Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2)

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  Oso walked up and licked Taylor across the whole face. Taylor lost his frown and lunged for the dog, and I panicked and raced toward them, not sure how Oso would react. But Oso didn’t flinch. He wagged his tail as Taylor cruised along his body, using fists full of fur for balance. He’d secured a best friend with two bites of Cheerios and a yummy face. I backed away.

  “Can we let him play outside for a little while?” Nick asked. “He’ll wind down in an hour or so. Fresh air and exercise will help speed the process.” He winked at me and held out his hand.

  I crazy love it when he winks. He could ask me to stand on my head and count to ten thousand and the answer will always be the same if he winks.

  “Yes. Sounds like a great plan.”

  We followed Taylor outside to meet the rest of the dogs. After a few sniffs, all of them but Oso wandered off. Nick and I sat side by side on the front steps and watched Taylor lead Oso on a chaotic exploration of the yard. Kitty, the big gray outdoor cat I’d acquired from the animal shelter that week, lifted her tail and ran for the bush.

  “Is he always this busy?” I asked as I nestled my head into Nick’s shoulder.

  He slipped his arm around me. “This is nothing.”

  Oh, my.

  The sun was setting, and a breeze picked up from the east. Nick raised his arm and ran his fingers through my hair. He lifted it up and slipped his face under it, then softly kissed his way up the back of my neck. He hit my just-the-right-spot spot, and my body’s constant thrum since his arrival ratcheted up even further.

  “Is Taylor looking sleepy to you yet?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “Wishful thinking. We can probably give him a bath in about half an hour. After that, I read him a book and sing him to sleep. Estimated crib touchdown in one hour.”

  He kissed my neck again.

  “Wow, that’s an awfully long time.” I’d always heard that couples had a hard time fitting in sex once they had kids, but I’d thought they just needed to try harder. Taylor was showing me the error of my ways in a hurry.

  Nick’s phone rang. He looked at the number. “My parents,” he said. “Do you mind?”

  “Of course not. Go ahead.”

  He answered the phone and walked out to where Taylor was rolling in the grass, which, unbeknownst to him, was the premier spot for cell reception. I followed and sat down beside Taylor. He rolled into me with a giggle, then rolled away again.

  “Slow down, Mom,” Nick said. “I can barely hear you. Can you repeat that?” His jaw clenched. “You and Dad need to file a police report. Don’t wait. I’m serious.”

  “I love you guys, too.” He hung up and stared out over the tops of the mango trees in the valley before us.

  “Nick? What’s up?”

  He sat down in the grass beside me and his words came out low and fast through chalky lips. “Derek showed up looking for Teresa and Taylor at my parents’ place. They told him they didn’t know where they were. He said he hoped they were smarter when he came back the next time.”

  I matched his half-whisper. “Your poor parents.”

  Nick cupped his hand around the back of my neck. “I’m so glad Taylor is here.”

  “I’m glad you guys are here, too.” And I was. Even if Taylor had taken me by surprise. “Are you OK?”

  “I’m great. I’m with you, Taylor is safe, and my parents are OK. Derek won’t hurt them. It will all be fine.”

  I nodded. I hoped so.

  Nick stood up. “Taylor, let’s go find your bedroom.”

  I hadn’t even thought about a bedroom. We headed through the front door and I led them to the office. “How about here? It’s only two doors down from us.”

  “Looks good.”

  We moved Taylor’s things in. “Watch this, Taylor,” Nick said, and he quickly assembled a portable playpen in the center of the floor, then clapped his hands and said, “Yay, Uncle Nick!” Taylor joined in.

  I did, too, but it was an uncertain clapping on my part. The pen was pink. I leaned into Nick and whispered, “Isn’t Little Mermaid a girl thing?”

  He put a finger over his lips, then moved close to my ear. “I left in a hurry. We stopped at Walmart to pick one up. They were out of Buzz Lightyear, and Taylor went nuts for Ariel. I didn’t have time to talk him out of it.”

  I clapped my hand over my mouth to hold in the laugh.

  Nick mock-glared at me and said, “Katie, where can we have our B-A-T-H?”

  My cheeks filled with heat instantaneously.

  Before I could think of an answer, he laughed. “Let me restate that. His, not ours.”

  “Oh!” I put the backs of my hands on my cheeks. “The only one I trust to be clean is mine. Follow me, boys.”

  So Nick gave Taylor a bubble bath in my claw-foot tub. He had to stand up and lean in over its tall sides, and it looked painful to me. I’d clean one of the smaller bathtubs between the Jack and Jill bedrooms upstairs in the morning, but Taylor seemed to love my tub. He kept up a constant stream of chatter as he played with his toys, although I couldn’t understand a word of it.

  Nick looked over his shoulder at me and spoke over Taylor’s voice. “My life sure has changed since Taylor moved in. It’s nonstop with this little munchkin.” He lifted the boy out of the water and wrapped him in a rainbow-striped beach towel, then carried him in to my bed and started dressing him, stopping to blow loud raspberry kisses on his belly. More squealing.

  When he was done, he picked up Taylor and a picture book, Go, Dog. Go, and asked, “Do you have a chair that rocks?”

  I didn’t have a true rocking chair, but I did have some outdoor chairs that rocked a little. “Follow me,” I said, and led him out to the great room’s balcony.

  Nick and Taylor took a seat and Taylor squirmed until he found just the right spot in Nick’s lap. I sat beside them and Nick gave his chair a little test rock.

  “Perfect,” he said. “And the view is great, too.”

  “I love it here, especially at sunset,” I said.

  “I was talking about you,” he said, and smiled at me.

  My stomach did a flip-flop, and I smiled back.

  I watched the fruit bats, known locally as island sparrows, come out of the eaves and sip from the pool while Nick read to Taylor. When he closed the book, Taylor turned around and put his head on Nick’s shoulder. Nick started rocking. I matched their rhythm.

  “Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed . . .” Nick sang, off-key.

  I covered a smile with the back of my hand. Taylor fell asleep before the rockets’ red glare. I followed them in to the makeshift nursery and watched as Nick skillfully transferred Taylor to the playpen and covered him with a crocheted blanket. I held my breath, but Taylor only snuffled as his body settled on the mattress. Nick closed the door with barely a click.

  “He goes to sleep really easily,” he said.

  “You’re very good with him.”

  “Thanks.”

  We stared at each other. It was our first moment alone since he’d gotten there, and the quiet was abrupt.

  I put a hand on a hip and tried for a Mae West voice. “Would you like to see the room where you’ll be staying, big boy?”

  “Lead the way, beautiful.”

  As I walked into the bedroom, Nick scooted in close and put his arms around me from behind. I leaned into him and we swayed. “I love you,” he whispered in my ear. “I couldn’t stay away from you any longer.”

  My heart swelled. I turned into him and said, “I feel exactly the same way.” His lips closed over mine, warm and soft.

  “Wait,” I said. I switched off the bedroom light.

  “Better?” he asked, laughing.

  “Much.”

  “I can still see you, you know.”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

  And then his lips found mine again, and I forgot about the light and the little boy down the hall, and was conscious only of Nick, of
me, of us, of this.

  Afterwards, we lay together in the dark. I held his arm in front of me and kissed all the parts I could reach.

  Nick spoke, his voice low. “Are you sure this isn’t too much for you, me moving in with my nephew?”

  I stopped kissing him and turned so I could see his face. He looked serious, worried.

  I reached one hand into his hair. “It will be fine.” I ran the hand down his neck and over his shoulders.

  Nick put his hand around my wrist. “You cannot imagine how much I’ve missed you.” His voice was suddenly rough. “I don’t want to be apart from you, ever.”

  “Show me,” I said.

  And he did.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  My slow-moving island life sped up with Nick and Taylor around. Nick set up the USVI branch of Stingray Investigations next to the headquarters of Connell Construction in a bedroom on the third floor. Our new office had tongue-in-groove ceilings, a wall of windows, and a balcony that looked over the sugar mill ruins and mango forest. The builder had probably designed it to be an alternate master or guest suite, but now that we had commandeered it, I wondered why I hadn’t done so in the first place. It was the perfect place to work—Excel, QuickBooks, and TurboTax were a lot less painful with a view like that.

  On a typically perfect late June morning, Nick was in the office tracking down a runaway polygamist wife who had left her fourth husband with a mountain of credit card debt and I was downstairs rehearsing with Ava for our upcoming re-gig for Trevor. Taylor was playing in his new high chair in the music room with us.

  “So, how it going with your sexy man?” Ava asked. She was almost demure in a strapless black knit romper.

  “It’s going great,” I said, then couldn’t help adding, “Although not like I’d envisioned.”

  “What, he not perfect like you?”

  I ignored her. “There’s just one more person living here than I’d planned for. It’s much harder to be spontaneous, if you know what I mean.”

  “HUN-GEE,” announced Taylor.

  “Just a minute, sweetie, and I’ll get you some fish sticks,” I said.

  “You mean harder to go for six orgasms in a day with him around,” Ava said.

  “HUN-GEE,” he insisted.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean,” I said, then turned to Taylor and gave him a crisp salute. “Yes, sir, right away, sir.”

  “I go make a phone call, then,” Ava said. She walked out to the front porch and I went to the kitchen to broil some frozen fish sticks. When I took them to the music room ten minutes later, the high chair was empty. Taylor was gone. In a split second, everything changed.

  I called out for him, but there was no answer, and I screamed for Ava and Nick.

  “Help! I can’t find Taylor! Help!”

  Nick’s feet hit the floor and I heard him running. My stomach lurched. I ran for the stairs to the ground floor that led out to the pool, and by the time I was halfway down, Nick had caught up with me. I heard Ava’s heavy footsteps above us.

  Nick and I burst through the open sliding glass door onto the back patio and my heart choked off my breath. I saw the top of Taylor’s head in the deep end, a few feet from the ledge.

  “No!” I screamed. “No!”

  Nick jumped in feet first, but what I saw when I got to the edge of the pool didn’t make sense. Taylor’s head was out of the water and he was holding onto a ladder that was perched across the corner of the pool.

  Ava came running out the back door onto the patio, yelling, “What going on?”

  Nick crossed the pool in seconds and gathered Taylor in his arms. The boy didn’t make a sound, just looked up into Nick’s face as Nick swam the few yards to the shallow end on his back and climbed out. I wiped tears from my cheeks and held out my arms.

  “There you are! I was so worried about you,” I said.

  Nick handed him to me and I squeezed him so hard he kicked, but I didn’t let go. All I could think of was Rashidi telling me I’d figure out the kid thing when I needed to, like everybody else. But he was wrong. I hadn’t.

  I started to cry again, and I handed Taylor back to Nick.

  “I’m a failure at this, Nick, I’m so sorry.”

  “Hush,” he said. “It’s OK. You’re not a failure. You’re great.”

  But I knew I was. How could I have let this happen? What was wrong with me? If Taylor had died, it would have been my fault.

  “How that ladder get there?” Ava asked.

  Nick said, “I have absolutely no idea. It wasn’t there an hour ago when we were swimming.”

  Ava cocked one hip and folded her arms across her chest. “There nobody even here working today. We the only ones.”

  I tried to pull myself together. “The dogs knocked it over, maybe?”

  Nick shook his head. “Couldn’t be. It was leaning up against the back of the house yesterday, over by where the workers were fixing the cistern catchment. Even if the dogs were out here, they couldn’t have moved it across the patio and put it over the edge of the pool.”

  And that’s when I heard Annalise. She was singing, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” deep inside my head.

  It felt like the patio was spinning around me, and I was the only thing anchored. I grabbed a chair to keep myself from falling. And then I felt her. A hand on my shoulder. I jumped and turned. The hand lifted and I saw nothing, but the singing didn’t stop.

  Nick and Ava were staring at me. Ava’s eyebrows had stretched into high peaks. Yeah, it probably did look like I was having a psychotic break.

  “She loves him,” I said, swallowing hard. “She’s singing to him.”

  Nick nodded. His eyes never left mine.

  It’s one thing to raise a dust cloud or make a booming noise. It’s another thing altogether to save the life of a child. And that’s what she had done, I was sure of it.

  “Annalise saved him,” I said. I was as sure of that as I was that she’d saved me.

  That night, Nick and I sat up in bed discussing our domestic arrangements while Taylor ran his favorite plastic dump truck all over our legs.

  “Taylor went to day care while I worked back in Dallas,” Nick said. “We need help. We’re understaffed.”

  “I agree. And one of us is underskilled.”

  Nick turned to me and shook his head. “No, one of us isn’t. It could have happened to anyone, Katie, and he is my responsibility.”

  But I knew the truth. I would never, ever let anything happen to Taylor on my watch again, but I also recognized my limitations. “Well, at least we’re in agreement on the needing help part.” I kissed Nick. “I’m going to wash my face.”

  Nick snatched up Go, Dog. Go. “We’re going to read our bedtime story.”

  Ten minutes, one mud mask, and a Nair job to my legs later, I returned to the bedroom. Nick and Taylor were snuggled up, eyes closed.

  I leaned in and whispered, “Are you taking him to his room?”

  I got a snore in reply. Taylor’s soft snuffles echoed Nick’s snores in a way that did something funny to my heart. I lay down beside Nick and snuggled in close.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I knew just the person to ask for help, so the next day, Nick and I took Taylor to meet Crazy Grove. The old man sat wrapped in a white crocheted blanket in a threadbare recliner that had probably been red once upon a time. He pointed at Taylor and then at his knee, so I helped the little boy onto Crazy’s lap. The rambunctious toddler sat still, gazing into Crazy’s wise eyes like a charmed python. I was mesmerized. Why couldn’t I do that?

  “We need help with Taylor,” I said. I explained what had happened the day before.

  Crazy shook his head. “Lotta!” he called.

  Lotta stuck her head around the kitchen door and I heard loud crackling noises. It smelled like the Wingroves would be eating “fry” chicken, as the Locals called it.

  “Yes, Mr. Wingrove?” She wore a bright yellow apron that made her round
middle look like a rising sun.

  His words were slow and still slurred, but I could understand him. “Your sister need to help them with the boy.” He waved his left hand in a “make it so” gesture, then he fell back in his chair, spent.

  Lotta nodded. “I send Ruth round tomorrow morning.”

  Nick and I looked at each other. He grinned and shrugged. “Well, all right, then!” I said. “Thanks!”

  A week later, I pulled the sheet over my head and tried to go back to sleep, but the echoes of little boy yells and the barking of my German shepherd begging for Cheerios kept me awake. Theoretically, Nick was letting me sleep in until Ms. Ruth arrived. How did real parents do it? Between the things Nick and I did that robbed us of sleep and the ungodly hour at which Taylor woke up, I’d started to look like a raccoon.

  “Katie, quick, in the kitchen,” Nick yelled.

  “Coming,” I mumbled. I dragged myself to a seated position and scrubbed my eyes against the bright sun streaming in through the windows. I searched for clothes. None on me, and none on the floor. They were probably buried under the covers at the foot of the bed. I stumbled to my chest of drawers and pulled a black-and-white striped sundress over my head, then used the potty, freshened up, and hauled my matted red mop into a high ponytail before I shuffled into the kitchen.

  “That was quick?” Nick teased. “Happy July Fourth. There’s coffee.”

  I nodded. I rubbed my eyes.

  He poured me a cup of black coffee and placed it in my hands, wrapping my hand around it with his. Our overlapped fingers alternated stripes of white and golden tan.

  “Ugh,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.” He grinned. “I thought we could have breakfast before Ms. Ruth gets here.”

  I smiled. “Or we could sleep.”

  “Kay Kay,” Taylor yelled from his high chair. Nick had set him up at the breakfast bar.

  I walked over and kissed the top of his head. “Good morning, Taylor.”

  Oso sidled up to me and I scrunched his ears. I took a seat next to Taylor, who held a fistful of Cheerios out to me, the same ones he’d just been rubbing against his drool-covered mouth.