’s couch, but I knew now that she trusted him. I just didn’t know how much.

  His brows pulled together in confusion at the question. “Ben?” He shrugged. “I don’t know who that is.”

  “He was my boyfriend, in high school, and I witnessed his murder. I saw him get shot, and then the killer turned the gun on me,” I said as tears pooled in my eyes. “He didn’t take the shot, though, because he didn’t want me dead. Not then, anyway. He wanted me to live for as long as he saw fit knowing he’d taken Ben from me. He wanted me to fear him, to live the rest of my life with him in the back of my mind, wondering when he would show back up and take someone else from me.”

  “Why?” Baxter asked. “Why would he kill your boyfriend and torture you like that?”

  The tears I’d been trying to hold back finally broke loose. “Because I took someone from him.”

  Baxter’s head tilted to the side, slow and considering. “Who?”

  I shrugged, pointlessly wishing things could have been different. “His father.”

  Pinching the bridge of his nose as if he were trying to fight off a massive headache, Baxter shook his head. “I don’t understand. You had an affair with his dad or something, and…”

  Crinkling my nose in revulsion, I said, “What? No.” I shook off that disgusting thought and tried to clear things up so Baxter knew just how dangerous it was to be around me. “No, it was my mom. She had an affair with his dad.”

  “How is that your fault?” Baxter asked.

  Shrugging, I tried not to let his wording hurt me too much. He didn’t mean it like that, even though that was what I had been told for so long. “I was the result of that affair. My mom got pregnant, my dad left his wife and son, and just took off. He abandoned them, not really for me, but because he’d been looking for an excuse to leave, and I ended up being it.”

  “So Bernadette…”

  “Is my half-sister. Her dad died in a car accident when she was three, and our mom was struggling to make it on her own when she met my dad.” I twisted the tube of the oxygen mask that was no longer in use. “I had no idea about any of this until I was in high school and Bernadette finally told me the truth. I didn’t take it very well, but she warned me against asking my parents about it. They’d built up this fantasy for themselves about how their life together started, how sweet and perfect it had all been. It was like their previous lives had simply never existed.”

  Baxter leaned back against a row of drawers built into the side of the ambulance. “I’m guessing that didn’t work for you, given what I know about you now.”

  The corner of his mouth turned up, like maybe that wasn’t as bad of a thing as he thought when we first met. I started to smile, too, but hesitated, knowing that was undoubtedly about to change.

  “When I learned I had a half-brother, I reached out to Simon. I hated that my dad had just walked out and forgotten about him. I thought maybe…” I shook my head, amazed at how stupid I had been. “I thought it would heal something, for both of us. There would be this kinship between us, right?” My lips began to tremble. “That wasn’t how he saw it. To him, I’d stolen the life he was supposed to have had. I had this seemingly charmed life when he and his mom were struggling just to get by after my dad left them. He hated our father, and after that, he hated me. I became the reason for everything bad in his life, and he decided to get even.”

  Sadness filled Baxter’s eyes. “So he killed Ben.”

  “And everyone blamed me.” When Baxter looked at me with a confused expression, I shrugged. “I should have just left things well enough alone. My parents blamed me. Ben’s parents blamed me. Even Bernadette blamed me a little, though she never said anything out loud. She’d warned me not to stir up trouble, but I’ve never been very good at that.”

  As I twisted my hands together, Baxter reached over and covered them with his. “You don’t stir up the trouble,” he said, “you just jump into what’s already there headfirst, but I don’t mean that as a bad thing.” He frowned and looked away. “I was scared to death when I woke up and you’d disappeared, but I really do understand why you did it. I don’t think any of this, or what happened to Ben, is your fault. I think you try to do the right thing and help people when they need it, and that lands you in some bad situations.”

  I looked up and met his gaze, trying to figure out if he really meant that. From the moment Baxter and I met, our relationship had been one fight after another, interspersed with moments like this I had no idea what to do with half the time. Deep down, Baxter was a good person. He wasn’t always the nicest person, but how many times had he already come through for me? He’d been a volatile, judgmental, irritating presence in my life since arriving in Manhattan, but he’d been a friend when I needed one. That was why this was going to hurt so much.

  “Baxter, thank you,” I said, struggling to keep myself from crying for the hundredth time. “Thank you for everything you’ve done to keep me sane and alive the last few weeks.”

  “But?” he asked slowly.

  “But Simon will come back. After what happened today, he’ll figure out where I am. No one’s seen him in five years, but the police are wrong if they think he’s given up. He’ll come back, and he’ll keep his promise. He’ll take someone else I care about, and I can’t stand the thought of that being you,” I said through a batch of tears, “even though you’re really kind of a jerk most of the time.”

  Sitting back and bracing his elbows on his knees, he was quiet for a few minutes. I waited, equally silent, for him to nod, stand up, and leave. I’d been nothing but a constant interruption and thorn in his side since we met. Not even a promise to my sister was going to be enough to keep him from washing his hands of me now.

  “I’ve changed my mind about something,” Baxter said. “I think you should date Sean.”

  At a loss, all I could say was, “What?”

  “Well, if Simon does come back and you’re dating Sean, I’ll be safe, at least.”

  It was awful of me, but I started laughing. I punched Baxter in the shoulder, too. “You are a horrible person. You know that, right?”

  He smiled, but it was tempered by concern. “Do you remember when you told me I didn’t owe you anything just because I made a promise to Bernadette to look out for you?”

  I nodded, holding my breath.

  “I told you it didn’t have anything to do with Bernadette.”

  “And when I asked you what it did have to do with, you never answered me,” I said quietly.

  “I got distracted by you…being in so much pain,” he said, “but the truth is, as good of a friend as Bernadette is, that alone wouldn’t make me jump into the middle of this kind of chaos. It had much more to do with you than her. Yes, I am an asshole to people ninety percent of the time. I’m not a pleasant person to be around. I became a lawyer to help people, though. My grandfather was a lawyer and he was one of the best people I knew. He despised the horrible things people did to each other, and he believed you had to do your part to set things right when you had the chance.”

  Baxter let his head fall into his hands. “There are so many ways I haven’t lived up to his memory, but I share his respect for people who try to help others.” He looked up at me, raw and exposed for the first time since I’d met him. “I appreciate you telling me about Simon, but I’m not going to stop being friends with you because I think it might be dangerous. Besides, you clearly need someone watching your back. You have zero sense for when something is too big to handle on your own, and I don’t want your death on my conscience.”

  I was ninety percent sure he was joking about that last part, but that wasn’t really what stuck in my mind. “Are we friends?” I asked.

  Chuckling, Baxter folded his arms across his chest and scoffed. “You think I let just anyone sleep in my bed and drape themselves all over me?”

  T
he reminder of the picture he took and threatened to send to Bernadette made my cheeks flush. “You better delete that picture.”

  “Never.”

  “You’re such an ass.”

  He shrugged and leaned back against the wall of drawers. His eyes closed after a few seconds and his body lost a good deal of its tension. “You better call Sonya,” he said. “She’s been driving me insane with texts and calls every five minutes since we realized you were gone. I refuse to talk to her anymore.”

  “I’ll call her as soon as my hands stop shaking.”

  His eyes stayed closed as he reached across and squeezed my hand for a moment. I felt my body begin to relax as my eyes closed as well. Williams was dead. I was safe for the time being. Baxter was still hanging around. My day hadn’t turned out at all as I’d expected, but for once, that was a good thing. Despite my best efforts, I doubted this moment of calm would last long, but I wasn’t as afraid to face whatever was coming next as I had been only a few hours ago. It was a start.

  The End of Book One

  Eliza’s adventures continue in the novella, “The Catalyst,” where Eliza crosses over into the Sydney Rye Kindle World and teams up with Hugh Defry and Mulberry to find a missing girl without actually getting involved. You can probably imagine how that will go!

  Check out “The Catalyst” on KindleWorlds

  The next full length novel in the Eliza Carlisle Mystery Series, “Firebrand,” will release in August 15th, 2017. Keep reading for a preview of Eliza’s next adventure!

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