I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(49)

“It’s all right,” said Edith, softly. “This is my friend John. I told him that sometimes guests make a mistake and come to the back door.”

The woman drew herself upright and gave John and Edith a smile with her swollen lips that would break anyone’s heart. “Please forgive my mistake. Johnny ran around back before I could stop him, and I saw the door and just knocked. So thoughtless of me.”

“Don’t give it a second thought,” Edith said. “It’s fine, just fine.”

“I just stopped in to drop off this book I borrowed,” said John, giving the woman his kindest smile and handing the book to Edith. “I’ll make myself scarce, now.”

“I think I’ll walk him out,” said Edith to Alice. “Please make yourself at home.”

Out on the porch, as soon as the front door was shut behind them, John turned and said, “Edith.”

“I told you it was just my guests,” she said, meeting his serious blue gaze. “And it is. There’s nothing to worry about.”

John lifted his hand toward her, as if to touch her arm, then shook his head and let the hand drop to his side. “I’ll be back tomorrow night,” he said. “We need to talk.”



The following night, he stood on her porch again, and said this: “Three days ago, at the station, we got a wire, one that went out to all the police stations in this area, to be on the lookout for the wife of a high-ranking military man in Portsmouth, Virginia, who had left in the middle of the night with her two children.”

Despite the June mugginess, a chill went through Edith. “Oh?” she said, as casually as she could. “Why this area in particular?”

“Apparently, she has family in Kent County. It seemed possible that she would take the children there, but she didn’t and is therefore still at large.”

Edith swallowed her sigh of relief. Blue Sky House was safe, at least for the moment, but there was still John to contend with. “‘At large’? Sounds more like a missing persons case to me.”

John shook his head and said, grimly, “She’s considered a kidnapper. That woman is a fugitive, Edith.”

Keeping a cool head was obviously her best hope of deflecting John’s attention from the goings-on in Blue Sky House. Edith knew this; she really did, but still her temper flared. “A kidnapper? They’re her own children, aren’t they? And tell me this, John, has it occurred to anyone that if a woman takes a risk like that, she must have her reasons?”

John sighed. “Edith, the woman and her children who came to your back door two nights ago match the description of Alice Finlay and her two children exactly, down to the curls on that little boy’s head.”

Edith averted her eyes, staring off through the porch screen to the yard beyond. Her azaleas were having an especially good year. It was dark outside now, but in the daytime, you could barely see the leaves for the pink riot of flowers. “Did this description of yours mention her fat lip, the bruises covering the entire left side of her face?” she asked, quietly, her eyes on the azaleas. “Did it include her broken ribs and collarbone?”

“No,” said John.

“Of course not,” said Edith, bitterly. “So I don’t see how it could possibly have been the same woman.”

“Are they still here?”

“You came to arrest them, is that it?” she said, clenching her hands into fists. “That broken woman and her baby and her little boy.”

John took her arm, gently, a kind, light touch, but she twitched it away.

“I don’t think anyone really wants to arrest Alice Finlay,” said John.

“There are all kinds of prisons,” she snapped. “So answer me: Is that why you came, to take that woman and her children back to theirs?”

“I came to see if they were still here,” said John, wearily.

She turned blazing eyes on him. “Well, they aren’t. They aren’t the people you’re—hunting down. And they aren’t here. They decided they weren’t quite up for a vacation right now, so they left just before dawn.”

John looked spent, faded, his face drawn into tight lines. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, and Edith recalled another time she’d seen him do this: the morning they’d found the bodies of the poor, drowned Driver twins. Without wanting to, she remembered how tenderly John had lifted Robbie Driver and placed him in the bottom of the boat, but, impatiently, she shook off the memory. That time, John had been on the side of right. He had always, since she’d met him, been on that side, but not tonight, not now that he had become one of the people who wanted to send Alice and her children back to what was surely the opposite of home.

“They weren’t the people you were looking for,” she said.

“Listen to me.” John leaned toward her, gestured with his hands. “These people coming and going in the dark. Strange cars on your street at all hours. If I’ve noticed, other people will. Just the other day, Walter down at the drugstore remarked to me that your guests must be especially accident-prone with all the gauze and bandages and Bacitracin you’ve been buying. And my God, what about the other guests, the ones who come in the front door in the daylight? It might take time, but they will notice. And then you’ll be a target, and I—” John’s voice faltered. “And I can’t have that,” he said.