J. Wachowski - In Plain View

His eyes were glassy. The unblinking stare curdled my stomach.

“Where’s Jenny?”

“She dropped the bat and ran.” He seemed embarrassed by that thought. “I guess I scared her. I didn’t mean to. Everything’s gotten so complicated.”

“Uh-huh. How’d you get in here, Pat?”

City girls always lock the door. In the back of my mind, I figured if he broke a window to get in, he was definitely dangerous. If he got in through some other means, he might still only qualify as an idiot with really bad boundaries.

When resisting the urge to panic, go with whatever rationale works.

Pat juggled the bat to his other hand and reached down into the pocket of his jeans. As he shifted, I realized the right-hand pocket of his jacket was bulging with something large and heavy.

“I have a key.” He tossed it on the kitchen counter. It was a twin to the one I carried.

“Oh. How’d you get a key?”

“Your sister gave it to me.”

“She did?” You smell like her. “You knew Angelina.”

Pat huffed, a sad, ironic sort of laugh. The bat swung from his fingertips, side to side like a pendulum. “Jenny didn’t tell. What a kid. What an amazing kid.”

Jenny. Pat’s intrigue went right out of my head. Where was Jenny? There were four ways out of the room: past me, past Pat, out the door or up the hall. I hadn’t heard a door open or close and my ears had been primed. She must have run up the bedroom hallway. I stepped that direction.

“The wacky-intruder thing is getting old. You and my sister were friends-I get it.” My sister’s taste in men sucked. “What do you want?”

“How did your TV story turn out? What did you say about Tom and everything?” He perked up as he said it, sounded more like the Mr. Vegas I’d met before.

“Good. It turned out good.” I eased another step toward the hall.

“I heard about that fire. Heard you had your camera there. Did you put that in there? About the fire at the Jost farm?”

“Some. Yeah. Where were you that night?”

“I wasn’t on call. I was busy. Somewhere else.” He stacked the denials one on top of another.

“You know Rachel? Or her dad-Tom’s dad?”

“No. Not really. A little. She’s the one who got all Tom’s stuff.”

So much for my Tom-Rachel-Pat love triangle theory.

“Hey, did they ever find a note?” he rambled on. “A note from Tom? I was just wondering.”

“No. No note. Were you hoping they would?”

It would be hard to swing the bat in the narrow width of the hall. I took a giant step back, into the hall so Pat had to pass me to get to Jenny. He followed.

“What exactly did you say about Tom on that TV show?”

“You’ll have to wait until next Monday. Seven o’clock central time. Why don’t you watch? See for yourself.”

“Can’t wait that long.”

“Why not?” I asked.

The outer layer of my skin began to tingle with the rush of adrenaline. I backed into the hall. It was dark. Had Jenny hit the lights as she ran by? There was indirect light from the other room, but the black-and-white photos of ancestors my sister had hung along the hall-Momma, Daddy, Papa, Gran, all dead, all gone-darkened the passage with the fierce faces of family ghosts.

Pat followed me, step for step, into the hall. “I’ve got to go now. Jenny’s coming with me this time.”

The words this time rolled through my head crushing all other thoughts.

“Don’t worry. I’ll watch out for her.” He stopped advancing on me. Took off his baseball cap and rubbed a palm over his scalp. Hat in hand, he added, “I won’t put her out on the road side again, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Hat went back on, backward. There was nothing shading those glassy eyes now. He was hopped up on something.

“You took Jenny off the playground.” Everything clicked. “She knew you, because you’d been dating her mom. That’s why she went with you.”

His words popped into my head, Jenny didn’t tell.

“You threatened her, didn’t you?” I swallowed the you son of a bitch. The guy was still gripping my Louisville slugger by the cap end.

We were halfway down the hall and running out of real estate. There were three bedrooms at the end. I had a good idea which one Jenny had chosen to hide in.

“You threatened a little eight-year-old girl. What happened to ‘prevent and protect’?”

Pat propped the bat in the notch of the bathroom door molding. Big, strong firefighter didn’t need a softball bat to get what he wanted from a woman in a bathrobe.

“Don’t shout,” he cautioned me. “You’ll scare her.”

“I’m not the one she ran away from.”

“Aren’t you?”

The flip side of knowing how to charm someone was knowing how to crush them. His words closed my throat. It felt like I’d fallen from a great height and landed flat on my back.

“Aunt Maddy?” a small voice called behind me. Jenny’s bedroom was on my left, which meant she was either in my room or her mother’s old bedroom.

“Jenny?” Pat called. “It’s me. I’m sorry I scared you, honey. Will you come out so we can talk?”

“No!” I found my voice with a shout. “Stay where you are, Jenny. Don’t come out.”

“That doesn’t help.” Pat jabbed his finger at me, less than three feet from my face.

I lost it. I backhanded him at the wrist, knocking his arm into the wall. His jacket was swinging heavily on that side, and the over-burdened pocket of his coat hit the wall half a second after his hand. There was a tearing shriek as the lining of his pocket split on impact. A large halogen flashlight dropped to the ground.

It was a Scooby-Doo moment: everybody looks down, everybody looks up. Maddy looks surprised. Pat looks guilty. Oh, those meddlesome kids.

“Ainsley told me he saw a light in the farmhouse the night of the fire.” The words popped right out of my mouth. “That was you.”

“I had to know if Tom left anything else.” Pat grabbed the flashlight and stuffed it back in the opposite jacket pocket. “Any more surprises. Your camera boy came to the firehouse and told us all about the bank manager’s visit to the farm, all about the papers being delivered. I thought maybe Tom left a note. That’s all. Shit’s sake, he left enough phone messages. The stupid ass.”

“The fire?”

Pat looked disgusted. His Sox cap came off again; he was sweating now. He wiped his face with the inside of his elbow and propped his butt against the wall as if he needed to rest before putting his hat back on. I couldn’t tell if he was tired, weak or strung out.

“It was an accident,” Pat said. “Simple as that. How was I supposed to know the guy was making coffee in the middle of the night? I’ll tell you something-six months ago, I never could have believed Tom could be such a selfish asshole. Mr. Holier-than-Thou. Those magazines I put in his car were nothing. So what? He could have passed them around at the station and been a hero. No, not Tom! Here I am, busting my ass trying to improve the situation for everybody and all he does is fuck the whole thing up.” He rolled his eyes drama-queen style.

“You burned the Jost farm down-by accident?”

“Try and stay on track here, would you? Jenny and I are going someplace safe while you do something for me.”

“What?”

“You’re the one who likes finding shit. Find the bag that Gina hid from me.”

“What bag?”

He leaned toward me and smiled. “Like you don’t know. I promised I would make it right. But I’m not having a lot a luck here, so I think Jenny and I will take a little vaca-time and you can do the looking.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”