Take Another Look (5 page)

“Whatever. We've got practice at four, but some of us are going to the swim park in the morning.”

“Just text me when you make a move,” Jane said. “And no hanging here in the morning. I've got some work to get done at the school.”

Harper groaned. “When am I going to be old enough to be trusted at home? Everybody else has friends over when their parents are at work.”

“You're not everybody else. You're special, honey.”

Harper rolled her eyes and ducked out the door. “Bye, Mom.”

“Be right back,” Luke promised.

Jane turned the deadbolt and peered out through the peephole, but she couldn't see them walking to Luke's car. The small tunnel of vision it afforded her was nearly useless. She sank against the door. She hoped she was doing the right thing, entrusting Harper to someone else's care. For years she'd walked in fear of Frank, making contingency plans and escape routes, but when a decade had gone by without any sign of trouble, she'd let her guard down a bit.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

She hurried up to her room and pulled a duffel bag from the closet. Toothbrush, underwear, change of clothes and nightgown—the nice one, with ribbons woven through the bodice. Her usual T-shirt and boxers could stay at home. She was filling a small cosmetic bag with her medication and essential makeup when the doorbell began to ring.

Was Luke back already? A spiral of fear twisted in her chest. Luke would not ring the doorbell, and not repeatedly. Luke knew the garage code; it wasn't him.

He
was here.

The doorbell chimed incessantly. He was not going away.

Her heart thudded in her chest as she bounded down the stairs, then stopped herself, falling back onto a carpeted step. She couldn't answer. But if she didn't, would he break down the door?

Call the police. She yanked her cell phone from her pocket as the bell pealed again, and then a knock came.

Indecision and fear tangled inside her. What if it was someone else . . . a neighbor or a friend of Harper's?

With a jagged breath, she crept to the bottom of the stairs and crossed to the door, sure that he could sense her movement on the other side of the door. Mustering her courage, she put her eye to the peephole. The man was turned away, and the damned peephole distorted things, but the thatch of dark hair and the broad shoulders were unmistakable.

It was him.

Frank.

Of course, he had stayed in shape, kept his muscles conditioned and strong enough to hold a woman down against her will or crush her windpipe.

The instinct to flee roared in her mind as she backed away from the door, which suddenly boomed. He was pounding on the door, rattling it in its hinges.

She wanted to beg him to go away, but she was afraid to reveal herself, and she knew her words would be powerless against him. Instead, she stumbled over to the bannister, hunkered down behind it, and tried to focus on the cell phone in her shaking hand.

Chapter 4

T
he pounding on the door rocked the house like a barrage of gunfire. Pressed into the newel post for shelter, Jane had her arms wrapped around Phee, who had wandered over, curious and obviously concerned. Jane tightened her grip on the dog as she strained to hear sirens. She had told the dispatcher he was breaking in, and the woman had assured her that a car was on its way, but it seemed like an eternity had passed since the time they'd hung up.

There was a sound from the street—a squeal of tires? Yes, a car screeching to a halt. Afraid to approach the door, Jane crawled to the living room window, with Phoenix following curiously alongside her. She tugged the cord of the Tiffany lamp to plunge the room into darkness, crouched down on her knees, and lifted the corner of the silk shade.

Jane trembled in relief and fear. Luke had returned.

At the edge of the lawn, Luke stood in the firing position she'd seen on crime shows, his legs planted securely, his arms stretched in front of him, pointing his revolver toward her front porch. From behind him, the lights of his car carved an eerie silver path over the grass. The Volvo sat cockeyed on the street, the driver's side door hanging open.

“Whoa! Sir! Put the gun down.” The order came from the front steps.

“Not a chance.” Luke's voice rang out, a steel hammer. “Put your hands on your head and sit down on the porch step.” She had never seen this side of him, not even when he was dealing with the most recalcitrant students. Because of the way the porch cut in, Jane couldn't see Frank from this window, but Luke's response indicated that he was complying.

“I'm a police officer,” Frank said.

That was one of the things that made him so dangerous, Jane thought as she rose and steadied herself against the console table. She didn't dare open the front door, but she could go out through the garage. Phoenix barked behind her as she hurried through the laundry room and hit the button for the garage door.

“Luke!” she shouted, bending down to see that he had moved a few feet closer. “I called the police. They're coming.”

He nodded without taking his eyes off Frank.

Phoenix spilled out behind Jane, barking at the intruder.

“Good dog.” As Jane went to grab the dog's collar, she peered around the corner of the house to get a look at Frank. Instead, she saw an attractive Hispanic man with a strong jaw and sleepy eyes.

What? The pulse that had been pounding in her ears began to fade. He was dark-haired with a medium build, but not the man she feared.

“You're not Frank!”

The man winced, but he kept his hands propped on his head and his eyes on the man with the gun. “Please, tell him not to shoot.”

Still compelled to keep her distance from the stranger, she hurried across the lawn to join Luke. “It's not him.”

There was a fine sheen of sweat on Luke's forehead. “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Then who the hell are you?” Luke relaxed his stance, but didn't lower the gun.

“Name's Alvarez . . . Dennis Alvarez. I'm a police detective with the DA's office of San Joaquin County. I've got ID.” Alvarez took one hand from his head to point down at his pocket, but he quickly clamped his hand back onto his hair when Luke waved the gun at him.

“Who hired you to stalk her?” Luke demanded. “You were at the school today, and now this. What the hell? Coming after a woman at night?”

“I haven't broken any laws. I have some questions for Ms. Ryan, that's all.” He turned to Jane. “I was trying to be discreet, didn't want to make a scene in front of your friends. I didn't mean to frighten you, but you've been a hard person to track down.”

Jane scowled. “And you didn't get the message? That I didn't want to be tracked down?” She had disappeared for a reason, and if this man could find her, so could Frank.

“I was doing my job, ma'am.”

The whoop of sirens bounced through the surrounding trees and houses. The Mirror Lake Police would be pulling up any second. She turned to Luke. “Do you want to put the gun away before the police get here?”

Luke glanced from the gun to Alvarez. “Shit.” He lowered the shiny black pistol. “Stay right where you are until the police get here,” he told the intruder.

Jane called Phee in closer and together they kept a watchful eye on the detective. Alvarez remained sitting with his hands on his head while Luke tucked the gun away in his car.

“Mr. Alvarez, I have some questions for you,” she said. “After the police run your ID, we'll talk.” At a diner, perhaps. Somewhere neutral. She certainly wasn't going to invite him into the house. The neighbors were already getting an eyeful. An armed standoff, and now two police cars that had burst into sight with lights and sirens exploding the darkness. It was enough of a disturbance to the neighborhood for one night.

She was conscious of the lights that had gone on in neighboring homes. Dave and Nancy Tully stood in their driveway, and Gary Larsen watched from his front porch, there for her, ready to help. She acknowledged Gary with a grateful wave and reassured the Tullys that everything was okay. Hard to believe, especially with the adrenaline that still sizzled in her veins, but it was true. Frank wasn't trying to kill her. Everything was fine.

She kept telling herself that, but she knew it would take hours, maybe even days, to come down from this frantic buzz.

Chapter 5

A
s they drove to the all-night restaurant to meet with Alvarez, the haunting refrain of “Building a Mystery” came on the radio, snapping Jane back to that fateful summer. She turned it off, craving silence.

“I feel like there's so much I have to tell you about the man I escaped from,” she murmured, drained from the encounter at the house. “But then, the complete story is probably trite. Such a middle-class horror story.”

“I can deal with trite,” Luke said gently. “But give yourself a breather. We're almost there. After we're done with this guy, we can talk. No limits.”

She nodded, sinking into the seat. Outside the air was cool, crisp. The temperature had dropped, but Luke had turned on her seat heater. That was Luke: thoughtful, protective. Although her trust in him was complete, absolute, definitive, Jane hadn't told him everything about her relationship with Frank Dixon. It wasn't easy talking about the biggest mistake of her life. Even years later, it burned.

When Jane looked back at the summer of 1997, she sometimes felt a pang of sympathy for the naïve young woman she had been after college graduation. Convinced that her life had been bland and ordinary, Jane was determined to set herself apart with some extraordinary adventures. Like most college students, Jane and her friends had been partying for years, but this was the first time they could imbibe in the local bar scene, a happening place in Burnson. In the apartment she shared with Marnie, she was free to skip meals and paint her toenails on the coffee table. Although their mornings were spent teaching summer school, they had the afternoons free to run along the river or take a ride to one of the beaches—“A perfect summer schedule,” Marnie proclaimed. By the afternoon the marine layer that fogged the California coast lifted, leaving a magnificent shoreline of sparkling indigo water, sand beaches, and sheltered coves. Jane sported a bikini for the first time in years and, with her new, fit body, she actually enjoyed wading into the cold water and hanging with the surfers.

After an evening nap, Jane and Marnie showered and primped, giddy with the potential of another night out on the Docks, the string of bars and saloons that stretched along the river at the edge of town. Each night they met new urban professionals and reconnected with old friends. They scored free vodka tonics and lemon drops from guys who wanted nothing more than light conversation and a few laughs. They sang the angry anthems of Sarah McLachlan and Paula Cole, wondering “Where have all the cowboys gone?” They knew all the words to the Beach Boys tunes that peppered every beach party. But Jane and Marnie had agreed that their theme song for the summer would be Sheryl Crow's “All I Wanna Do.” They were in it for the fun.

“We deserve it, after all these years of busting our buns in school,” Marnie had declared.

Like the female singers who flung their bitterness through every jukebox and radio, Jane considered herself to be stoic and smart, exquisite and sophisticated. But beneath all the labels, some earned through years of school and some recently acquired through weight loss and exercise, Jane was mostly a romantic, a needy young woman in search of the hero who would sweep her off her feet. For the first time in her life she had a job, some money to play with, an apartment away from the folks, and the power to turn heads when she walked into a bar. Freedom was sweet, but coupled with a whiff of sexual attraction, it was a spicy dish, too hot for a timid heart.

And it had been the summer of fun. Marnie developed a crush on Jason, a bartender at one of their hangouts on the Docks. Jane remained unattached. But unlike the wallflower school days of awkward pity hookups, Jane's solo status now felt like a journey of independence. She had lost twenty pounds, and that made all the difference. Men gravitated toward her, and women wanted to be her friends. For the most part, Jane basked in the glow of male attention. Oh, there were vile, hungry looks here and there, but she found most guys to be polite. They enjoyed her little stories. They liked to laugh, as she did. And some of them were downright chivalrous, holding doors, giving up their bar stools, buying her a drink, or walking her to her car.

The golden days and indigo nights of summer passed all too quickly. Although Jane looked forward to her first year of full-time teaching, she hated to see her glorious lifestyle dwindle away. There would be no more trips to the coast for a while, and their obligation to chaperone school football games meant the nights at the Docks would be few and far between. “Our reign is ending,” Marnie had said with a cute pout of her full lips.

When the summer began to wane, Jane and Marnie joined the other revelers in a countdown the last week of August. The town of Burnson had a darkly comic tradition of staging a Labor Day parade, during which marchers carried makeshift balsa-wood coffins to bury the summer. Most of the bars on the Docks entered a coffin in the legendary best-coffin competition. The bar where Jason worked, Smackdaddy's, was relying on patrons to decorate theirs. The owner had assembled it in his garage, and now the small wooden box was set up on a table in the bar. Tubes of paint, brushes, and markers were set up for customers to decorate the coffin as they saw fit.

“That is just pathetic.” Marnie shook her head at the coffin, which sported a few poorly rendered flames and skulls. “A class of kindergartners could do better.”

Jane pushed back the sleeves of her denim jacket. “Come on, Marnie. Let's show them how a proper art project is done.”

They decided to cover the box with swirls and stars in bright colors, reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh's
Starry Night
painting. Jane focused on making a deep blue sky and a simple green landscape with pointed cypress trees while Marnie painted in glistening swirls of silver, white, and yellow.

It was a typical Saturday night, with music blaring, patrons gathering three-deep at the bar, and barely room to breathe out on the dock. But inside at their table, people gave Jane and Marnie room to work.

They were putting the finishing touches on their masterpiece when a customer came in and told Jason to turn on the television over the bar, reporting that something had happened to Lady Di. One of the guys remarked that he had never liked her, but Marnie defended the former princess.

As Jason turned the music down and clicked on the television, word spread through the crowd. Conversation dropped to a murmur as people turned to the TV over the bar. Paintbrushes in hand, Jane and Marnie pressed in toward the television screen, riveted as reporters showed the dark streets of Paris. They were talking about Princess Diana in the past tense; listening closely, the subdued patrons of the bar learned that she had died from injuries sustained in a car accident.

Jane and Marnie shared a hug.

“It's so awful,” Jane said. “She was starting a new life.”

“She seemed happy, being out of the restrictions of royalty,” Marnie agreed.

Jane had always admired Diana, from the fairy-tale story of a young nanny plucked from relative obscurity to become a princess, to the survivor's tale of a woman who dared to buck age-old tradition and free herself from an unhappy life. Jane saw herself in Diana's struggles, at least in the first part, with an ugly duckling turning into a swan. And this was the summer when Jane had ascended from ordinary to something special. Pretty, popular . . . independent.

As Jane sat at the table and contemplated life and death, the way things could change in a heartbeat, Marnie brought over two frosty v-shaped glasses.

“Lemon drops, on the house,” Marnie announced, handing one to Jane. “Jason said it's a gesture of thanks for saving Smackdaddy's coffin from coming in last.”

Jane lifted her glass in a toast. “To Lady Di. I can't believe she's gone.”

“It's like losing a friend. Does that sound deluded? I mean, it's not like we hung out with her.”

“But we watched her become a princess. We saw her get married.” The royal wedding had been one of Jane's earliest memories. The fancy carriage—just like Cinderella's—and the long train trailing down the aisle of the cathedral.

“My mom cut her hair short like Diana's. And those beautiful evening gowns. Sparkling and sleek. She was living every girl's dream of a life.”

“Or so we thought.” Jane took a deep sip from her drink. It was her second of the night; she'd been nursing a hard lemonade as she painted. But now she wanted more than the light social buzz. She took another drink as she wondered about the path of Diana's life. “Do you think Diana ever found happiness?” she asked Marnie.

“I don't think happiness is something you find. It comes in fleeting moments. Like a flower in full bloom or a bubble floating along. Each moment of joy is short-lived. The bubble will burst. But there's always another one floating your way, eventually.”

That was Marnie: poetic, ever hopeful.

There was more toasting to Diana mixed with conversation on the finite nature of life.

“You've got to live for the moment,” Jason said emphatically, and the group gathered at the bar drank to that sentiment.

 

When Jason announced last call, Marnie turned to Jane and told her she'd be going home with Jason. “Are you okay on your own?”

“No problem!” Jane exclaimed, maybe a bit too emphatically. How much had she had to drink? She'd lost track. But she'd eaten a good absorbent dinner, and the drinks had been spaced out over time. She'd be fine.

As she stood up to leave, the periphery of her vision was dull and fuzzy, and it seemed to require a supreme effort to walk. One foot in front of the other, she told herself. One breath in, and then out. The mechanics of living could be so difficult. Especially when you were drunk.

“Are you okay to drive?” one of the bartenders called after her.

She lifted her hand in what she hoped looked like a dismissive wave. The cool air outside the bar sobered her up fast. Fresh air was what she needed. Her little Honda gleamed from its spot in front of the bar. She loved her little red car. Well, she had to love it since she'd be paying for it over the next few years.

After she bumped her head on the way in, she slunk down in the driver's seat, rubbing vigorously and wondering if she should call a cab. The worst case scenarios loomed large in her mind. She could crash like Diana, and that would be very bad. She could get a DUI, and that would be bad, too. She might lose her job, or even her teaching certification. A teacher had to set a good example, and breaking the law was not a good thing.

“Not good,” she said aloud as she buckled her seatbelt. But the fresh air had helped her realize that she was upset and sad . . . tired, too. Not really drunk. Besides, she was a good driver, and the apartment was just down the road. “A straight shot,” she said. Well . . . with a few turns. Gripping the steering wheel with one hand, she turned the key. She could do this.

The view through the windshield was surreal, a driving course on a dark video game as she accelerated slowly, steering carefully to stay on the track. The street by the Docks was well lit and fairly quiet, with only a few stragglers walking and the occasional car moving past her.

As the waterfront gave way to the industrial area, the lights dimmed, and she had to strain to see parts of the roadway. What a dark night! Was there no moon in the sky?

Just as the darkness closed around her, bright light bounced through her car. In the rearview mirror, the strobe of a police vehicle flashed red and blue. A cop. Oh, no! Right on her tail. The double whoop of the siren let her know that she had to pull over.

You're okay. You're okay,
she told herself as she rolled to a stop on the gravel shoulder of the roadway and put the car in park. It was probably just a routine check. A glimpse in the rearview mirror revealed only the bright lights of the police cruiser behind her. Leaning toward the mirror, she was horrified by the fine beads of perspiration glistening on her upper lip. She swiped at her face and then shoved her trembling hands in her lap.

The beam of a flashlight hit her window, and she rolled it down and peered up at the dark form of a man.

“Good evening, officer.” The calm teacher voice came through. “Is everything okay?”

“License and registration, please.” The voice was gruff, brisk.

She handed him the driver's license from her wallet, but panic swirled as she wondered about the registration. The console. Of course. Her father would have put it there when he registered the car for her. She found the little leather folder that had come with the car, and the registration seemed to smile up at her. Phew!

“Jane Flannery.” He moved the beam of the flashlight from the ID in his hand to Jane's face. “New car?”

“Pretty new.”

“Have you been drinking, Jane?”

“Yes.” Why had she said that? She was afraid to lie to him. He was such an ominous figure: dark uniform with a shiny badge, baritone voice, face obscured by that wailing beam of light. “But I'm not drunk. I mean, it was spaced out over hours and hours.”

“Is there a reason you were driving with your lights off?”

“I . . .” She squinted through the windshield at the overwhelming night. No wonder it seemed so dark. She turned the switch, and the road was suddenly illuminated. “I didn't know. Sorry about that.”

He moved away from the door. “I need you to step outside the vehicle for me.”

She followed him to the brightly lit area in front of the cruiser's headlights. Panic seeped into her heart as she studied him. Thick black hair and chiseled features. A stern slash of a mouth. In his dark uniform, he was a wall of strength, solid and unforgiving. His name plate read: DIXON.