Pall in the Family

by Dawn Eastman

  The doorbell rang, but Tuffy didn’t have the energy to bark. He looked at Seth from underneath his messy fringe and sighed. I followed my mother out to the front hallway and caught a glimpse of Milo as she pulled the door open. He was standing next to a pretty blonde woman who could only be—

  “Julia?” Mom said as she stood there gaping.

  “I knew it!” Vi said from behind me.

  While the ladies stood staring, I gestured for Milo and Julia to come in.

  “Clyde, I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Julia Wyatt.”

  “She’s not dead?” Seth had come out of the kitchen to see what was going on.

  “Seth!” Mom exclaimed.

  Julia laughed. “No, I’m not dead.”

  Mom hustled them into the living room and then headed off to the kitchen for more coffee. We sat and continued to stare at Julia. Milo reached over and took her hand, and she smiled.

  “So, tell us!” Vi said, and rapped Mac’s cane on the floor.

  Julia jumped and looked at Milo.

  “Julia drove in from Chicago last night. We’re heading back tomorrow as long as I’m not needed at the police station,” Milo said.

  Mom bustled in with a tray of coffee mugs and cookies.

  “What did I miss?” she asked as she sat next to Vi on the loveseat.

  “Not a thing, Rose,” Vi grumbled.

  “Mac thought it would be a good idea for us to stop by and talk with you. He thought it would clear the air a bit.” Milo sipped his coffee and seemed to consider how to proceed. “I helped Julia run away right after high school. She was eighteen and legally an adult, but we wanted to be sure no one would look for her.” Milo glanced at Julia, who nodded. “Her father was a vicious drunk, and after Julia’s mother died, he drank even more.”

  He squeezed Julia’s hand. She looked at her lap.

  “I’m not going to go into detail, but she needed to get away from him before something truly terrible happened.”

  I remembered all those times trying to “see” Julia that summer she disappeared. All I saw were bruises and tears, which must have been why she decided to run.

  “Now that my father is gone,” Julia began, “we thought it would be safe to return here. But, after everything that has happened, we’re thinking we’ll just stay in Chicago. There are too many bad memories here.” Her voice was soft and, when she finally looked up, it was to nodding heads and sniffles from Mom.

  Milo went on to tell us that Mac knew about it even all those years ago. As a new police officer, he’d gone out to the Wyatt house on domestic disturbance calls. But there was never enough evidence, and until Julia was eighteen, she would have nowhere to go, so she didn’t press charges. She just tried to stay out of trouble and avoided her dad if he’d been drinking. Milo hatched the disappearance plan after a particularly violent outburst from Julia’s father when she’d talked about going away to college.

  Although they couldn’t get married because Julia didn’t want any paperwork to trigger a renewed search, they’d been living happily in Chicago. Then, Milo talked to Tish and began his quest to reveal his father’s killer.

  * * *

  After Milo and Julia left, I sent a text to Tom to see how things were progressing at the station. Rather than text back, he arrived on the doorstep ten minutes later. We had all reconvened in the kitchen, and I led Tom there to fill us all in at the same time.

  Vi greeted him as he sat down at the table. “What’s the news, Tom?”

  Tom shook his head. “It’s all sort of confused right now, but everyone is busy trying to compile the evidence and avoid Mac. He wants the case against Joe and Cecile to be airtight, and he wants it yesterday.”

  “Have they confessed?” Mom asked.

  “No, they asked for lawyers the minute we got them to the station, so a confession is unlikely. We did just get a report back on the gun Stark had with him in the woods. It’s the same gun that killed both Tish and Sara. Unfortunately, it has all sorts of fingerprints on it, including yours, Clyde.”

  “They must have other evidence against him,” I said.

  “Mac has a couple of people in the woods digging in the area where Joe had started. I’m not sure what he’s looking for. . . .”

  “He probably thinks Joe was digging up the rifle that killed Milo’s dad.” Seth’s head was down, examining Tuffy’s cast, but he was apparently paying attention.

  “What about Gary?” I asked.

  “He’s off the hook. He came down last night to volunteer the information that he had been threatening Sara on her website. He wanted to scare her into selling her land to Milo so he could get the money to pay off his gambling debts.” Tom nodded thanks as my mother slid a mug of coffee in front of him.

  “Poor Sara. She probably would have given him the money if she knew he needed it.” Mom pushed the cream and sugar toward Tom.

  “What about Clyde’s car? Who cut her brake line?” Seth asked.

  “Once we got fingerprints from the Starks, we checked them against a partial print found under the car. It matched Cecile.”

  “I knew it!” Vi slammed Mac’s cane against the floor. Tom jumped. “Cecile would be mortified if anyone knew that she used to work in her dad’s garage. She could probably cut a brake line in her sleep.”

  Seth and Mom nodded. Tom looked confused.

  “Thanks for coming to the rescue in the woods, Tom.” I smiled at him. Seth sighed, and I imagined the accompanying eye roll.

  “I wish I could say it was my idea, but Mac knew you were in danger once we saw that the Starks weren’t at home. I don’t know how he figured it out.”

  “Tish had reported them back when she was a kid. No one listened to her then, but Mac must have found the report and put it together with the articles we found at Sara’s,” Seth said, and all eyes shifted to him.

  “What?” Seth said.

  “How did you know all that?” Tom said.

  “It’s obvious, now that we know who did it.”

  “Oh, this is for you.” Tom slid a folded piece of notebook paper across the table.

  I opened it with shaky hands. Meet me at the bridge tomorrow. Ten a.m. Please?

  “What? What is it?” Mom said, as I slipped the note into my pocket and smiled.

  The rest of the day was quiet. Vi had called all my Friday clients and cancelled. Not one of them had an issue with the lack of a dog walker, but they all wanted details of the arrest in the woods. Alex and Diana stopped by to check on everyone. They said the gossip in town was that I had led the police to the killer using my psychic ability. Mom fielded phone calls and gave me pointed looks as she told people I was not open for business.

  30

  On Saturday morning, I waited on the bridge for Mac. The sun was bright, but the light filtered through the trees on the water below. The stream bubbled brightly under the bridge. It had been a long time since I’d felt this light and free. I realized I was happy. I was going to see Mac, and the dream that I thought predicted his injury or death had been wrong. I had been wrong. He was going to be fine.

  I spotted him coming along the path. He wasn’t using his cane, since he’d given it to Vi, and seemed to be moving more easily without it. He walked up to meet me at the top of the small rounded bridge. He put out his arms and smiled. It was a smile I had seen so many times before, mostly when I was asleep.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  I went to him and he folded me into his arms. I breathed in his pine-and-lake-breeze scent. We stayed like that for a long time.

  “Mac, I need to tell you something.” I pulled away to look at his face.

  “Do I want to hear it?” He smiled down at me.

  “That letter you wrote. The one you gave to Tish?” I wasn’t doing this right. His smile faded.

 
“We don’t need to talk about it. Let’s just start from here.”

  “But you need to know.”

  “Ancient history.” He drew me back into his arms.

  “The thing is . . . I just got it.” I felt his arms stiffen.

  “Just got what?”

  “The letter. It was part of Tish’s will. She left me your letter and said she was sorry to have kept it, but the time wasn’t right for us.”

  Mac let go of me and turned toward the bridge wall.

  “So, all that time I thought you had chosen your psychic life over me—”

  “I thought you were mad that I didn’t tell you about Dean,” I said to his back.

  His shoulders started to shake. I panicked for a moment—I’d never seen Mac cry. I didn’t think I was ready for that. I looked around, trying to come up with a distraction so I could pretend I hadn’t seen.

  He turned, and I saw that he was laughing. Laughing so hard he was crying.

  I stamped my foot. “I don’t know what’s so funny about wasting eight years when we could have been together.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just, well, we can’t fix the past.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t mad about your involvement. I just didn’t know how to handle it.” He rubbed his eyes and appeared to be trying to pull himself together. “When you told me that you had dreamed we would be married, I knew we would have to get away from here if we could ever live a normal life without the psychic influence.”

  “Why didn’t you ever call, or come back?”

  “Well, I wrote that letter and thought that if you wanted what I wanted you’d come to me. I was a coward.” Mac turned toward the stream again. “I didn’t want to tell you in person and risk watching you choose this place over me.” He turned toward me. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “I’d have had a few things to say to Tish if she were still alive.” I crossed my arms and glared at the stream, which now seemed brightly irritating.

  “I brought something to show you.” He put his arm around my shoulder and turned me toward the path.

  We looked back down the pathway in the direction of the parking lot. I didn’t see anything. Mac whistled. A large brown dog turned the corner onto the trail. I recognized his dark droopy face as he came limping along the track through the trees. His left front leg was wrapped in white, and another bandage crossed his chest. Andrews waved from the other end of the trail. Baxter sped up a bit when he saw me, and I ran down the path to meet him. I was so happy to see him I didn’t even mind the drool. He slobbered and wagged his tail so hard his whole body moved with it. I buried my face in his fur and didn’t let go until my entire sleeve was wet. We walked slowly back to Mac, Baxter limping and flashing his doggy smile at me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I should be thanking Baxter. He did the one thing I was trying to do all along.”

  Suddenly I was in his arms and I felt all the pain and stress fade away. It felt better than I remembered. It felt like home.