Jenny tried a smile and took a big, deep breath. “Could we check the basement, too?”
I hoisted the wood onto my shoulder. “You bet. Let’s go.”
Basements can be creepy on the best of days, but ours was definitely intruder free. Jenny looked slightly embarrassed, but she was speaking to me in full sentences now, so I didn’t mind.
We stopped in front of the spare fridge and I pulled out a frozen pizza.
“Would you take this up and turn the oven on, kiddo? I’m going to throw in a load of wash, before I throw myself in the shower.”
I was still wearing the clothes I’d started with on Monday. Even black jeans can only take so much. I dropped my pants and stuffed them into the washer.
“Double-check I didn’t leave anything in the oven,” I called.
Jenny remained where I’d left her, right at the bottom of the steps. “Go upstairs…by myself?”
“I’ll be less than two minutes. You want to take this with you?” I held out the bat.
Her mouth twisted in a rising grimace. That smile of hers needed work.
“It’s heavy.” She put the pizza box under one arm and carried the bat in front of her with both hands.
“Darn right it’s heavy. What should we do tonight?” I kept talking as she went up the stairway, giving her a voice to hang on to as well. After I tossed my shirt in the washer, I dug through the hamper for other stuff that could stand a double wash. “Want to watch a movie? After Sheriff Curzon leaves, maybe we could watch some cartoons…Jen?” There were no sound effects upstairs-oven door squeaking, gas clicking as the oven fired-so I called louder, “Jenny?”
No answer.
A giant thud rocked the ceiling above my head.
My first thought was that she’d seized again and pitched a header on the kitchen floor.
I sprinted for the stairs, throwing on some old bathrobe hanging near the dryer, pounding up two at a time. As I rounded the top step, I hollered, “Jenny! What the hell was that?”
“Hello, Maddy.”
Pat the fireman was standing in our kitchen. I caught him in the act of picking up the fallen bat. He let it swing from his fingers by the cap end. “Did you send her up here to club me with a baseball bat?”
“Softball,” I corrected. Under duress, my primal nature reverts to know-it-all. “What are you doing here, Pat?”
Recognition took the edge off my shock and sharpened my anxiety until I tasted sour metal at the back of my tongue. He was wearing jeans, a leather jacket and a baseball cap-White Sox. Figures. My grandfather always said don’t trust a White Sox fan.
His eyes were glassy. The unblinking stare curdled my stomach.
“Where’s Jenny?”
“She dropped the bat and ran.” He seemed embarrassed by that thought. “I guess I scared her. I didn’t mean to. Everything’s gotten so complicated.”
“Uh-huh. How’d you get in here, Pat?”
City girls always lock the door. In the back of my mind, I figured if he broke a window to get in, he was definitely dangerous. If he got in through some other means, he might still only qualify as an idiot with really bad boundaries.
When resisting the urge to panic, go with whatever rationale works.
Pat juggled the bat to his other hand and reached down into the pocket of his jeans. As he shifted, I realized the right-hand pocket of his jacket was bulging with something large and heavy.
“I have a key.” He tossed it on the kitchen counter. It was a twin to the one I carried.
“Oh. How’d you get a key?”
“Your sister gave it to me.”
“She did?” You smell like her. “You knew Angelina.”
Pat huffed, a sad, ironic sort of laugh. The bat swung from his fingertips, side to side like a pendulum. “Jenny didn’t tell. What a kid. What an amazing kid.”
Jenny. Pat’s intrigue went right out of my head. Where was Jenny? There were four ways out of the room: past me, past Pat, out the door or up the hall. I hadn’t heard a door open or close and my ears had been primed. She must have run up the bedroom hallway. I stepped that direction.
“The wacky-intruder thing is getting old. You and my sister were friends-I get it.” My sister’s taste in men sucked. “What do you want?”
“How did your TV story turn out? What did you say about Tom and everything?” He perked up as he said it, sounded more like the Mr. Vegas I’d met before.
“Good. It turned out good.” I eased another step toward the hall.
“I heard about that fire. Heard you had your camera there. Did you put that in there? About the fire at the Jost farm?”
“Some. Yeah. Where were you that night?”
“I wasn’t on call. I was busy. Somewhere else.” He stacked the denials one on top of another.
“You know Rachel? Or her dad-Tom’s dad?”
“No. Not really. A little. She’s the one who got all Tom’s stuff.”
So much for my Tom-Rachel-Pat love triangle theory.
“Hey, did they ever find a note?” he rambled on. “A note from Tom? I was just wondering.”
“No. No note. Were you hoping they would?”
It would be hard to swing the bat in the narrow width of the hall. I took a giant step back, into the hall so Pat had to pass me to get to Jenny. He followed.
“What exactly did you say about Tom on that TV show?”
“You’ll have to wait until next Monday. Seven o’clock central time. Why don’t you watch? See for yourself.”
“Can’t wait that long.”
“Why not?” I asked.
The outer layer of my skin began to tingle with the rush of adrenaline. I backed into the hall. It was dark. Had Jenny hit the lights as she ran by? There was indirect light from the other room, but the black-and-white photos of ancestors my sister had hung along the hall-Momma, Daddy, Papa, Gran, all dead, all gone-darkened the passage with the fierce faces of family ghosts.
Pat followed me, step for step, into the hall. “I’ve got to go now. Jenny’s coming with me this time.”
The words this time rolled through my head crushing all other thoughts.
“Don’t worry. I’ll watch out for her.” He stopped advancing on me. Took off his baseball cap and rubbed a palm over his scalp. Hat in hand, he added, “I won’t put her out on the road side again, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Hat went back on, backward. There was nothing shading those glassy eyes now. He was hopped up on something.
“You took Jenny off the playground.” Everything clicked. “She knew you, because you’d been dating her mom. That’s why she went with you.”
His words popped into my head, Jenny didn’t tell.
“You threatened her, didn’t you?” I swallowed the you son of a bitch. The guy was still gripping my Louisville slugger by the cap end.
We were halfway down the hall and running out of real estate. There were three bedrooms at the end. I had a good idea which one Jenny had chosen to hide in.
“You threatened a little eight-year-old girl. What happened to ‘prevent and protect’?”
Pat propped the bat in the notch of the bathroom door molding. Big, strong firefighter didn’t need a softball bat to get what he wanted from a woman in a bathrobe.
“Don’t shout,” he cautioned me. “You’ll scare her.”
“I’m not the one she ran away from.”
“Aren’t you?”
The flip side of knowing how to charm someone was knowing how to crush them. His words closed my throat. It felt like I’d fallen from a great height and landed flat on my back.
“Aunt Maddy?” a small voice called behind me. Jenny’s bedroom was on my left, which meant she was either in my room or her mother’s old bedroom.
“Jenny?” Pat called. “It’s me. I’m sorry I scared you, honey. Will you come out so we can talk?”
“No!” I found my voice with a shout. “Stay where you are, Jenny. Don’t come out.”
“That doesn’t help.” Pat jabbed his finger at me, less than three feet from my face.