Under Threat

by Robin Stevenson

  “I thought…” I choke out. “For a second, I thought…” I thought he’d been shot. But I can’t say it. Not in front of Diane.

  “You thought he’d had a stroke?” Mom says. “No, no. Stop worrying. Your dad’s as fit and strong as plenty of men twenty years younger.”

  “Yeah.” I wipe my hand across my eyes, blinking away tears.

  “Though he’ll be off his ankle for six weeks. Honestly, I can’t quite see how we’re going to manage that. Still, one step at a time, right?”

  “Right.” My heart rate is slowly returning to normal. Leah and Diane are both staring at me. “Should I come to the hospital?”

  “No point,” she says. “You’d just be waiting around anyway. I’ll stay here with him until he’s out of surgery. We’ll see you at home, though probably not until the morning. Don’t wait up.”

  “Okay,” I say. “See you in the morning.”

  When I hang up, Diane puts her hand on my shoulder. “What is it, Franny? What happened?”

  “My dad slipped on the ice,” I say. “He broke his ankle.”

  “Oh dear.” She hesitates. “I’m glad it’s not worse. You looked so upset…”

  I look down at the floor. “I thought… um, he has high blood pressure. And awhile back, he had a ministroke type thing.” I shrug. “So I thought the worst, you know?”

  None of that is technically untrue, but I still feel like I am lying to her.

  “Do you want to stay the night?” she says. “If you’d rather not be at home by yourself?”

  I hesitate. The front door bangs open and Jake walks in. He stands there, staring coldly at me for a moment, then pulls off his boots and walks down the hall without saying a word. I shake my head. “No,” I say. “I should go home. I’ll be fine.”

  A couple of hours later, I regret those words.

  I’m not fine at all. The house is too empty, too quiet. The street outside is too dark. The park that runs along our backyard is full of trees, any one of which could hide a sniper. I close the blinds, double-check the locks on the front and back doors and turn on all the lights.

  I’m seventeen, for god’s sake. It’s not like I’m not used to being home alone. But I haven’t been this spooked since I watched three horror movies back to back at a sleepover when I was thirteen.

  I want to call Leah, but it’s almost midnight. I curl up on the couch in the family room—it’s at the front of the house, away from the park—and check my email and Facebook. Then I flip through the photos on my phone. Almost all of my pictures are of Leah, Buddy and other people’s horses. Finally, my almost-dead battery dies, which I guess is probably a sign that I should go brush my teeth and get into bed.

  Then the phone rings. The landline. And the only person who would call me this late is my mom. I jump up, run to the phone and answer it on the second ring. “Hello?”

  There is an odd pause, and I know even before I hear the voice. Maybe I should just hang up, but I can’t. I’m frozen to the spot.

  “You’ll burn in hell for what you’ve done.” The voice is low, muffled—like he is covering his mouth or speaking into a towel to disguise his identity. “All those babies you’ve killed. All those unborn children whose deaths you’re responsible for.”

  I’m flooded with anger. And I want to know who this person is at the other end of the phone line, this person who thinks he has a right to threaten my parents. To turn our lives upside down. “Stop calling us,” I say. “You’re crazy.”

  “There’s a target on your back, Heather Green,” the voice says. “If you don’t stop, we’re prepared to use lethal force to stop you.”

  He thinks I’m my mom. “You’re wrong about everything,” I say.

  “You’re a mother. You should know better.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I demand. “Who are you?”

  “Baby killer. Maybe we’ll murder your child,” he says. “Your daughter. Her name’s Franny, right?”

  I hang up, drop the phone and stare at it like it’s a poisonous snake that might suddenly attack me. My heart is racing, my whole body shaking.

  They know my name.

  Then I feel stupid and embarrassed, because they’ve known my parents’ names for years. My mom and dad live with that every single day, and they don’t let it stop them.

  I pick the phone back up and dial my mom’s cell.

  She answers right away. “Franny?”

  “Mom.” I’m determined not to cry, but my voice wobbles. I can’t help it. “That guy called again.”

  “Oh, honey. Are you okay?”

  “Kind of freaked out. He knew my name.”

  “Look, maybe you should call Rich Bowerbank.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” I say.

  “I know. But he gave us his home number…and I don’t like the idea of you being there on your own.”

  Nor do I. “I’m going to come to the hospital,” I say. “Are you in emerg?”

  “In my office,” she says. “Quieter place to wait. Perks of being on staff, right?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I say. “Maybe fifteen.”

  “You’ve got school in the morning,” she protests. “You can’t be up all night.”

  “Believe me,” I say, “I’m more likely to sleep there than I am here.”

  Chapter Seven

  But when I get to my mom’s office, she’s not there. I go inside, sit on her desk chair and wait. I’ve never in my whole life felt so completely exhausted.

  I’m almost asleep, my head on my arms, when she comes back.

  “Franny.” She touches my shoulder lightly. “We should find you an empty bed.”

  I shake off the sleepiness. “Where were you? Were you with Dad? Is he out of surgery?” I notice the dark circles under her eyes. “You look worse than I feel.”

  “It’s been a hell of a day,” she says.

  “Is Dad okay?”

  “Fine. Doped to the gills but fine.” She hesitates.

  “What?”

  “The call you got. Was it right before you called me?”

  “Yeah. Like, literally just a few seconds before. Why?”

  “Because right after I got off the phone with you, I got a page from security. The hospital received a threat and—” She breaks off at a knock on the door. “Come in.”

  Two cops enter. One is a man, young, black, heavyset. The other is female and about Mom’s age, with short gray-blond hair and wire-framed glasses. “Dr. Green?” she says.

  “Yes.” My mom beckons them to take a seat. “And this is my daughter, Franny. She answered the call at our house”—she glances at her watch—“almost an hour ago.”

  The female cop nods, introduces herself and her partner and asks me to repeat word for word what the caller said.

  I do my best. Baby killer. You’ll burn in hell. Lethal force. The female cop, whose name I’ve instantly forgotten, writes it down, but it all sounds silly and melodramatic—like something on a true-crime special. But when I get to the part where he said, There’s a target on your back, Heather Green, I break down and start crying again.

  “Very upsetting,” the male cop—Barnwell? Bromwell? Browning?—says. He says it kind of tersely, though, like he really just wants me to toughen up and get on with it.

  He’s right too. I take a deep breath, clench my fists and get on with it. “He said maybe they should kill my kid—I mean, my mother’s kid. He thought I was her—and they knew my name—”

  “Did he say your name? Or just claim to know it?” he asks.

  “He said it. He said, It’s Franny, right?”

  My mom looks pale, and her lips are pressed together so tightly they’ve almost disappeared. She squeezes my shoulder but says nothing.

  “And Franny, did he say they? Or I?”

  “What?” I don’t understand.

  The female cop leans forward. “He means, did the caller refer to himself as a single person? Did he say we should kill your
kid, or I should kill your kid? Try to remember. It could be important.”

  It’s like some bizarre sentence-diagramming exercise: pronouns and verbs. The pronoun seems rather unimportant, compared with the verb kill and the object me. But I think back, trying to recall his exact words. “I think he said we,” I say slowly. “But I’m not 100 percent sure.” I meet her eyes, which are pale and blond-lashed behind the glasses. “Does it matter? I mean, couldn’t he just be lying anyway? Trying to make us think he’s part of a group when he’s just some lone nutcase?”

  “It’s possible,” she says. “But at this point, we want to get as much information as possible. Tell us about his voice. How did it sound? High-pitched? Low? Did he speak slowly or fast? Did he have an accent?”

  “Low,” I say. “Well, lowish. A man, for sure. And not fast or slow. No accent—at least, not that I noticed. His voice was kind of muffled, like he was trying to disguise it. Speaking with something over his mouth, maybe.” I try to imitate him, putting my hand over my mouth and speaking in a deep voice. “Like this.” I take my hand away. “Only he didn’t sound like that. Obviously.”

  “That’s helpful, Franny,” she says, making a note. “Thank you.”

  “What was the threat to the hospital?” I ask. “Was it a phone call?”

  “Yes.” She exchanges glances with the other cop, who nods, and then looks at my mother.

  “You can tell her,” my mom says.

  “The phone call was made by a male caller.” The cop leans forward, elbows on her knees. “He told us he’d left a package in one of the third-floor restrooms near the women’s clinic. A warning package, he said.” She shook her head. “We would have treated it like a bomb threat, but someone had actually found the package right before he called and opened it—stupid thing to do—”

  “They opened it? Not staff, then,” I say. “They’d know better.”

  “No, no. A fourteen-year-old girl who was supposed to be in bed in the pediatric ward but was in fact pissing around the hallways with her boyfriend.”

  I laugh, but stop quickly. It could have been very unfunny. “And it was nothing?”

  “Just a box wrapped up like a gift. Inside, a doll with its arms and legs pulled off. And a note saying the next one will be a bomb.” She shakes her head. “At least the kids had the sense to report it.”

  “You think it’s the same person? The guy who called our house?”

  She nods. “It seems likely. The phone call to the hospital came right around the same time as the call to your house. Right after, we think.”

  “So he made one phone call and then the other…” I break off. “But he must have come here first. To leave the box. So maybe someone saw him?”

  “We’re going to go public with this,” she said. “Ask for people who were at the hospital this evening to come forward if they saw anything. Someone carrying a wrapped gift in a hospital—you wouldn’t think anything of it. But if we’re lucky, someone will remember and we’ll get a description. If he’s working alone, maybe someone saw a man going into the women’s restroom.”

  Given the fact that I’ve had people freak out in women’s restrooms more than once because they think I’m a guy, this seems likely. I don’t even look like a guy. I’m just not as girly as most girls. As Leah—

  “Wait,” I say. “This’ll be on the news?”

  “In the morning. Yes.”

  “Will our names be used?” I ask.

  “I made a statement,” Mom says. “As department head, I thought it was important. So my name will be, at least. And I suspect the media will make the link back to the threats in the past… Jennifer Lee resigning…”

  She’s still talking, but I’ve stopped listening. All I can think about is that Diane Gibson is going to find out what my parents do after all.

  I’ve always been so proud of my parents’ work, and I know how important it is—but right now I wish they did almost anything else.

  And I hate myself for feeling that way.

  Chapter Eight

  It’s almost morning by the time Mom, Dad and I get home. Dad’s cranky and sore, despite being medicated, and Mom’s stressed, and none of us gets more than a couple of hours’ sleep.

  Mom says she’ll write me a note if I want to stay home, but I decide to go to school. It’s Friday, and I just want things to feel normal. As normal as possible anyway.

  I shower, dress, force down some toast and send Leah a text: Call me. We need to talk.

  Leah texts back almost immediately. On school bus. What’s up?

  I chew on my bottom lip. Threats at hospital last night. Will be in news. Including my mom’s name.

  You okay?

  Am I okay? Good question. Not so much. Tired. Worried about your mom seeing news.

  There’s a long pause while I wait for Leah to respond. I wish I was actually talking to her. I want to hear her voice.

  Finally her reply appears on the screen. Come over after school. Better if you tell her yourself.

  I text a sad face. Hope she doesn’t freak out.

  Me too.

  Love you, I type. XO

  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO back at you.

  Hugs and kisses. I touch the screen with my finger as if I can scoop them up and hold on to them to get me through the seven hours until I see her.

  School is a blur of hallway chatter and locker doors slamming and teachers’ voices droning. I have to fight to stay awake. I actually doze off in my afternoon math class, head on my desk, and wake up with my cheek in a puddle of drool. Charming.

  Three o’clock can’t come fast enough.

  Finally the bell rings and I’m free, in my car and driving to the Gibsons’, windows open to let in the cold, fresh air, radio blasting. By the time I pull in to their long driveway, I’m feeling oddly optimistic.

  Maybe this is a good thing, having it all come out. After all, a few days ago I was arguing that we should tell Diane. Having secrets sucks.

  Besides, if Leah and I are going to stay together, eventually our parents will want to meet one another. Sooner or later we’ll have to deal with this. And the more time that goes by, the harder it will be. I don’t want Leah’s mom to feel like I’ve lied to her.

  I park by the barn and glance at the time on my phone. Three thirty. Leah won’t get here for another fifteen minutes at least, and Diane’s rarely home before four, so I head in to see Buddy. He lifts his head and whickers a greeting—or more likely a request for a treat. I keep a bag of carrots in my tack box in front of his stall door, and he knows it. It’s the main reason he loves me, but I don’t mind. I snap a carrot in half and hold it out to him, enjoying the warmth of his breath and the velvet softness of his lips against my palm.

  “Buddy, Buddy, Buddy,” I say, leaning my forehead against his and kissing his white star. “What would I do without you?”

  A noise startles me—a metallic clatter—and I turn to see Jake leaning his pitchfork against the wall. He must have been mucking out stalls at the other end of the barn, but I didn’t even hear him approach. He’s wearing baggy coveralls and a wool hat jammed over his short blond hair.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Jake grabs the handles of his wheelbarrow—it’s full of wet wood shavings and horse manure—and walks away without a word.

  “Right,” I say. “Good to see you too.”

  Even for Jake, that was rude.

  Leah comes flying into the barn a few minutes later. She’s wearing a navy duffle coat and a white wool hat over her long hair, and her cheeks are pink from the cold.

  I slip out of Buddy’s stall and hold my arms wide, and she throws herself into them as if we haven’t seen each other for days. I hold her tightly and wish we could just stay here forever.

  “Leah, Leah, Leah,” I murmur.

  She laughs, pulls away and unbuttons her coat so that I can slip my arms around her inside it. She’s wearing her school uniform—a plaid kilt, which is sexy as hell on her. It kill
s me that private schools still make their students dress in a uniform that is total porn-fantasy material. I mean, do they not know?

  Leah kisses me, and I kiss her back, sliding my hand under her shirt to feel the warm silky skin of her lower back.

  “Mmmm,” she says. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Me too.” There’s a noise outside, and I’m so on edge that I actually startle, jumping back like a spooked horse.

  “What’s wrong?” she says.

  “I don’t know. Nervous,” I say. “But we shouldn’t start making out here anyway. Jake’s around. He was mucking out stalls, but he didn’t even say hi. Totally ignored me.”

  She makes a face. “Let’s go up to my room. He won’t bug us there.”

  At the sound of Diane’s car door shutting and the beep of her alarm, we leap off Leah’s bed, straighten out our clothes and rush down to the living room so that when she walks in, we’re sitting on the couch like we’ve been there the whole time.

  I don’t know if she’s fooled at all, but from the way she greets me—relaxed, friendly, normal—I guess she hasn’t heard about my parents. Which is good. I’d rather she heard it from me.

  “Can you stay for dinner, Franny?” she asks me. “You’re very welcome.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “If it’s no trouble. I feel like you’re always feeding me.”

  She smiles. “I like feeding people. And I’m used to having lots of hungry mouths to feed. With Esther and Hannah gone, the house feels so quiet and empty.”

  “You should see my house sometime,” I say. “Quiet and empty is normal for me. But thanks. Can I help?”

  “You and Leah can make a salad,” she says. “I’m just reheating some soup from the freezer, and there’s some corn bread a friend made.”

  “Perfect,” I say. The first few times I ate dinner here, Diane made a big fuss—cooking up these complicated meals. Leah said it was her mom’s way of letting me know she was okay with Leah and me being together, but I’m glad she’s relaxed enough now to feed me reheated soup. It makes me feel more like part of the family.