Rachelle McCalla - Twin Threat Christmas

Debbi’s eyes widened, and she clamped her mouth shut.

“Something’s going on.” Eric lifted the laptop, pulled the kitten quilt out from underneath it and explained briefly, “I’m nearly positive that’s Vanessa Jackson downstairs.”

“Eric, no.” Debbi’s voice fell into the chiding tone she’d used long before when he’d vowed to go out searching one more time. “She’s been declared—”

“I know.” Eric didn’t want to hear the words again. “But nobody ever found out what happened to her. All I know is, Vanessa was my friend. I’ve got to help my friend.”

Debbi grabbed his arm as he stepped toward the bedroom door. “Even if it means aiding a known criminal?” She showed him the cell phone she held in her hand. “I was about to call the police.”

Eric sucked in a breath, his conscience in sudden conflict. Any other time, he’d say it was the right thing to do. “If Vanessa wanted to go to the police, she’d have done it already.”

“So we let her kill us in our sleep?”

“She’s not going to hurt us. Not in front of her kids.” He’d seen enough of the way the woman interacted with the girls to know she was purposely protecting them. That she was used to protecting them. But how far had she gone to protect them?

Debbi cut off his thoughts. “That didn’t stop her from killing her husband.”

“We don’t know what happened.” Eric wasn’t sure he wanted to know, exactly. He could guess at a few things, but all of them involved the kind of ugliness and hurt he wouldn’t wish on anyone, certainly not on the girl he’d cared for so strongly. “We should at least wait and hear her story. Can you wait that long?”

“How long will that be?”

“Give me an hour, maybe two. If she won’t tell us what’s going on, then you can call the police.”

“Fine.” Debbi flashed him the look she always gave him when he outfished or outmaneuvered her. Her final words floated after him on a sigh as he headed back down the stairs. “Although I don’t see why she’d let us live once we know what she’s up to.”

* * *

“Mommy, the kitten quilt.”

“I’m going to look for it.”

“No, it’s there.” Abby pointed.

Vanessa turned to see Eric standing in the doorway, an uncertain look on his face, kitten quilt in hand. “Ah. Thank you.” She accepted the quilt, which solved one tiny problem while introducing various others.

Her first priority from the moment the shadow of Virgil’s Land Rover had darkened the basement walls had been to get her girls tucked safely into bed at this cabin. But she hadn’t expected anyone to be there, certainly not Eric, the friend she’d long ago wished would be more than a friend, whose presence complicated everything. She felt a stab of guilt as she avoided looking him in the eye, instead focusing her attention on tucking the quilt securely around her daughters on the double-size lower bunk.

“Good night, Mommy.” Abby and Emma effectively dismissed her, snuggling in under the blanket as though they were on one of the countless innocent visits she and her sister had made to the cabin a generation before. She’d prayed for something like this for them—but not this way, not going through what they’d been through, or what yet lay ahead.

“Good night.” There was nothing more to do or say. She couldn’t put off facing Eric any longer.

She closed the door behind her and stepped toward the living room, deciding as she did so to ask questions first, to play offense instead of defense and maybe put off answering too many questions until she knew a bit more about what was going on.

Eric stood in the middle of the cabin’s great room, near the table that separated the open kitchen from the sofa and television on the other side.

She glanced at him only briefly, saw confusion and maybe even anger on his face, and quickly looked away, taking in all that had changed and all that had stayed the same in the cabin. Her grandmother’s knitted afghan still topped the sofa, but it was a newer sofa. Some of the pictures on the walls were the same. Some had changed. The familiarity of it all made her want to sob with relief, but she held herself together. She had to. For the kids.

“So, you—” Eric started.

Vanessa remembered her plan and cut off his question quickly. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s my place.”

“No, it’s not. It’s mine.”

“Alyssa sold it to me.”

“So my grandfather—”

“He died. Six years ago.”

She’d told herself that much was likely. Her grandfather was old, and his health had been declining rapidly, but the words still hit her like one of Jeff’s controlling blows.

And just like in the early days when Jeff hit her, Vanessa fought back. “So Alyssa sold you her half? Half the cabin was supposed to go to me.”

“Your sister sold me both halves.”

“She can’t sell my half—”

“She can. You were declared legally dead.” Eric took a step toward her. “What’s going on, Vanessa? Or should I call you Madison?”

Vanessa pinched her eyes shut at the words, which struck her like another blow. “How do you know—”

“It was on the news.”

“What was?”

Eric opened his mouth, looked toward the ceiling and made a resigned noise in his throat. “Maybe you should just watch it yourself. I can find it online. But first—what happened to the baby? Sammy? He wasn’t in the vehicle.”

Vanessa heard real concern, maybe even fear in Eric’s voice, almost enough to drown out her own terror over what the news might have to say. “I left him with my sister.”

“Alyssa knows you’re alive, then?”

Much as she’d have liked to confirm his words, she knew it wouldn’t be entirely honest to do so. “She’ll figure it out. I need to see that newscast.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Eric climbed the steps and returned with a laptop, which he set on the table. The website was already up on the screen.

“Debbi had it open,” he explained quietly as the broadcast began to play.

Vanessa reached past him to adjust the volume, just loud enough for her to hear without risking the girls overhearing anything from the other side of the bedroom door. She’d made too many sacrifices to preserve their innocence, to let it be destroyed now.

“Authorities are asking everyone in the Chicago region to be on the lookout for this vehicle, driven by Madison Nelson of Barrington, who is believed to have shot her husband dead before driving through the back wall of their garage with their three children in the vehicle.”

“Dead,” Vanessa repeated softly. She’d expected it from the moment the Land Rover pulled into the driveway. Still, hearing the words, seeing the images of the house where she’d been held captive for so long, made her tremble.

Pictures flashed across the screen—her home, the prison where she’d been held, surrounded by yellow police tape. The broken-out back wall of her garage. The vehicle, which was now parked outside. Pictures of her children and a particularly unflattering photograph of her, which had been taken mere minutes after she’d given birth to Sammy after a grueling labor.

But the most horrifying thing wasn’t the pictures. It wasn’t even the fact that Jeff was dead.

“They think I killed him? Why would they think that?”

No sooner had she voiced the question than Virgil appeared on the screen, saying horrible things about her, voicing ugly motives made all the more terrifying because, to anyone who didn’t know her, they would sound plausible. And no one really knew her, not anymore. So everyone would think Virgil’s lies were true.

“You didn’t kill him?” Eric’s voice behind her was soft, even cautious.