CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Something hit the side of her car, and
Molly flinched. She was driving back from the doctor’s office, and
about to turn onto Willow Tree Court. Thwack! It happened again, this time on her car door.
“Good God, what is that?” she asked no one in
particular.
She almost stepped on the brake, but a
BMW was on her tail, and it was sure to rear-end her. So she kept
moving, turning left onto the cul-de-sac. Out of the corner of her
eye, she saw some movement in the vacant lot at the corner. It was
Carson and Dakota Hahn—along with Jill’s son, Darren. The little
brats were throwing dirt balls at passing cars. Molly wanted to
roll down her window and scream at them, but she was afraid she’d
end up with a mouthful of dirt. So she just kept
driving.
The doctor had agreed to squeeze her in
for an appointment this afternoon. She’d gone on the sly while Jeff
and the kids visited Trish to make funeral plans for
Angela.
The latest cul-de-sac killings had been
the top news story since yesterday. So the receptionist at the
doctor’s office had taken pity on Molly and not charged her for
missing yesterday’s appointment. The doctor had recommended an
ob-gyn, with whom Molly now had an appointment in a
month.
That seemed like such a long time away.
Molly figured she’d wait until after Angela’s funeral to tell Jeff
about the baby.
As she turned into her driveway, she
spotted a woman at her front stoop. A pretty brunette in her
mid-thirties, she held a pie in her hands. Her jeans and the clingy
waffle-pattern pale blue top showed off her trim, aerobicized
figure. She came down the front walkway to meet her.
Molly climbed out of the car, and shut
the door.
“Are you Mrs. Dennehy?” the woman
asked.
Molly nodded. “Yes.”
“I’m Rachel Cross, your new
neighbor.”
Molly smiled. “Oh, hello, it’s nice to
meet you.”
“What happened to your door?” she
asked, nodding at the car.
Molly glanced at the dirt smudges where
Lynette’s and Jill’s brood had hit the bull’s-eye with their dirt
balls. “That’s the handiwork of the little darlings down the
block,” Molly explained. “There’s a vacant lot by the intersection
at the end of the cul-de-sac, and the kids sometimes throw dirt
balls at passing cars.”
“Sweet,” Rachel said. “Well, I stand
warned. I’ll make sure to drive with the windows rolled
up.”
“Good idea,” Molly said. She smiled at
her. “I’m Molly, by the way. Is that pie for us?”
“Yes, it’s apple,” Rachel said. “I made
it myself—that is, if removing it from the bakery box and covering
the pie with Handi-Wrap constitutes making it.”
Molly took the pie from her. “In my
book, it does, definitely. This is so nice of you. I should be
bringing a pie over to you, welcoming you to the
neighborhood.”
“Well, I heard the news about your
husband’s first wife, and according to the mailman, her kids live
with you now. So—well, my mother always used to bring a pie over to
the neighbors if there was an illness or a death in the
family.”
“That’s sweet, thank you. And it’s good
to know the mailman has his finger on the pulse of what’s happening
around here. Too bad he can’t always get the mail to the right
address—which reminds me, I have something for you. . . .” Molly
balanced the pie in one hand while she unlocked the door. “Would
you like to come in?”
“Oh, thanks,” Rachel said, shaking her
head. “But I still have a ton of unpacking to do.”
“Be right back.” Molly scurried inside
the house. She set the pie down on the kitchen counter, then
grabbed the mail—rubber-banded together—that she’d gotten by
mistake. There were only five pieces of mail, mostly junk; but
there was something that looked like a personal letter. She left
the door open as she brought it back outside to Rachel. “We got
these by mistake last week. They’re addressed to you.”
“Well, that’s mighty neighborly of you
to keep them for me,” Rachel said. “And about that pie, the woman
at the bakery said if you heat it in a conventional oven for
fifteen minutes before serving, it’s incredible.”
Molly nodded. “Thanks again, Rachel. I
hope you’ll take a rain check, and drop in any time.”
Rachel gave her a nervous smile and
shrugged. “I’m glad to hear you say that. I don’t know a lot of
people in Seattle. I moved here from Tampa, Florida. I looked at a
map of the United States and figured Seattle was just about as far
as I could get from Tampa—and my ex-husband.”
“Sounds like an interesting story,”
Molly said.
She nodded. “We’ll save it for some
snowy night by the fire. Anyway, I dealt with this Realtor over the
phone, and he sent me photos of the house over the Internet. I fell
in love with it while I was still in Florida. I didn’t hear about
these—these cul-de-sac murders until after I bought the house.” She
let out a long sigh. “I’m a little nervous about being alone in a
new place as it is. I feel a lot better knowing I have a nice
neighbor next door.”
“Well, vice versa,” Molly said with a
smile. “Feel free to call up if you ever get scared or you need
anything.”
Rachel nodded and waved to her as she
started down the walkway. “Nice meeting you, Molly!”
As Molly waved back, she remembered her
last conversation with Kay, in which she had promised to be Kay’s
Neighborhood Watch buddy.
Molly’s smile waned.
Stepping inside, she closed the door
and went back to the kitchen. The pie looked pretty damn good. She
wondered if she should give in to her craving and have a slice. She
was searching through the utensil drawer for a knife when the phone
rang.
Molly snatched up the receiver. “Yes,
hello?”
There was no response on the other
end.
“Hello?” she repeated.
“Ask him where he
really was,” a woman whispered.
“What?”
The woman didn’t reply. But Molly heard
her breathing—like someone with asthma.
“Who is this?” Molly
asked.
She heard a click on the other end of
the line and then nothing.
The next afternoon, Jeff and Chris
drove to Northgate Mall so Chris could get a decent suit for the
funeral. The services were delayed until next week because of the
autopsy.
Molly planned to work on her latest
painting, still in the early stages. It was for a national
soft-drink company’s print ad. The client wanted an illustration
with twenty people, all drinking cola at a party; but each person
was from a certain period from the 1920s to the current day. It was
to represent the ninety years people had been enjoying that soft
drink brand. Molly thought it was a corny idea, but the money and
the exposure were good.
From the basement she’d gotten Erin
some watercolors and paper, so they could work together up in her
studio. If the phone rang, she’d let the machine answer
it.
She was still a little unhinged by
yesterday’s call, mostly because Angela had gotten those strange
phone calls not long before she’d been murdered. Molly had told
Jeff about it: “ ‘Ask him where he really was.’ What do you suppose
she meant by that?”
Jeff had seemed unfazed. “Yesterday, we
got how many hang-ups and how many people calling just to hear our
voices? We’re in the news, and we’re in the phone book, not a good
combination. We’re going to get some weird calls. You really need
to screen them, hon.”
Molly had taken his advice today. There
had been several hang-ups.
She and Erin were about to head
upstairs when she heard shrieking outside. It sounded like Carson
and Dakota Hahn.
Molly peered out the living room window
and gasped.
A man was running up the cul-de-sac
with Dakota Hahn in his arms. Screaming and squirming, she was
covered with blood and dirt.
“Stay here,” Molly said to
Erin.
She hurried outside. Next door, Rachel
stepped out of the house as well.
Molly raced up the walkway. She saw
Carson and Darren trailing behind the man, crying. They had blood
all over their hands. Carson stumbled and fell on the pavement. He
let out a loud wail.
Molly ran out to the street and scooped
him up. The sleeve of his jacket was torn, and Molly could see
blood. It looked like he’d skinned his arm in the fall. He was
crying so hard, he couldn’t seem to get a breath.
The man holding Dakota swiveled around
to face her. He was about thirty, and borderline handsome, with
wavy dark blond hair and a cleft in his chin. He looked panic
stricken. “Are you the mother?” he asked, over the children’s
screams.
Breathless, Molly gaped at him—and then
at Dakota, whose chubby, dirt-smudged face was lined with bloody
scratches. She wouldn’t stop shrieking.
“Are you the mother?” the stranger
repeated, louder this time.
With Carson writhing in her arms, Molly
shook her head and pointed to Lynette’s house. “They live over
there. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” the stranger yelled. “I
was driving by, and I heard the screams. Then I saw the kids on
that lot at the corner, and they were bleeding—”
“Ye gods, look, he’s got pieces of
glass in his hands!” Rachel exclaimed. Hovering over Jill’s son,
Darren, she held him by his wrists. The plump, brown-haired
six-year-old wriggled in her grasp and cried softly—a miserable
staccato moan.
Within moments, Lynette and Jill ran
out of their respective houses, adding to the chorus of screams.
Lynette tried to take Dakota from the Good Samaritan stranger, but
when her daughter reached up to wrap a hand around her mother’s
neck, the glass embedded in her palm scratched her. Lynette
automatically recoiled.
“God, now you’re bleeding, too,” the
man said. “Better let me carry her inside. . . .”
Jill looked slightly crazed with her
unkempt auburn hair and her too-tight black tee and purple pajama
pants. She practically pushed Rachel out of the way to tend to her
son. “What happened?” she demanded to know, grabbing him by the
wrist. She examined his hands. “Who did this?”
“We were just playing!” Darren sobbed.
“The dirt had glass in it. . . .”
Jill rushed Darren to her house at the
end of the block.
Once inside Lynette’s house, the
stranger propped Dakota on the kitchen counter near the sink. Molly
sat Carson down in a chair at the breakfast table. She carefully
peeled off his jacket and checked the scrape on his arm from when
he fell. It wasn’t too bad. She kept telling him that he would be
all right, and he calmed down a little. His jacket got the worst of
it. Then she looked at his hands. Past the blood and dirt, she
could see about three little pieces of glass in one hand, and two
in the other. His right-hand index finger had a bad cut on it.
“We’ll need some tweezers, Lynette,” she announced.
Running water over some paper towels,
Lynette didn’t seem to hear her past Dakota’s incessant screams.
The stranger held the little girl’s arms down while Lynette cleaned
off her scratched, filthy face.
Molly had a pretty good idea of what
must have happened. Obviously, the kids were in the vacant lot
again, scooping up dirt balls to hurl at passing cars. They must
have stumbled upon a patch of dirt with broken glass scattered
about.
Molly glanced over at Rachel, standing
in the doorway to Lynette’s kitchen, wringing her hands. “Do you
need some antiseptic?” she asked, over Dakota’s sobbing. “I have
Neosporin at home. . . .”
Lynette didn’t seem to be listening.
She put down the wet paper towel and reached for her daughter.
“You’re scaring her,” she snapped at the man. “I’ve got her now.
There, there, sweetie . . .”
“That’s Lynette’s way of saying thank
you,” Molly murmured to the man. Lynette didn’t seem to catch the
remark. Molly led Carson to the sink and ran his hands under the
water.
Lynette turned toward her. “Did you do
this?” she hissed.
Molly frowned at her. “Of course not,
my God. . . .”
“You’re always complaining about the
kids playing in that lot. Maybe you decided to do something about
it—”
“Lynette, I wouldn’t plant broken glass
in there. Give me a break.”
Yet Molly wouldn’t have been surprised
if someone whose car had been pelted by dirt balls often enough had
scattered the glass in that spot—perhaps someone on the cross
street. Or maybe some slob had just tossed a bunch of bottles out
of a car passing by the lot.
Lynette turned to Rachel and the man.
“I’ve got it under control, people. I’m fine. You can go
now.”
“Well, you’re welcome, and it was
awfully nice meeting you,” Rachel said, with a jaunty little
salute. “We’ll see ourselves out.”
The blond-haired stranger just looked
baffled as he sheepishly followed Rachel out the door.
“Lynette, that was our new neighbor,
Rachel Cross,” Molly said, rinsing Carson’s hands under the cold
water. With her fingernails, she carefully picked out some of the
bits of glass. The bleeding wasn’t bad, but Carson kept squirming.
“And the man was a total stranger who stopped to rescue your
injured children. He got his jacket all bloody carrying your
daughter around, and all you did was snap at him like he was your
indentured servant. I know you’re under duress, but really, a
thank-you might have been nice.”
“I’m pretty sure what this is all
about,” Lynette whispered, rocking Dakota in her arms. “Well, I’m
sorry, but I felt it was my duty to talk to that police detective
the other night. I wasn’t looking to get you in
trouble.”
“You didn’t get me into trouble,” Molly
said. “So don’t worry about it.” She gently dabbed Carson’s hands
with a paper towel. “He’s going to need some antiseptic on this
scrape from when he fell. . . .”
“So—you expect me to believe you’re not
upset?” Lynette pressed. “And you’re not the one who called
me?”
“What are you talking about?” Molly
asked, concerned. “What call?”
Lynette quickly shook her head.
“Nothing, forget it. I—I can carry on from here.” She nodded toward
the door. “Thank you, Molly.”
Her tone sounded more like a
fuck you than a thank
you. But Molly just let it go. She needed to get home to
Erin. She quickly dried off her hands and then headed for the door.
Outside, she found Rachel standing at the end of the Hahns’
driveway. “Are the kids okay?” Rachel asked.
Molly nodded tiredly. “Where did that
man go?”
“Oh, he slinked off into the sunset
with his tail between his legs.” She nodded toward Lynette’s house.
“Well, I’m not too crazy about her. I can’t believe she actually
accused you of cutting up her kids. Who would do something like
that? And the other one—with the chubby kid who looks like Pugsley
on The Addams Family—she practically gave me
a full body check to get at her kid. I guess I shouldn’t judge them
during a situation like this.”
“Oh, you’ll find once you really get to
know them—”
“That they’re both bitches?” Rachel
finished for her.
Molly laughed.
“Seriously,” Rachel said. “I think
you’re the only nice person on this block. I mean, look over there
at that one.” She nodded toward the Nguyens’ house. “After all the
screaming and commotion, it was enough to wake the dead. You’d
figure any normal person would offer to help—or at least be curious
about what happened. But she didn’t even bother to step
outside.”
Molly noticed Natalie in the
second-floor window. She was slouched in a rocker with one leg over
the chair arm. It looked like she was reading a
magazine.
He glanced in his rearview mirror at
the turnoff to Willow Tree Court.
He’d known beforehand that it was a
cul-de-sac. Lynette Hahn had told him—on the TV news, when she’d
talked to reporters in front of her dead friend’s former residence:
“We’re on a cul-de-sac here. Angela moved from one
cul-de-sac to another. You never think anything like this will
happen to someone you know, someone you care about and love. . .
.”
The brief news clip hadn’t given him a
very good idea of the street’s layout. It wasn’t until last night,
when he’d done a brief survey, that he realized most of the houses
on the street were at the edge of a forest. He liked that. And the
vacant lots—two of them with half-built houses—gave him so many
places to hide while he studied the habits of the
residents.
Of course, the house that piqued his
interest the most was the Dennehys’. Angela’s ex-husband seemed
like the most logical suspect in the Alder Court murders. The man
in the driver’s seat intended to find his copycat—which meant
watching the house and following around the
ex-husband.
With Willow Tree Court behind him now,
he studied the road ahead. It was starting to get dark. He switched
on his headlights.
He glanced down at his beige jacket—at
the blood on his sleeves.
Lynette Hahn’s little brat had bled on
him. That was what he got for being a hero. He wondered if the
broken glass scattered through that lot had been planted there on
purpose. Perhaps someone had a grudge against Lynette and her
children. Did the same person have a grudge against Angela
Dennehy?
Maybe he wasn’t the only one with a
score to settle on Willow Tree Court.
He rather liked the cul-de-sac. He’d
already been inside the Hahns’ place. He thought about coming back.
Or maybe he’d find a way to get inside one of the other homes—a
night visit.
He glanced at the stains on his sleeves
again.
Funny, he was usually so careful when
he left a cul-de-sac. He hardly ever had a speck of blood on
him.