Crash & Burn (Tessa Leoni, #3)(48)

“One I’d like to meet,” Kevin assured him.

“If that’s what it was about, they’d pick a hotel, someplace more . . . suitable. This feels more . . . Magnum, P.I.”

“Magnum, P.I.?”

“You know. Meet with the undercover investigator in the parking lot of the grocery store to receive the surveillance photos of your cheating spouse. That sort of thing.”

Kevin rolled his eyes, then gestured with his head toward their out-of-commission charge.

“We should take her home,” he said again.

But Wyatt just couldn’t do it. They were pushing their luck. With the case, with Nicky’s fragile mental state.

He still heard himself say, “Not just yet.”





Chapter 18




VERO IS IN the closet. She is wedged back as far as she can go, knees clutched tight against her chest, while the woman piles blankets on her.

“Don’t make a sound,” the woman orders, voice low, tone fearful. “He’s had a bad day; that’s all. Temper’s a little hot. So be good. Stay out of the way. Understand me, child?”

Vero nods. She’s afraid of the dark. She doesn’t want to be trapped alone in a cramped, smelly closet. But by now she understands there are worse things than abstract terrors. For example, why worry about the monster beneath the bed when a very real bogeyman sleeps on top of it?

I want to comfort her. I feel her growing dread as my own. But when I reach out my hand, nothing happens. I’m here, but I’m not here. I’m the outsider looking in. And I keep my attention on Vero because the woman . . . the woman hurts too much.

The woman steps back. She’s done the best she can. It won’t be enough; I know that. But at least she tried, and for a woman leading her life, that’s something.

Footsteps, down the hall. The sounding board of my life, I think. Footsteps thudding down corridors, menacing me.

The woman closes the closet door. Not all the way; she leaves a faint sliver of light because once Vero had panicked in the pitch-black and had started to scream. The man hadn’t liked that. He’d beaten them both until their faces were bloody and Vero had lost consciousness. The woman had had to wait until he finally rolled over, snoring loudly, before she could ease out of the bed and curl up around her daughter’s motionless form.

She’d held her all night long, rocking soundlessly, begging her baby girl not to die, because she was all she had, her only hope, her one bright light. Without her, she’d be lost in the dark, and though the woman couldn’t say it out loud, all of her life, she’d been afraid of the dark, too.

Vero had survived. Another night, another day, another week, another month. The woman survived, too, and so they rolled along in this seedy little apartment, both living in dread of footsteps down the hall.

Tonight, the man staggers into the bedroom. His shirt is already off, his hairy belly rolling over the waistband of his sagging jeans.

“Woman,” he roars, reaching for his belt. “Why the f*ck aren’t you naked?”

In the back of the closet, Vero whimpers.

I’m sorry, I try to tell her. You shouldn’t be seeing this. You shouldn’t be living this.

But we both know this is nothing new, and the worst is yet to come. Outside these walls. In an entirely different place with scores of footsteps tramping down floorboards. The woman isn’t perfect, but at least she tries. Soon, sooner than Vero realizes, the woman will be gone and all she’ll have is a rosebush with bloody thorns climbing up a wall. Then this dirty closet will seem like paradise, if only Vero had known it at the time.

The woman strips off her stained blue housecoat. Best to do as he says. No only makes things worse.

The man grunts in approval. Kicks his pants off. Demands the now-naked woman come over, get to work.

Vero closes her eyes. She doesn’t like to see, but there is nothing she can do about the sounds. Once she tried humming, but he found her and beat her again.

“Kids are to be seen, not heard!” he’d roared at her, which Vero had found confusing, because best she could tell, she wasn’t allowed to be seen either. She reappeared in the apartment only once the man went to work. Then she and her mother were together, and briefly, all was well. Until the sound of footsteps in the outside hall. The jiggle of a key in the apartment’s front door.

This is Vero’s life. At six, who is she to argue?

The noises finally stop. The woman is crying softly, but that’s nothing new. Vero is rocking back and forth. She’s hungry. She needs to pee. But she waits for the sound of snoring. That’s the all clear, the signal it’s safe to come out.

Eventually, after it seems forever has passed, the man falls asleep. The closet door eases open. The woman stands there.

Her right eye is swollen. She moves gingerly, as if her entire body aches. But neither she nor the girl comments. This is the woman’s life, too, and she learned long ago not to argue.

The woman helps Vero out of the closet. They tiptoe out of the bedroom, into the cramped family room, the tiny kitchenette. Vero finally pees, but doesn’t flush the toilet. For the next few hours she and the woman share the same goal: Don’t wake the slumbering beast.

The woman makes Vero a bowl of cereal. She doesn’t eat herself, just lights a cigarette, stares tiredly at the far wall. Sometimes, the woman goes quiet for so long, Vero worries she’s dead, eyes open but unseeing.