The Last Safe Place

by Ninie Hammon

  Seemed like he stood there an hour before he saw a sudden puddle of light on the lawn shining out through the rain from an upstairs window. Then the hall light glowed through the stained glass panels on both sides of the door. An eyeball appeared at the peephole and Theo heard the deadbolt snap free. Bernie opened the door but hid behind it like a woman got caught in her nightgown by the UPS man.

  The Barney-Fife-nervous little man’s whole face was a question mark. “What …?”

  Theo didn’t answer, just turned and motioned for the others, urging them on with a stage-whispered, “Hurry up!” Gabriella, Ty and P.D. rushed up the steps and scuttled past Bernie and into the house. Gabriella slammed the door behind them and leaned against it, panting and half sobbing.

  “What …?” Bernie tried again.

  Gabriella ignored him.

  “Theo,” she gasped. “There’s a phone on the table at the end of the couch in there.” She pointed into the darkened study. “Call the—”

  “The law, yeah, I know.”

  Before he hobbled out of the entryway, Theo took off his robe and wrapped it around Gabriella’s shoulders. She looked surprised, then grateful. Standing there shivering in the bright light in that wet cotton nightgown, she looked like the winner of a wet t-shirt contest. She needed something to cover herself and Bernie wasn’t falling all over himself to help her out.

  “What are you doing here?” Bernie’s voice sounded like he’d just inhaled helium.

  “Running for our lives,” Gabriella told him.

  “I got you a new security system. The thing cost more than the gross national product of most Third World countries.”

  “Fat lot of good it done if anybody with opposable thumbs can disarm it,” Theo said. “Where’s the dad-gum light switch?”

  “Theo, please,” Gabriella said. “Hurry!”

  “This is hurryin’.” He felt around on the wall, mumbling under his breath, “I move fast for a old man. If I’s gone live long enough for a walker, I’d need one with a airbag.” He found the light switch, then the phone and punched in 911.

  Gabriella turned to Bernie. “Have you got a gun?”

  “What?”

  “A gun in the house?”

  “No.”

  “A hunting knife, an ax, anything?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then you better hope the police get here before he does.”

  “He who?”

  “Who do you think—Yesheb. He broke into the house! And you wouldn’t believe me that he was dangerous.”

  Theo put his hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver and spit at Bernie, “You ain’t ’xactly doing a bang-up job looking after Gabriella—you know that, don’t you? And without her, how you figure to finance all them alimony payments?”

  A female voice spoke into Theo’s ear. “Alimony payments? This is the 911 dispatch. Do you have an emerg—?”

  “Yes, I got an emergency!” Theo turned his attention back to the phone in his hand. “We in Upper St. Clair and you need to send the po-lice ’fore that maniac shows up and kills us all.” The Upper St. Clair part’d build a fire under them. Tell the law you was in the Hill District or Homewood Brushton and they wouldn’t show up ’til the dead bodies started to stink.

  Gabriella rushed over and yanked the receiver out of his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m calling from 2811 Ft. Couch Road. My son and I and my father-in-law came here, ran here because a man broke into my house and …” He saw her fire a glance at Ty and edit whatever she was planning to say. “… and now he’s after us.”

  She answered a couple more questions, then hung up. Bernie was babbling but didn’t make no sense, something about selling Gabriella’s new book. Making money was the only thing Theo’d ever heard him talk about. Theo and Gabriella both ignored him.

  Soon as she hung up the phone, Gabriella shoved her arms into the sleeves of Theo’s robe and pulled the belt tight round her waist. Her eyes swept the room—the dark corners, the doors, the windows—like a prison searchlight. Her gaze passed over Ty and then yanked back to him. The boy was on his knees on the cold tile floor with his arm around P.D. His eyes were still huge, his face pale. She crossed to him and got down on one knee in front of him.

  “Hey champ,” she said. Her voice was trembly, but she got control of it. “You okay?” She reached out and ruffled his black curls. Theo figured Ty hated that. Most boys did at that age, but tonight, he leaned into her. It was clear Gabriella’d done somethin’ to bring a world of hurt down around both they heads. Theo didn’t know what it was but he was certain she hadn’t meant to put that boy in danger.

  “Who was that man, the one we almost ran over?” Ty asked. “Is he the same man we saw at the park and at the grocery store and in Florida? The one who’s always sending you black roses?”

  Gabriella nodded.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  The boy pushed the big, round glasses up on his nose, was all the time doing that—more often when he was upset. But he didn’t need those big glasses to see the blood on his mother’s ear and soaked white nightgown.

  “Actually, I hurt myself. Got hung up when I was trying to get away from him.”

  Theo didn’t believe that for a minute.

  Gabriella pulled Ty into her arms, held him tight against her. “The man you saw is crazy, that’s all. Crazy people do crazy things. But we’re fine now, Sweetheart. We’re safe here.”

  Theo didn’t believe that either. From the look on her face, neither did Gabriella.

  TY DIDN’T BELIEVE a word his mother said. They weren’t fine and they weren’t safe—here or anywhere else. He was certain they weren’t because he knew what none of the rest of them did. He knew why the man in black was after them. He also knew the man wasn’t after them at all. He was only after Ty.

  The boy felt cold, a freezing in his veins like crystals forming in the little river of water that flowed across the roof tile outside his window. He’d watched it happen last winter, fascinated by how the cold could turn the clear water milky, sluggish and then still and dead.

  The cold expanded all through him, freezing the rest of him as it slowly dawned on him that he had put everyone he loved in danger. His mother and Grandpa Slappy could be struck down along with him.

  Ty’s mother let go her crushing hug, sat back and looked down at him. Ty stared up into her eyes, locked onto her gaze and held on. He’d heard her tell Grandpa Slappy a couple of days ago that she’d never seen a child as intense as he was, who looked you right in the eye, never blinked or looked away. What his mother didn’t know was that Ty always looked dead into her eyes to avoid looking at the rest of her face. He couldn’t stand to see it, the ugly scarred horror that had melted away her beauty and turned her into a freak people gawked at and whispered about behind her back.

  But her eyes were still beautiful, still the same hazel green—exactly the same color as the eyes that looked back at him in shame when he looked into the mirror.

  “I love you, Champ,” she said, and he could tell she was about to cry.

  And that was his fault, too. Her tears were his fault. Everything was, all of it. He was the reason they were being hunted, chased out of their beds in the middle of the night.

  Oh, how he yearned to tell her that, to blurt out in a rush how he’d been hunkered down, waiting for this for a long time. How he ached to tell her that the man in black, the Boogie Man, had come for him, not her. But, of course, she was in danger, too, would continue to be as long as she was …

  Ty stopped breathing.

  … as long as she was near him.

  His mother got to her feet when she heard the wail of a distant siren, but Ty stayed where he was on his knees beside Puppy Dog.

  Mom and Grandpa Slappy would never be safe until … until Ty was not there to draw the attention of the man who was after him. It was suddenly clear to Ty what he had to do. He had to leave, had to put as much distance as he possibly could between him and
everyone he loved in the world. He had to run away.

  A TEAM OF police officers rolled up with siren wailing and lights flashing. Gabriella met them at the door. One was a fat, red-headed man with a round face and chipmunk cheeks. The other officer was a hulking black man who stared openly at the scar on her face and asked blunt, borderlinehostile questions. While Theo took Ty into the kitchen in search of Mountain Dew, and Bernie barricaded himself in the den making telephone calls, Gabriella described what had happened to her and how she had escaped.

  She didn’t fill in all the details—how she’d collapsed sobbing on top of her iPhone in the bed, picked it up and tried to figure how she could use it to call the police without Yesheb hearing her. With her trembling hands, she’d accidentally touched the voice memo icon and watched the needle jump as it recorded her sobs. That’s when the desperate plan formed in her mind. She’d forced herself to record ten full minutes of crying, fearing that any second Yesheb would open the door and catch her. Then she set her iPhone in the slot on her SoundDock speaker deck, touched the playback icon and made her escape.

  But she did tell them in detail what Yesheb had done to her and described the bloody knife he’d shown her. At that point, Rude Cop spoke into the microphone attached to a clip on his shoulder and before long five more officers appeared, conferred with the first two and then left. She had just completed her account of trying to run Yesheb down with her car when one of them came back into the room and spoke into Fat Cop’s ear.

  Fat Cop nodded, then gestured toward Gabriella. The other officer gawked at her—he’d figured out she was the famous novelist Rebecca Nightshade—and didn’t pick up that he was supposed to tell her what he’d found out until Fat Cop elbowed him in the side.

  “Ma am, we looked and there wasn’t … I mean, we couldn’t find the guard, Ridley, any trace of him,” Bumbling Cop said. “Searched all around the buildings and the grounds and didn’t find a thing out of the ordinary. No blood, no signs of a struggle. And no vehicle. Did he drive to work?”

  “You think a rent-a-cop and an attack dog took a cab?”

  Bumbling Cop actually considered the question for a moment before he realized it was sarcasm. “There’s no blood in the house, either, Ma’am. None on the sheets—”

  “Then Yesheb changed the sheets!”

  “Why would he do a thing like that?” Rude Cop asked.

  To make it look like I’m the one who’s crazy.

  But she said nothing because she could already see where this was going. The same way all the other complaints had gone.

  “In fact, all the beds in the upstairs bedrooms were made, no evidence anybody’d slept in them,” Bumbling Cop continued. “And the windows were closed, too. No blood in the hallway where he … where you say he …”

  “Bit off my earlobe? What—you don’t believe me? Look at this!” Gabriella turned her head and thrust her bloody ear toward them. “You think I was attacked by killer pinking shears?”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean that, ma’am … Ms. Nightshade. I’m just saying the house was locked up tight.” He held up the car keys she’d left in the ignition of the Town Car parked out front. “Had to use the door key on this ring to get in.” He placed the keys on the coffee table. “And the alarm went off as soon as we opened the door. Liked to never got that thing shut down. The phone line worked fine, too.”

  About half an hour after that, another officer came in and had another whispered conversation with Fat Cop.

  The round-faced policeman looked sheepish when he spoke to her, like he was embarrassed for her that she’d been caught in such an obvious fabrication. He’d recognized her by now, too. And had likely been told she was nuttier than a jar of Planters, filed complaints about being watched and followed all the time.

  “Ms. Nightshade, we found Officer Ridley’s car at his house in his driveway—no dog, though. He lives alone and he wasn’t there, but a neighbor said he sometimes goes off, stays gone for days.” The officer lowered his voice. “Said he had a drinking problem.”

  Gabriella just looked at him.

  A security guard walks off the job in the middle of the night to go have a beer with his pit bull—that seem reasonable to you?

  “And we checked on this Al Tobbanoft guy, the one you have a restraining order against. His butler said he’s in the hospital with a broken foot—”

  “That’s what I ran over—his foot!”

  “He broke it three days ago, Ma’am. That’s what the doctor …”

  “What hospital?”

  “Stonybrook, a private hospital.”

  “Do you know who owns it?” she asked, then answered her own question. “I’d say the safe money’s on the Al Tobbanoft family. But you might have to trace back through half a dozen corporations … which you can’t, and I’m sure you wouldn’t even if you could.” She let out a long sigh. “Forget it. Just forget it.”

  The officer assured her they would continue to look into the incident and to check up on Thomas Ridley, who would no doubt show up unharmed after sleeping off a drunk somewhere. He said they hadn’t dusted for prints in the house, but would be glad to if she requested it.

  Fat Cop had become ingratiating. Any minute now he’d ask for her autograph.

  But why look for fingerprints? If Yesheb had been careful enough to haul off the bloody sheets, he wouldn’t likely leave any fingerprints behind.

  There was no point in investigating further. Fat, Rude, Bumbling—and the other four dwarves—had no idea who they were up against. But she did. The report on Yesheb and his family from the private investigation agency she’d hired to check up on him—the same agency that had sent Ridley to guard her house—had been painstakingly thorough. Ridley had delivered it personally.

  “He’s a head case,” Ridley had told her. The ex-police officer/security guard had gum in his mouth and popped it as he spoke. “Sophisticated, well-mannered, good looking—but a wacko. It was like yanking a redwood tree up by the roots, by the way, to drag information out of people. Everybody who’s ever met him is scared of him. All I got was bits and pieces, but it looks like this guy has yo-yoed in and out of mental institutions since he was a kid. Hears voices, hallucinates, delusions of grandeur—one of those guys who thinks he’s Attila the Hun one day and the Jolly Green Giant the next. Couldn’t nail a diagnosis, but I figure he’s at least bipolar and my money’s on psychopath. Don’t guess the label matters—all you need to know is the guy’s insane.”

  Oh, and there was one other thing she needed to know. The man was also rich. Gabriella Carmichael was a wealthy woman; Yesheb Al Tobbanoft was Arab oil sheik rich. Affluent on a scale normal human beings couldn’t comprehend. He had the kind of obscene wealth that meant you could do anything you wanted and get away with it.

  FROM THE GUEST bedroom on the second floor of Bernie Phelps’s house, Gabriella watched the sun bleach the night out of the sky over Pittsburgh, saw the city stretch, yawn and reach for its morning coffee. She was sitting up in bed, her back against the headboard and her arms wrapped around her knees with Ty snuggled up next to her. He hadn’t wanted to sleep by himself.

  As gray dawn light slowly chased shadows into the corners of the room, her reflection gradually appeared in the ornate mirror above the dressing table across from the bed. Any time she caught sight of herself in a mirror, she automatically turned her head so only the left side was visible. Her good side. But she no longer had a good side. Her left eye was swollen partially shut where Yesheb had slapped her and a deep purple bruise puddled below it.

  Black eye and bruised cheek or scar and mangled earlobe. Pick your poison.

  Ty stirred and moaned in his sleep. She stroked his hair. It wasn’t kinky—just big, shiny black curls that she probably let get a little shaggy because the curls were so adorable. Of course, if he knew that …

  Gradually, the pinched look left his face and he relaxed. Probably a nightmare. Gabriella didn’t have to go to sleep to have those anymore. They bro
ke into her house and bit off her earlobe while she was wide awake.

  She reached up and touched the tender flesh. One more challenge for her plastic surgeon, and she’d already financed Harvard educations for all three of his kids. Her face was the best reconstruction money could buy, and it was still a work in progress. But it would never look like it had before. The doctor told her that as soon as she woke up, before he gave her drugs that barely took the edge off the searing agony. She’d have to recalibrate her view of normal—that’s how he’d put it. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what normal had looked like. Not a beautiful face, but pretty. Definitely pretty. High forehead, dark feathers of eyebrow above large hazel eyes, ho-hum nose, mouth too big, heart-shaped smile and a lone dimple on her right cheek, charmingly asymmetrical. That was gone now, of course. The acid had chewed through the dimple as it ate a hole in the side of her face all the way to the bone.

  Bernie loved her scar, but then, Bernie would have loved leprosy if it made him a buck. He leveraged the disfigurement—a face scarred just like the heroine in her book—and created a marketing strategy around it that helped catapult The Bride of the Beast to the top of the New York Times best-sellers list. Her “Zara signature,” along with a wardrobe of “costumes,” straight black hair with bangs cut into a sharp triangle with the point at the bridge of her nose and blood-red fingernails combined to form an indelible trademark. Rebecca Nightshade, Gabriella’s pen name and alter ego, was a franchise.

  Ty wiggled, his brow furrowed and he rolled over onto his side, then over onto his back again. Another nightmare. Or perhaps a sequel to the first one. He looked achingly vulnerable in his sleep, but maybe even more so when he was awake. He’d insisted on big, round frames for his glasses that made him look like a baby owl.

  She gulped back tears. For the past eight hours, she’d refused to allow her mind to process the greatest outrage of the night, because if she’d thought about it while she was trying to get away, she might have frozen solid from the horror of it, stood like a pillar of salt. But she couldn’t dodge the reality any longer.