Before she had the chance to slide it all the way out, Dodger rammed his nose against it, sniffing, and it slipped out of her hands. Dodger slipped off the couch with it as it hit the floor and, playfully, he grabbed a corner of the thick wrapping, the cigar box still held half inside, and dragged it across the room, inviting a game of hide-and-seek or tug-of-war.
Beth stood up as he scurried away from her, his tail wagging. “Dodger, stop that!”
The box slid all the way out of the express envelope, landing on its side, and the top fell open.
The explosion sounded like the end of the world. The last thing that crossed Beth’s mind before she blacked out was that Bill had kept his word. He had gotten her. And now she would never be able to tell her story.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
When Beth woke she was lying on the dirt outside. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious. Smoke poured through the charred door of her house. Nick crouched over her, his face stained with soot.
“It’s okay, Beth,” he was whispering. “Just hang W on. They’re on their way.”
She heard a siren and tried to sit up. Her head hurt, and she felt dizzy. She began to cough, calling, “Dodger! Dodger! Nick, where’s Dodger?”
But the look on Nick’s face was a clear enough answer even without words. Distraught, she sank back against the ground.
“Hang on,” he said. “An ambulance is coming.”
She became gradually aware that he wasn’t simply touching her to reassure her, but rather that he was pressing hard on her chest because she was bleeding. She closed her eyes, feeling nauseous. The fire truck wailed toward her house, getting louder and louder, and she opened her eyes just in time to see it jerk to a halt and the fire crew leap off and begin unwinding the hose. Behind the fire truck came an ambulance, and two EMTs rushed to her.Nick moved aside as the two began to check her vitals.
In minutes, she was in an ambulance racing to the hospital.
When the ambulance reached the hospital and she was whisked inside, she again saw Nick’s worried face as he jogged along beside the gurney. Then darkness closed over her.
I n the waiting room, Nick stood at the window, staring out at the pond they had sat at just last night. How could he have let her open that package? Why hadn’t he realized what it was and snatched it out of her hands? Why hadn’t he been clued by the return address of the dead woman?
Smoke inhalation, burns, a chest wound—but Beth could have been killed. If the puppy hadn’t knocked the box off the couch, if she’d had it in her lap as Bill Brandon had intended, she would have been. Instead, the dog was blown apart, and she’d been knocked back.
He had dived toward her the moment the bomb had exploded, had dragged her out of the fire started by whatever incendiary device Brandon had included in the box. Then he had scrambled to her car where he knew she kept a phone. He’d been shaking so hard he almost hadn’t been able to dial 911.
Thank God she was alive.
The sliding doors to the emergency room opened, and Lynda and Jake burst in, with Jimmy on their heels. He had asked a nurse to call them, for he hadn’t had the composure to do it himself.
“How is she?”
“She’s in surgery,” he said. “She has a pretty bad chest wound. I don’t know . . . how bad it is.”
“I got hold of Larry Millsaps in his car,” Lynda said. “He’s heading out to Beth’s house with a bomb inspector, and he’s determined to get definitive evidence against Bill Brandon. He’ll need it—he said they tried again today to get an arrest warrant for Brandon, and Judge Wyatt refused again.”
“What is wrong with that judge?” Nick shouted, slamming the heel of his hand against the windowsill. “If he’d issued it last night, there wouldn’t have been a fire at the paper, and Beth wouldn’t have . . .” He stopped, unable to continue.
“I don’t know, Nick. Judge Wyatt is really hard-nosed. I always try to avoid him in the courtroom if I can. He’s not the most reasonable man in the world.”
“Then what’s he doing on the bench?”
“He’s a lifetime appointee. Plus, he’s the presiding judge. There’s no one higher to appeal to unless they go to the prosecutor. He has great job security.”
“Even if he’s an idiot?”
She sighed. She was still trying to find an answer when the doctor came out and looked around for Nick. “Mr. Hutchins? She’s out of surgery, and she looks good. We were able to clean all the fragments out of her wound—it wasn’t as bad as it looked, and her stitches should heal quickly. Thanks to you, her blood loss wasn’t bad, nor did she inhale much smoke. You just may have saved her life.”
“The dog saved her life,” he said.
Jimmy’s eyebrows rose. “Dodger saved her? Where is he?”
Nick swallowed. “Jimmy, I’m sorry, but Dodger’s—” He stopped, gesturing hopelessly, trying to think of a way to break the news.
Jimmy’s face fell. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Nick looked at Lynda and Jake, wishing for someone to say it for him. But there were no takers.
“I’m afraid so. If he hadn’t done what he did, Beth might be the one dead instead.”
Jimmy tried to plaster on his tough-kid look, and nodded stoically. He turned away from them and went to look out the window. Jake followed him, laying a hand on his shoulders, but the boy shrugged him away.
Nick turned back to the doctor. “When can I see her?”
“In a little while. We’ve put her in a room, and she should be waking up soon. We’ll be keeping her until we’re satisfied that there aren’t any complications. Maybe she can go home tomorrow.”
Home, Nick thought. Her home was in bad shape. She wouldn’t be going there.
Lynda patted his back. “We’ll wait here, Nick. You go on in and see her.”
Nick was grateful that they didn’t make him wait.
T here was a nurse standing over her bed when she woke up.“Beth, how do you feel?” the nurse asked.
Beth had to think for a minute. “Okay,” she whispered, but realized instantly that that wasn’t exactly true. “Where is this?”
“The hospital,” the nurse said. “You were in an explosion. Do you remember it?”
It started to come back to her in film-clip images . . . the package . . . the tape that was too tough to tear . . . Dodger getting it away from her . . .
“You’ve had some injuries, but you’re going to be fine. I’m going to run out for just a minute and let the doctor know that you’re awake, okay?”
She watched the nurse leave the room, and lay there for a moment, looking around at the cold, barren room, with nothing in it that belonged to her, and realized how alone she was. Just like Tracy.
She closed her eyes, her mind moving slowly through disjointed images until it called up a time when she was ten, when she’d broken into a huge home of a wealthy businessman. No one had been home, but he’d had a bird that she hadn’t been told about. The bird had fluttered in its cage, spooking her, and she’d taken off running. She’d been so spooked that she had run through the sliding glass door to his patio. It had shattered around her, knocking her out and cutting her in a million places. The other kids had quickly carried her out and thrown her into the van.
Bill had refused to take her to the hospital because he was afraid someone would make the connection between the glass door shattered in a robbery attempt and the little girl covered in glass fragments. Then they’d be caught for sure. So he’d kept her in a room by herself at the home, where he had tweezed the fragments out one by one. It had been a slow torture, one he had seemed to enjoy, and he had followed each withdrawal with a swab of alcohol that had stung worse than any pain she’d ever felt before or since. She still had small scars in some places to remind her.
She’d had bruises all over her body from that incident, and must have had a concussion as well, for she’d slept at least three days following the accident.
Lying here in this roo
m alone reminded her of the week she’d spent in bed in that room at SCCH as a child, wondering if anyone out there cared at all about her, wondering if anyone even gave her a thought.
Bill had told her as he picked glass out of her that they had ways of identifying the blood on glass shards, and that he expected them to arrest her at any moment. It was her fault she was in this position, he’d told her, because she shouldn’t have panicked. He was trying to protect her by keeping her here, he’d told her, but Bill’s kind of caring wasn’t the kind she craved. His was a sick, self-centered concern that frightened her to death.
Funny that Bill was behind this injury, as well. He had almost succeeded at keeping her quiet. He had almost killed her along with her story.
Tears rolled down her face. Lying here, alone, she felt like a wasted, discarded, useless body—the way Tracy probably felt.Was God really there, watching out for her, or was he just disgusted by her?
She thought of the lies she’d told about this story, the anonymous confession, the sneaky way she’d tried to get Maria to confess so that she, Beth, wouldn’t have to. She thought of the secrets she’d kept from Nick, from Phil, from the law enforcement officers who needed to know the name of the only available adult witness. The secrets she had kept from little Jimmy, who needed to know that there was someone who truly understood his plight as no one else could, someone who had been there and suffered as he was suffering, someone who had survived it—maybe even grown through it.
Could God see through those sins and walk with her now? The consequences of confessing those sins loomed ever bigger in her consciousness, reminding her that there would be a price to pay. But all those children were still paying. Paying and paying, and they would continue to pay as they grew older and broke free of Bill Brandon. They would pay like she was paying until someone broke the cycle.
And that’s what she’d been trying to do. But she’d been trying to do it the easy way, the cheap way. Maybe there was no cheap way. Maybe the only way was to accept the possibility of losing her job and her reputation, and to tell the truth. Maybe then she could have a chance with God.
To do that, she’d have to forget the story she’d written so neatly and remotely, and instead offer herself as a witness who could put Bill Brandon away for life. The buck had to stop somewhere, and it was going to stop here. Unless he stopped her first.
She heard a knock on the door, and then it opened. Nick stood there, looking as fragile and shaken as she’d felt lying out on the dirt with her house burning behind her. He tried to smile, but she could see that the effort was almost too great for him.
He came and leaned over her. “Are you all right?” he asked.
Her voice was hoarse, weak. “Yes. Amazingly, I am. I wasn’t supposed to be, though. He intended to kill me.”
She could see that Nick agreed with her.
“If I could have just gotten the package away from you before you opened it,” he whispered. “I should have realized right away . . . I should have taken it and—”
“Shhh,” she whispered, reaching up to touch his lips. “Don’t. He set us up. He knew I wouldn’t be able to resist a package with Marlene’s name on it. He’s smart, Nick. I told you how smart he is.” She closed her eyes, fighting the tears. “Poor Dodger. He didn’t know what hit him.”
Nick clearly didn’t know what to say. He just stroked her hair back from her face, and she closed her eyes.
A memory, white-hot and miserable, came back to her, a memory of another little dog they had found at the home. It had wandered up onto the lawn one day, and they had played with it, then asked Bill if they could keep it. He’d told them no.
She wasn’t sure why that little dog had created such a fierce longing in them, why the children had wanted him badly enough to risk Bill’s wrath, but someone had suggested that they hide it and keep it anyway, that they could keep it a secret from Bill. They had all agreed.
They had hidden the little dog in a storage shed at the back of the grounds at night, then moved him wherever he was least likely to be found during the day. He had been a kind, gentle secret that bound the children, so unlike the dark, ugly secrets they had shared before.
But one night, when they’d come in from robbing the home of the president of the local college, Bill told them that he’d discovered the puppy, and that he realized how much they must love the dog to work so hard to hide him for so long. He told them that they had worked hard for him, too, and that they deserved something of their own for their labors. He told them they didn’t have to hide the puppy anymore.
Eagerly, they had all run out to the shed to get the puppy and bring him in, each of them arguing about which one of them the dog would sleep with that night. They had reached the shed, thrown open the door, flicked on the light—
The puppy lay dead on the floor, shot through the head.
Bill had taught them a valuable lesson.
She wondered how many more “valuable lessons” he had taught to Jimmy and Lisa and all those other children at the home—lessons that might twist and scar them for life. How many times over the years had she fantasized about a rescuer who would come and save them all from Bill. Maybe that was why she had suffered the childhood she had. Maybe God was grooming Beth to be the rescuer of these children. Maybe she was going to be their Esther, groomed “for such a time as this.”
“I have to go,” she said weakly, trying to sit up. “I have to get out of here.”
“You can’t leave, Beth. You have to stay, at least overnight.”
“No, I can’t. I have to talk to Phil, my editor. I have to tell him what happened. I have to tell him some other things.”
“I’ve put too much pressure on you,” Nick said, his eyes misting over. “I’ve made this seem like the most important thing in the world, and you almost got killed. It’s not worth it.”
“Of course it is! Until I get that story printed, I’m in danger.
Once the story’s out, it would be too obvious if anything happened to me. He wouldn’t dare try anything.” She looked up at him.
“Nick, tell them I’m okay. That I can go. Please?”
“No,” he said. “You’re not as strong as you think. You have to lie still, Beth. You have to stay here.”
“Then make Phil come to me,” she said. “And call Lynda, and Larry Millsaps and Tony Danks at the St. Clair Police Department.” “Lynda’s already here,” he said. “With Jake and Jimmy. But I’ll call the others. I’ll tell them to come tomorrow.”
“No, not tomorrow. Now! I have something I have to tell all of you, Jake and Jimmy, too. Something important, Nick. Please.It really can’t wait.”
“Okay,” he said finally. “Just calm down. Be still. I’ll go call them now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The doctors were at first strongly opposed to having such a group in her room so soon after her injuries, but when Beth convinced them that her long-term safety depended on a quick arrest of the one who’d injured her, they finally allowed it.
Phil was the first one in when the group came quietly into her room. “Beth, are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes, for now,” she said. “But I need to talk to you. All of you.”
Lynda rushed forward and hugged her. “I’m so glad you’re okay. And what a miracle that Jimmy wasn’t there.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Where is he?”
“I’m right here,” Jimmy said from behind Lynda. He came up to the bed, hands in his pockets, and glanced awkwardly at her. “Bill did this, you know.”
She swallowed hard and nodded. “I know.”
“But he’ll get away with it. He always does.”
“Not this time, Jimmy.”
Jake bent over the bed and pressed a kiss on her cheek, and she saw Tony and Larry coming in. Nick was last to enter the room, and she held out a hand to him. He came to the bed and held her hand, lending her support he didn’t even know she was going to need.
“Thanks for c
oming, everybody,” she said. “I won’t keep you long. You’ve probably all figured out by now that someone’s trying to kill me, to keep me from finishing the story I’m working on, about the St. Clair Children’s Home. Last night, the St. Clair News building was burned down, and this morning, the explosion—Bill Brandon doesn’t want it printed.” She cleared her throat and looked at her editor.
“Phil, you kept saying you wanted one more quote. Yesterday, I gave you one, but it was from an anonymous source.” She hesitated, then forced herself to go on. “But it’s time to tell who that source is. The reason this story is such a passion for me is that . . . I was the anonymous witness who grew up at SCCH.”
Nick looked more stunned than anyone. His mouth fell open. “You what?”
Jimmy gasped, then narrowed his eyes and studied her closely. The others looked first at one another, then at her, shock evident on their faces.
“I didn’t want to tell anyone because . . . being in Bill’s home brings with it some degree of . . . guilt.”
“Wait a minute,” Phil said, scratching his head. “Are you telling me that you’ve seen these abuses firsthand?”
She closed her eyes again, and Nick tightened his hold on her hand. “I’m telling you that I’ve been involved in them.”
Larry and Tony got up from their chairs and came closer to the bed. “So you were one of the kids in his crime ring? He actually used you to break into homes and steal things?”
“That’s right. From the time I was eight years old until I left the home at eighteen.” She lifted her chin high, to fight the tears pushing into her eyes, and met Nick’s stunned gaze. “I’m sorry, Nick. I should have told you—”
Nick took a few steps closer, his face twisting as he tried to understand. “You were in that home? But I worked for HRS then.
I would have seen you.”
“No, Sheila Axelrod is the one who processed my release when I turned eighteen. And actually, we did cross paths a couple of times. But I’ve changed my hair color and cut it, and I changed my name. But I came to you when I decided to expose Bill, because I knew you seemed like someone who would listen. I knew that from the way you treated some of my housemates.”