“I’m so happy to meet you, Simon.” Michelle offered her own hand and Simon gave it a vigorous shake. “Rachel has told me a lot about you.”
Michelle’s response to children never failed to amaze Rachel. All the defenses came tumbling down, some childlike part of her shone through and made an instant connection. It was easy to believe Michelle could reach autistic children when no one else could. Anybody would expect her to be a natural, confident mother. They might think that of Rachel too, but they would be wrong in both cases.
“You want to meet Mr. Piggles?” Simon asked, eyes wide and hopeful.
Momentary alarm bloomed in Michelle’s face. “A pig?”
Now that was something Rachel would like to see: Michelle meeting a pig.
Simon giggled. “He’s a guinea pig.”
Michelle visibly relaxed. “Oh, well, in that case, I would love to meet him.”
“Do you mind meeting me first?” Darla Duncan, in jeans, sweatshirt, and athletic shoes, walked toward them with a smile and an outstretched hand. “I’m Darla, this little whirligig’s grandmother. Glad to meet you at last, Michelle.”
Rachel, knowing her sister so well, could see the small signs of emotional withdrawal as Michelle greeted this middle-aged woman with a makeup-free face and brown hair secured in a ponytail with a rubber band. Michelle’s smile froze in place, the warmth Simon had ignited in her blue eyes cooled and faded. She placed a perfectly manicured hand in Darla’s, which was rough from working in the yard without gloves. Rachel was sure Michelle noticed the bit of gardening dirt Darla had failed to remove from under a couple of fingernails.
“How do you do?” Michelle murmured.
“You girls come in and I’ll make us some tea,” Darla said.
“But I’m gonna show her Mr. Piggles,” Simon said. “You have to come too, Rachel.” He grabbed Rachel’s and Michelle’s hands and tugged them forward.
Rachel laughed. “Okay, first things first.”
Simon charged into the house and up the stairs, pulling them along, chattering as if he wanted to tell Michelle everything about himself as quickly as possible. Rachel noticed the warmth returning to her sister’s eyes and smile as she heard about Simon’s school, his teacher, his best friend, and what he liked most for school lunch.
In Simon’s bedroom, Rachel leaned close to speak to the brown and white guinea pig, while Michelle stood back a couple of feet. “Hey, there, Mr. P,” Rachel said. “How’s Simon treating you?”
The fat little animal responded by lifting a tiny dish in his teeth and bobbing it up and down. Rachel reached into a bag on a shelf under the cage and pulled out a peanut. She slid it through the mesh and dropped it into the dish. Mr. Piggles scurried to his hutch in one corner with it.
“Oh, that’s funny,” Michelle exclaimed. “Simon, he’s very handsome and very smart.”
“I didn’t even have to teach him,” Simon said. “He learned to do that all on his own.”
“Then he’s even smarter than I thought.”
“He wants more.” Rachel pointed to the cage, where the guinea pig had reappeared with the now empty dish in his teeth. “Mish, why don’t you do the honors?”
She hesitated, half-smiling. “He doesn’t bite, does he?”
“No,” Simon said, in a fresh fit of giggles. “He’s not dangerous or anything.”
“I guess I’m being silly, huh?” Michelle said.
“That’s okay.” Simon shrugged. “Girls are scared of a lot of stuff.”
“Hey, watch it,” Rachel teased. “I’m a girl. I’m not scared of much.”
“You’re not a girl. You’re a grownup.”
Michelle raised an eyebrow at Rachel in amusement.
“Anyway,” Simon said, losing a fight to hold back a grin, “you’re not all that brave. You’re scared of spiders.”
“Busted.” Rachel hung her head in shame.
Michelle laughed, a genuine, out-loud laugh, something Rachel hadn’t heard from her in…How long? Years. Since before Mother died and their whole world fell apart.
The chime of Michelle’s cell phone sounded from her purse. She froze, staring down at the bag hanging over her left shoulder.
“Let it go,” Rachel said.
“That’s a telephone ringing, isn’t it?” Simon asked.
Michelle unzipped the top of her shoulderbag.
“Don’t,” Rachel said. “Mish, don’t answer it.”
“Why don’t you want her to answer her phone?” Simon caught Rachel’s arm to get her attention.
Rachel met her sister’s gaze and shook her head. But Michelle extracted the phone. When she glanced at the caller ID, her pale face went bloodless and she drew a shaky breath.
“Let me.” Rachel grabbed the phone from Michelle’s hand. The readout said “Caller unknown.” She pressed the button to answer but said nothing, just listened to the low, raspy voice.
“Our time is coming, Michelle. We’ll be together very, very soon. Be ready for something special.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Late that night, Rachel lay in bed in the dark, listening to the wind fling twigs at the windows and set the old house to moaning and creaking as air pushed in through the attic vents.
Downstairs, Brandon Connolly stood guard, armed and ready to handle any threat. Billy Bob, always a sharp watchdog, snored in his bed by the bedroom door, but at the slightest abnormal sound he would waken in an instant. Tom would be home within the hour.
Rachel knew Michelle was safe here, that nothing would happen to her sister tonight, yet she felt as agitated as the wind, unable to be still. She kicked off the sheet and blanket, felt chilled after a couple of minutes, pulled the covers back up. Was Michelle lying awake too? Probably. The house’s isolation frightened her so deeply that Rachel doubted she’d slept much since arriving on Sunday.
Only three days since Michelle arrived. Four days since Rachel, Tom, and a group of teenagers had discovered Shelley’s body. Rachel felt as if a lifetime had passed, and her raw nerves begged for an end to it.
True to her word, Rachel had repeated to Michelle exactly what the caller said on the phone when they were at the Duncan house. Michelle had gone rigid and hadn’t spoken a word on the drive back to the farm. Throughout dinner with Ben as their guest, she’d remained mostly silent, giving brief, distracted answers when Rachel or Ben asked her a direct question. She disappeared into her room before Ben left.
Lying in the dark without Tom beside her, Rachel couldn’t keep the stalker’s words from cycling through her head. Our time is coming…We’ll be together…Be ready. Soon, he’d said. But most men who tormented women with anonymous phone calls, messages, and gruesome “gifts” were cowards, weren’t they? They didn’t always graduate to physical violence. When one of them did, though, a woman ended up hurt or dead.
She wouldn’t be able to go to sleep until Tom came home. Sighing, she threw off the covers again, swung her legs off the bed, found her slippers with her toes. When she tugged her robe out from under Frank at the foot of the bed, he bleated in protest.
At the window, Rachel pulled back an edge of the curtain and stared out like the lonely wife of a sea captain, searching for her husband’s ship on the horizon. The outside security lights cast a cold, bright glow around the perimeter of the house, and clouds passing over the full moon played shadows across the front yard. The trees thrashed in the wind as if trying to tear free of the earth.
No sign of Tom’s car coming down the road. No sign of life anywhere. Rachel was turning away when she caught a movement from the corner of her eye. Leaning closer to the window, she peered into the yard.
A figure darted through the shadows, racing from the house and across the yard and driveway to the road. Rachel’s breath caught in her throat. Man? Woman? She couldn’t tell. Torn between yelling for Brandon and watching the fleeing figure, she let too much time pass. In seconds, it was gone, swallowed up by the woods across the road.
Rachel ran from the room, p
ounded down the hall and the stairs. “Brandon!” she screamed. “Somebody was here. He was at the house.”
Brandon stood at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on his pistol. “What? Where?”
“He ran into the trees across the road. I saw him from the bedroom window.”
“Stay here. Stay inside.” Brandon tore out of the house through the front door.
A second later Rachel heard a thud and a shout of surprise.
She ran to the door, yanked it open. Under the porch light, Brandon sprawled on his back. Her heart racing, Rachel pushed the screen door open. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“Don’t come out!” Brandon shoved himself to his feet. “Don’t step in it.”
“Step in what?” Rachel looked down. At the same moment when she saw the pool of dark liquid on the porch floor, she registered the rank, meaty odor. “Oh, my god. Is that blood?”
“Yeah. Not too fresh either.” Brandon rubbed his left elbow and frowned at the woods. “No chance of catching him now. I’ll call for backup.”
Bile rose in her throat and Rachel swallowed it down. She was around animal blood all the time and had long ago stopped reacting to it, but the mess on the porch made her want to vomit.
She stepped back and closed the screen door while Brandon called dispatch on his cell phone. Michelle’s voice behind her startled Rachel. “What’s going on?”
Rachel spun around. Billy Bob had come downstairs with Michelle and now skirted Rachel’s legs to get to the screen door. He snuffled and snorted, taking in the odor, and lifted a paw to push at the screen. Grabbing the dog’s collar, Rachel said to Michelle, “Stay back. You can’t go out there.”
“What is that smell?” Michelle’s face knotted with revulsion and horror as she peered around Rachel and Billy Bob. Her voice rose in alarm. “It’s blood, isn’t it?”
“I’m pretty sure it is,” Rachel said. “But nobody got to you, that’s the important thing.”
“But somebody came right up to the house and poured blood on the porch.” Michelle’s voice rose and thinned. “Even with a police car parked out front and the security lights on.”
“Whoever did it, he’s gone now.” Still gripping Billy Bob’s collar, Rachel shut the main door. She tugged the dog into the living room and Michelle followed. “Brandon’s calling for more deputies.”
“I hope you aren’t going to tell me I’m perfectly safe and I shouldn’t worry.”
Rachel sank onto the couch, exhausted. “Okay, it worries me too, I’d be crazy if it didn’t, but let’s not panic, okay?”
Michelle sat next to her. “Speaking as a psychologist, I’d say panic is a perfectly reasonable response to this event.”
Rachel burst out laughing, and after a second Michelle joined in. They leaned against each other, surrendering to the absurdity of the situation.
“Are you two okay?”
Brandon’s voice from the doorway stopped their laughter abruptly. Wiping tears from her eyes, Rachel said, “I guess this is making us a little loopy.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” His grim expression aged his young face by years. He held his boots in his hands with the blood-smeared soles turned up. Billy Bob trotted over and started sniffing the back of Brandon’s uniform pants, where the fabric had soaked up blood after his fall. “I’ve got a couple of cars out looking for a man on foot. They’re going around the other side of the woods in case he parked over there.”
Anxiety flooded back, replacing gruesome hilarity. Rachel stood and pulled the dog away from Brandon. “I’ll clean your boots for you. Would you like to change into a pair of Tom’s jeans?”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that. I’ll just stay on my feet. I won’t get this stuff on your furniture.”
Rachel stepped over and tried to take the boots from him, but he held on. “You don’t have to clean them. Just tell me which sink to use.”
“It’s the least I can do,” Rachel said. “You should stay here anyway, so you can keep an eye on the yard.”
“Yeah, right.” Brandon let go of the boots.
Handling them carefully, avoiding the blood, Rachel carried them to the basement and dropped them in the laundry sink. Her hands shook so badly she had trouble pulling on rubber gloves. Calm down, she told herself. Breathe. Tom will be home soon.
She tried to wash off the soles without wetting the uppers, but she couldn’t control her hands and kept splashing water on the leather. Muttering in self-disgust, she turned off the water and began swabbing the boots with damp paper towels, wiping away streaks of blood that had already begun to dry.
“I should leave,” Michelle said from the doorway. “You shouldn’t have to go through this because I’m here.”
Without looking around, Rachel said, “Nobody’s asking you to leave.”
“I know, and I appreciate it. But if I go, this person, whoever he is, will follow me and you won’t be subjected to this kind of thing anymore.”
Rachel tossed the soiled paper towels into the trash can, stripped off the gloves and threw them in too. She faced Michelle. “And where will you go? Back to your husband, who doesn’t believe you’re being harassed? Back to a place where the police won’t do anything to help you?”
Michelle slumped against the door frame as if she needed its support.
Rachel hated the mean-spirited sound of her own words, hated the look on Michelle’s face, the mute plea for mercy that made her think of a beaten dog. “I’m sorry, Mish. I shouldn’t have said that. The situation’s stressful enough without me adding to it.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Michelle said. “I can’t hide here forever. I have a career, I have patients. And you have your own life.”
“Give Tom and Dennis a chance to help.”
“They have more important matters to deal with.” Michelle pushed back a strand of hair that had fallen across one eye. “It isn’t fair to ask you and Tom to put up with things that are aimed at me.”
“Listen.” Rachel gripped her sister’s shoulders. “This mess tonight could be totally unrelated to you. Tom’s investigating a murder, he’s getting under people’s skins. Somebody could have decided to get back at him.”
Did she really believe that? Rachel was no longer certain what she believed. All she knew was that she would go crazy worrying if her sister were out of sight, hundreds of miles away.
Michelle looked doubtful. “I’ll sleep on it.”
“Good. Don’t rush to do anything. Don’t make a decision because of what happened tonight.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Flashing lights up ahead. A light bar on a Sheriff’s Department cruiser parked on the road in front of the house.
“Aw, god, no,” Tom muttered. Tightening his fingers on the steering wheel, he sped up. When he drew closer he saw a second cruiser parked on the roadside, its lights off. Probably Brandon’s vehicle. But two cruisers meant trouble. Tom barely slowed as he passed the cars and swung into the driveway.
He slammed the door behind him and jogged to the house, where Brandon waited at the bottom of the steps. Before Tom could speak, Brandon held up both hands to stop him. “You don’t want to go in this way, Captain.”
“What’s going on here?” Tom could smell it. Blood, rank and faintly metallic. What had happened since he’d phoned Rachel from the road ninety minutes ago? “Where’s Rachel? Is she hurt?”
“I’m right here,” Rachel called from the doorway, standing behind the screened door. “We’re all okay. Nobody got hurt.”
The clutch of dread around Tom’s chest eased a little, and he was able to take a deep breath again. He peered at the porch. Light from the fixture above the door glinted off a dark crimson pool three feet wide. “Who did this?” he asked Brandon.
“I don’t know.” Brandon shook his head. “I didn’t see anything or hear anything.”
“Are you telling me somebody came right up to the house while all these lights were on, and threw, what, a gallon of blood
on the porch, and you didn’t see a thing?”
“I was inside, where you said you wanted me to be.” Brandon sounded a little defensive. He’d argued in favor of staying outside the house all evening. “I made the rounds over and over, looking out all the windows. This happened while I was checking the back yard from the kitchen.”
Tom dialed back his anger. He wasn’t being fair to Brandon, who had followed orders. “Nobody got in the house, that’s the important thing.” And blood on the porch was minor compared to what could have happened. He glanced toward the door again, reassuring himself that she was really there, unhurt. Michelle stood beside her, an arm linked with Rachel’s, looking like she’d been zapped by a stun gun.
“I saw somebody running away.” Rachel pointed across the road. “He disappeared into the woods.”
“Keith Blackwood’s over there now, looking around,” Brandon said. “We had a couple of cars on the other side of the woods pretty soon after it happened, but they didn’t see anything. I guess he got to his car fast and he was long gone by the time our guys showed up. Rachel was the only one who saw him—”
“And I didn’t get a good look,” Rachel said. “I can’t even say for sure it was a man.”
“All right, I’m here now. Brandon, why don’t you go and see if Keith’s found anything? But I doubt the guy dropped any evidence for us to trip over. Look around for a while, then give me a call and go on home.”
“Will do, boss.”
As Brandon started off toward the woods, Tom surveyed the porch again, infuriated by his own helplessness as much as the thought of someone defiling the home he shared with Rachel. Was this the work of Michelle’s stalker, or was somebody trying to warn him away from the Beecher case? “I’ll come in through the back door,” he said.
Rachel waited for him there, and she stepped into his embrace. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she whispered.
Tom pulled her close and pressed his face against her silky hair.
Rachel’s voice was muffled against his shoulder. “If you hold me any tighter you’re going to break a rib.”
“Sorry.” Tom pulled back to look into her face. Smoothing her auburn hair off her brow, he said, “You’d better tell me what you saw while it’s still fresh in your mind.”
Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 17