No Bad Deed

by Heather Chavez

  “Whatever it is, tell me.”

  Our eyes locked, and, finally, he said, “I wish I’d been able to save Audrey’s life. I understand why you were so angry. Why you still are.”

  At his words, I reached for the grudge I’d carried for six years like some parasitic twin. I had blamed it for Audrey’s illness, even though she had long since recovered, and trotted it out whenever I needed an excuse for why the world sucked, or for my own parental shortcomings.

  Sure, Sam, I may have missed Leo’s game or been late to Audrey’s party, but my father wouldn’t get tested and couldn’t help Audrey, and isn’t that so much worse?

  With my fresher grief, the past seemed more insignificant than it had before, and my reliance on old grudges petty and potentially dangerous for my son. I had failed my own children too many times, but this wouldn’t be one of those.

  “I’m sorry too,” I said.

  Red’s eyes misted at my olive branch, which he accepted with a nod, but his mouth remained set in a grim line. It was clear the conversation wasn’t over.

  “The day you called to tell me Audrey was sick, my first impulse was to help.” His voice cracked. “I’ve always wanted nothing more than to take care of you. From that first night.”

  Eyes overbright now, shoulders squared, Red squeezed my hand. His palm was slick, mine cold.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said.

  Red told his story in a rush.

  He started doing work on Dee’s house in 1980, the spring Natalie Robinson turned sixteen.

  Long before it became a private residence, Dee’s home in the Napa Valley had been a winery. Built late in the nineteenth century, it was one of hundreds of wineries operating in the state in 1920. Then Prohibition came, and the Depression, and everything changed.

  The production of sacramental wines, exempt from the Eighteenth Amendment, saved some wineries, while others changed crops, but most shuttered. Only a few dozen managed to survive.

  Over the ensuing decades, some of the abandoned sites, known as ghost wineries, found new life as restaurants, shops, or even, once again, wine-producing facilities.

  More than Prohibition, a tiny sap-sucking pest had doomed the winery that would become Dee’s house. To supplement income lost to the phylloxera, a creamery had been built, but bad business decisions had doomed that too.

  So it became just a home for an eccentric woman and her two daughters.

  Though renovations had made the main house livable, its stone walls had started to crumble, mold had crept into its cellar, and wood beams shed splinters the size of toothpicks.

  Dee recruited Red to restore the house to its historic glory.

  The day Red met Dee’s daughter Natalie, he made note of the boxy sweater, worn despite the heat, and immediately guessed the teen was pregnant. He also learned, just as quickly, that such matters weren’t discussed in Dee’s house.

  Outside the house, however, he heard rumors: Dee hadn’t been able to bring pregnancies to term since Natalie’s birth—scar tissue, one person said; emergency hysterectomy, claimed another. Yet earlier that year, Dee had suddenly shown up in town with a baby in tow.

  The baby’s name was Megan.

  Red had never been much for kids, but Natalie’s little sister was the most beautiful baby he had ever seen. Her eyes glowed with an intelligence she would no doubt grow into, and despite her scratched skin and too-thin arms, Megan was quick to smile. Usually. Sometimes Red saw hints of a developing anger.

  Because of the rumors, Red risked asking if Megan was adopted. Dee snapped, She’s mine, which ended that conversation.

  At least with Dee. When Red asked the same question of Natalie a couple of days later, the teen told him how earlier that year, her mom had spotted an infant Megan in a Fresno grocery store. Wouldn’t it be nice to have another little girl? Dee had asked. As if they had been car shopping and she had been deciding whether to upgrade to leather.

  According to Natalie, Dee had stalked the baby through the store, pretending to study jars of olives and tubs of yogurt, but really watching the girl whose mother called her Megan and who was only loosely strapped into the shopping cart. When Megan’s mom had knelt down to retrieve a can of stewed tomatoes, it had slipped from her hands and rolled away from her. Away from her baby. Three strides and Dee had snatched the baby from the cart. Five more and she had cleared the aisle, the infant silent in her arms even as her mom began screaming. The sound had drawn the lone security guard away from his post near the exit.

  Natalie insisted on Red’s silence, and he gave it to her. Too easily, in retrospect, especially since he had weeks before noticed bruises on Natalie’s arm, and scratches even deeper than the ones on Megan.

  He blamed cowardice. He knew what he would risk by taking Natalie and her sister from the house without Dee’s consent. Such a move would get his photo on every newscast and in every newspaper: the creepy contractor who abducted two girls, one a beautiful, very pregnant teen.

  But Red couldn’t stop running the angles. To make it work, he wouldn’t be able to go home. Not until the police could be convinced the children were someone else’s victims and that he only meant to save them.

  Maybe he could go to the police before he took the girls? Tell them about Megan, have them check their records for missing babies.

  But what if the police didn’t believe him or Natalie had lied about her sister’s name? What if the parents were looking for a Sara or an Angela instead? There would be an investigation, and Red wasn’t certain the children would survive that.

  There was also the possibility that Natalie had lied.

  Still, there was no explaining those bruises on Megan and Natalie. That wasn’t to say Red didn’t try. An accident. Sports injury. A self-inflicted cry for attention.

  Twenty-four hours later, Red stopped making excuses and made a decision: he would take Natalie and Megan from the house and work through the details later.

  That night, Red noticed the sweat tracing Natalie’s hairline, the intensity with which she gripped the edge of the dining room table, the way she pulled the oversized sweater around her like a blanket, and he knew. Natalie was in labor.

  Dee didn’t, so Red faked a distraction in the kitchen—the clatter of dropped tiles, followed by a lie that he had ordered the wrong size cabinets. Even from the kitchen, he heard the squeak of the front door he had been meaning to fix.

  While Dee didn’t hear the squeak, the silence pricked her ears. Red marked the moment she felt Natalie’s absence by the darkening of her expression.

  Outside on the porch, Dee screamed for her daughter. Then, spotting her, yelled: What have you done? Her eyes blazed, twin strobes of crazy.

  Beneath the magnolia tree, Red saw the girl too. Natalie was crawling, struggling to stand. When he had first started work on the place, the magnolia had been thick with pink blossoms the size of teacups, but that night the branches were flowerless. Natalie was pale as milk, her face slick. She’d miscarried, she said. But was there too much blood for that?

  Red noticed Natalie no longer wore her sweater. Had it been used to wrap a newborn, then discarded along with the baby somewhere in the darkness?

  Dee walked the perimeter of the house, calling out as she did. Baby, baby, baby. As if a newborn, especially a dead one, were capable of a response.

  While Dee called and Natalie bled, Red scanned the bushes and acres beyond for signs of life. Seeing nothing, he panicked over how to get Natalie and Megan to his truck, and how to find the baby. If it was even alive. Dee demanded Red leave, and he could tell she meant it. She herded Natalie inside.

  I can help her, he said to Dee.

  Dee returned to the porch with a gun. This is our business. Get out.

  Red stalled, trying to come up with a new plan since his old one had been blown to shit.

  I have to get my wallet and my keys, he told her.

  Just then, in the distance, Red heard what might have been a baby�
��s strangled cry.

  Dee cocked her head, and Red thought she heard it too. Then he realized she was only studying him. For a moment, Red was sure he was going to get shot in the gut, or lower.

  But, reluctantly, Dee allowed him entrance into the house to retrieve the wallet that was already in his pocket, even as she kept the gun aimed at his groin.

  Then Natalie screamed—theater or a true health emergency, Red couldn’t be sure—and Dee shifted her full attention to her daughter. No trace of empathy settled on Dee’s face, only frigid resolve. She rested the gun on the ground next to where her daughter had fallen.

  Red tried one last time, I can take her to the hospital. Dee refused his offer by placing her hand on the gun.

  The realization came then, a blow to his gut: three children needed his help, but he could save only one. Megan, the now fifteen-month-old Dee had abducted earlier that year, who was inside asleep. Natalie, the teen likely beyond his help. Or the newborn whose cry he was now certain he could hear.

  With Dee distracted, Red slipped into the house and grabbed Megan, despite her age still small enough to hold with one arm. He focused on her heartbeat, erratic but strong, and tried not to think of the two children he was forced by circumstance to leave behind.

  After leaving Dee’s that night, Red never again returned home, not even to pack a bag. His only stop on his way out of town was at a pay phone, which he used to call 911. Red told the dispatcher about Natalie. He intended to share all of Natalie’s story—the abuse, Dee’s instability, the baby he left behind. But his new daughter started crying and, afraid of being caught with a stolen toddler, Red replaced the handset in its cradle without saying more.

  Spurred by his tip, the police searched for Natalie. They found her two weeks later, but by then, she was in a box in the ground, dead.

  Though I knew it was a trick of shadow, Red’s skin appeared to sag, and his voice was weary when he ended his story.

  “What happened to Megan?” I asked. But of course I knew. I was Megan. Which meant, “You’re not my father.”

  Red grabbed my hand as if to emphasize our connection but released it just as quickly.

  “I love you, Cassie. I’ll die knowing my purpose in life was to raise you,” he said. “But, no, I’m not your father.”

  43

  Red’s gaze wandered down the street, not toward anything but rather away from judgment. I sidestepped back into his line of vision. I forced him to look at me.

  “So Dee abducted me from that grocery store in Fresno, and then you abducted me from her.” My breath came in short, angry bursts.

  “What else could I have done?”

  “What about my parents?”

  “It was only your mother, and she died years ago.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Silence.

  “How many years ago?”

  When he answered, his voice was thick, strained. “About twenty years ago.”

  Twenty years. I was already an adult by then. In college. Only a couple of years away from meeting Sam, and then having kids of my own. “I could’ve known her. My mom.”

  Red struggled to hold eye contact. “It took me years to find her, and by then—”

  “You didn’t want to lose me?” My voice broke as I considered what I had lost, not to mention the cost to my mom, whose only mistake was dropping that can of stewed tomatoes on the grocery store floor. “What happened to the baby you left behind? Natalie’s child?”

  Red cringed and looked away again. “Later, I heard the police found only Natalie’s body. No baby.”

  “But how can that be?”

  He shrugged. “Dee was rich, and she was good at keeping secrets.”

  Not as good as the man who had raised me, apparently. “You’re sure the baby survived that night?”

  Red hesitated. “I want to believe it did.”

  I’m not sure I wanted the same thing. What would it have been like for a child to grow up in that house?

  Suddenly, the mention of that other child’s pain reminded me of my son’s, and I seized on another detail from Red’s story. “Wait. Where was Dee’s house?”

  My father cocked his head. “Why?”

  Audrey’s comment. When I had been cleaning her wound. The one I had dismissed too quickly then, but which now quickened my pulse. “Audrey heard her abductor talking about whining ghosts.”

  Red inhaled sharply as he made the same connection I had. “Ghost winery.”

  “Still know the address?”

  “I’ll never forget that place.” But he didn’t offer the address, instead stepping into the streetlight’s glare and grabbing my hand. His skin was cold and damp. “Don’t go.”

  “He’s got Leo.”

  “Let the police handle it. That detective, Rico. He seems like a smart guy.”

  “He is. But if I’d been taken, what would you do?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “Anything.”

  I gestured toward the inside of the clinic, where Audrey sat at the reception desk. “Take care of her.”

  “I haven’t given you the address.” His voice wavered.

  “You will. You owe me.”

  He took a step back and shook his head, even as we both knew he would tell me. Then he recited an address in Napa.

  “We’ll need to talk about this.”

  I didn’t need to ask what “this” was.

  “We will.”

  His breathing hitched. “After you find Leo.”

  “And Sam.”

  Red looked away to spare me the doubt in his eyes.

  “Tell Rico where I’m headed.”

  “But give you a head start?”

  We might not have been linked biologically, but Red knew me, maybe better than anyone.

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  Once alerted by Red, Detective Rico would have protocols to follow, calls to make, perimeters to set on the property. And I could drive pretty damned far in ten minutes. I wanted him there, but only after I arrived.

  I watched Rico’s car pull away from the clinic, with Red and Audrey inside, then I climbed into the truck. From the heating vent, a folded sheet of paper protruded.

  As I reached for it, my hand shook. The note was scrawled with a heavy hand, the black ink spreading at the edges of the words. When I touched the paper, ink came off on my fingers. I warned you about the police. Now I’ll have to kill them both.

  On the back of the note was the same address Red had just given me.

  How long had the note been there? I decided it must’ve been planted after Rico arrived, but before the other police cruisers. Either way, a risky move. I worried at that, and at the invitation.

  On the highway, I drove faster than was prudent, trying to outrace my thoughts. Growing up, I had always been the girl without a mom, but it hadn’t mattered because I had my dad. Then I had started junior high, and more of my classmates began wearing bras and makeup, and boys began paying attention even if they were as intimidated as hell by the bras and makeup. So I had invented a mom—in the stories I told my classmates, she was a pilot who baked elaborate cakes and knew the words to every Aerosmith song. When a group of girls discovered my lie, my downfall had been swift and painful. For them too. I might have punched one of them in the nose.

  But, again, I’d had my dad. I’d always had my dad. Until now. With one revelation, I had lost him, and a mom who might have been a pilot who baked cakes while listening to Aerosmith, but whose occupation and interests and favorite songs I would never know because I would never know her.

  Worse, my husband was missing, and my son.

  From the note: Now I’ll have to kill them both.

  No. That wouldn’t happen. I had already lost enough.

  I cut the travel time to Napa by half. As I approached the property, I slowed. Like I had done at Daryl’s, I headed for an adjacent parcel rather than coming in straight on.

  I wasn’t stupid. I knew I had no leverage. But I had
my life, and maybe I could bargain with that.

  The electric motor at the gate looked like it had broken years before, the drive-up keypad dangling useless beside it. A gust propelled the metal box against the fence, away from it, back again, the hollow ping of the pendulum marking time.

  I rattled the rusted chain and padlock that secured the gate. The low-tech alternative proved worthless as well, the lock springing with the movement. The mechanism hadn’t been secured. With another shake, the lock tumbled onto the gravel.

  Come on in, it seemed to say.

  I drove without my headlights on, my windows down. I heard the crunch of my tires on the gravel and felt the chill of the wind scrubbing my cheeks.

  The road narrowed. I pulled the truck as far off the road as I could, parking it between two oak trees. Then I killed the engine and got out.

  I took a breath and walked toward the lights of the house nestled on the hill, leaving behind the walnut trees and the narrow gravel road, passing what may once have been a guest house. Now all that remained were two walls that tilted in the absence of a roof and sagging floorboards open to the sky.

  Nearer the main house, beneath an oak tree, I stumbled, landing on my knees. When I reached out for balance, star thistle stabbed my palm.

  In the dark, I found the obstacle that had snagged my shoe: a single bone jutted from the hard-packed dirt. I shivered. I was in the right place.

  I didn’t dwell on the bone and its implications. I focused my attention on the rows of wine grapes that marched up a nearby hill, leading to a house with all its lights blazing.

  In the distance, a car’s headlights bobbed. I tucked myself behind the trunk of the nearby oak and stood still, watching. I hoped the tree and shadows would be enough to hide me, but if the driver was searching for me, he would find me.

  The car veered toward the main road, passing a hundred yards from where I stood. If the driver spotted me, he gave no sign.

  Once clear of the headlights, I continued walking toward the house. As I moved, I remembered the bandage scissors I had earlier slipped in my pocket. I pulled them out now, pressing against the tip for reassurance.