Guardian Angel

by Andrew Neiderman

  “Maybe. I’m too confused right now to give any of that any thought. I just want to settle back and calm things down so I can think clearly.”

  “And don’t forget…Depend on your attorney,” Tricia added.

  Megan nodded.

  “I’d better go up and check on Jennifer,” she said.

  “Go ahead. I’ll hang out for a while.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “It’s fine. Where am I going? I’ll leave when I see you’re tired enough to fall asleep.”

  Megan smiled. “Thanks, Tricia.”

  The wine and conversation settled her a bit, but Megan could still feel the trembling inside. Now she was grateful she had permitted Jennifer to watch television in her room. It really was fortunate Jennifer hadn’t seen or heard anything, she thought as she got her ready for bed.

  “Look, Mommy,” Jennifer said, and showed her how she could push the button on the tiny flashlight Steve had given her. “After you put out the lights, I can make circles on the walls and drive away anything that looks bad in the dark. It’s like a magic flashlight.”

  Megan smiled. “Maybe it is.”

  “It was nice of Steve to give it to me.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “He should have given you one too,” Jennifer said. “It would make you feel better in the dark.”

  Megan laughed. Thank goodness for her daughter, she thought. She could bring her a little relief.

  “Maybe he is trying to do just that. We’ll see,” she said, kissed her good night and went back downstairs to sit a while longer with Tricia so she could put off going to bed to fight with her own demons.

  Steve was in so deep and so consuming a rage, the traffic before him was blurred.

  Take a few steps back for a while? What exactly did that mean? This was the time to take a few steps forward. You don’t retreat when a creep like that comes at you. You back him down. Scott was in so much pain? Poor Scott. Why was she telling him this? Did she expect him to feel sorry for the guy? And what about Jennifer?

  This guy comes barging into her home and makes her feel guilty, and her answer to it all is to take a few steps back? She’s weakening—she’s slipping out of my fingers, he thought.

  Hell, he threw away a good job today to be there for her and she tells him to take a few steps back?

  Her husband’s just a conniving son of a bitch. Look at that whole business about the private detective getting murdered last night. Why didn’t he tell her the whole truth? He wasn’t murdered outside of her house. He deliberately made it sound that way to get her upset.

  He realized, off course, that he couldn’t say anything to contradict that without revealing he knew much more. It was frustrating. He hated when these smart guys could figure out ways to twist things around and get their victories without risking anything. That’s exactly what her husband did tonight. Scott got what he wanted without really confronting him.

  Steve was primed to break the bastard’s neck if he just came at him. The coward knew it, too. He couldn’t have made a beeline out of there any faster. Why hadn’t she seen that yellow streak? Why hadn’t she thanked him for being there, for being stronger, for being her guardian angel when she needed one?

  Was he wasting his time again? Was his mother right? She’d be all over him for making such a mistake. She would see it in his face the moment he walked into that house tonight, he thought. Mothers were like that. They could practically read their child’s thoughts. Why go home? At least let sufficient time pass so he could paint over the cracks in his ego and his dream. She might not notice then.

  He made a quick decision and turned toward the 405 Freeway. He decided to head down to San Diego and spend a while on his boat. Nowhere else did he think as clearly as he did when he was on that boat and out on the water. First, it had a way of calming him down and he knew it was impossible to make the right decisions unless you were calm. Second, he could avoid his mother for a while, give him the time to recuperate. He’d call her when he got there and make the conversation short, so she wouldn’t pick up on anything. Of course, she would want to know about his work, but he could tell her the man he was hired to replace returned and they let him go. She’d believe that one. She always told him the world wasn’t fair; it was just the world.

  He sped up. Traffic was never light, but it was lighter this time of night. Still, it would take him over two hours. He didn’t listen to the radio. Instead, he listened to his own thoughts. It was as if he had a radio in his head and could hear a talk show that was all about him and his women. The two commentators, two parts of himself, carried out the argument.

  You try too hard, Steve. You have to give a woman a chance to get used to you. She has to convince herself she’s not making a mistake. It’s only natural for a woman who has made a big one to think like that. Don’t be so hard on her.

  That’s bullshit. Any woman who is worthy of you should immediately see that you bring the love and stability to her life that she needs, especially now when she’s feeling the most vulnerable and the loneliest. She shouldn’t be hesitating at all. If she’s too afraid, you have to be stronger yet. Patience is an excuse for inaction.

  On and on it went in his head. It actually made him so dizzy, he had to pull off the freeway to stop for some coffee. He found a place that resembled an old-time diner and sat at the counter. One of the waitresses serving two truck drivers caught his attention. She looked a lot like Julia—the same figure, the same color hair tied back the same way Julia liked to tie hers and even the same way of tilting her head to the right when someone spoke to her. When she turned and looked his way, it sent a chill up his spine. The resemblance was mind-boggling. This had happened to him before, but never as vividly. It was as if she could haunt him through her similarities with other women.

  He turned away and hovered over his steaming coffee. What were Julia’s words that had thrown him into such a rage that day? It was more than the words themselves; it was the vicious, gleeful way she had said them. Never had she looked uglier to him.

  “You’d be the worst kind of father any child could have. You hated your own father, but you’re just like him. You have to have it your own way, have everyone think like you, be like you. You would smother a child, especially a boy, to death.

  “Having a child with you should be considered a capital crime,” she added.

  There they were, having this argument in the midst of a weather system while out to sea. She blamed him for it, of course. Why hadn’t he checked it more thoroughly before having them go out? Lately at least seven out of ten things she said to him were criticisms of one thing or another. He thought, How did I fall into this cesspool of a marriage?

  He told her to look over the side to see if they were dragging anything. It had happened before, hadn’t it? Reluctantly, she did what he asked and he swung the boat dramatically. She lunged forward and disappeared. She was probably criticizing him all the way into the water. He heard her shout and took his time to get over to the side. She was nowhere in sight at first and then her head bobbed up and her arm was extended. He looked at her hand grasping the air, waiting for him to take hold of it.

  Calmly, he asked, “Don’t you wish you were pregnant?”

  Then he walked away, thinking that was a very pertinent question to ask her. No matter how he felt about her as a woman, he wouldn’t have permitted a yet-to-be-born child to drown. She would have saved herself if she had permitted him to have a child.

  It was damn cold that night, damn cold and windy. He knew she wouldn’t last long. She was practically completely forgotten by the time he returned to the dock.

  No matter how he pressed the memories down in his mind, they had a way of resurrecting from time to time, and whenever they did, it seemed like just yesterday.

  He blew on his coffee and took a sip. Itwas starting to rain now, too. He saw the drops zigzagging down the restaurant’s front window. When he was a little boy, his mother would say,
“God is crying,” whenever it rained. As nasty as it was that day Julia drowned, it hadn’t rained. God wasn’t upset then, but he was upset tonight.

  What had Megan said? Take a few steps back for while? That didn’t mean for a while. That was a nice way of saying, Maybe you shouldn’t be in my life right now. Maybe I’ll reconcile with my husband after all.

  If he just bowed politely and retreated, he would never be in her life and she and Jennifer would never be in his. He could hear the arguments in his head starting again, the two commentators.

  How could he shut it off? He slapped his hands over his ears.

  “You all right?” the counterman asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “They won’t shut up,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  He stood up, dropped a few dollars on the counter and hurried out. It all grew louder in the Corvette. He pounded the dashboard a few times and then he started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot, but when he reached the freeway entrance, he didn’t go south; he went north.

  This wasn’t the time to retreat. One voice was winning out over the other and as it did, it grew quieter in his head. He was grateful for that. It helped him understand what he must do, how he could show her what was the wrong way and what was the right way. He got off the exit that would take him home and drove in behind his truck. He got out quietly so his mother wouldn’t hear him and went to the truck to grab a flathead screwdriver. He dug deeper into his toolbox until he found the knit cap, some rope and the dust mask. He put on a pair of work gloves, rolled up his sleeves and got back into the Corvette.

  By the time he reached Beverly Hills again, all was relatively quiet. Without a moment’s second thought or hesitation, he turned onto Megan’s street.

  He was happy to see that Tricia Morgan’s car was still in the driveway. Megan had not gone to sleep and therefore had not turned on the house alarm. He parked his Corvette on the street and then, sticking very close to the shadows, he made his way onto the property and around to the side door of the attached garage. It was nothing to pry it open by just moving the lock’s bolt back. When he closed it softly behind him, it locked in place again. Only a very good forensics man would see the tiniest of scratches on the bolt.

  The door from the garage into the kitchen was still unlocked, so he slipped in quietly. He could hear them talking in the living room. He heard his name mentioned a few times and knew they were doing some drinking. He laughed to himself and went to the alarm keypad by the door to the garage. He was quite familiar with the system. He simply opened the garage door to see what number corresponded to it and then pressed “bypass” and entered the number. Now when Megan set her alarm, probably out there, she wouldn’t notice that the garage door had been bypassed. It could be opened without setting off the alarm.

  Once that was done, practically floating over the floor, he made his way to the pantry and slipped inside, leaving the door open slightly so he could hear Megan move about the house. Then he curled up and waited.

  He was very patient.

  He had all the patience in the world.

  He pulled the knit cap down over his eyes to the bridge of his nose and then slipped on the dust mask.

  Just a little while longer, he thought. Just a little while longer and it would all begin again.

  After Tricia finally left, Megan was still so unnerved by the evening’s events, she knew she wouldn’t fall asleep without taking something, but she hesitated to do that. She was afraid she wouldn’t be there for Jennifer. Jennifer was having nightmares more often since Megan and Scott had broken up and the divorce proceeding had begun. She was old enough to understand what divorce meant, but she was still too young to accept it. Not a day went by without her asking a question that had as its underlying motive the consideration of a reversal. Couldn’t they make up, mend the split, compromise, or simply put, think more about her than themselves?

  The motive for this divorce was not as clear as motives for divorce usually were. Neither Scott nor she had cheated on the other. This was more of an insidious, cumulative series of actions, or rather inactions, that eroded the foundation of love that had brought them together in the first place. It was difficult to explain all that to Jennifer because children were more forgiving.

  Daddy is a busy, important man, but he still loves me. Daddy wouldn’t do anything to deliberately hurt us.

  How do you explain to a child that she’s right, but that isn’t enough? Placing value on priorities was still too abstract a concept. Reluctantly, Jennifer would accept the situation. She had no choice, but she would never fully understand it, and in the end, when she was older, she would blame them both. Megan was confident of that and that weighed on her. However, it wasn’t enough to change her mind. She was battling for her own well-being, and if she wasn’t well, Jennifer would suffer more. Just maybe she’d understand that much soon.

  Well, I won’t take a sleeping pill, she thought, but I can make myself some warm milk. That does work on me.

  She checked on Jennifer before she started down to the kitchen. She looked so much smaller and younger tonight as she lay there with her favorite stuffed toy, an old-fashioned rag doll, beside her. The fact that Scott had bought it for her was an irony not lost on Megan. Any amateur psychiatrist would interpret Jennifer’s clinging so hard to it as her deep-seated need to have him back, to have things the way they were, regardless of how rocky it was. Megan stared at her for a moment, fighting back the tears that wanted to gush, and then she saw the little flashlight Steve had given her. It was a thoughtful gift. She was positive Jennifer was using it regularly now. It brought more pain to her heart. She quickly turned away and hurried down the stairs before she could sob and wake her up.

  She always left some lights on downstairs—a small lamp in the living room and a light above the sink in the kitchen. The chandelier above the stairway was dimmed, but threw enough illumination to make it safe. And of course, there were the outside lights, which went on when the sensor declared it was dark enough. Windows were lit, as was the entire front.

  Scott and she once had gone out to dinner with Brody Palman, a professional bodyguard. He had begun working as a security employee for a company that protected the homes of movie stars, but quickly grew bored with that and worked for a company that guarded the lives and homes of paranoid businessmen. One had actually been under a death threat, which he’d claimed was a result of his work with Homeland Security. Brody had great stories to tell, leaving out the actual names of his employers, of course.

  It was Brody who had convinced Scott to get a gun for the house. She’d been against it, having had no experience whatsoever with firearms. She had been worried about Jennifer. There were too many horrible stories about children getting their hands on weapons in homes. Brody’s point, which was the one that had impressed Scott the most, was that it was precisely because of Jennifer that they should have a weapon.

  “Look,” he’d said, “I know you feel very safe in Beverly Hills. It probably has one of the lowest crime rates in the country, but don’t forget the famous bank robber Willy Sutton’s answer when he was asked, Why rob banks? He said, ‘Because that’s where the money is.’ Burglars aren’t going to rob homes in poor communities. They know there’s not much booty there for them. But a home in Beverly Hills…guaranteed to be worth the effort. I’m not talking about only drug addicts.”

  Scott had bobbed his head like one of those dolls or animals placed in the rear window of cars. It was as if he had springs in his neck. She’d known the argument was over before it began, especially when Brody added, “You have two major things going to discourage break-ins: your good lighting around the house and your alarm system. If someone comes through both of those, he or they can be stopped only with a bullet.”

  Terrifying.

  But that terror was exactly why her putting up an argument would have been useless. Scott had bought the gun and put it right by his side of the bed. She rea
lized, of course, that it was still there, but she placed her comfort and confidence in the lighting and in the alarm system. She always armed the alarm before she went upstairs and it was armed now.

  So at first she thought she might be having a waking dream when the dark figure, looking as if it had formed out of the shadows in the corner by the stairway, stepped out. She had little time to react. His arm came around with whatever he was grasping in his hand and he struck her in the back of her head just above her neck. The blow sent her sprawling on the tile, sliding a few feet on her right side. She was unable to get her right arm up fast enough to keep her face from hitting the tile, but she felt no pain there.

  She blacked out before it could reach her brain.

  But it was there, stinging, aching, screaming, the moment she regained consciousness. She didn’t get to her feet right away. For a long moment, she tried to remember what had happened. When she lifted her head, the house was spinning too much and the dizziness wouldn’t subside. She battled herself into a sitting position and took deep breaths to keep herself from passing out again. The pain in her head was so intense, she thought she would definitely faint again, and fought hard to remain conscious. Then she began to dry-heave, the acid rising in her throat and causing her to gag. She had to lie down and wait for it to subside.

  When it did she sat up again and then took hold of the side of a table in the hallway and pulled herself into a standing position. She kept her eyes closed and worked at keeping steady. A wave of fear washed over her as she listened. Was whoever had hit her still here? She looked around.

  What had happened?

  Were they being robbed? Was it over? Were they still in the house?

  The next thought that came to her was What about Jennifer? She moved cautiously to the stairway, listening for sounds of anyone else in the house. It was quiet, so she climbed the stairway, clinging to the banister, pulling herself along. It seemed to take hours to get to the top, but finally she did and then lunged toward Jennifer’s bedroom.

  At first she thought everything was all right. Then she turned on the light and saw that what she thought was Jennifer was just her blanket, bundled. Where was she?