The Midnight Hour Page 15

  Grace stared at him. He met her gaze, his expression a combination of exasperation, humor, and understanding. This feeling she had that she could rely on what he was telling her, rely on him, warred with the more subtle promptings of her intuition. Maybe he was right, she thought, and her screaming mother-instinct was wrong.

  She had always had a tendency to be overprotective where Jessica was concerned.

  “All right,” she said. “All right. Linda—you remember Linda—is picking Jessica up after school. She drives a tan Ford Escort. Just—have somebody see that they get home okay. And have somebody do a few drive-bys this afternoon and tonight.”

  “I will,” he promised, his lightened tone and expression telling her that he thought she was seeing reason at last. “Don’t worry. I—”

  There was a knock at the door. Before Grace could move to answer it, the door opened and Owen Johnston stuck his head in. Fiftyish and married, with a thick head of silver hair and a kindly expression, he was a fellow Domestic Court judge, and Grace had a standing date with him and the other three Domestic Court judges on the fourth Thursday of each month.

  “You ready to go to lunch, Grace?” he asked, spotting her. She was still in her judge’s robes, turned toward the door, with Marino standing behind her. Owen glanced over her head at the cop, and then back at her, frowning as though he thought he had intruded on something personal. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “I’ll be with you in one minute, Owen,” she said with a smile. He nodded and withdrew, closing the door behind him.

  When she turned back to Marino, his expression had changed in some undefinable way.

  “I’ll take care of things, Your Honor,” he said crisply and, just like that, walked past her and out the door. Grace was left staring after him for a frowning moment before a gentle knock reminded her that Owen and the others were waiting. Hurriedly unzipping her robe, she joined them for lunch.

  And refused to allow herself to remember the delicious little tingle she had felt when Tony Marino had held her hand.

  As it happened, that day and the next were uneventful, even reasonably pleasant. When she anxiously (though, she hoped, subtly) questioned Jessica about what had gone on at school, her daughter reported that none of her friends had been caught with any drugs in their lockers, so none of them had been arrested. The kids who had been arrested, as well as the boy who was shot, were juniors and seniors, and she didn’t know them. She was happy because most of the kids had started talking to her again, although some of them—like Allison—were still being kind of snotty. Listening, Grace thought with relief that Marino had been right. With the drug investigation at Hebron concluded, perhaps Jessica really was no longer in danger.

  Reaching that conclusion, even tentatively, was such a relief.

  Basketball tryouts were Saturday morning. Grace got Jessica to the gym early at eight A.M., then stayed to watch, chewing nervously on her knuckle when things got tense. The Hebron Ladybirds was one of the best girls’ high school teams in the state, and the competition to make the squad was fierce. As a freshman, it would be difficult for Jessica to make varsity, but she had her heart set on it.

  “Jessica’s doing well,” Ann Millhollen murmured encouragingly as Jessica went six-for-six from the free-throw line. Ann sat beside Grace in the bleachers, which were sprinkled with parents watching the try-outs. Ann’s daughter Emily was a friend of Jessica’s and was trying out as well.

  “Thanks. Emily is, too,” Grace replied. Emily had gone four-for-six from the free-throw line, but she was tall and sturdily built and murder on the boards.

  “She was so nervous this morning. Was Jessica?”

  “Jessica doesn’t get nervous,” Grace reported wryly, rubbing her chewed-on knuckle. “I do.”

  “Oh, look at that!” Ann exclaimed, her gaze caught by the action on the court. Grace’s head whipped around, and her stomach twisted as she watched her daughter run the length of the court with a steal, go for a layup—and have the ball snatched from her hands at the last second by Tiffany Driver. No call from the coaches, who were acting as refs. The look on Jessica’s face as she chased the ball downcourt again made Grace proud and despairing at the same time. Jess was determined to make the team, and she was playing her heart out. Jumping to block Tiffany’s shot, she was knocked to the floor. Grace winced.

  Once tryouts were over, Grace drove Jessica home to change clothes. In a one-time exception to the three-month grounding that was still in force, Grace had agreed to let Jessica go to the mall for lunch and a movie with a group of girls who had tried out for the team.

  It was hard not to relent occasionally. Grace justified it by reasoning that they had both been under so much stress lately that Jessica really needed this time with her friends as a kind of release.

  As for danger, there shouldn’t be any. All had been calm for two days. The drug thing was over. Jessica’s friends were speaking to her again. And it was broad daylight and a whole group of girls and the mall, after all.

  If the mother-instinct thing wouldn’t leave her alone, Grace thought, she could always go to the mall herself, stay out of sight, and keep an unobtrusive eye on her daughter.

  Though Jessica would kill her if she was caught.

  As she pulled into the garage, Grace was smiling faintly at the thought of skulking behind kiosks while trying to keep her daughter in view. Jessica leaped out of the car as soon as it stopped, then hesitated. Ordinarily she would have run in ahead of her mother, dropped her gym bag in the kitchen, and headed straight upstairs for a shower, but after her recent upsetting experience with the mirror, she was reluctant to go inside alone. Grace understood perfectly what she was feeling, without Jessica needing to say a word. In many ways, despite the recent ups and downs in their relationship, she and Jessica operated on the same psychic wavelength. Probably because it had been just the two of them for so long.

  Therefore Jessica was only a little bit ahead of her as they entered the house through the kitchen door. True to form, she dropped her gym bag by the coatrack—and then stopped dead.

  “Mom, you got me a cake?” Jessica asked in disbelief, inadvertently blocking Grace’s view as she stood as if carved from stone, staring at the kitchen table.

  “What?” Carrying her purse and a bag of groceries, Grace nudged her daughter aside, glanced at the table, and stopped dead, too.

  In the center of the table was a layer cake, beautifully presented on a doily-bedecked paper plate, decorated as if it had been ordered for someone’s birthday. It glistened with white icing and yellow roses with green leaves and apricot buds. Leaning closer, Grace saw that the top of the cake was adorned with a picture, drawn in icing, of a basketball going through a hoop. The message read, “Good luck, Jessica.”

  Grace had not ordered the cake, nor authorized anyone else to do so. In fact, she and Jessica rarely, if ever, ate cake.

  More important, the confection had not been on the table when she and Jessica had left. And since then, no one else should have been in the house.

  Chapter

  24

  “A CAKE.” MARINO STARED down at the cake on the table, his hands closing around the back of one of the green-painted ladderback chairs that made up the kitchen set. He glanced at Grace, who stood on the opposite side of the table watching him. “So what makes you think that a cake that says ‘Good luck, Jessica’ constitutes a threat?”

  Officers Gelinsky and Ayres, who’d been on the scene for about ten minutes, hovered nearby. Gelinsky appeared faintly bored as he contemplated the cake, while Ayres looked downright dour as she, like Marino, looked at Grace.

  “I didn’t order it. We don’t eat cake. And it was not in the house when we left,” Grace explained for the second time, holding on to her patience with an effort. Marino had just arrived. Gelinsky and Ayres had already been underwhelmed by the significance of a cake as a threat.

  “Your sister probably brought it. For God’s sake, it’s a nice gest
ure. Unauthorized delivery of a cake is not exactly a crime.”

  “My sister knows Jessica and I don’t eat cake. My sister did not bring it. No one who knows us would bring it. Jessica is diabetic. We do not eat cake.”

  Grace spoke emphatically. On the surface, she supposed that it probably did seem as if she was having a strangely negative reaction to what could be construed as a charming surprise for Jessica. But the cake was sinister. She felt it with every iota of intuition she possessed, and regarded the beautifully decorated dessert with as much fear as if it were a live bomb sitting in the middle of her kitchen table.

  Whoever had written the message on Jessica’s mirror had left the cake, she knew.

  “It’s not over,” she said aloud, crossing her arms over her chest. She wore a navy wool blazer over a white turtleneck and khakis, and still she was cold, cold to the bone. The kind of cold that had nothing to do with the heavy gray skies outside, or the rainy mist that hung like fog in the air.

  “What?” Marino glanced at her, a hint of exasperation in his voice. His black hair was wavy today, too, adding credence to her theory that its latent curl was brought out by rain, and she thought maybe he’d had it cut, because it looked shorter around his neck and ears. Like herself, he was dressed in a blazer and slacks, the former tan tweed, the latter well-cut dark brown wool. He was even wearing a tie, of tan silk with thin black stripes. With the tiny part of her mind not consumed with mushrooming fear, she wondered where he’d been headed when she had paged him.

  “It’s not over,” she repeated, crossing her arms over her chest to ward off the chill and glaring at him across the table. “You said it was over, and it’s not. Whoever wrote on Jessica’s mirror and stole Mr. Bear did this.”

  “Jesus.” Marino shook his head at her. “You really are getting paranoid, you know that?”

  “I am not getting paranoid.” Grace fought down a bubble of rising hysteria so as to sound cool and collected and forceful. “You see the cake, don’t you? It’s real, and it’s on my kitchen table although it wasn’t here when I left the house, and my daughter and I don’t eat cake and didn’t order it. The writing on the mirror was real, too, and Jessica’s teddy bear was really down by the road, and I really chased an intruder from my yard the night I found it there. So explain to me exactly how all those circumstances add up to my being paranoid, if you please.”

  “It’s a cake, Grace.”

  His use of her first name, the first time he had called her by it, appeared to slip out unnoticed. Grace noticed, but she was too worried and upset and generally beside herself with concern for her daughter to do more than register in passing what he’d said.

  “It’s a threat.”

  A horn blared in the driveway. Grace started, unnerved by even that homely sound. Marino and the other police officers glanced around toward the front of the house from whence the sound had come.

  “Mom, Mom, it’s them!” Jessica flew into the kitchen, fresh from her shower and dressed to go out, which meant the usual jeans and top with the addition of dangly earrings, shoulder bag, and a black leather jacket styled as a minitrench, which was belted around her tiny waist. Determined not to terrify her daughter, Grace had played down the significance of the cake. But she had thought Jessica understood that its arrival precluded any chance of her being able to go to the mall.

  “Jess . . .” she began helplessly, shaking her head as she started to tell her daughter that she could not, after all, go.

  “Oh, Mom, please.” Jessica must have read her intention in her eyes and from her body language. “Please. I want to go so bad! I haven’t been out of the house in weeks, and I’ve been so good, and it’s driving me crazy being cooped up here like this and everything’s okay with my friends again and I don’t want to screw it up. . .. Please!”

  “Jessica, sweetie, I know I said you could go, but—”

  “I don’t care about the stupid cake,” Jessica said passionately. “Or the mirror or anything else! This thing is ruining my life, and I’m not going to let it happen. I just can’t stay cooped up in the house forever, Mother! I have a life!”

  From the driveway, the horn sounded again.

  “Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please,” Jessica begged, her hands clasped prayerfully beneath her chin.

  Without in the least meaning to do so, Grace glanced at Marino. He was watching the two of them with a sardonic expression that said more clearly than words that he considered her putty in Jessica’s hands. Grace’s lips tightened. Not that his opinion mattered to her in the least.

  “Mom, please.”

  Jessica’s eyes were huge, and beseeching. Against her better judgment, Grace felt herself caving in. She couldn’t keep Jessica under guard forever, couldn’t build walls around her no matter how much she wished to do so.

  The truth was, she had a hard time denying her daughter anything, and always had.

  “Will you promise, promise, promise me to stay with the other girls no matter what?”

  “Oh, Mom, yes! Thank you, Mom! You are the best mother in the whole world!”

  Taking Grace’s question for consent, which in a tacit way Grace supposed it was, Jessica darted over, dropped a kiss on her cheek, and, to avoid Officer Gelinsky who was testing the latch on the rear door, ran out of the kitchen toward the front door.

  Grace was already getting the terrible feeling that she might have made a mistake. One look at Marino’s face told her he felt the same, although for a different reason. He was thinking about discipline; she was worried about danger. She shot him a defiant look: her daughter, her call.

  “Excuse me a minute, I’ll be right back,” Grace said, to Marino and the others. “I just want to have a word with the mother who’s driving.”

  She hurried after Jessica. Ann, who was driving the girls to the mall, was of course burning with curiosity about the presence of a police car (the one Ayres and Gelinsky drove was marked) in the driveway. Grace told her that they had had a break-in, without going into the matter in depth. She did, however, ask Ann to keep an eye on Jessica. This Ann promised to do. The conversation was short because the girls were in a hurry to get going and made no bones about their impatience. Still, when she watched the car pull out of her driveway, Grace felt a little better about her decision to let Jessica go.

  When she returned to the house, rain beaded her hair and dampened her clothes. Her face was wet, and she could taste the cold moisture on her lips. The house’s warmth enveloped her like a blanket. Its familiar smell, a mix of what she had decided long ago was furniture polish and old wood and the Love My Carpet powder Pat sprinkled on the rugs on Wednesdays, was comforting. She passed Officer Ayres, who was on her way outside, in the hall, and nodded to her. The woman nodded back, but did not smile. As it had been when she had come to the house before, her demeanor was so professional it bordered on unfriendly.

  “There is no sign of forced entry,” Gelinsky was telling Marino as Grace walked back into the kitchen. The overhead lights were on, although it was only early afternoon, to combat the darkness of the day outside. With its soft, warm colors and homey furnishings, the kitchen looked far too cheerful to be the scene of a police investigation.

  “What about footprints? It’s been raining all day. There should have been some footprints if someone came in from outside,” Marino replied.

  “I didn’t notice any,” Gelinsky said apologetically, looking around on the floor. If there had been footprints, Grace thought, following his gaze, it was too late to discover them now. If they had existed, they had been obliterated by more footprints as first she and Jessica and then the three police officers had walked around the kitchen without any thought for evidence that might lurk underfoot. The area circling the table and the paths to the front and back doors all showed traces of a damp, mud-smudged path, but it was clear even to her untrained gaze that no single footprint was distinguishable from the rest.

  “Did you lock the doors when you left?” Marino glanced at
Grace as she shook her damp hair with her hand to rid it of as much moisture as possible. Their eyes met.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What door did you come in?”

  “The back door. Behind you.” She nodded toward it.

  “Was the door locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that the door where the latch doesn’t catch right?”

  “Yes. But it did this time. I had to use my key to unlock it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t mean much, though.” Marino frowned thoughtfully. “If someone did find the door improperly latched, entered by it, and then left by it again, the latch might have caught when whoever it was left.”

  Officer Ayres returned at that juncture, her hair and clothes wet just as Grace’s were. Her shoes made squelching sounds as she crossed the tile floor to the table. She carried a Polaroid camera and immediately began taking pictures of the cake. The continuous click-whir sound of the camera at work was loud in the quiet house.

  Moving away from the area where she was taking pictures, Marino leaned a hip against the center island, drummed the fingers of one hand on the tile counter-top, and focused on Grace, who stood just a few feet away, near the sink.

  A lone cereal bowl that had not yet made it into the dishwasher waited in the sink, Grace noted absently. Jessica had had cereal for breakfast.

  “Who has a key to your house? Besides your sister.”

  “The Aliens do. They live next door.” She picked up the bowl and put it in the dishwasher. Her breakfast dishes were already there, waiting to be washed until there was enough for a full load.