Kiss Of Evil

59

The fifth time she texts Jesse Ray she stops, halfway, defeated, her tears no longer an enemy. No one is going to save her. No one is going to wave a magic wand and keep her out of prison. This had gotten so bad, so fast, that everything she had worked for in the past two years seemed to be slipping away. If she had just been able to get the money into a trust for Bella, to show her father that the little girl’s future was secured, she might have had a life.

Jean Luc had told her to call no one, to stay inside her apartment until he came for her.

But she knows that if she can just get to her car, she will find the courage to drive down to the Justice Center, walk inside and start talking before she can stop herself.

She puts on her navy wool parka. In her right pocket she slips her Buck knife. In her left pocket is her pepper spray.

Keeping the lights off, she crosses the apartment, tiptoes through the small foyer, sidles up to the door. She checks that the security chain is on, the deadbolt turned. She looks through the peephole: just the fish-eye view of the hall, exactly the way it looks every time she gets paranoid and peers through it. Quiet, empty, monastic. She puts her ear to the door, listens. Nothing. Not even the hum of the elevators. She looks through the peephole again, then takes a step back, turns her deadbolt to the left and silently rotates the knob, opening the door an inch.

She is alone.

She steps through the door, locks it, eases her way to the stairwell, cringing at the sound of the squeaky hinge. A few moments later she steps into the small, deserted Cain Manor apartment lobby. Earlier, she had come home to find a pair of men working on the front doors. They told her that, due to the recent murder in Cain Park, they were putting in new, high security locks. The thought had made her feel a little better, but only a very little.

Now it no longer matters.

She glances around the empty lobby, then floats silently down the corridor and out into the rear parking lot.

The first thing she notices is the deep lavender moonlight on the snow. As she approaches her parking space, the light on her car returns a greenish cast to her eye, a color that makes her pause for a moment, disoriented, thinking it may not be her car. A glance at the license plate. It is her yellow Honda. Right where it is supposed to be. Then why is She stops in the middle of the thought, her mind tripping over an image that her heart doesn’t seem to want to process. She cannot understand why someone is sitting in the passenger seat of her car. She cannot understand why this person looks so familiar.

She cannot understand why Isabella is sitting in the passenger seat of her car.

It is Bella’s tam-o’-shanter, her round face, her dark curly hair. Yet, although most of her daughter’s face is obscured by shadow, one thing is clear to Mary, and that is this:

Her daughter is not moving.

“Bella!”

Mary sprints to the car, slipping on the ice, fumbling with the keys, a spike of raw terror in her heart. It seems like a full minute before she can get the key in the frozen lock, the frosted window now clouding with her breath, concealing her daughter’s tiny form.

She whips open the door and grabs her child from the front seat. Too hard, too light, not a child not a child not Isabella not Isabella The world stops. Relief washes over her in a huge hot wave, taking her legs out from under her. She falls to her knees.

It is not her daughter.

It is Astrid, her daughter’s big doll, the one she herself had sent by UPS for Isabella’s last birthday. Astrid wearing Isabella’s old clothes.

Release, first. Then confusion.

Then, a reprise of her fear.

Because there, in the plum-colored moonlight, pinned to the doll’s coat, is a directive that Mary has no trouble at all understanding, a square of white paper bearing a simple message:

Go back.