Dangerous Reunion

by Marilyn Pappano

  By the time Yashi reached the short road where the long-extinct Dixieland Amusement Park had grown up nearly a hundred years earlier, she was having trouble breathing, and her knees were quivering. She was a lawyer. She’d been an assistant district attorney. She’d had dealings with law enforcement most of her adult life. Where was her professionalism? Her much-touted ability to stay calm in any crisis?

  After she turned left onto Ozark Trail Road, the old original Route 66, the road wound through a shadowy curve, trees canopying overhead, underneath an old railroad bridge and around another curve cut through rocky hillsides. She slowed, always her habit, as the left-hand turn into Will’s driveway came when the road began to straighten, but this time her speed dropped to practically nothing.

  Police vehicles filled the driveway and the short stretch of grass along the road. There was barely room for her little Bug between a big white pickup and a black SUV, both bearing police markings. She eased the car into the space, cut the engine and sat there trying to breathe.

  Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  The rain hadn’t let up. Four figures huddled together on the porch, talking: Sam Douglas, the chief; Daniel Harper, a detective she’d dealt with only a few times before leaving the DA’s office; Lois Gideon, a uniformed officer who knew more about the department and the town than the rest of them combined; and a young woman in shorts and a T-shirt, dark haired and pale skinned and, considering that she’d made the official call requesting Yashi’s presence from Ben’s personal cell phone, probably Morwenna the dispatcher.

  She’d probably been at Ben’s house when whatever had happened, happened.

  He liked to sleep in late on his days off. She’d probably been sleeping in late, too.

  With him.

  Not important, Yashi’s brain reminded her. Her family was the important thing here, and there was no sign of them.

  At least there were no ambulances or fire trucks among the vehicles. That was good. That meant no one was hurt.

  Or they were beyond the help of paramedics.

  Sweat broke out across her forehead, the trembling of her hands increased and anxiety fluttered in her chest. If she didn’t calm down, she was going to go into full panic mode, and that—

  A knock on the driver’s window startled her, drawing a shriek as she whirled about in the cramped space. Ben was standing there, bent down from his substantial height of six feet four inches to gaze in at her. He wore a slicker, the hood pulled over his head, but his face was streaked with rain, and he looked grim.

  “Oh please, no.” The groan was torn from her at the sight of him. Ben was stoic. He had the best poker face she’d ever seen. He rarely let his emotions show, particularly on the job. He was quiet and calm and studied, and no one could ever guess what he was thinking, but now—

  He pulled the door open a few inches and said in a flat voice, “Drive over to my house. I’ll talk to you there.”

  A moment later, he passed in a blur behind her car. She grabbed her cell, praying for a call from Will, saying, it’s all right, just a misunderstanding. After pulling her keys from the ignition, she jumped out, slammed the door and ran after Ben. The air was muggy, too thick to breathe, a combination of August heat and a deluge of biblical proportions.

  In seconds, everything from her hips down was soaked. When he stepped across the ditch, then climbed up the path there to his yard, she did the same, missing the flat wide stepping-stones, setting her feet into the cool water rushing down the slope. Her shoes squished and slid as she started up the path, nothing but a stretch of grass kept mown to provide easy access between neighbors.

  Ben never once looked back at her. He climbed the steps to the porch, paused at the door and then finally faced her. The grimness was still there, but it was better concealed. This was more in line with what people jokingly called his detective face. The joke: it was also his normal-conversation face, his reading-a-good-book face and so on.

  “Do you want to go inside? It’ll be cold.”

  She shook her head so strenuously that water streamed from her hair. Even while getting drenched, she hadn’t thought to pull her hood over her head. Ben used to tell her that she resembled Bobcat when he got a much-hated bath.

  “Sit. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  When the door closed behind him, she walked to the end of the porch, turned back and went to stand at the railing directly across from her cousins’ house. Now there was a crime scene vehicle, and pulling in behind the others was a pickup truck. Quint Foster—former assistant chief, demoted to just officer—climbed out of the driver’s side, and a shorter form, definitely a woman, got down from the other side. They joined the people on the porch, took off their jackets, their shoes, put on booties and went inside.

  Yashi’s hands gripped the railing while she bounced on the balls of her feet. She wanted to go inside, too. She wanted to see Will and Lolly, wanted to find out what was going on and how to fix it. She wanted assurance, comfort, a fear-soothing hug, an absolute promise that whatever was wrong would soon be okay.

  The door closed behind her, and she felt rather than heard Ben’s approach. No comforting or hugging would be coming from him. She’d destroyed all his softer feelings for her. The first year without him had been impossible, the second merely miserable. She’d cried a million tears over him, had flung two million curses at him and a billion more at herself. She’d missed him more than she’d ever missed anyone.

  For a kid who’d lost both parents at age six, that was saying a lot.

  * * *

  Ben brought a notepad and an ink pen with him. He left his jacket on a chair to drip, wiped the sweat from his neck and sat in his favorite chair to begin the interview. Daniel and Sam had both offered to do it. It was common knowledge Ben was more comfortable interrogating than interviewing. Or, Sam had suggested, they could wait for their newest hire and first female detective, JJ Logan, to arrive. But he’d said a stiff no, thanks. They didn’t know he had reason to avoid all contact whatsoever with Yashi Baker, and he didn’t intend to tell them. No one outside the Muellers had known about their yearlong relationship, and he meant to keep it that way.

  “When was the last time you saw the Muellers?”

  Yashi was still, her head erect, her spine straight. Though she looked tall and elegantly lined, tension radiated from her. She stared at the house a long time, seeing nothing, before turning to face him. “Last Sunday. We had dinner after church at Pablo’s.” Her voice quavered, but a breath steadied it. “I talked to Will on Wednesday about Theo’s next soccer game, and Lolly emailed me some recipes Thursday. I had a text from Brit yesterday. She wanted to know if I’d teach her to drive the Bug. She’s got high hopes of getting a car for her sixteenth birthday, and she thinks a Bug might suit her.”

  “Did they mention any plans for today?”

  Yashi slipped out of her jacket and, as he’d done, draped it over a chair back to drip. She was dressed for a morning at home: gray cotton shorts and a T-shirt that had seen better days. It was a leftover from her days at the University of Texas, and she usually wore it to sleep in.

  Gathering her blond hair in her hands, she wrung water from it, then shook it back. “Theo always has practice of some sort on Saturdays. Lolly picks up groceries during practice, Will works in the kitchen and Brit tries to put as much distance between herself and them as she can. Not,” she hastily added, “that there’s a problem. It’s just... She’s fifteen.”

  Ben hadn’t asked for or needed an explanation. He knew the Muellers were close, probably unusually so these days. Besides, he had three younger sisters and two brothers. One of them, George, had put so much distance between him and the family that none of them had seen him for coming on twelve years.

  Whatever had happened with the Muellers had nothing to do with their teenage daughter longing to be grown up.

  Yashi was silent until he
finished making his notes, then she met his gaze. “What happened?”

  Part of him wanted to refuse to answer her questions. That wasn’t the way a police interview worked. He asked the questions. She answered them. Simple. But the part of him that might be a better cop than he was a man wasn’t juvenile enough to resort to that. They were her family. She had a right to know at least the basics. Trouble was, the basics were all he had to offer and raised nothing but questions.

  “Morwenna and I were having breakfast when she noticed the front door was open there.” He didn’t look at her, didn’t care if she wondered whether he and Morwenna were involved, didn’t care if she did or didn’t give a damn who he slept with.

  “I called Will and Lolly and got no answer,” he went on. “I called Brit, and she’d sneaked out in the night to go to her boyfriend’s house. She thought she’d be back before anyone woke up. They’re supposed to be home. Their cars are there. Lolly’s purse and keys are on the hall table, and so are Will’s keys and phone. And...” His mouth thinned as he recalled the scene in the living room. The amount of blood wasn’t an incompatible-with-life scenario, unless it all came from one person. It was the lab’s job to figure that out.

  Yashi’s face had gone pale, making her eyes seem ridiculously blue in contrast. She pressed her lips together, and muscles clenched in her jaw, her neck, her hands. “And?”

  He didn’t want to go on. Delivering bad news to a family about their loved ones was always hard, and the fact that he knew both the family and the loved one made it even harder. Especially since the family in this case was pitifully small. Yashi was an only child; so was Will. Their parents had died when they were kids, and their grandparents before that. Both sets of great-grandparents had immigrated, one from Canada and one from Russia. Other than distant relatives back in their homelands, the family line was down to Yashi, Will and his kids.

  Maybe just Yashi and Brit.

  She waited, motionless. Her eyes were fixed on his face, steady and unyielding, and her breaths were measured. To anyone watching her, she appeared calm and patient. To the person unlucky enough to be the focus of that stare, she appeared slightly less lethal than a nuclear warhead.

  He took a deep breath, wished he’d let Sam or Daniel or JJ have this job, then quietly answered. “There was a struggle in the living room. Things knocked about, spilled milk and wine, table upturned. It doesn’t look as if any of the beds were slept in, but the kitchen is clean and there are leftovers in the refrigerator, so we’re guessing it happened last night, between dinner and bedtime. Do they still stay up late on Fridays and watch movies?”

  Yashi’s nod was vague, not as to the answer, but lacking the strength to be emphatic. No wonder. While she’d been cozied up doing whatever occupied her Friday nights these days, three of the four members of her family had been fighting for their lives.

  And it was absolutely not the right time to remember that he used to occupy her Friday nights.

  He closed his eyes briefly, let himself see the scene again in his head, then looked at her. “There was blood in the living room. A lot of it.”

  She’d been pale earlier. Now she turned white, and her body began sliding to the porch floor. If not for the balusters behind her, she would have pitched back into the yard. As it was, she slid down until her butt hit the floor, knees drawn up, and she hugged herself tightly, hiding her face in her arms.

  Ben listened for tears, watched for the shuddering of her shoulders. This was one of the things he hated about interviews. It wasn’t in him to offer emotional or physical support to someone whom he’d just given bad news. JJ could do it if she had to. Sam was really good at it. Lois excelled at it. Even Daniel, who was a little on the stiff side, could unbend much better than Ben could.

  But no tears came from Yashi. No shudders. No sobs. No great sorrow unleashed. Dragging a wheezy breath into her lungs, she lifted her head. The sorrow was there on her face, shifting her appearance from pretty blonde to tragic beauty, but her eyes were dry. “So my family’s been attacked, injured, kidnapped and possibly—” her voice caught, a hiccup, then turned steely “—possibly murdered. Do you have any clues yet? Any ideas why this happened to them?”

  He was shaking his head when his cell beeped with a text. Seeing it was from Sam, he automatically glanced across the road and saw that everyone over there had gone inside the house except Morwenna. Morwenna knew her limits when it came to the job, and she observed them strictly.

  The text was short and terse. You need to see this. Putting down his pen and notebook, Ben shrugged into his slicker and set off. Even as he said, “I’ll be back,” Yashi scrambled to her feet. He didn’t tell her to stay put. He wouldn’t in her situation. She wasn’t just any citizen or worried family member. She’d been an assistant district attorney for six years. She was more familiar than most with the damage people could inflict on others. If Sam didn’t want to let her in the house, she could wait on the Mueller porch.

  The rain was showing signs of easing up finally. It still fell with a steady patter, but the rivers running down the road were narrowing, and the ditches were slowly draining. Ben and Yashi climbed into the shelter of the porch, took off their jackets, kicked off their shoes and put on booties before Ben gave the partly opened door a push.

  Sam pulled it open, gestured for Ben to come inside, hesitated with Yashi, then gave her a nod. When they’d joined the small group of grim people in the foyer, Sam closed the door.

  There was a message written in red on the inside of the white door. Clunky letters, paint running in drips from the overspray, looking all too much like drops of blood, and the text—the promise—was chilling.

  I’ll trade them for her.

  * * *

  Yashi walked outside, barely glancing at Morwenna. Some small part of her brain that was still functioning in Normal Land noted that Ben’s friend was younger, prettier and possibly color blind. That part of her hoped that if he wanted her, he got her, complete with happily-ever-after.

  She took the steps one at a time, grasping the railing, unable to see through the rain and the dampness in her eyes, unable to make out anything without that gruesome bloodred message superimposed over it. She walked to the driveway, past Lolly’s minivan and Will’s SUV, and stopped where the ground dropped steeply into a small valley. The creek that cut through it rushed with surplus water. It was the kids’ favorite playground: wading, climbing the boulders that edged it on both sides, sailing makeshift boats. Brit liked to stretch out on the flat rock in her bikini, invisible from any vantage point except where Yashi was standing now. It was the only time she welcomed Theo’s splashes because they cooled her baking skin.

  Every time Yashi saw her in a bikini, she was struck anew by how young she seemed to Yashi and how attractive she was to the males out there. Though Brit was restricted from the more revealing clothes her friends wore, she could be covered head to toe and guys would still notice her.

  One pervert in particular wanted her badly enough to come take her from her house in the night. Badly enough to kidnap her family when he found she wasn’t there. Irrationally enough to think he could trade them for her. Oh dear God. Where had Brit met him? She was too savvy to fall for someone online. She knew the hooks, the lures, had been taught internet safety along with use your napkin and brush your teeth and reuse, reduce, recycle.

  Was it a teacher at her school? The coach of her soccer team? Someone sitting in the pew behind her at church, benignly singing hymns? The parent of a friend? A neighbor? Her doctor, her dentist, someone she trusted as a friend?

  The possibilities were endless. Yashi knew too well that more often than not, criminals didn’t look like criminals. Sure, there was the guy with Kill all cops tattooed on his forehead who’d, surprise, shot a cop. The unshaven, unbathed, wild-eyed terrors who made protective instincts scream from a hundred yards away.

  But so many looked
normal. Behaved normally. Did everything but think normally. The ones whose friends and neighbors said, But he seemed like such a nice guy. He coached my kids. He treated his grandmother like a queen. The ones no one would ever look at and think, He could be an embezzler, a rapist, a predator, a kidnapper, a murderer.

  Everything inside Yashi shuddered with despair. She hugged herself tightly, willing the sickness back into her stomach, calling on years of coping to gain some semblance of emotional control. She was bending forward at the waist, eyes closed, taking short, steady breaths through her nose, when a light touch on her arm startled her upright again.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to surprise you.” Morwenna stood there, concern lining her face. Like Yashi, she’d left her slicker on the porch. It was too hot a day to swelter inside rainproof fabric. “I’m Morwenna. I’m the one who called you.”

  Yashi sniffed and dashed her hand across her face, wiping away raindrops—teardrops—only to have more appear in their place. “Yashi.”

  “Would you like to go back to Ben’s to wait?” Morwenna’s sympathy was sincere, but different from what she’d seen on the faces of the officers and crime scene investigators when she’d walked inside Will’s house. There was an innocence to it that offered both acknowledgment and hope. She knew this was a bad situation, but she expected only the best outcome. Her faith touched that cold, hollow spot in Yashi’s gut.

  “Yes. P-please.”

  Morwenna took hold of her arm and guided her around the vehicles in the driveway to the road. She wasn’t chatty—Yashi had expected chattiness—but got her across the yard, onto the porch and seated before she disappeared inside the house. The moments until her return passed unmarked, no thoughts, no words, only images of Will and Lolly, Brit and Theo, the way Yashi had always known them. Laughing, happy, teasing.

  Morwenna came back, arms full. First, she set two bottles of water on the round table between the chairs, then she shook out a thick fluffy bath towel and handed it to Yashi. “I’d offer something stronger than water, but the only other thing Ben has in the house is coffee, and trust me, his coffee isn’t drinkable.”