Билл Пронзини - In an Evil Time

Cassie nodded and went away. She was much better with the Doberman than he was; Fritz was well trained but trusted her more than anybody else. Her veterinary training. Animals responded to her instinctively. He swung around to pour another drink; felt his stomach quiver and changed his mind. At the back of the house, the barking stopped. Pretty soon Cassie returned.

Her first words then “Where were you tonight?”

“A business meeting, I told you that.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“What makes you think I’m lying?”

“Your cell phone. Why was it switched off?”

“I didn’t know it was. Must’ve pushed the button by accident.”

“Dammit,” she said, “you’re up to something.”

“No.”

“Something drastic. I can feel it.”

“No.”

“You’d better tell me. I have a right to know.”

“Cass, for God’s sake.”

“Whatever we do, any of us, it has to be legal. It has to make sense.”

“Make sense,” he said bitterly. “Get a restraining order, buy a guard dog, take a self-defense class, alert the neighborhood watch, keep a log of drive-bys, save all correspondence, record all phone calls, keep your cell phone handy at all times, join a support group. Has any of that made sense? It hasn’t stopped him and it won’t stop him.”

“Angela is talking again about going away,” Cassie said. “Changing her name, starting a new life. She’s serious this time.”

“Does that make sense? He’ll hunt her down wherever she goes if it takes him the rest of his miserable life—”

“It’s the only choice I have left, Daddy.”

Angela had come downstairs and into the living room so quietly they hadn’t realized she was there until she spoke. Robe, slippers, her short hair lank and uncombed, her face scrubbed and colorless. Movements slow, listless. Twenty-five years old, pretty, she’d always been so pretty, the slender, wheat-blond image of Cassie at that age. Now she looked haggard, less youthful than her mother at forty-six — sharper lines around the mouth and eyes, the eyes themselves, once so full of life, faded and glassy from the constant strain. Rakubian’s marks, deeper and more permanent than the cuts and bruises she’d worn like a badge of shame when she first came home.

Angela. His little girl. The ideal daughter — he’d said that to people while she was growing up, with pride and in all seriousness. Such a happy child, always laughing, full of questions, interested in everything. Never rebellious or troublesome, as Eric had been as a teenager. Never any problems until the summer after her high school graduation, when she’d taken up with Ryan Pierce and lost her head and her virginity and ended up pregnant with Kenny. And even that hadn’t been so bad; the kid had married her voluntarily, and if he’d been too immature to hold down a steady job and care for a family, then been a deadbeat father for more than a year after the divorce, at least he was neither abusive nor crazy. She’d have been all right if she’d gone on to college after the split with Pierce, let Cassie and him raise her son until she got her degree and found a teaching position. But no. Trying so hard to be independent, insisting on paying her own way, working days and going to school nights... that damn secretarial job in San Francisco, Rakubian and his superficial charm and lavish attention, the quick and impulsive rebound marriage. One huge mistake that had put her life, Kenny’s life in jeopardy...

“Daddy, don’t look at me that way.”

He realized he’d been staring. He went to her, hugged her, stroked her hair. “Dog wake you, baby?”

“No. I wasn’t asleep. I heard you drive in.” She stepped out of his embrace, gave him a wan smile. “You look like you’ve had a pretty rough night too.”

“Never mind about me. Think about yourself.”

“That’s all I have been thinking about. Kenny and myself. This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I pretty much made up my mind yesterday. We can’t go on living like this, terrified all the time, never knowing what David will do next. I have to do what’s best for both of us.”

“Running away isn’t the answer.”

“It might be. It’s a hope, anyway. If we stay here... David meant what he said tonight. He’ll kill us, and nobody can stop him.”

I can stop him, Hollis thought. I will stop him.

Cassie said, “He’ll find you, no matter where you go.”

“Not with help from NOVA and Stalking Victims Sanctuary. They can arrange a new identity for us, a place to live, and a job for me. He won’t find us. I have to believe that.”

“But you can’t ever be sure he won’t. You know he’d never give up, and he has plenty of money, resources...”

“At least we’ll have a halfway normal life again.”

“You say that now,” Hollis said, “but it won’t be normal or anything like normal. Looking over your shoulder every time you go out on the street, jumping every time the phone or doorbell rings or you hear a strange noise. You’d never be free of fear.”

“ This kind of fear is worse. I can’t breathe, I feel like I’m suffocating right now.”

She moved to the couch, slumped down on it with her knees together, her hands palms up in her lap. So young, sitting there like that. And so old. He felt as though he were choking, too. On love and rage as well as anxiety.

“We’d never see you again,” Cassie said. “Either of you. I couldn’t stand that.”

“You will see us. We’ll find a way to keep in touch, get together when we’re sure it’s safe.”

“It’ll never be safe enough. And you wouldn’t dare phone or write—”

“You’re forgetting e-mail. The support organizations have access to secure sites for message forwarding. Please don’t keep trying to change my mind, it’s only going to make things more difficult for all of us.”

Cassie glanced at Hollis, then went to sit beside her. “Where would you go? You can’t just pack up your car and start driving without a destination in mind.”

“I have a destination in mind.”

“Aunt Celia’s?”

“Mom, we’ve been over and over that. Aunt Celia and I don’t get along, you know she doesn’t approve of me. I don’t care if she is your sister, she can be a bitch sometimes, and Uncle Frank lets her walk all over him. Besides, David knows about them, knows they live in Cedar Rapids. It’s the first place he’d look.”

“Just for a few days...”

“Only as a last resort.”

“Where, then? What destination?”

“Well... Boston.”

“For heaven’s sake, why Boston?”

Angela hesitated before she said, “It’s about as far from Los Alegres as you can get. And a big city, a place to get lost in until I can make arrangements for someplace even more secure.”

Hollis said, “You’re hiding something.”

She started to deny it, hesitated again, and then sighed and said, “It was Eric’s idea.”

“Eric?”

“He knows somebody at Cal Poly, another student whose folks have an apartment they don’t use very often near downtown Boston. He’s trying to set it up so Kenny and I can stay there two or three weeks.”

“I thought we agreed to keep your brother out of this as much as possible.”

“I couldn’t help it, Daddy. I didn’t go to him. He called yesterday, while I was here alone. I tried to downplay how bad things are, but he kept probing. I couldn’t lie to him even if I wanted to. He knows me too well.”

“And he offered up this Boston idea.”

“Yes.”

“How upset was he?”

“He wasn’t, not the way you mean. He really isn’t as hot-headed as he was before he went away to college.”