“Until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.” Her voice was drowsy and far away.
“Not yet, Isabella,” Zachary growled. While she might be ready to meet her maker, he was not ready to let her go.
“Let go!” Spencer protested, his voice rising from despair to anger for the first time. “You’re ruining it! Let her go in! It’s the only way the thoughts are going to stop!”
“You can’t get rid of thoughts of doing something terrible by doing something equally bad or worse.” Zachary clenched his teeth with the effort of holding Isabella up. He could hear the police arriving, yelling to one another, coordinating their actions, but he was locked into the moment with Spencer, unable to move his eyes to the right or the left.
“You have no idea. You have no idea of how horrible the thoughts are. You wouldn’t believe that I could think things that are so… so depraved. This is a mercy. For her to go peacefully and be with Declan again. It’s what she wants.”
“They’ll help you, Spencer. They’re going to get you help.”
Spencer seemed to become aware of the police for the first time. He looked around in horror, his eyes getting bigger. He looked once more at Isabella, then finally abandoned his mission, making a run for it.
He didn’t get far.
Zachary was relieved to have Spencer’s extra weight off the shelf of ice. He breathed out slowly, tightening his grip on Isabella.
“Now it’s time to get you out of here to where you’re safe.”
Hands grabbed Zachary’s ankles. Two strong hands on each leg.
“You got a good grip on her?” a voice demanded.
“Yes.”
“Hold tight. We’re going to pull you back from the hole.”
He tightened his grip. “I’m ready.”
The voice gave a three-count, and then they pulled. Zachary kept ahold of Isabella.
They both slid easily across the ice, her body completely out of the water.
“That’s it,” Zachary breathed. “You’re safe. You’re okay.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Zachary and Kenzie stood watching as Isabella was covered with blankets and loaded into the ambulance.
“Glad it’s not you this time?” Kenzie asked.
“Very glad,” Zachary agreed. He rubbed his arms even though he was dressed warmly enough for the weather. “I’ll bet she’s colder than a witch’s behind.”
Kenzie laughed, nodding. “You did good,” she said. “You saved her.”
“This is not how most of my investigations end. I’m glad she’s okay.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want it to be him.”
“No one did.”
“Any idea what she was given?” one of the paramedics asked them.
“My first guess would be cough medicine,” Zachary said. “But I’m not sure if he could have gotten her to take it. He could have slipped her a prescription for anxiety. Valium, maybe.”
“We’ll have to get them to run her blood when we get her to the hospital.”
“We might be able to find out from Spencer,” Kenzie suggested.
Zachary looked at the police car they had put Spencer in. Hands over his face, Spencer was crying uncontrollably. “I wouldn’t count on it. It’s probably going to be a while before he can talk.”
“You’re both all right?” The paramedic looked from one to the other. “How are you feeling?” he asked Zachary.
Zachary brushed at the snow coating the front of his jacket from sliding across the ice. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“You didn’t get wet?”
“No. Just Isabella.”
They watched as the ambulance pulled out a few minutes later. Molly would follow it to the hospital and give them the information they needed to admit her daughter.
“What are you going to do for excitement now?” Kenzie teased.
“I’m looking forward to going back to a non-exciting life. A nice insurance fraud, that’s what I’m feeling like right now. Following someone around for three weeks to see if they really do have a whiplash injury.”
Kenzie smiled. “Sounds incredibly boring and tedious.”
“Exactly.”
“And what about… your health?” She stared at the police car Spencer sat in rather than looking at Spencer. “Sounds like you’ve still got some issues to work through.”
“I guess I’m like Spencer,” Zachary said. “I always figured I could just keep it to myself and muscle through it on my own, but maybe… the cookies at the support group weren’t so bad.”
Kenzie gave a smile of approval.
“Cookies are good,” she agreed. “That would be a good place to start.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Zachary settled into his easy chair with his morning cup of coffee and turned on the TV. He didn’t often watch morning TV, but there was a show on that he wanted to check out.
The theme song for The Happy Artist started to play, and the opening credits played while showing different angles of Isabella painting in past episodes. It was the first new episode of The Happy Artist since Spencer’s arrest, and she’d been sorely missed in the intervening months. Then there was a view of Isabella sitting on a stool facing the camera, talking about the painting she would be undertaking for that episode. She seemed calm and relaxed, much more in her element than she had been when she and Zachary had both appeared on a talk show interview the previous day.
Then she had looked small and vulnerable. She seemed uncomfortable in her own skin and looked like she was wearing the wrong clothes or colors. Unlike the producers of The Happy Artist, which insisted that she keep her tattoo covered up and her memorial jewelry to a minimum, the talk show wanted to show her off in all of her mourning regalia. She had short sleeves that she kept tugging at, and the numerous chains and pendants made noise whenever she moved. Her mic had to be repositioned several times to find a placement that didn’t pick up the clinking.
They had run Zachary through the details of the investigation, more focused on his two near-death experiences and Isabella’s suicide attempt and her close call at the pond than they were in how he had developed the case. Then the cameras were focused back on Isabella, stroking the tattoo on her arm, gazing off into space, her lips mouthing the familiar words.
Until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.
“And how are you feeling now, Isabella? Have you been able to move on, knowing the truth of what happened to Declan?”
“Yes… I’m doing a lot better now. It’s horrible, knowing what Spencer did. At least I know… it wasn’t my fault, and that Declan didn’t suffer. He just went peacefully to sleep and never woke up.”
“Are you getting the help and support that you need?”
“What I didn’t know is that for the few months before the arrest, Spencer had been manipulating my environment. He had messed with my social media feeds, blocking out friends and changing my interests to dark and depressing things, so that whenever I went online, I just felt worse and worse. He blocked numbers on my phone and email as well, so that people couldn’t reach me. They didn’t know he had blocked them.” She turned her head to smile at Zachary. “Zachary has been so good in helping me sort it all out since then, so that I have the support of my friends and colleagues again, instead of feeling so isolated and alone.”
“That must have lifted a big weight off your shoulders.”
“It did. I guess Spencer thought that if he could make me depressed enough, he wouldn’t have to do anything directly. I would just kill myself. He almost succeeded.”
“And are you getting professional help?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Things are much better now.”
“What would you say to Spencer now, if you were face-to-face with him?”
Isabella bit her lip, her brows drawing down. “I guess… I’d tell him I was sorry.”
There was a noise of exclamation from the host, but Isabella went on, ignoring it.
/> “I wasn’t a very good mother. I should have paid more attention to Declan and taken care of him more. I shouldn’t have left him for Spencer to take care of all the time. I should have noticed that something was wrong… I should have asked Spencer about what was going on, but I was just focused on myself. On my comfort and my profession.”
She sighed and stared pensively off. Her fingers brushed over the tattoo again, and she looked down at it as if she hadn’t been aware she was touching it.
“He’s here with me all the time, now,” she said. “He can’t ever wander away now.”
Isabella stopped speaking, but he could still see her lips mouthing the words.
Until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.
Isabella gave a brave smile and brushed a few stray cat hairs from her dress.
She was much better on her own show. She sat on the stool she was comfortable and familiar with and chattered to the camera about colors and tones and shades. She was wearing the clothes that suited her, even if she did have to wear long sleeves to cover up her tattoo. And just one necklace and ring. Nothing that would be too distracting as she painted.
Zachary sipped his coffee while he watched her begin to daub the canvas. A beautiful seascape started to appear. Cerulean blue waves and fluffy white clouds scudding across a sky of celestial blue.
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ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR
Mystery/Suspense:
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She Was Dying Anyway
He Was Walking Alone
They Thought He was Safe (Coming Soon)
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Dairy-Free Death
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Witch-Free Halloween (Halloween Short)
Dog-Free Dinner (Christmas Short)
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Coup de Glace
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What the Cat Knew
A Psychic with Catitude
A Catastrophic Theft
Kenzie Kirsch Medical Thrillers
Unlawful Harvest
Cowritten with D. D. VanDyke
California Corwin P. I. Mystery Series
The Girl in the Morgue
Stand Alone Suspense Novels
Looking Over Your Shoulder
Lion Within
Pursued by the Past
In the Tick of Time
Loose the Dogs
Young Adult Fiction:
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Tattooed Teardrops
Two Teardrops
Tortured Teardrops
Vanishing Teardrops
Between the Cracks:
Ruby
June and Justin
Michelle
Chloe
Ronnie
June, Into the Light (Coming Soon)
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Mito
EDS
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Toxo
Breaking the Pattern:
Deviation
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By-Pass
Stand Alone YA novels
Stand Alone
Don’t Forget Steven
Those Who Believe
Cynthia has a Secret
Questing for a Dream
Once Brothers
Intersexion
Making Her Mark
Endless Change
Gem, Himself, Alone (Coming Soon)
SNEAK PREVIEW
HIS HANDS WERE QUIET
Mira Kelly put the pictures of her son down on her kitchen table, one at a time, like they were precious treasures she thought Zachary might try to run off with.
Photographs were Zachary’s passion. Ever since Mr. Peterson, his foster father at the time, had given him a used camera for his eleventh birthday, he’d been taking pictures. It was that passion that had eventually led him to his profession. Not a department store photographer or a wedding photographer, but a private investigator. It gave him the flexibility to set his own hours, even if many of them were spent sitting in a car or standing casually around, waiting for the opportunity to catch a cheating spouse or insurance claim scammer in the act.
Zachary ignored the lighting and framing issues in Mira’s pictures and just looked at the boy’s face. He was a teenager, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Still baby-faced, with no sign of facial hair. Dark hair and pale skin, like Zachary. Quentin’s hair was a little too long, getting into his eyes in uneven points. Zachary couldn’t stand hair getting in his face and ears and kept his short. Not buzzed like foster parents and institutions had always preferred but still easy to care for. The first few pictures of Quentin didn’t give a clear view of his eyes. His eyes were closed, hidden by his shaggy hair, or his face was turned away from the camera. Then Mira put one down on the table that had caught his eyes full-on, looking straight through the camera. Blue-gray. Clear. Distant.
Mira kept her fingers on the photo, reluctant to release it to him. “Quentin was a beautiful baby,” she said. “Everyone always said how beautiful he was. Not cute or handsome, beautiful. He could have been a model. But he didn’t smile and laugh when you made smiled or tickled him, like other babies. He laughed at other things; the sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree, music… I didn’t realize, in the beginning…” She wiped at the corner of her eye. She’d been resisting tears since she had first greeted him.
Isabella Hildebrandt had said that Quentin had been autistic when she asked Zachary if he would meet with Mira. The boy had been living at the Summit Living Center, some sort of care facility, when he had died suddenly. ‘Died suddenly’ was a euphemism that Zachary particularly hated.
Mira was convinced that Quentin’s death couldn’t have been suicide. “He wouldn’t have done that,” she insisted again, looking at the picture that showed Quentin’s eyes.
“Why not?” Zachary asked baldly.
He could see that his bluntness surprised her. She was used to people talking about her son’s death in veiled terms. Coming at it sideways and trying to comfort her. But that wasn’t Zachary’s job. Zachary’s job, if he took the case, would be to find out the truth about Quentin’s death. And if he was going to do that, he needed Mira to speak plainly instead of soft-peddling euphemisms.
“He… he couldn’t.” She stumbled over the words, looking for a way to explain it. “That just… wasn’t something that he would have been capable of.”
“Physically, you mean?”
“No, he was healthy physically, mostly, but… he had autism. He didn’t have the ability… mentally… to decide to do something like that, and plan it out, and follow through.” She shook her head. “The idea is ridiculous.”
“Because he was mentally handicapped.”
“No… not handicapped. I just don’t think… I don’t think he could have understood what it meant, to kill himself. And I don’t think he could have planned it out. There is other stuff that can go along with autism… His executive planning skills…”
Zachary wasn’t sure what that meant. He looked at the other angles of the case. “Was he depressed?”
“He was happy at Summit. It was a good place for him. The only place that had been able to manage his behavioral issues.”
/> Zachary looked at the haunting eyes that looked up from the photograph. “This is a recent photo?”
“Yes.” Mira looked down at him. “I know he’s not smiling for the picture. But he never smiled for pictures. He was happy at Summit. They were able to get him off of all of the meds that the other places had put him on. So that he could be himself and not a drugged-out zombie.”
“Sometimes depression isn’t obvious. People are often taken by surprise by suicides.” Zachary looked away from her uncomfortably. Other times, depression was obvious and friends or family members did everything they could to head it off. Like with Isabella Hildebrandt, when her mother had hired Zachary to look into her son Declan’s untimely death, hoping to bring Isabella some peace. They’d been unable to prevent her suicide attempt. Only luck and quick-acting professionals had been able to bring her back. As they had done for Zachary in the past. “When you say they took him off of his meds… did that include antidepressants?”
“No, he was never on antidepressants. He was on other medications to keep him quiet. I couldn’t have him at home anymore, because he was too much of a danger to my younger sons. And me.”
There was a snapshot on the fridge of Mira with two younger boys, maybe eight and ten. Mira was a slight, small woman. The ten-year-old was almost her height. There were no pictures of her with Quentin, but Zachary suspected he was taller than she was by a few inches. Even though Quentin had a slim build, a child in the midst of a meltdown could be very strong. Looking down at the pictures of Quentin on the table, Zachary saw another child in his mind’s eye.
She Wore Mourning Page 26