“I’m waiting for a call from—”
“Turn on Channel 4. Now.”
I found the remote for the TV under a cushion and hit the button.
“…unknown if the victim knew his assailant or whether the assault was a random act of violence. No one else was harmed in the bizarre attack against an unidentified passenger at Reagan National Airport, which occurred in one of the tunnels leading to the upper level of the parking deck.”
The announcer paused and pressed her ear. “We’re just getting word… It has now been confirmed that the victim is dead. The attack appears to have occurred at close range, and the wound is believed to have been made with a sharp instrument which most likely punctured the heart. Again, at approximately three-twenty this afternoon a man was severely injured, now confirmed dead, at Reagan National Airport shortly after disembarking from his flight from California. The perpetrator is at large and no description is currently available. We will continue to update you with news of this breaking story as it develops.”
For a moment I couldn’t breathe. I hit the off button.
“Mom, it’s James, isn’t it?” There was a catch in Cara’s voice.
I managed to say, “I don’t know.” I didn’t want to hear what I knew she was about to say.
“Mom, was Dad murdered?”
“Have you eaten?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I want you to put a few items into a backpack or whatever you have handy. Toothbrush, lipstick, deodorant, underwear, a couple of changes of clothes—whatever you can’t live without for two or three days. I’ll be there in twenty minutes to pick you up.”
“You can’t. I’m still at work.”
“But you’re watching TV.”
“We had it on in the lounge. Two of the kids we’ve sent to camp for the past couple of years are here. Their dad started beating the hell out of their mom, so they came here. I called the police. He’s in custody. She’s at the hospital. And I’m trying to locate a family member to take them.”
“Let Social Services take care of that.”
“They’re scared, Mom. That’s why they came to me. They trust me. I can’t just leave them.”
“Listen to me,” I said with as much strength as I could summon. “There has to be someone else there that can help. Go home now and—”
“No,” she said, cutting me off. “I told you, I can’t. Besides, I have work tomorrow.”
“Tell your boss you need a few personal days. Tell them you’re sick. Hell, tell them I died.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I wish I were.”
“Mom, is this really that serious?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, praying I was wrong.
I could hear her sigh.
“I should be able to make it to your place in a few hours.”
“Now,” I insisted. “I’ll pick you up now.”
“A few hours,” she repeated firmly. “I’m not going to bail on these kids. And I’ll have to call Phillip to explain what’s going on.”
I hadn’t yet met Phillip, but Cara seemed to be crazy about him.
“No! You can’t tell him anything about your father,” I warned. “I don’t want him involved.”
“I’ll tell him whatever I want.”
“Not until I’ve had a chance to talk to you. Promise me, Cara.”
She paused for several seconds.
“Cara…” I repeated.
“All right. I won’t tell Phillip anything, and I’ll come to your place as soon as I find the kids’ aunt. I promise.”
I swallowed back the fear that insisted we leave now, without another second of delay. Surely a few hours would make no difference. Cara would never abandon those children, and I wouldn’t leave without Cara.
Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe seeing Stephen’s body had put me so on edge I’d lost all reason.
Or maybe it had alerted me to a real danger I’d been trying to deny ever since Stephen’s death.
“When you get here,” I said, “don’t bring your car inside the security fence. Park behind the building and walk around through the gate.”
“All right.”
“If you can get away earlier—” I began.
Cara hung up without letting me get in one more plea.
I dropped the receiver in its cradle. I had my own packing to do and some phone calls to make.
I didn’t want Cara near me, but I didn’t want her out of my sight, either. I could only hope whoever did this, whoever murdered James, was certain I knew nothing about Stephen’s life. All I could offer Cara was the little I knew. I prayed that it would be enough to keep her safe.
Chapter 4
Cara didn’t make it to the house until after two in the morning. I’d nearly worn a path in the carpet working off my worry.
She’d brought her bag with her, but she wasn’t quite ready to go. She also wanted answers about what had happened to James and what it had to do with us. Unfortunately, everything I said only led to more questions.
“Dad was a geologist,” Cara stated evenly. “When he was away, he was on expeditions. Are you saying he wasn’t?”
“I’m saying I don’t know what he was or where he went. He told me he was a geologist.” That was his first story, the one he’d kept publicly, and the one I used when people asked and I had no better answer to give them.
Cara drummed her fingers on my kitchen table. She was pale and exhausted. I hoped she’d had some dinner.
“But you knew otherwise and you’re only now telling me?” she said.
“I suspected otherwise,” I said. “What was I supposed to do? Tell you your father was lying? Have you confront him?”
“No, Mom. I’d say that was your job,” she snapped, putting me squarely in my place.
“What should I have said to him?” I asked. “That no matter what story he came up with I knew he was working for the government or some secret agency? Besides, I didn’t know. Hell, he could have been working for some madman in the Middle East.”
“Don’t say that.” Now she was angry. “He may have lied to you and to me, but don’t say things out of bitterness. My father was a good man. I know that and so do you. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it for the right reasons.”
I threw up my hands. How could I make her understand? “It doesn’t matter if he was good. It wouldn’t have mattered if he were working for God Himself. It’s…” I couldn’t get out another word.
“It’s that he lied to you about it.”
“Yes, and I hated him for it.” She had cut right through to it. The pain was evident in her face, but I wanted to give her the gift that Stephen had denied me, the only gift I couldn’t live without—honesty.
The muscles in my throat were so constricted it actually hurt to speak. “When you want to share your soul with another person, like I did with your father, when you’re willing to share every part of your being, how is it that that person whom you care so much about can keep a huge part of who they are from you? I would have kept any secret he had. I would have done whatever he asked. But I had to know.”
“And he never told you.”
“Never. Even before we married, he’d become aloof, distant. Foolishly, I believed things would change between us because I was convinced your father really loved me. Even later, after I realized that whatever Stephen was involved in was dangerous, too dangerous, he thought, for me to know about, I had to have answers.”
“That’s why you left him.”
“Physically I left him. Mentally, he’d left me years before. My one concern was you. Somehow Stephen managed to keep us safe. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I felt you were in less danger with him knowing exactly where you were. But I was always terrified that whatever he was involved in would spill into our lives. I wanted you to have a father. I wanted you to have Stephen for a father, but…”
“You loved him.”
It’d been s
o long since I’d put a label on my feelings.
When I didn’t answer, she said, “Mom, you did love him. That’s why you never divorced him, why you still went on vacation with him, why you let him sleep over. Did you not even listen to what you just said about him?”
“I don’t know what I felt for him. Maybe I loved him. When I wasn’t hating him.”
I didn’t cry. I’d spilled so many tears when I’d lost my sister Josie all those years ago—and with Stephen. Tears changed nothing.
Cara came to my side, her anger gone. She folded me into her arms and lay her head on my shoulder. Then she cried for both of us, like she used to when she was a little girl and I would hold her tight.
But we only had so much time. I hugged her to me. “I want you to go to West Virginia now. Tonight. It shouldn’t take you more than four hours. I’ve already called your great-aunt Rachel. She’s expecting you. It’s better that you be there than with your grandparents. They’re too easy to trace. The difference between my maiden name and Rachel’s married name puts you one step further from discovery. We can reevaluate tomorrow.”
She pulled back from me and frowned. I wiped her tears with my fingers and tried to smooth the wrinkles between her eyes.
“Why are you so certain we’re in danger?”
I’d never planned to tell her any of this. If she’d been younger, I might have gotten away with it, but now she gave me no choice.
“Do you remember when you were five and your father picked you up from kindergarten?”
“Yes. We met you at work and he took us on a surprise vacation to Disney World? Sure. Why?”
“He packed your clothes and he packed mine, and he ordered me into the car. I had no idea where we were going or why. I almost lost my job over it. But I saw the fear in his eyes and I dared not refuse.
“On the way to Florida, your dad told me a man had been seen talking to you on the playground of your school. He had you by the hand when a teacher saw him. She got you inside the building and called your father as well as the police. But the man was gone by the time they got there.”
She paled. “It was probably some random—”
“There was nothing random about it. It was a warning. I was furious with your father.”
“But you went to Florida, anyway.”
“Yes. I went. I had no other options. We were gone two weeks, three days of which you and I were by ourselves. I have no idea where he was.”
“He never offered you an explanation?”
I shook my head. “Only that there’d been a security breach, and he’d taken care of it. He promised it would never happen again, and it didn’t. Not until now. It was after that incident that he started training me.”
“Training you? What are you talking about?”
“He made sure I knew how to use a gun, showed me how to canvass a room, plan an escape, secure phony ID.”
“Crap, Mom. What the hell was going on?”
“I told you. I don’t know. All I know is that it was dangerous to be with him—and to be away from him. One time he came home with a wound to his calf. You remember. You must have been about nine.”
“Sure. He’d been hurt on a hike.”
“He’d been shot.”
“He told you he’d been shot?”
“No. He said a pick had gone through his leg in an accident on a climb. He’d been treated, but he never went to the doctor for any follow-up visits. When I dressed the wound, I knew he was lying. The entry and exit wounds from a pick would have been neater. This had a small hole on one side and a large tear on the other.
“You already know about the times he simply left on his ‘expeditions,’ and we had no idea when he’d be back,” I continued. “Did you know he carried a copy of your high school schedule with him? He knew every class you ever took, when it started and when it ended, the name of the teacher and the number of the room it was held in. He carried a small book with the names and addresses of your friends.”
Her face was ashen. There was too much to absorb. Her pain was evident in her eyes. She’d always known how much he loved her, but she’d never known how much he feared for her.
“Cara, we really don’t have time for this. Your great-aunt Rachel—”
“Will have to wait. I’m not going.”
“I know you don’t want to do this—”
“You know I won’t do it.”
Damn. Why did she have to be so much like me? And like her father.
“I don’t intend to make the same mistakes that you and Dad did. I have to tell Phillip what’s going on. He deserves an explanation.”
“You don’t have a choice,” I insisted.
“You mean like Dad might not have had a choice?”
“Cara…”
She reached for the phone.
“If you make that call, you may be putting Phillip in danger, as well.”
That stopped her.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. “If it’s not safe for me to be here, it’s certainly not safe for you.”
“I have a plan.”
She nodded. “How long have you had this plan?”
“As long as I’ve known this day might come.”
“It used to include me,” she reminded me. “I know you would never have left me with anyone else when I was a child. And I’m not about to let you leave me out now. If we have to do this, we do it together.”
“All right, then,” I agreed. “We leave together.”
Cara stood and immediately sat back down. Both of her hands were trembling.
“I think I’m going to be sick.” She closed her eyes and swallowed hard.
“You didn’t eat, did you?” I asked.
She shook her head. Then she dashed for the bathroom. It was all too much for her system—her father’s body turning back up, James’s murder, no food, no sleep and two children who were counting on her to watch out for them. I could hear her retching through the closed door. After several minutes the toilet flushed and she opened the door. She had to steady herself against the frame. She’d always had a weak stomach.
“I need some time. I can’t get into a car like this.”
“How long?” I asked.
“A few minutes. Please. Just let me lie down. Then we can go.”
She saw me look at my watch. It was already a few minutes after 3:00 a.m. I’d give her half an hour, no more.
“If no one’s come for us yet, it’s unlikely they’ll come tonight,” she reasoned.
I didn’t like it, but she was probably right. I nodded. If we left soon, surely we’d be fine. I could gather my energy while Cara rested.
I tucked her into bed, lay down in the dark in my own room, and convinced myself we’d be safe for a few more minutes. The dead bolt was on. It was a secure building with a guard station and a fence around it, and my condo was on the fifteenth floor.
The sound of Cara’s breathing drifted through the open door. I would have asked her to lie next to me, but she didn’t need to know how scared I really was. One crazed woman was enough for what lay ahead of us.
My eyes drifted shut, and somehow, despite my best efforts, I fell asleep.
Breath tickled my neck and brought me totally aware, a cold sweat prickling my body. Someone was bending over me, checking to see if I was awake, and it wasn’t Cara. He had a distinctly masculine scent.
I didn’t dare open my eyes. Any movement, even to reach for the gun lying next to me, would be too late. It was probably already too late, but that didn’t stop me. My daughter, I prayed, was still asleep in the next room.
In one quick move, I rolled to my back and drew my knees to my chest. I felt my feet connect with something solid as I straightened my legs, shoving with all the force in my body. I heard an oomph coincide with a loud thump against the wall, as I grabbed the gun and rolled off the other side of the bed and onto the floor.
“Christ, Elizabeth! Are you trying to kill me?”
“James
?” I reared up, still on my knees, the mattress protecting all but my head and arms, the gun pointed into the dark in the direction of his voice. “I thought someone else had saved me the trouble.”
“So did I, at least for a while.” His voice sounded strained.
“How the hell did you get in here?”
“Tricks of the trade.”
With my free hand, I fumbled for the bedside light and switched it on. James was standing between the wall and the bed, hunched, with an ugly expression on his handsome face. One arm under his black jacket cradled his abdomen. I must have hurt him more than I thought I could.
Cara stood in the doorway, holding the biggest damn baseball bat the Sports Authority carried. She must have found it where I kept it under her bed. Her cheeks were pink, her hands steady.
“Who died at the airport?” she demanded.
He turned and shook his head at her. “Damn it, Cara! You gonna beat up on me, too? You can put that thing down. Your mom’s pretty much incapacitated me.”
She set the bat in the corner, folded her arms across her chest, leaned back against the wall and offered him a smile. “You could have tried the doorbell.”
“If I’d known the reception you had waiting for me, I would have. I didn’t expect to find you here.”
Cara opened her mouth, but I cut her off. “I asked her to spend the night with me.”
He looked back at me. “You might want to put that gun away.”
I had it pointed straight at his head. I sat down on the bed and lowered the gun onto my lap. That’s when I saw the blood seeping into his shirt. I hadn’t been the only one who’d hurt him.
“I don’t know who jumped me at the airport,” James said. “But he obviously wasn’t thrilled about my coming here.”
“I see.” Even I couldn’t help but smile at him, this ghost back from the dead. In his late twenties, he looked like the image of a surfer—blond, broad-shouldered, tanned. There had been a time when I thought that was exactly what he was—before I knew he worked with Stephen and wasn’t just some guy Stephen had befriended playing Frisbee on the beach.
I’d first met James when Stephen and I were in California for what I thought was a vacation. Cara was doing her study abroad in Italy and I was missing her terribly.
No Safe Place Page 3