The Life She Stole

by S W Vaughn

  “Absolutely not. You can’t go anywhere,” he says. “Don’t worry about Hannah, or anyone else except yourself. It’s not safe for you.”

  I can’t help smiling at the sheer worry in his voice. “All right. I’ll stay here,” I tell him. “And I’ll eat this sandwich I just made.”

  “You do that.”

  He says he has to make more calls, so we hang up. I know he’ll check in with me again soon — and next time, I might not be able to answer. The idea terrifies me, but I’m determined to go through with this.

  I eat the sandwich, and then make a second one and force it down too. By then I think enough time must have passed for me to go and get my daughter, but it’s only 9:15. I still have to wait.

  Suddenly I realize that there’s one more person I should talk to about this, and I haven’t even thought of him once in all this time.

  Brad is her father. He should know that his daughter is missing.

  I have to get the scrap of paper with his room number on it out of my purse, since it was in the memory of my previous phone. I send the call through, and it rings and rings and rings. There’s no answer, and no voicemail or ‘unavailable’ message. Maybe he’s sleeping.

  But a deep, cold feeling in my gut says I’d better make sure.

  I dial information and get connected the main hospital number, and then ask for the fifth floor nurses’ station. The woman who answers the phone sounds irritated, and I know she’s not going to volunteer much help.

  So I’ll have to make her.

  “I need to speak to Brad Dowling right away, and he’s not answering the phone in his room,” I say after the terse greeting. “Can you go in there and get him for me?”

  “Who is this?” the woman says, and then adds, “Never mind. He’s probably sleeping, and we don’t wake up sleeping patients to take phone calls. This is a hospital.”

  “He’s not sleeping. He’s missing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Speaking the words out loud make me certain of it. “I said, he’s missing!” I shout. “Go in his room and check. He’s not there.”

  “This is ridiculous,” the woman says, and there’s a clunk. But I can still hear the background noises in the hospital. She hasn’t hung up the phone — she’s just put it on the desk, and hopefully gone to check on Brad.

  The few minutes she’s gone are endless. When the woman finally returns to the phone, she says angrily, “How did you know that? Who is this? I’m calling the police, right now.”

  “You do that,” I say, and hang up. I’m shaking again. But I make myself stop. Now more than ever, I need to be calm and in control. I’ve suddenly realized why Jill wants my daughter. Because she’s Brad’s daughter. And now she has him, too.

  She’s taking my family, and giving it to herself.

  I can’t wait one moment longer. I grab a hoodie from the hook beside the kitchen door, slip it on, and move into the garage. There’s a back door leading to the yard, and I go through it and run across the grass, cutting across the neighbor’s lawn behind my house to the next block. My heart smashes like it’s being pounded hard on an anvil, but I don’t stop.

  The park is just a little too far away to walk there in time. So I head for the convenience store on the next corner and call for an Uber. I’m told that a car will be there in fifteen minutes, and I ask them to please hurry. They say they’ll try.

  My ride gets to the convenience store in twelve minutes. I pay almost no attention to the driver as I get in and give the address of the park. I’m watching the phone the whole time, watching the minutes tick closer to my daughter.

  It’s 9:50 when the Uber car stops in front of the park, which is nothing but a green, grassy expanse with a small clustered playground near the back, bordered by a fringe of trees. I tip the driver extra and get out, rushing across the shaggy, late-fall grass toward the playground. That’s the most likely place for Jill to meet me. She wouldn’t want to do this out in the open.

  I stand by the swing set and wait, facing the street and listening to the neighborhood winding down. The steady sound of crickets overlaid by a brisk, steady autumn wind, and the creak and rustle of the trees as the branches blow. The faint, constant hum of streetlights and the louder, intermittent hum of tires from passing cars. The babble of someone’s television through an open window, and someone shouting in the distance. If I squint, I’m pretty sure I can see lights that belong to Hannah’s house from here.

  Time crawls toward ten o’clock and then past it to 10:01, then 10:02 and 10:03. By ten after, I’m almost too horrified to move and thinking about calling Ollie anyway. She’s not here. Something must have happened.

  Just then I hear something behind me. A rustling sound like the trees, but closer. Before I can turn to look, there’s a huge, hollow thunk, and pain explodes in my head, bringing total blackness with it.

  30

  I open my eyes with a gasp, but it’s still just as dark as it was when I passed out. There isn’t a drop of light anywhere, and my head is pounding. I can feel something sticky and wet on the back of my neck that has to be blood. It takes a minute, but I piece together what happened.

  Jill hit me with something, knocked me out, and took me … somewhere.

  Moving is slow and painful, but I can’t do nothing. I feel around with my hands, find that I’m lying on a cold, flat surface — smooth concrete, I think. Is this a garage? The air is cool, slightly musty, but I don’t smell anything oily or metallic. This is more of a basement scent, like mildew waiting to happen.

  Spending countless hours in hundreds of houses over the years has apparently taught me a few things I never realized I’d learned.

  I pat my pockets, hoping to find the phone but knowing I won’t, and I’m right. It’s gone. I can’t see a thing, and I don’t hear a sound other than a very faint hum that could be anything, coming from anywhere. I push myself carefully into a seated position and sprawl out with my palms pressed to the floor, taking shallow breaths as dizziness threatens to overcome me. The feeling is slow to fade.

  Someone laughs in the darkness.

  “Jill?” I call out, suddenly feeling much more in control of myself. Fear and adrenaline has a tendency to drown out everything else. “Damn it, where is Alyssa?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  The mocking echo of the text she sent to me, one of the first ones, burns through my blood, and I’m up like a shot and swinging blindly in the dark. “I swear to God, I’ll kill you if she’s hurt,” I growl. “What’s wrong with you? How could you do this? You were my friend!”

  There’s a faint click, and a blinding flood of light fills the space around me. I gasp and squint as my head starts pounding again, and my vision gradually adjusts. This is definitely a basement. Poured concrete floor, cement block walls with bleach-white grout … a brass-lantern style glass light fixture in the center of the ceiling.

  I recognize that light fixture. I’ve seen it dozens of times over the two years I’d been trying to sell this place.

  Why am I in Hannah’s house?

  “Over here, Celine,” Jill calls.

  I swing my aching head toward her voice and blink her into focus. She’s standing in the entrance to this simple, square room, a ‘bonus room’ at the back of the expansive basement in the Quintaine property. She has something in her hand, something shiny and metallic and sharp.

  A butcher knife.

  “This is honestly a shame,” Jill says casually as I stand there staring at her. “I was getting better, I really was. I’d just about forgiven you for stealing Brad from me —”

  “From you?” I rasp, incredulous. “He wasn’t with you!”

  “Shut up and listen,” she snaps. “I was going to let it all go. You had Alyssa, and she’s part of Brad, but I was happy to let you raise her so I could be the fun one. The surrogate aunt.” She takes a menacing step forward. “But then Brad woke up … and I knew I had to have it all.”

  I shudder.
“You killed Rosalie. And Teryn.”

  “Of course I did.” She grins and points the knife at me. “Your friends. I would’ve stopped with Rosalie if the cops had actually arrested you like I’d planned, but they didn’t. So I moved on to Teryn. And somehow, you weaseled out of that one, too.” She shakes her head and sucks her teeth. “I bet you slept with Detective Chambers, didn’t you? That’s why he let you go. So I had to frame someone else instead.”

  “He doesn’t believe it,” I say weakly. “It was too obvious. He’s going to keep looking into it.”

  Jill flaps a hand. “All part of the plan,” she says. “We did that on purpose. Soon enough, that detective will find out it was your stupid plan to plant the obvious evidence and make the murders look unconnected, to throw them off the trail.” Her smile returns, cold and calculating. “It’ll be in your suicide note. Then I can tell Alyssa that her mommy was a murderer, and she’s better off with me and her daddy.”

  Out of that whole insane, rambling mess, my mind seizes on a single word. “We?”

  “Oh, that’s right. Didn’t I tell you?” she laughs. “Me and Hannah.”

  My legs sag in shock, and it takes every ounce of my flagging strength to stay on my feet. At least that explains why I’m here.

  “It was brilliant, really, the two of us working together,” she says. “She took care of the technical stuff, and I took care of taking your life apart piece by piece. We both had you fooled.” She gestures with the knife, its flashing arc leaving a streak of light in the air. “It was so easy to get Alyssa, too. Hannah visits Izzy at school and slips your daughter a snack with a little ipecac syrup in it, then texts you a picture with an attached virus that shuts down your phone’s call function. Alyssa gets sick, the school can’t reach Mommy dearest, so they call reliable Aunt Jill, who comes to pick her up. No questions, no suspicion.”

  I can’t bring myself to mention my daughter to this lunatic I thought was my friend, half afraid that just speaking her name will doom her. So I croak, “What about Brad?”

  “Oh, we’re just going to share. We each get a daughter, and we both get him.”

  Jesus. If they’d told Brad this insane plan of theirs, he was probably just as terrified as me right now.

  I’m trying desperately to figure out a way past Jill when another voice speaks from the gloom behind her. “You know, Jill, I’ve changed my mind,” Hannah says. “I’m not going to share Brad with you, after all.”

  Jill opens her mouth, starts to turn, and a deafening blast roars through the basement. A deep red stain blossoms at the front of Jill’s light blue shirt, spreading rapidly until it soaks her chest. She coughs, and blood foams and oozes from her mouth.

  Then she collapses to the ground with a sickening thud.

  31

  Without giving myself time to think, I rush for the knife in Jill’s outstretched hand. But Hannah is there instantly, pointing the gun she’s just used to murder Jill at my head. “I wouldn’t do that,” she says. “I’m not opposed to killing you slowly.”

  I glare at her and raise my hands. “Brad was right about you. You’re psychotic.”

  She laughs hard enough to shake her shoulders. “Maybe I am,” she says. “And speaking of Brad, you’re so distraught over losing him that you’re going to kill yourself, after taking your friend with you. It’s going to be a murder-suicide.” A grin splits her face. “Of course, the police know that Jill took your daughter, and Brad. They’ll never find them where I’m going to stash them. And then once the heat dies down and they stop looking, I’ll just quietly leave town and join my family. Rich people do eccentric things all the time.”

  The whole time she’s talking, I’m edging toward Jill’s body, trying to reach the knife. She finally notices and fires the gun at the floor, a few feet away from me. The bullet ricochets and slices across my upper arm, drawing a stream of blood that soaks my shirt and hoodie.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Hannah says.

  “Why?” I say angrily. “You’re just going to kill me anyway.”

  “Yes, I am. But if you try to fight it, I’m going to kill Alyssa too,” she says with a sneer. “I didn’t even want your cheerful little brat of a daughter. I was going to get rid of her, but my Izzy wants a friend. And it’s like you said to me earlier … Izzy is way more important.”

  Hearing her twist the words I spoke in kindness and spit them back at me is the last straw. Absolute rage explodes through every fiber of my being, and I lunge at her.

  She’s too surprised to bring the gun up fast enough. She pulls the trigger anyway, but the shot misses and I’m on her, knocking her to the ground. I grab a handful of platinum-blond hair and slam the back of her skull against the hard basement floor, again and again, until her struggles weaken and she stops moving.

  Then I wrench the gun from her stiff hand and start across the basement toward the stairs. I know this house like the back of my hand.

  And I’m going to find my daughter.

  Alyssa has to be here somewhere, her and Brad both. Hannah said that the police would never find them where she was going to stash them, which meant that she hadn’t stashed them yet. So they’re in the house, somewhere.

  I refuse to believe otherwise.

  I’m trying to hurry and keep it quiet at the same time. There’s still Julie to consider. She works for Hannah, and I can’t be sure that she isn’t on the side of the crazy lady who pays her. As for Izzy … I shudder to think of what’s happening to her right now. She’s only four, like Alyssa. She can’t possibly go along with this willingly.

  No wonder the poor child hates her mother. She probably senses that she’s psychotic.

  The basement stairs lead to an alcove-slash-pantry at the back of the smaller of the two kitchens on the ground floor. I know the door creaks slightly, so I grip the gun tight in one hand and slowly push the door open with the other. There’s no sound from the other side, and only a dim light shining from the kitchen, but it’s enough to reveal that no one’s standing in the pantry.

  My first instinct is to find a phone and call Ollie, or 911. But I know there’s no house phone here, and I didn’t have time to search Jill and find out whether she had mine on me.

  I’m not sure whether Hannah is dead, or just unconscious. In case she’s the latter, I have to find them before she wakes up.

  I step out of the basement and peer into the kitchen. Looks empty. This is the back of the house, so I’ll work my way to the front room by room, and if I don’t find anything, I’ll take the stairs near the front door to the second floor. There’s also a full attic. I’m hoping to find them before I have to go up there.

  No one is in the formal dining room, the big ultra-modern kitchen, the study, or the den. That leaves the living room and the parlor on the first floor. I check the parlor first, since the entrance is closer than the archway leading to the living room.

  And this time I find something. An indistinct shape lying on the floor by the Chesterfield where I’d stupidly tried to comfort poor, lying, viciously calculating Hannah. The light isn’t on in the room and I don’t dare turn it on. There’s just enough backlight from the foyer to make out the size of the shape — much too big to be a four-year-old. It’s an adult, possibly Brad.

  The shape doesn’t seem to be breathing.

  I creep-rush toward the shape and crouch down, trying to keep my body out of the dim patch of light from the foyer. This is definitely a person, but it’s not Brad. It’s Julie. She’s face-down on the carpet, her blonde hair sprawled messily around her head, but there’s something wrong with it. The shadows on her hair are all wrong.

  I shake her shoulder gently. It’s unpleasantly stiff. Swallowing a lump of nausea, I attempt to roll her over, and move her far enough to see the bloody hole in the center of her forehead, where she’s been shot.

  A startled cry surges through me, and I let go of the body to clap my hand over my mouth and muffle it. She’s the only one I was worried might
hear me, but it feels wrong to scream here in the company of the dead. And Hannah might hear it, if she’s only unconscious and I’m loud enough.

  I straighten and head for the living room. At first I think there’s no one in here either, but then I see the curve of a head at the top of a wingback chair that faces the fireplace. Whoever it is has dark hair, and I hope it’s Brad. I hope he’s alive.

  Not wanting to give myself away in case it’s not Brad, I approach the chair as quietly as I can, with the gun extended in front of me. When I’m close enough that I shouldn’t miss if I have to shoot, I step quickly around the side of the chair and aim the gun.

  It is Brad. His head is bowed, and it looks like he’s fallen asleep sitting up.

  “Brad?” I whisper loudly, praying he doesn’t have the same hole in his forehead that Julie did.

  He shivers, raises his head slowly, and then flinches with a startled half-cry. “Celine! How … why do you have a gun?”

  “Damn. I’m sorry,” I say quickly, lowering the gun to my side. “I took it from Hannah. She’s dead or unconscious, I’m not sure which. But we have to hurry.”

  He pales suddenly. “Hannah’s dead?” he whispers.

  “Like I said, I don’t know. That’s why we have to hurry,” I say. “Do you know where Alyssa is?”

  Brad looks confused. “Alyssa?” he repeats.

  “Yes. My daughter. Your daughter.” I try not to get too frustrated with him. He’s been kidnapped from the hospital, and he looks off, somehow. Maybe they drugged him. “Do you know where she is?”

  “I … don’t,” he says slowly. “What about Jill?”

  “She’s definitely dead. Hannah shot her.” I can’t waste any more time with this. If he’s not drugged, he has a head injury or something. I’ll have to get him on the way out. “Listen, I’ve got to find Alyssa,” I say. “Just stay here. If you have a phone, call 911. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”