No Safe House

Thirty-eight Terry

I wasn’t expecting to see what I saw when I got to the house.

Tire tracks across the lawn, Cynthia’s car, door wide-open, nosed up to the house, Grace and her mother locked in an embrace on the front step.

Grace sobbing. The security alarm whooping.

I slammed on the brakes, left the car in the street, and ran to them. Grace saw me through watery eyes. “Dad!”

“Grace! Grace! Are you okay?” I asked her once, then at least five more times.

Cynthia used my arrival to pry herself free of Grace — not, I suspected, because she didn’t want to comfort her, but because she wanted to see where the man who’d been trying to get into the house had gone.

She ran halfway down the driveway, looking up the street into the distance.

“Shit,” she said.

“He didn’t hurt you, did he?” I said to Grace, hugging her, trying to be heard above the alarm.

“He didn’t get in,” she said. “Mom came. Almost ran him down.”

A woman who lived across the street, still in her housecoat, had stepped out of her house with a mug of coffee in her hand. She called over, “You okay?”

I shouted back, “We’re okay, thanks.”

“Should I call the police?”

Cynthia started to shout yes, but I stopped her with a firm shake of the head. “No, it’s okay!” I yelled. “We’ve got this.”

Cynthia shot me a look. “Are you kidding?” she said. She started walking toward me at full tilt. “Someone tries to break in and attack our daughter and you don’t want to call the police?”

“Let’s get inside,” I said. First thing I had to do was enter the code to stop the alarm from screeching. I didn’t know whether the alarm had been activated by the man getting the door open or Grace opening it herself when she saw her mother.

“What the hell is going on?” Cynthia asked.

She went to her car — the engine was still running — and reached in to shut it off and grab her purse. She had her cell phone in her hand.

“If you’re not calling the police, I will.”

“No, Mom, wait,” Grace said.

That got Cynthia’s attention. “What?”

“Please,” I said. “Let’s go inside. You may be right — we may have to call the police. But first I want to make sure Grace is okay.”

Her sobs had turned to sniffs. “I’m okay. I am. I told you.”

Cynthia took that as permission to make the call, but again I stopped her. “Please, not yet.”

We went into the house and closed the door, at which point the alarm, only annoying up to this point, became deafening. I went to the security panel, entered our four-digit code to cancel it. Once it was silenced, we could hear the phone was ringing. That’d be the security monitoring service. I ran to the extension in the living room and snatched the receiver off the cradle.

“Hello!” I said. “Alarm, right?”

“Is this Mr. Archer?” A man enunciating very carefully.

“It is.”

“Are you having an emergency?”

“Everything’s okay.”

“We need your password, Mr. Archer. Otherwise we will be dispatching the police.”

I was so flustered it took me a second to remember it. “Telescope,” I said. “Our password is telescope.”

“Okay,” he said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“We — we forgot the alarm was on and opened the door,” I said. “We’re very sorry.”

“Not to worry, Mr. Archer. The good news, your system’s working. You have a great day now.”

I put down the receiver and saw that Cynthia was back to holding Grace. My wife was looking at me fiercely.

“Why weren’t you here?” she asked.

“I was out for a few minutes,” I said.

“Doing what?”

I shrugged. “An errand.”

“To an appliance repair place?” she asked. “At seven in the morning?”

I looked at Grace. “Did you tell your mother where I was going?”

She shook her head.

I looked back at Cynthia. “Were you following me?”

She broke away from Grace and took a step toward me and pointed a finger. “You said you’d look after her. But something’s going on and I want to know what it is.”

“How about answering my question? Were you following me? Have you been spying on us?”

When Cynthia hesitated, Grace said, “Jeez, is that true, Mom? You’ve, like, got us under surveillance?”

Cynthia must have decided a good defense was a good offense. She bristled and said, “Good thing, too! If I hadn’t been, that man — he’d have gotten into the house!” Back to me. “And who was he? If you don’t want me calling the police, does that mean you know who he was?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Grace, you sure you’ve never seen him before?”

She shook her head.

“Could he have been the man in the house?” I asked.

“There was a man in our house?” Cynthia asked.

“Not our house,” I said.

“He might have been the guy,” Grace said, “but I don’t know. Even if it was him, how could he have a key, Dad?” she asked.

“Maybe he didn’t,” I said. “Maybe he had one of those, whaddya call ’em, lock-picking sets.”

“But it didn’t take him anytime at all. I heard a key go straight in and the lock started turning.”

“I saw him use a key,” Cynthia said. She looked at me. “Who did you give a key to?”

“No one,” I said. “Did you give a key to anyone?”

“Of course not.”

I looked at Grace. “Are you kidding?” she said. “You think I’m an idiot?” I gave her a look that suggested her last twelve hours made that a risky question.

I said, “Okay, the only people who have a key to this house are each of us, and Teresa.”

“Well, that sure wasn’t Teresa trying to break in,” Grace said.

“Why would someone have a key and want to get in here?” I asked. I was looking at Grace.

“Like you said. I’m a witness.”

Cynthia looked dumbstruck, trying to get her head around what we were talking about.

“Yeah,” I said. “But what are the odds the person who was in that house would have a key to ours?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I just — I don’t know, Dad.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Cynthia asked. “What the hell is going on?”

I took a second to compose myself, let the proverbial dust settle around us. I said, “We’ve got some trouble.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, Grace and I told her everything, from the beginning. We didn’t leave anything out. When Grace neglected a detail, I filled in a gap, and vice versa.

Cynthia, to her credit, mostly listened, asking only the occasional question, letting the story unfold. If it had been me hearing all this, I’d have been interrupting every ten seconds.

I finished by telling her where I’d just been, how I had hoped maybe I’d find Stuart Koch at home.

“So you still don’t know what happened to him,” Cynthia said.

We both shook our heads.

Grace said, “I know you probably want to chew me out and all that stuff, but Dad’s sort of done some of it, and right now I really have to go to the bathroom, so can it wait until I get back?”

Cynthia nodded.

As Grace got up from the table, her mother grabbed her arm and pulled her in to give her another hug. Grace wrapped her arms around her mother’s head and said, “I’m glad you’re home. Even if it’s just for a visit. And everything’s going to shit.”

Cynthia looked like she wanted to say something, but held back. All she said was, “Go.”

When Grace was gone, Cynthia looked at me.

“You could chew me out now instead,” I said.

She reached out and gripped my hand. “What a mess.”

“What’d Tommy Lee Jones say in that movie? ‘If it ain’t, it’ll do till the real mess gets here.’ Yeah, this is bad.”

“I think you’re right about getting her a lawyer. Pronto. We don’t know what’s coming.”

I nodded.

“But we’ve been through tough times before,” Cynthia said. “Thanks to me. My troubles nearly got us all killed.”

“It’s nice that we can take turns,” I said.

“You think that man at the door — that he was here to get Grace? That he was in that house and thinks she saw him?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Let’s say you’re right,” Cynthia said. “How could that person have a key to the house?”

Good question.

Cynthia speculated. “Maybe Grace — or you, or I — maybe we left our keys out somewhere, allowing someone to make a copy. You know, like when you leave your car keys with the dealership service department, or you give them to a valet and they’re hanging there at some restaurant where anyone could sneak off with them for a while.”

Except I was a schoolteacher and Cynthia worked for the health department. Okay, we had a cleaning lady, but we didn’t exactly throw our money around that way. “When was the last time you used the valet service at a hotel or restaurant?” I asked.

“Never.”

“Same here.”

“Maybe one of Grace’s friends? Got into her purse, took her key and copied it?”

“From the way Grace described the guy, it wasn’t a kid. It was someone my age.”

“But even if he got into the house,” Cynthia said, “he’d have had to contend with the alarm system. Soon as that went off, he’d have had to run.”

“He didn’t know we had one,” I surmised. “If he knew we had one, he’d have had to know the code to disable it.”

We were both quiet for a moment.

“Stealing a key and copying it is one thing,” Cynthia said. “But none of us would be dumb enough to give out the code.”

“Only people who know the code are you, me, Grace, and Teresa.”

“Second time her name has come up,” Cynthia said.

And again, we were both quiet.

“No,” I said. “I mean, even if it was Teresa, that she gave someone a key and told him the code, what would be the point? What have we got? We don’t have a security system to protect our valuables. We have it to protect ourselves, after what happened years ago. And that guy, when he was trying to get in, he figured no one was home. He rang the bell, he knocked, and Grace didn’t answer. So maybe he wasn’t coming in to attack her. He was coming in for some other reason. What would he steal? Your priceless jewelry?”

For the first time, Cynthia chuckled softly, despite everything.

“My rare coin collection?” I continued. “The thousands in cash that we keep stuffed under the mattress?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said, and her face grew dark. “I’m going to talk to Vince.”

“Oh yeah, that’s a plan. He loves us. When I saw him last night, he wasn’t any more friendly than when you and I visited him in the hospital years ago.”

“I’ve seen him,” she said.

“What? You mean, recently?”

Cynthia nodded. “Yeah. He visited me at the apartment.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, breaking my hand free of hers. “You’ve been seeing Vince?”

“I haven’t been seeing Vince,” she said, leaning back in her chair away from me. “But I’ve talked to him. I wrote to him after his wife died, sent a card. He spotted me driving around, followed me to the apartment, thanked me. And he apologized for how he treated us way back then.”

“I didn’t get my apology,” I said.

“I guess the card you sent got held up in the mail.”

I had no comeback for that.

“Anyway,” Cynthia said, “I want to talk to him. I think he’ll be more forthcoming with me than you.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

“No. I’ll do it alone. Besides, someone needs to be with Grace. All the time.”

I didn’t disagree.

I pressed my back against the chair and folded my arms across my chest. “So how long have you been keeping an eye on us?”

She bit her lip. “Since I left.”

“Wait a minute. You couldn’t be watching us all the time.”

“No. But most nights. I’d park around the corner. There’s a tree — you know the one, out front of the Walmsleys’ house?”

I nodded.

“It’s wide enough to hide behind. I can’t get to sleep unless I know you’re both home safe. Especially Grace. I could see her window, and sometimes I’d wait until she turned off her light, and then I’d go home.”

She swallowed. “What I wanted to do was just come in. I wanted to go up to her room and kiss her good night and turn off the light for her. But I guess, when you’re fourteen, you’re too old for your mother to do that.”

“I think she’d have been okay with it.”

“And then, after I’d done that, all I’d have wanted would be to slip into bed next to you.” She sniffed. “But then I’d drive back to the apartment. Until the next night, and I’d do it all over again.”

I should have known. I should have suspected from the very beginning that this was what she would do.

“Can you forgive me?” she asked. I uncrossed my arms, leaned forward, and took her hand.

I nodded. “For loving us? Yeah, I think so.”

I was about to give her a hug when we heard a scream from upstairs.

Grace.

Actually, not a scream. A shout. A single word: “Yes!”

Cynthia and I ran up the stairs and found her in her room, sitting on the bed, phone in hand, a smile on her face unlike any I had seen in some time.

“What is it?” I said, coming through the door first, Cynthia right behind me.

Grace looked up, and she was smiling.

“He’s okay!” she said.

“What?” her mother said. “Stuart?”

“He just texted me! He’s okay!”

She handed the phone to me and I held it so Cynthia could see the screen, too. We read:

Those messages had all been written this morning. Grace had sent a dozen others last night.

And then, just now, there was this:

Cynthia and I exchanged glances, then looked at Grace, who was beaming.

“This is, like, the best news ever,” she said.