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Tell him I hope he feels better.
Athena nods.
Walk the dog and clean up after him.
Athena rolls her eyes. She loves Leaf, but she hates picking up his shit, finds the heat of it through the plastic bag disconcerting.
Mom leaves, and Athena goes back to her computer for another ten minutes or so, then takes a shower and gets dressed and makes herself a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Leaf follows her around the kitchen, sits by her feet as she eats, looking up at her occasionally, expectantly. He knows they’re going for a walk.
So they go for the walk, and that’s when Athena sees the car, a four-door blue Toyota, just parked down the block. She sees it but doesn’t think anything of it, only that there’s someone behind the wheel apparently talking on the telephone. Big deal. On the way back, after Leaf has done his business and she’s got a bag of crap in her free hand, the car’s gone.
Athena takes care of the trash, makes sure there’s food and water in Leaf’s bowls, and then gets her bike from the garage. It’s an absolutely beautiful day, no clouds, and not too hot, either. She puts on her helmet and rides down the Island Line Trail, arriving at Nunyuns a little after ten in the morning. Locks up her bike and steps into a cloud of baked delights, the heavy scents of spice and yeast. She buys two cinnamon buns to go, and it’s easy, because they know her there, so there’s none of the difficulty Athena sometimes has when she’s out alone. She’s unlocking her bike when she thinks she sees the same Toyota parked across the street. She isn’t sure, though, because she didn’t look at the license plate this morning, and when she thinks of it now, the car is already pulling out and turning off Champlain Street and onto North.
Athena puts the Kryptonite lock back into its holder on her bike, fastens her helmet once more. She looks around. She thinks about Dad, what he said about knowing who is around and knowing where to go and knowing how to get out and knowing where to hide and where to get help.
Around her, there are people. This, she thinks, is not useful, but she has a good memory, and she tries to study their faces without being too obvious that that’s what she’s doing. Some of the faces she’s seen before, around town, and she figures they’re safe enough.
Where to go? Well, this is Burlington. She’s maybe six blocks north of downtown right now; it’s not as if she couldn’t find help in any direction she chose.
How to get out? See above, Athena thinks.
Where to hide? Too many places to count, beginning with inside Nunyuns. So that’s definitely covered.
Where to get help? That makes her grin. There’s a Burlington PD black-and-white coming down Champlain even as she looks.
Athena tells herself she’s being paranoid, and then throws her leg over the bike and takes hold of the paper bag and the handlebars together, starts pedaling along North until she gets to Union, where she turns south. She’s careful at the turn, looking all around, but then she’s always careful on her bike, always snatching glances over her shoulder for traffic that might be coming up from behind.
She doesn’t see the Toyota anywhere. Or, more precisely, she doesn’t think she sees that Toyota anywhere.
She loops around on Hickok Place, then turns north again onto Converse Court, and near the end of the street she hops off her bike and walks it up the driveway, leans it against the side of the house beneath a massive maple, the shade so sharp there’s a moment of blindness before her eyes adjust. She goes to the front door, hits the doorbell, imagines the light flashing inside, and then it opens and Joel is standing there, grinning. The surgery had been minor and the doctors hadn’t had to open him up to do it. Athena thinks he looks good, but she’s thought he looks good ever since they met, back when she first started at Hollyoakes.
Cinnamon buns, she tells him.
Awesome.
They eat their cinnamon buns and hang out in the family room for a while, playing video games and then just talking before doing anything else. Both of Joel’s parents are at work, and his brother is away at summer camp, so they’ve got the house to themselves, and eventually they do what teenagers do when they’re alone, unsupervised, and in love. They’ve talked about having sex, but neither of them is ready for it, they’ve agreed. Athena’s thought about going to the Planned Parenthood on Saint Paul Street, just in case, but she hasn’t gotten up the nerve to actually do it yet.
She’s rethinking that choice when she leaves Joel just before three that afternoon, her lips swollen and chapped from making out for almost two hours straight. She climbs back onto her bike feeling almost sick but not quite, an aching longing that isn’t necessarily between her legs but isn’t entirely in her breast and stomach, either. Maybe it’s because Joel’s still recovering from his hospital stay, but everything they did they did slowly, and when she took off her shirt for him and he took off his for her, she can still feel the extraordinary pleasure of warm skin touching warm skin. He held her breasts as though they were made from crystal, and she had to put her hands on his to assure him he wasn’t hurting her, the sharp contrast between her pale and his dark skin beautiful to her. She felt him through his jeans, had wanted to actually touch him there, for real, and she thinks he wanted her to do it, too.
Athena gets her bike onto Pearl Street, heading toward the lake, thrilling at the thought of being in love. She wonders if Mom thinks they’ve already done it, because she so clearly knows they’re together, and she finds herself thinking about her parents, if they could’ve ever felt the way she’s feeling right now. She can’t imagine it.
She’s forgotten entirely about the blue Toyota by the time she comes off the Island Line Trail and eventually finds her way back to Edinborough Drive and home. She hops off the bike and wheels it around to the back of the garage, heads inside, and is almost immediately tackled by Leaf, who’s heard her coming and greets her, snuffling and licking her hands. She gives him a good scritch, and her phone vibrates, and there’s a text from Joel.
I love you
She replies:
Ur just horny
that 2
I love you 2
She knows she’s smiling and can’t stop. She takes Leaf outside, grabbing the ratty tennis ball they use for playing fetch. It’s been gnawed and slobbered almost smooth. She tosses, and he retrieves, and they do this around the front yard for almost twenty minutes before Athena sees the black Mazda, just sitting there, up the block. Not a blue Toyota, not in the same place, and even from here she can see it has Vermont plates. But she can’t remember seeing a black Mazda on this street before.
This time, when she throws the ball, she throws it in that direction, harder than before. The ball bounces, rolls, and Leaf tears after it, and Athena trots after them both.
There’s someone in the black Mazda. Someone who looks like he’s talking on the telephone.
Leaf has the ball, is running back to her, and she takes it from his mouth, soggy and slimy, pivots, and chucks it hard back toward the yard. Leaf tears off in pursuit, and she follows him, forces herself to do it slowly. She finds the urge to look over her shoulder, back toward the black Mazda, almost impossible to resist, somehow fights it until she’s on the porch, has opened the door. She turns to summon the dog, and that gives her a good excuse to look back to the street, and the black Mazda is exactly where it was, and then it’s moving, and she and Leaf both watch as the car rolls past.
Athena could swear it’s the same person behind the wheel, the same person she saw that morning.
The car disappears.
Athena stands in the open doorway, thinking. She tells herself she’s overreacting. She tells herself that she knows where to go and what to do and where to hide and who to call for help. She tells herself she has no reason to be afraid. She knows there’s a shotgun in the closet with the towels, and that it’s loaded, and that Uncle Jorge and her dad both made sure she knows how to use it.
She texts her mother.
where r u
The response vibrates in her
hand perhaps a dozen seconds later. That’s fast for Mom, and Athena thinks she must’ve had the phone in her hand.
Office. Home at 5.
comin to meet u
Everything ok?
kk
I don’t know what that means.
ok
She glances up at the street again, seeing no strange cars, no strange people, seeing nothing much at all, in fact. Most of the time, Athena doesn’t mind that she’s deaf, doesn’t really even think about it. It’s what she is, it’s her, it’s all she’s known as far back as she can remember. But times like this?
Times like this, she really wishes she could hear the sound of a car coming down the street.
She finds Leaf’s leash, the dog going bonkers the moment he realizes what she’s doing, and she motions him to stay. Clips him on, and they step out, and she locks up behind her. She checks the street again, then cuts across the backyard, then into trees so thick it’s like a compacted forest. When she emerges, she’s on Sunset Cliff, and she looks both ways, scanning for the black Mazda and the blue Toyota, and she doesn’t see either.
She thinks that means she’s safe.
Chapter Eighteen
JORDAN WEBBER-HAYDEN holds the gun in her hand and waits for the woman and her child to return home.
The gun is a Walther PPQ M2 and holds eleven rounds, one of them chambered and ready. She bought it within an hour of her conversation with her Lover from a gun store in Alexandria, along with a box of .40 S&W ammunition, using her ID. As Virginia requires neither a waiting period nor a permit for the purchase of a handgun, the longest part of the transaction was when the gentleman selling her the weapon had to call ATF to run her Form 4473. The check came back clean, the way she knew it would, because Jordan Webber-Hayden has never been convicted of a felony, has never done anything that would prevent her from lawfully possessing a firearm. She was back on the Capital Beltway within thirty minutes of entering the store, heading west toward I-95.
Jordan flexes her fingers around the grip, reawakening the memory of weapons training almost a decade old. It’s coming back faster than she’d have thought, the weapon already familiar in her hand.
She checks the clock on the microwave against the one on her wrist. It’s seven minutes to three in the afternoon, and from what her Lover has said, she can expect the woman and the girl to return shortly after five. She has just over two hours.
Two hours to consider what it is he wants her to do.
Two hours in which she could just walk away, leave everything behind, and not ruin the three lives she knows she is about to destroy.
It had been easier than she’d expected, getting into the house.
She’d found the place without difficulty. Her Lover had given her the address, and upon arriving Jordan had parked down the block, on the opposite side of the street. She’d killed the engine and pulled out her smartphone and spent the next twenty minutes pretending to look at that and not the street, the whole time watching the house and the traffic. There was almost no traffic at all, and nothing in the way of movement from the house.
Satisfied, she’d started the engine once more, driven away, turned, turned again, and ultimately parked four blocks away. She’d unpacked the Walther, loaded it, tucked it into her waistband at the small of her back, where her shirt would cover it, then gotten out of the car and taken her time with the walk.
When she reached the house, she’d headed straight to the front door and knocked as if she were expected. There’d been no answer, also as expected. She’d already noted the alarm-company decal on the window, peered through the glass to see the panel on the wall in the front hall, a single green light shining. She’d taken that to mean the system was working but not armed.
The garage was to her left, so she went around the side without pause, then through an unlatched gate and into the backyard, where she’d found the back door to the garage unlocked. Inside was everything one would expect, up to and including a workbench and a dust-covered Bowflex machine. The adjoining door into the house had been locked.
She had no lock picks, but she did have the tools from the bench, and for the next seven minutes she worked carefully and slowly, consciously trying to avoid marring the plate or the knob with any telltale scratches. Then the lock had surrendered, and she opened the door with her heart climbing, waiting for the trill of the alarm that never came.
There’d been a roll of old duct tape on the workbench, and she’d taken that, then locked the door behind her.
Jordan checks her watch again.
It’s now three minutes to four, and there has been no sound from the garage. She moves the Walther from her right hand to her left, picks up the mask she’s made from the watch cap she found in the front closet. It’s not a ski mask, but there were scissors in one of the kitchen drawers, and it was easy enough to cut the eyeholes. With its edges pulled down, it’s big enough to cover her chin. She fingers the mask, pokes her fingers through the holes she’s made for her eyes. She wonders if she should’ve cut one for her mouth.
She considers wiping down the scissors, going back through the house, and clearing her prints from every surface she’s touched, but it’s not a pressing concern; Jordan Webber-Hayden has never been arrested, never once had her fingerprints on file.
It’s a nice house, Jordan thinks. She wanders out of the kitchen, gun still in one hand, the mask now in the other, and into a comfortable family room with a big-screen television and a stereo stack. In another ground-floor room is a home office, bills and paperwork of everyday life. She thinks it’s peaceful here. She could live in a house like this. She heads upstairs, steps into the master bedroom. It’s very Laura Ashley, but a little off, and Jordan imagines money is tight in this home, but they’re making do with what they can. She takes a moment to look at the photographs in their frames on the dresser, at this family of three. There’s an adjoining master bathroom, and she notes the abundance of feminine products, the lack of masculine ones. She checks out the other bedroom on the floor, this belonging to the child. It’s a bedroom on the cusp, transitioning from childhood to adolescence.
She wonders if she and her Lover will ever make children. Until this moment, she has never considered it, and she is self-aware enough to know that she is thinking this now because of what she is here to do. She wants children, she realizes, and though they have never spoken of it, she feels, absolutely, that her Lover does not. He is her Lover; he is not a husband.
She heads back down the stairs, wondering about what might have been. She does not have to do this, she tells herself.
Then she hears the garage door opening, the grinding of the motor, the sound of the car. She puts the mask on and steps around the corner to the hall, out of sight. Jordan hears their voices before the door is open. They’re talking about dinner. The door falls closed, heavy, pushed, and the woman passes the open archway to the hall, not six feet from where Jordan is standing, a bag of groceries in her arm, sliding her purse down her other arm, sets both on the counter together. Her keys clatter on the tile. She’s shorter than Jordan, and older, in her late thirties or even early forties, black hair in a bob, a little on the heavy side. Jordan thinks her clothes are like the decor in the master bedroom—trying too hard.
“Go get cleaned up,” the woman says. “I’ll have dinner ready in fifteen minutes.”
The girl rounds the corner into the hall and sees Jordan and for a moment she has no idea what she’s looking at. From what her Lover said, Jordan knows the girl is twelve, but like her mother, she’s dressing to be something she isn’t.
The moment of shock breaks, the girl starts to take a step back, starts to open her mouth. Jordan moves forward before she can, takes hold of her by the throat, points the gun in her face. Pushes the girl back into the kitchen.
There’s the sound of glass shattering, and a strangled cry, and Jordan sees the woman turning away, lunging for the far counter.
“Don’t,” Jordan says.
“Let her go!” the woman says. “You fucking let her go or I will kill you.”
Jordan considers this. She needs them alive to do what her Lover requires, at least for now. In her hand, she can feel the girl shaking.
“Drop the knife,” Jordan says.
“Fuck you! I will end you! Let my daughter go!”
Jordan releases the girl, and the girl recoils, both her hands going to her throat. The moment she’s clear, her mother is moving, the knife high, and Jordan pivots inside the strike, slams her left forearm across the woman’s jaw, snapping her head back. The woman staggers, tries to right herself, and Jordan hits her in the face again, this time with her elbow. The woman hits the counter, collapses to the floor, landing hard on her behind, the knife clattering away. Blood is flowing from her nose and mouth.
In her periphery, Jordan sees the girl start to move, and she turns, bringing the Walther up again. The girl freezes, one arm already extended. Jordan points to the roll of duct tape on the counter.
“Take that, start tearing strips,” Jordan says.
She’s about to add that she doesn’t want to hurt them, either of them, when pain blasts along her right leg, out from the side of her knee, and she’s falling, has to put her free hand out to catch herself. She twists just as the woman kicks at her again, and the blow misses the joint and lands on the inside of Jordan’s thigh.
Jordan jerks back, trying to keep her feet, sees the woman is now pulling herself up, the blood still running from her nose. The girl is moving, too, again going for the knife on the floor, and in the way that adrenaline makes such realizations clear, Jordan thinks the girl is being stupid, that it would be much quicker to just grab another knife from the rack.