Watching Their Steps

by Alana Terry

  I wasn’t sure why, but I knew—all the way to my bones—that the man who had killed Jacob was a part of the reason I couldn’t remember the first ten years of my life.

  Chapter 17

  I SAT ON A BLANKET against the inside of my front door with my sketchbook, charcoal, and a bowl of miniature marshmallows. I popped one of the marshmallows into my mouth.

  The more people who passed through my apartment, the less secure it felt. I didn’t intend to let anyone else in for a while, even if they pried the keys away from my landlord.

  There was a quiet double tap on the outside of the door, and I glanced at the clock on the microwave. Sam. I couldn’t let go of my fear that he would wind up dead just like Jacob. We had settled on an hourly check-in during the day. I tapped back. He was safe. I was safe. We could both breathe a little easier.

  I was finishing up the last few details of what should’ve been a sketch of a butterfly when Sam said, a little more loudly than necessary, “Marx.”

  He was giving me a heads up.

  “I’m on my best behavior, Sam. I just wanna talk to her,” Marx said in his normal relaxed drawl.

  I hadn’t seen Marx since yesterday morning when he stormed out of my apartment. I stopped drawing and sat up a little straighter.

  “I’ll give you two some privacy,” Sam said.

  “Holly,” Marx called quietly through the door. His voice was as smooth as honey. He was trying very hard not to sound threatening.

  “I don’t really wanna talk to you.” I propped my knees up and continued shading in the image with the small piece of charcoal.

  “May I come in?”

  My fingers stilled at his request. The last time he’d been in my home, it had left me rattled. “No.”

  “Then will you come out?”

  “Nope.”

  I’d hoped my refusal to let him in would send him on his way, but I heard him sit down on the other side of the door with a regretful sigh.

  “That’s okay. I can wait until you’re ready,” he said.

  I set down the piece of charcoal with delicate care despite my frustration. “What do you want from me, Detective?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I owe you an apology for yesterday. I had just come from the hospital, and I was . . . not myself.”

  I could hear the pain in his voice. Losing Jacob had hurt him deeply, and even now he was struggling with it. “I’m sorry for what happened to Jacob.”

  Marx made a quiet noise in the back of his throat that sounded like pain. “It’s not your fault, Holly, but knowin’ you, I expect you think it is.”

  “He was out there to keep me safe.”

  “He volunteered.”

  I blinked back the tears that burned my eyes and released a shuddering breath. “That doesn’t make it better.”

  “I know.”

  He fell silent, and I returned my attention to the sketch in my lap, trying to focus all the pain and confusion into the image I was creating.

  “Holly, I’m sorry,” Marx said, and I could hear the genuine regret in his voice. “I asked you to give me a chance to earn your trust, and then I came into your home and scared you. I had no right to do that. I expect you’ve had enough scare in your life without me bein’ a part of it.”

  Trust was a fragile thing—easily shattered and difficult to repair—and I wasn’t sure how I felt about him now.

  “But it’s important to me that you know—no matter how angry I get, no matter what I say or do in that anger—I will never put my hands on you. I was so wrapped up in my own anger and pain that I didn’t recognize my own stupidity until Sam pointed it out. And I’m sorry for that.”

  Despite being overwhelmed by anger and grief yesterday, he had still respected my physical boundaries by staying behind the table and away from the door.

  “My tenth foster father had a temper,” I said. “It usually kicked in around his fourth beer. We tried to hide them from him once, but that didn’t work out so well. There were three of us, and we learned to scatter pretty quickly.”

  I wasn’t sure why I felt compelled to share that with him. Maybe to convince myself he never would’ve crossed that line, or maybe I just needed him to know I understood the difference between his emotional outburst and the actual threat of violence. He’d caught me off guard yesterday, but I recognized the difference.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  I rubbed my fingers across the white edges of my drawing, leaving charcoal smudges as I recalled the events that had brought an end to my stay in my tenth foster home. “We had a class project, a simulated volcano, and my foster brother and I worked together on it. We named it Mount Nicolas, after our foster father.”

  “Because he erupted?”

  “Yep.”

  “Fittin’.”

  “I thought so,” I said. “We even put a little moat of beer around it.”

  He chuckled on the other side of the door. “Why do I get the feelin’ that was your idea?”

  “Yeah,” I said as I remembered the maelstrom of consequences that followed that project. When it came to light that we had free access to alcohol in our foster home, someone was sent to investigate.

  If I’d known then what waited for me in my next foster home, I would never have made that volcano. At least my drunken foster father had somewhat prepared me for what would come next.

  “What happened then?”

  “We were removed, separated, and sent to different homes.”

  “That happened a lot for you, didn’t it?

  “Only like . . . ten or twelve times,” I replied, trying to keep my tone light. I had run away from some of my placements, including my tenth one, but the police had tracked me down and taken me back.

  “That must have been difficult.”

  “Yeah, well, nobody’s childhood is perfect.”

  I puffed out a heavy breath and pushed myself to my feet. I gathered up my blankets and notebook and set them on the table. I knew I couldn’t hide behind this door forever, not if I wanted this madness to end, and I needed to find a way to put Marx on the right track.

  I steeled myself before unlocking the door and pulling it inward a fraction. It would be fine . . .

  Marx climbed to his feet on the patio, looking just as tired and threadbare as he had yesterday, but I saw only guilt and sadness in his eyes.

  I kept one hand on the door as I silently debated whether or not to let him in, and he waited patiently for an invitation. “Don’t ever yell at me again,” I warned him.

  “If I do, you’re welcome to smack me.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why, so you can arrest me for assaulting a police officer?”

  His eyebrows drew together. “Holly, if I arrested a woman your size for smackin’ me, I would be the laughin’ stock of the department.”

  I rolled my eyes and stepped aside to let him in. He walked into my kitchen and stood by the table, giving me the space he knew I wanted.

  I closed the door and turned to find him studying my sketch with wrinkles of confusion across his forehead. “Is this a flyin’ sausage?”

  I gritted my teeth. “It’s a butterfly.”

  “Why does it look like it went through a blender?”

  Really? A blender? I snatched my notebook off the table and flipped it shut before he could offer up any more insults. “I assume you came here for some reason other than insulting my artwork.”

  “I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  Oh. That was . . . thoughtful. I tucked my hands into the back pockets of my jeans and tried not to look awkward. “I’m fine.”

  He caught sight of the bowl of marshmallows on the counter and smiled. “You have a thing for marshmallows.”

  I grabbed my bowl of marshmallows protectively. “It’s practically a food group. Marshmallows, chocolate, and then everything else.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “I’m not sure marshmallows are even in the food pyramid.”

&nb
sp; “Maybe not yours.” I popped a marshmallow into my mouth. “Are you hungry? Do you . . . want some food? I have Swiss rolls somewhere.” Actually, I was pretty sure I’d stashed those in my feminine hygiene box under the bathroom sink. “Or Nacho Doritos.” Those were safely in the cupboard.

  One habit I learned in foster care that had stuck with me was to hide my food if I wanted to keep it. In foster homes it had a tendency to vanish into thin air, and shockingly, no one ever saw a thing. Not even the kid still licking the powdered cheese from his fingers while hiding your chip bag behind his back.

  “I’m not particularly hungry.”

  “I have chocolate milk.”

  “No,” he said quickly, and at my puzzled frown he added, “But thank you.” He glanced around the apartment, probably noticing that it reeked of bleach and ammonia. I had scrubbed everything until my hands hurt. “Your wall isn’t finished.”

  “Yeah, I’m not tall enough,” I said as I glared at the three inches of zigzagging yellow paint between the ceiling and the fresh coat of purple.

  “Even with the chair?”

  I released an exasperated breath. “Even with the chair.”

  Marx stripped off his jacket and laid it over the blanket on the table. When he unbuttoned his sleeves and started to roll them up, I gave him a wary look. “Whaaat are you doing?”

  “Finishin’ your wall.”

  “You don’t have to do —”

  “Where’s the paint?” he asked, ignoring my protest. He looked at me expectantly until I folded and grabbed it from under the kitchen sink. I gathered the roller and paint tray as well, and he took them into the living room. “So purple is your favorite color, huh?”

  “Not this purple.”

  “What kind of purple?” He shifted the couch aside with embarrassing ease. That had taken me a lot longer to move.

  “Eggplant purple.”

  He grunted. “Eggplant. That is not one of God’s finer vegetables. Ranks right up there with Brussels sprouts and spaghetti squash. That is not spaghetti.” He picked up the folding chair and set it down in front of the wall. When he climbed up with the roller, his head was less than a foot from my ceiling.

  A small flicker of jealousy passed through me.

  I stood uselessly off to the side as he filled in the unpainted portions of the wall. It may not have been my favorite purple, but it was worlds better than pee yellow.

  “You missed a spot,” I teased.

  He gave me a flat, unamused look. “I did not miss a spot.”

  As he added a second coat of paint to the entire wall, I pondered how to approach our miscommunication problem. I needed him to believe my foster brother wasn’t the killer. If he continued working under the assumption that he was, then he wasn’t trying to find the man who was actually responsible for the pictures . . . and the bodies.

  My fear was that the only way Marx would believe me was if he saw the truth for himself. That meant I had to give him a name. I didn’t want to open that door, because there was no closing it.

  But Jacob . . .

  This man had murdered him and left him on my doorstep. Someone needed to find him and put an end to this before anyone else got hurt. All things considered, the decision was obvious, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept.

  I stared at the finished wall as I considered my words carefully. “I think . . .” My voice trailed off as I struggled to find the courage to continue. “I think I’m ready.”

  “Ready for what?” Marx asked as he climbed down from the chair and laid the roller back into the tray of paint.

  “To tell you the name of the man responsible for the extra dead bolts on my door.” A small tremor started in my voice, and I couldn’t seem to will it away.

  Marx’s expression turned carefully neutral. “Okay.”

  “He’s not the man who killed Jacob, and the only way you’re gonna believe that is to see it for yourself. So I’ll tell you his name under three conditions.”

  He didn’t look thrilled that we were negotiating information again, but after his outburst yesterday, I didn’t expect he would put up much of a fight. He rolled down his shirt sleeves and buttoned them as he sat down on the furthest arm of the couch. “I’m listenin’.”

  “I’ll tell you what you need to know about him, but after that, no more digging. You don’t ask me any more questions about him or . . . or about anything he did to me.”

  He studied me for a long moment before saying, “Okay. If he’s not our guy and he’s not an immediate threat, I promise I won’t ask anythin’ else.”

  That wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for, but it was probably the best I would get from a detective. They were addicted to unraveling mysteries, and my past was certainly a mystery.

  “Fine,” I agreed. “He grew up in Maine. I don’t know where he is now. But I’m sure you’ll find him. When you do, you can’t give any indication that you know me.”

  He frowned. “Why not?”

  Fear made my voice sharp. “You just can’t.”

  “All right,” Marx said with deliberate calm. “What’s your third condition?”

  “You can’t talk to him.”

  “Holly, I have to —”

  “You cannot talk to him!”

  A muscle flexed in Marx’s jaw as he clenched his teeth. “You do understand that as a cop, a part of my job is interrogatin’ suspects, which does in fact require me to talk to them.”

  This wasn’t an issue I was willing to budge on. “Then I can’t give you his name.”

  He shifted on the arm of the couch, visibly frustrated, and pressed his hands together in front of his mouth as if he were going to pray. He sat that way for a moment as he tried to make sense of my conditions. “Why can’t I talk to him?”

  “Because he’ll figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “This,” I said, gesturing to everything around me: my home, my few belongings, the woman upstairs who meant more to me than anyone else on this earth. “I told you he found me before. He’s found me three times in the past ten years. Sometimes I see him coming, but last time . . .” My throat tightened against the words.

  Marx’s lips thinned.

  “I was so careful not to leave a trail, but when he wants to find me, he always finds a way. With my information in your database and the fact that you had information about my foster homes sent to you, I know I don’t have much time. But I want that time. Every second of it.”

  Marx didn’t speak right away. “For the sake of argument, this man is not our killer, and you’re afraid that if he finds out I’m in some way connected to you, he’ll follow me here,” he summarized. “And he’ll do what?”

  I hugged myself. That was one of those things I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to talk about. “If he finds me and I don’t see him coming, then . . . I hope you get assigned my case.”

  Marx blinked as he absorbed the implications of my answer, and then something icy slid beneath his careful expression. “Give me his name.”

  I drew in an unsteady breath and gave him the name I hadn’t spoken to anyone in almost twelve years. “Collin Wells.”

  Chapter 18

  I BRUSHED ASIDE THE sheer curtains over my kitchen sink and squinted into the darkness at the uniformed officer standing like a statue in my front yard. Sam had introduced us the other night. He was Jacob’s replacement.

  I was pretty sure his name was something vaguely feminine like Marilyn or Meredith. I decided that if I ever spoke to him, I would just call him “Officer.” Then I would get it right either way.

  His face was hard to forget. It looked like someone had taken a strip of leather and stretched it over a skeleton. There was no softness to him.

  “That guy creeps me out,” Jace announced from my living room. She was running a thoughtful finger above the playing cards lying face down on my floor.

  I gave her a chiding look as I walked back into the living room. “He’s trying
to help protect me, so don’t be so mean.”

  She rolled her eyes at me and returned her attention to the cards. “Red two, red two . . . where are you . . .” She held the red two of diamonds in her hand, and was trying to match it with the two of hearts. She loved memory games.

  I slid my hands into the back pockets of my jeans and watched silently as she tried to puzzle it out. She hesitated over every card and then moved on. She hated to lose, even to herself apparently.

  I was going to turn eighty-five before she picked a card. “Middle row, second from the left.”

  She flipped it over and scowled at the two of hearts. “How . . . ?”

  I grinned. “It has a little Cheetos smudge on the corner from the last time we played.”

  Jace laughed. “You’re such a cheater.” She pulled the pair out of the playing field and set them aside. She flipped over an eight of spades, and the hunt began for its mate. “So what do you think of Sam?”

  I gave her a puzzled look. “Serious, focused, no-nonsense kind of guy . . . but he’s also very competent and I think he cares.” Though it was sometimes hard to tell. “Why?”

  She grinned sheepishly. “No reason.”

  Ha! She had a crush on my bodyguard. “What happened with Gale?”

  She had tried at least twice to have a date with him since all this began, and I felt like such a selfish person for forgetting to ask long before now how it had gone.

  “Eh,” she said, giving me a so-so gesture with her hand. “He wanted to touch my feet.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She huffed and set the card down as she looked up at me. “He has an amazing accent. I could listen to him talk all day long, but the man has serious foot issues. I can’t feel my feet, which I mentioned when he asked, and he wanted to know if he could touch them right there in the restaurant. He actually asked if he could remove my shoe for me.”

  I covered my mouth as I tried not to burst out laughing, but her appalled expression did me in and I laughed until I couldn’t breathe. “In the restaurant?”