In Safe Hands (Search and Rescue #4)(132)
The horror of that thought snapped Jules out of her temporary paralysis. “Everyone, stay up here. No, wait.” There were no exits on the third floor. Jules made a frantic mental note to install some way to escape from the attic in the near future.
If she was getting hauled off to jail right now, though, that wouldn’t be necessary.
Wrestling her panicked thoughts back under control, she took a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering exhale. “Okay. Head for the kitchen and out the back door to the barn. Y’all can hide in there—or behind there, if it looks like it’s going to fall down on your heads.” She met Sam’s frantic gaze and tried to force a smile. “Maybe it’s just the welcome wagon.”
The doorbell rang again, longer and more insistently that time, and Jules started down the narrow stairs, her heartbeat hammering in her ears. The kids followed her, their tentative footsteps a heartbreaking contrast to the pounding joy they’d shown running up them just minutes earlier.
Did I do the wrong thing? Jules wondered, as her teeth found a raw spot on the inside of her lip. The sting wasn’t as painful as the rush of guilt, though. She’d taken her siblings from a life of affluence and, in exchange, forced them to live in fear, always hiding, always having to look over their shoulders.
“I don’t want to go back,” Dez said in a tiny voice as they descended the stairs to the main level.
“You won’t.” The resolute way Sam said the words, without a stutter, erased Jules’s doubts. Courtney might’ve been able to give them material things, but they’d have a better life with Jules, even if it was a life on the run.
At the base of the stairs, Jules turned toward the front door and then paused, looking sternly over her shoulder at the scared-looking group. “Whatever happens, you stay hidden. Got it?”
The younger three nodded, looking worried, but Sam sent her a tight-lipped frown that promised nothing. The doorbell rang for the third time, and she waved them toward the kitchen. Only when they disappeared through the doorway did she start to walk toward the front door, each step slower than the one before it.
The dirty stained-glass panel running the height of the door just revealed the vaguest of outlines. Jules could tell that whoever was out there was big, however—very, very big. She hoped the dim interior of the house hid her from whatever giant lurked on the porch, waiting for her to answer.
She took a deep breath and let it out as she stretched up onto her tiptoes so she could see out of the peephole. Jules blinked, her lashes brushing the door, and the figure on the porch came into wide-angle focus.
She stopped breathing, stopped thinking. All she could do was stare. The cops were there. She’d barely gotten the kids to their new home, and she’d already failed them. Her knees went watery and her vision was strange, putting a gray film over everything, including the officer’s nightmarish face, distorted by the peephole glass.
The world rocked a little, and she had to take a step back to catch her balance, cutting off her view of the cop.
This is it, she thought. Nausea flooded her and she swallowed hard. Her brain spun with images of jail and the kids going back to Courtney.
No. The complete unacceptability of the idea cleared Jules’s mind. There was no way she was going to allow that.
A heavy fist landed on the wood of the door, pounding several times, startling Jules and sending her skittering backward. Her heels hit the bottom stair, knocking her off balance so that she sat heavily on one of the steps. As her heart pounded in her ears, Jules gripped the banister spools and tried to think.
Should she reveal herself, walk outside and accept her fate, allowing Sam and the kids time to escape? Or should she not answer, delaying the inevitable? If she was arrested, Jules doubted that the kids would run. Well, they probably would run—right toward her, trying to defend their sister.
She’d keep quiet then, ignoring the knocking and the doorbell. It might not give them much time, but maybe Dennis could find them somewhere else, somewhere that was actually safe, somewhere the cops weren’t at her door within minutes of her and the kids’ arrival.
The thumps on the door stopped, and Jules held her breath. Was the cop leaving, or was he just going to get reinforcements? The shadow behind the glass shrank and then disappeared altogether. Jules stayed frozen, waiting for the next step—more footsteps on the porch, a voice from a megaphone telling her to surrender, the door splintering after a hit from a battering ram.
Instead, there was silence. For several long, long moments, all Jules could hear was the rasp of her anxious breaths. Then, there was the rough roar of a diesel engine turning over.
Confusion knotted her eyebrows. That didn’t sound like a squad car, or even a squad SUV. That was a truck—a big one. Pushing off the stairs, she took quiet, cautious steps to the door. The figure was gone, but a large object remained on the porch. Squinting, she tried to make it out, but the peephole didn’t give her a good enough view.
Biting the inside of her lip, she slowly, soundlessly turned the lock and opened the door a crack. Jules peered out just in time to see the rear of a florist’s box truck trundling down the driveway. Her gaze dropped to the object on the porch. It was a potted plant, wrapped in a bow with a card attached.
Her laugh rang out, and she clapped her hand over her mouth to mute the sound. Flowers. What she’d thought was a cop had actually been a delivery driver, complete with dark-blue uniform. Her heart drummed against her ribs with residual adrenaline, and she couldn’t stop laughing into her muffling hand.