Dear Santa
Page 6
“What we’re suspecting is a child molester,” she was saying. “Isn’t that right?”
“It’s one of the possibilities,” he answered in a grim tone.
There was nothing he hated more than the kind of animal who preys on children. Vic could feel his rage heat up just thinking about it.
“But, if that’s the case, why would Coyote run off? Why wouldn’t he just tell somebody at the center? We make a big point of letting kids know they can do that and that they should. I’m sure they do the same thing at the school. Why wouldn’t he just talk to someone, you for example?”
“Unless the creep is a member of Coyote’s family. Kids are more reluctant to talk when that’s the case.”
Katherine shook her head, and coils of fair hair tumbled around her face from beneath her knit cap. Vic did his best to concentrate on what she was saying instead of on how the chill of the afternoon had brought a bloom to her cheeks, or the way the car heater was now turning her skin dewy.
“I don’t think it’s a family member,” she said. “Otherwise, Sprite would probably have recognized him or at least made an association with the car.”
Vic would have liked to ask her how anybody could be so smart and so beautiful at the same time, but the stillsensible part of his mind told him how corny that would sound. He nodded instead and turned the car heater down a little. Maybe the rising temperature was starting to addle his brain and that was why all he could think about was the way Katherine’s mouth naturally curved up slightly at the corners. When he started wondering what it would be like to place the tip of his tongue there, he knew he had to say something to distract himself.
“Maybe the kid was too afraid or too ashamed to tell someone,” Vic said off the top of his head.
Katherine shook her head again. “That doesn’t sound right to me either. If the man in the black car was a child molester, that would make him a threat to Sprite, too. From what Stefan Piatka said, Coyote is very protective of his little sister. I believe that if he thought she was in danger he’d go to somebody for help, no matter how frightened or embarrassed he might be. I have a feeling we’ve got something other than the usual garden-variety child predator here.”
“Do you have any ideas about specifically what that other something might be?”
The reminder of the reality of how much danger Coyote could be in was bringing Vic’s head out of its fog of lust or infatuation—or whatever—fast
Katherine sighed. “I don’t have a clue, really. Except that I don’t like the sound of a shiny new car in a neighborhood this marginal.”
“I agree with you there,” Vic said. “Those kind of characters usually come into a neighborhood like this because they’re up to no good.”
“I’d like to take a closer look.”
Her hand was on the door handle and pulling it backward before he could react. She had the door open and was about to get out of the car by the time he could grab her arm.
“I’m not sure you should do that,” he said.
She turned slowly to look down at his grip on her arm.
“You have a habit of latching on to women, don’t you,” she said in a tone that made him let go of her immediately.
“Sorry,” he said. “But I thought we already decided that with Sprite back at the school and Coyote on the run and Tooley Pennebaker at work this time of day, according to the school records, their apartment must be deserted.”
“I want to take a look at it anyway.”
She put one foot out of the car, and Vic had to restrain himself from grabbing her again. That was obviously a nono with her, especially after the way he’d behaved last night.
“What if the bogeyman in the big car is around?” he said.
“Don’t you think he’d have figured out the same things we did about the place being deserted this time of day? If he really is watching for Coyote, then we can assume he wouldn’t waste his time here right now.”
She slid the rest of the way out of the car then and shut the door behind her with a resolute slam. Vic had no choice but to follow.
KATHERINE HAD MORE than one reason for getting out of the car. The rising tension in there was about to make her jump in her skin. It wasn’t just Vic’s blasting car heater that warmed her face to the flush she could feel creeping downward to other parts of her. As she sat there talking to him, she’d been unable to ignore the charges of challenge leaping back and forth between them, and that challenge had everything to do with the fact that he was a very sexy man. She’d known many men she thought of as attractive, but very few struck her as sexy. Maybe none had ever struck her this hard. Certainly, something had changed between them in the time they’d spent together. Something had altered the way she viewed Vic Maltese. She could actually feel her temperature mount when she was around him no matter how cold the weather might be. She stepped onto the frigid sidewalk and could see her breath steam in front of her. Still, her cheeks and the back of her neck flamed.
He’d wanted to leave her behind earlier. Now she wished she could do the same with him. These new feelings about Vic came to her entirely unbidden and weren’t particularly welcome. She’d been a long time without a man in her life, even longer without a man in her bed. She’d been taken entirely by surprise when she turned toward him just moments ago in the car, and experienced the unmistakable impact of a spark darting straight from his eyes into hers and, from there, along her nerve endings and through her blood. She knew instantly, of course, what it was. She simply hadn’t known it was going to happen. Meanwhile, he was at the moment following her out of the car, and there was nothing she could do to stop him.
Katherine hurried into the crunch of snow just off the curb. She started to congratulate herself for wearing more sensible boots today. Then she remembered Vic practically carrying her across the parking lot last night and how that had embarrassed her into wearing the flat, rubber-soled footwear she had on today. Which in turn reminded her that she had been on close terms, if you could call it that, with Vic for less than twenty-four hours now. He shouldn’t be igniting passions in her, or whatever it was he did, anywhere near so soon. As a matter of fact, she didn’t want him, or anyone else, igniting anything in her at all. She had her share of burn scars already.
“Do you know which apartment is theirs?” Vic asked from the other side of the car.
He seemed to want to keep his distance from her as well. She hoped that was what he would do.
“The file at the center listed the apartment only as B,” she said, ducking her head against a sharp blast of cold she couldn’t help but feel even in her present, rather overwrought state.
Katherine continued across the two-lane road. There wasn’t much in the way of traffic. The workday activity of State Street and Capitol Hill was many long blocks from here. The house where the Bellaway children lived with their aunt was no worse for wear than the rest of the block but no better off either.
There was a stoop outside the house. Katherine climbed the seven cement steps to the door and checked out the smudged nameplates beneath the doorbells. The Pennebaker plate had “1F” in parentheses after the B.
“According to this, I’d guess they’re on the first floor in the front, but I can’t tell which side of the building that is,” she said.
Vic had stopped at the foot of the steps to the stoop. He didn’t look like he was about to move closer. Katherine suspected he might have felt the electrical thing between them as well. Maybe he didn’t care to be zapped by it again any more than she did. He only nodded in response to her comment.
“I’m going to ring the bell,” she added.
She pressed the flat button that appeared as if it might once have had the luster of mother-of-pearl. Nothing happened. She pressed the bell once more, harder this time, and a sharp buzz was audible then from what sounded like the right side of the first floor. Katherine waited a long moment but heard nothing more from inside the building. She buzzed again and listened again.
“And, if he’s hiding, he won’t answer the bell.”
“That would be my guess.”
From the stoop, Katherine tried the handle of the door to the entry way of the building, but the door was locked. She cupped her hands around her face and peered through the glass in the door. She couldn’t see much of anything through the curtain that covered the pane.
“I think I’ll take a peek through those windows,” she said, indicating the pair that abutted the edge of the stoop.
“Be careful,” Vic said. “You don’t want anybody to see you.”
He was right. Anyone inside observing her surveillance could be alerted in time to run off, if they hadn’t been so alerted already. Or, a neighbor might notice Katherine snooping around and call the police. She gazed up and down the street but saw no one, not even a face behind a frosty window. She proceeded cautiously to the edge of the stoop and leaned just far enough over the rail to peek around the frame of the first window. What she saw made her pull back and flatten her body against the wall.
“Vic,” she said in the loudest whisper she could manage without guaranteeing she’d be heard by anyone who happened to be inside. “Come here.”
She made a quick, beckoning arm motion she hoped would communicate her urgency.
“What?” he asked.
She pressed her gloved finger to her lips. “Shh.”
He apparently took her seriously because he said no more and stepped as noiselessly as was probably possible for a man his size onto the steps.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered when he got to her side.
“It looks like the place has been trashed.”
Chapter Seven
Once they had called the police, Katherine retreated across Ten Broeck Street to lean against Vic’s car. Her coat was smudged with winter road soot from its dusty metal surface, but she didn’t care. She breathed deep and drew in air as needle-sharp as Chicago’s notorious frigid wind had ever been. She wished she could will her heart to freeze as solid as the ice at the corner of Vic’s windshield. In the instant it took for that thought to form and fade away, Katherine understood she should will her heart to freeze against him. as well.
Her gaze darted to Tooley Pennebaker’s stoop, where Vic stood on the sidewalk with one booted foot on the bottom step as he leaned to listen to the much shorter policeman at his side. A dark lock of Vic’s hair fell forward as he leaned down. He shoved the lock back with an impatient swipe of his hand, and she felt the movement like a touch.
She turned quickly away. No matter how confused she might have been emotionally during these past difficult months, there was one thing of which she was absolutely sure. She must not set herself up for loss and devastation again. She was still too vulnerable to risk that.
After Daniel’s death, she’d pushed her feelings as far down beneath the surface of herself as she could get them to go. She’d run away and ended up here in Albany, where she’d kept herself furiously busy with work ever since. That combination of running, hiding and hard work had assured her safety, at least from additional heartache—till today.
Despite the progress she had made on her emotional front, still sometimes she could be assaulted by an almost overwhelming sense of loss. When that happened, she’d become acquainted yet again with what she thought of as her soft center, a place like a pool filled with sadness. She never knew in advance which experiences or associations might send her plummeting back to the sorrow of Daniel’s death. Otherwise, she would have avoided those circumstances as surely as a gun-shy soldier avoids battle. Otherwise, she would have run from Ten Broeck Street and never set foot on Tooley Pennebaker’s stoop that afternoon.
If forced to guess at the cause of her sadness today, she’d have to choose one of two things. The sight of the police car was one possibility. A police car with its dome light flashing an eerie, rotating glow, first red then white, had accompanied her last ambulance ride with Daniel to the hospital. He was beyond the help of hospitals by then, or sirens or flashing lights.
Another possible trigger for today’s flashback to devastation could be the similar devastation she’d seen through Tooley Pennebaker’s window. The living room and its contents had obviously been threadbare even before someone went in there and started tossing furniture around. Many of those poor pieces were broken now, and Katherine couldn’t help but imagine what hardship that might cause for Coyote, Sprite and their aunt. Katherine had never known much material want in her life, but she was no stranger to bleakness. What she’d glimpsed through that window this afternoon was bleak almost beyond her capacity to bear.
Katherine shook her head and sighed. A couple of kids with pleading eyes living one rundown tenement apartment away from homelessness, and a man who drove hot cars and wore black leather. She couldn’t have come up with three people more likely to put her already wrung-out heart through a wringer again if she’d ordered them from central casting.
Katherine pulled herself out of the hunch she’d slid into against the dusty car. She adjusted her scarf and pushed the escaped bits of hair back under her cap. She resolved that from now on she’d be wise as well as smart and keep her heart to herself, where it belonged. The husky voice at her elbow interrupted her second repetition of that resolution.
“What’s going on over there? Do you know?”
The woman at Katherine’s side was only about five feet tall, but she was very solidly built. She was scowling as if she wanted to punch somebody. Katherine hoped that somebody wouldn’t be her.
“You with them?” the woman asked, gesturing toward Vic and the policeman on the opposite side of the street.
“Yes.”
Katherine resisted the impulse to clarify that she was with the Arbor Hill Center contingent of the official gathering across the way, not the police. She understood that the police weren’t likely to be very popular in this neighborhood.
“What’s your business here?” the woman asked.
“I’d have to know who you are before I answer that.”
The woman looked Katherine up and down. She wished she couldn’t feel against her cheek the corkscrews of hair that had popped out yet again from beneath her cap in a way that she knew made her look about fourteen years old.
“Who are you to be asking who I am?” was the woman’s response.
“My name is Katherine Fairchild. I’m from the Arbor Hill Children’s Center.”
Katherine wished she could back away. Though she was several inches taller, she couldn’t help feeling that the force of this woman’s personality towered over her. Until, suddenly, her entire demeanor appeared to change. A wide smile broke across her face, and the angry flatness in her eyes came suddenly alive.
“That’s the place my Coyote hangs out in sometimes,” she said. “He’s told me there’s good people works over there.”
“You’re talking about Coyote Bellaway?”
“Could there be more than one kid with a name like Coyote?”
Katherine was bewildered. “Are you Tooley Pennebaker?” she blurted.
“That’s my name. Call me Tooley.” She extended a mittened hand toward Katherine’s gloved one.
Katherine accepted the handshake and found herself caught in a grip as commanding as she might have known it would be.
“You’re Coyote and Sprite’s aunt? Their mother’s sister?”
The woman hesitated, then finally admitted, “Not so’s you could tell it by looking at me.” Her skin was the color of deep, rich chocolate, as dark as Coyote and Sprite were pale. She sighed. “I expect Coyote’s been telling that one about me being his blood kin.”
“That’s exactly the one he’s been telling,” she said.
Tooley gave Katherine a penetrating look. “I care about those poor children as strong as if they were my blood, that’s for sure. And t
heir ailing mama, too. She and me go way back.”
She shook her head. The expression on her broad face made clear how sad she considered the story of the Bellaway children and their mother.
“Are you going to let him keep on telling it?” she asked.
“Do you mean, am I going to report that you’re not a blood relative of Coyote and Sprite?”
“Mmm-hmm. That’s just what I mean.”
Katherine hesitated.
“You know what the welfare will do when they find out, don’t you?” Ms. Pennebaker asked. “They’ll clamp those two sweet children into foster care faster than you can say Jackie Robinson. They most likely won’t keep them together, either. Coyote could handle that okay. He probably could handle about anything. How Sprite would take it though, I don’t know, and that precious girl’s already missing her mama so bad it ought to make you cry your heart out.”
Katherine would have preferred another answer to the one she must eventually and inevitably give.
“I won’t be the only one making that decision,” she said.
“That’s what they call passing the buck, honey.”
Katherine didn’t deny that. She didn’t say anything. Instead, she started across the street with Tooley Pennebaker bustling right behind her.
VIC SAW the two women approaching and swore silently. Under most circumstances, he’d have been pleased by the prospect of Katherine Fairchild joining him, standing by his side, maybe gazing up at him with those eyes that reminded him of a blue-gray mist just before sunrise. Even now, he felt a rumble in his chest at the sight of her. He hadn’t experienced that particular sensation, at least not so he remembered it, since high school. He wished that realization came happily to him. Instead, he found himself suddenly more disgruntled than ever.