Night Wraith Read online

  Detective Rice patted Gavin on the shoulder, then opened his car door and got on the radio to call in a request for a crime scene team.

  Headlights that swept the area followed the sound of another vehicle coming up the narrow road.

  “Oliver,” Gavin said, “Make sure Ben parks down by our vehicle.”

  “No problem.” The sergeant lumbered off, waving down the coroner as his car approached.

  Rice finished on his radio then popped his head out of his car. “They’re on the way.”

  “Guess we’d better document as much of this as we can and cordon off the area.”

  Detective Rice didn’t have a chance to respond before they felt damp, frosty kisses on their cheeks. They looked up simultaneously. Fluffy white flakes fell from the increasingly bitter air.

  It began to snow.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Karen’s cell phone rang distantly in the other room. Its spy theme ringtone was eerie in the darkness. Nothing good ever came from a phone call in the middle of the night, phone cheerily glowing and making a fun little noise or not. As she turned over she realized the temperature had dropped in the house and at some point she’d wrestled with the covers, now twisted around her legs. She got up, stumbling half-asleep into the kitchen of her one-bedroom apartment. The phone glowed on the countertop next her to keys.

  The phone’s face read GAVIN above his phone number, and her heart caught in her throat as she snatched it up, pressing Call.

  “Gavin?” she said.

  “Karen.”

  “Hi. What’s going on? Are you okay?”

  “I’m all right. I’m just ... out on a call.”

  Karen looked at the clock above the oven. Its green numbers read 3:36.

  “It’s serious?”

  “Pretty serious.”

  There was a moment of silence between them, during which Karen felt her insides bundle up and do a slow churn. As she came more fully awake, the memory of their last painful conversation came to her, and she tried not to let any of her feelings about it seep through right now. He was calling her. That was a start. A good start.

  “Look, Karen, I hate to call you up out of the blue like this, especially after last week, but—”

  “It’s okay, Gavin. I told you, you could call me any time.”

  “Would you mind going over to the house for me? Stay with Carly?”

  Karen felt a pang of hurt, but she reminded herself that this was part of what she wanted with him. For him to stop blocking her out, to let her into his life. Their life. And she really liked Carly; Gavin just hadn’t let her get close enough to get to know her very well. Still, the honest truth of it was that she wished that he’d called because he needed to see her, or be with her, to have her with him and confess that he wanted her in his life forever. Then she kicked herself for selfish thoughts.

  Don’t be such a fool, Karen Ann, her mother would have said. You sound like a lovesick girl with a crush. And she would have been right. Gavin did need her, and this was a sign of trust on his part. It was no proclamation of devotion, but it was a step in the right direction. And that was okay.

  Gavin’s voice came again in her pause, nervous this time. “Look, I’m sorry, I know this is a bad time. I guess I just wanted someone to be there with her—”

  “No, no, Gavin—I’m sorry, I’m just not awake yet. Sure I’ll go over to the house for you.”

  “You know where I keep the extra key.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks so much, Karen. This means a lot to me.”

  She blushed, ashamed of her selfish thoughts. “It’s no problem, Gavin.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.”

  She tried not to let the excitement of what that meant come through in her voice. God, you are sick for this man, girl.

  “It’s no problem,” she said. “Really.”

  “I’ll call the house when we’re ready to wrap up. I had a breakfast date with Carly I may have to postpone, but as late as she sleeps on the weekends I’ll probably be home, rested, and showered again before she’s conscious. Maybe you can join us?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “I know we need to talk about ... everything. I’m sorry about last week.”

  “Gavin, please. I understand you’re going through a lot. I’m still here for you. Whenever you’re ready to talk.”

  “Thanks, Karen.”

  After he hung up the phone, her insides relaxed from their tightening knots. It sounded promising, but she had to be cautious. Don’t count on too much. It could all come down again like a child’s house of blocks. You rest too much on hope and not enough on solid ground.

  She wasn’t sure if her desire for him came more from the fact that she was nearing forty, childless, and living in a small town with few desirable prospects, or if she really loved him. It was a question she’d asked herself a hundred times these past few days as she wavered between okay-and-making-it to downright depressed.

  Karen turned up the heater before taking a quick shower. She changed into some winter clothes, the chill in the air not yet abated by the time she walked out the door, locking it behind her. A fresh thin layer of snow made the night glow.

  She climbed in her Jeep, pulled her coat tighter around her, and drove carefully across town to the Wagner house, headlights beaming through the ghostly light of pre-dawn snow.

  * * *

  Icy breath plumed from between Karen’s lips as she let herself in the side gate of Gavin and Carly’s house. Her fur-lined boots crunched through the fresh powder down to old ice-crusted snow that hadn’t melted from the shadow-side of the house. One side of the yard was built up with railroad ties containing a garden full of crispy dead stalks of vegetable plants poking from the blanket of white. One of the ties at the end of the garden bed was shorter than the others. She moved it aside and found the key box with the house key inside. Karen brushed a strand of her long black hair over one shoulder as she stood beneath the overhang of the back porch and unlocked the back door. When it opened, she pushed her way in and was awash in warmth, the lingering scent of coffee, and the underlying smells of Gavin and Carly’s home. Carly’s perfumes, the pile of unwashed clothes in the laundry room, the scent of Gavin’s musk from the upstairs bathroom, a vague redolence of last night’s dinner.

  Karen quietly closed the door and switched on a lamp behind the couch. It shed its glow over the living room. Two empty beer cans sat atop the coffee table next to a paperback facedown on top of a pile of newspapers. Next to the couch, on the carpet, sat a worn-out pair of work boots, half unlaced, their tongues hanging out like tired dogs. A flannel shirt was cast aside and smashed along with some throw pillows in the corner where he usually sat, and on the loveseat where Carly liked to nuzzle was a crochet blanket and a plate of crumbs, an empty glass filmed with drying milk resting on top. Karen draped her coat over the back of the couch and instinctively took the plate and glass to the kitchen. There were a few dirty dishes in the basin, illuminated in the glow from the window above the sink.

  She listened to the silence of Gavin’s house, looked ruefully at the small table in the bay-windowed breakfast nook where they’d last talked over coffee that went cold. She didn’t hear anything upstairs, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  Still, Gavin had sounded worried about Carly being here alone.

  I’d better check on her, just let her know that I’m here.

  Karen left the kitchen and crossed the shadow-shrouded living room to the staircase. She gripped the smooth lacquered wood rail that led to the second story and took light steps, two of the stairs creaking in the same places she always remembered. In the upstairs hall, she passed the bathroom door on the right and came to the door of Carly’s room on the left. It stood partially open, veiled in shadow.
r />   Karen pushed open the door, looking inside. “Carly,” she said quietly, not wanting to scare her. “Carly, it’s Karen.”

  When she had the door open enough to see, she caught her breath, startled. Her pulse raced, thinking something terrible at first, but then realized what she was seeing. Carly’s boyfriend Ethan lay shirtless in Carly’s bed, Carly curled up on top of him, asleep. Perhaps sensing the movement of the door, or hearing Karen’s voice, she stirred. Her eyes blinked before Karen could back out of the doorway and pretend she didn’t see this—

  Carly made a high-pitched squeak of terror as she saw Karen’s form in her doorway.

  Karen quickly put out her hands in a placating gesture. “It’s okay!”

  “What are you doing here?” Carly’s voice wavered between anger and fear.

  “I—your dad called and asked me to come and stay. He’s going to be gone for the rest of the night and didn’t want you here ... alone.”

  “Oh my god,” Carly looked at Ethan, who awoke blinking at the shadows of his girlfriend and the woman in her doorway.

  “Oh my god,” she said again. “You can’t say anything about this. He’ll kill me.”

  “It’s okay,” Karen said. “Relax. It’s okay, really.”

  Ethan sat up, covering his shirtless torso. His eyes went to the clock and realized it was almost four in the morning. “It’s almost four! I fell asleep. Carly,” he looked between her and Karen. “We didn’t do anything.”

  Karen couldn’t find anything to say, except, “Okay.”

  He stood, self-conscious as he groped for his T-shirt and jacket in the dark. “Carly, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sleep so long. I’ve got to get home.”

  After he pulled on his shirt and jacket, he went instinctively to the window, then paused and looked back at them. Carly was still sitting up in bed blinking away sleep.

  Karen stood, a dark silhouette in the shadowed doorway. “You can use the front door if you want to.”

  Ethan stiffened. Carly laughed.

  “I’ll give you a ride, too, if you need one.”

  Ethan looked between Karen in the doorway and Carly in bed. The tension relaxed in the room as it dawned on them they were all on the same side.

  “Thanks, but it’s not far. And ... thanks for not telling Chief Wagner about this.”

  “It’s snowing.”

  “That’s okay. It’s really not far.”

  Karen smiled and Ethan crossed the bedroom to sneak past her in the doorway. She stepped aside and let him pass, his shoes thumping quickly down the stairs.

  “Ethan!” Carly got up, gown flowing, and grabbed her plush pink robe from where it hung on the chair in front of her vanity. She wrapped herself quickly and hurried past Karen, down the stairs to meet Ethan before he slipped out the door. “Wait.”

  Karen lingered in the upstairs hall, giving them a moment alone to say goodbye. She smiled wistfully as she heard their low voices and the quiet smack of a kiss before the door closed. Karen resisted the urge to peek inside Gavin’s room and went back down into the living room.

  * * *

  Later that morning, after Carly went back to bed for a few hours and Karen napped on the couch not feeling comfortable enough to go into Gavin’s room, they sat in the breakfast nook together. Karen sipped a cup of green tea. Carly drank a glass of orange juice, hair still wet from the shower, smelling like fresh shampoo. A bay window was next to the breakfast table. Outside the snow had accumulated three inches, a thick gray cloud cover in the skies above, leaving everything in shades of pre-dawn twilight.

  “We didn’t do anything, you know.”

  “All right. I’ll take your word for it.”

  Carly drank some of her juice and stared out the window. “He’s the biggest sweetheart. His mom’s been wheelchair bound since she had a stroke three years ago. He’s the youngest of three brothers, but they’re off to college, and the oldest moved to New York.”

  Karen nodded and sipped her tea. Carly gazed out at the cold.

  “I was a little upset last time I saw him on Friday so he came to check on me.” Carly looked away from the window and focused instead on the orange juice in her glass. “I wish Mom could have met him.”

  Karen felt a stab and inwardly admonished herself for it, because she had no right to feel territorial. She and Gavin had dated for six months on and off, but it never got serious enough for Carly to ever face the prospect of Karen replacing her mother. She didn’t know if she felt sad or glad about that—if glad, it was only because there wasn’t any serious rift between her and Carly, and not because she didn’t crave a deeper relationship with Gavin. It was sad because she knew that the relationships were not mutually exclusive, and the indication of the depth of her relationship with Carly was likewise an indication that Gavin had never really let her into the deepest corners of his life.

  She wanted to ask Carly what she was upset about, but she thought she knew, so she didn’t want to pry. “He seems like a pretty nice guy,” Karen said.

  “He’s amazing,” Carly said, and speaking the words sent her off into dreamland. When the teenager looked up and met Karen’s eyes, she sobered. “You really won’t tell Dad?”

  “I won’t rat you out. But if he asks me directly, I don’t want to lie to him.”

  Carly chewed her lip, lost in thought. “Maybe I should tell him myself.”

  “Maybe,” Karen set down her teacup, began absently folding one of the cloth napkins as she spoke. “Once, when I was seventeen, I had this boyfriend, Richard Davis, and I sneaked him into the house. Our house was two-story, and my bedroom was in the basement, so we figured it was safe. He came in the back sliding glass door, and we planned to sneak him back out the same way. Anyway, we were making out in my bedroom when he had to use the bathroom. So he did. Now, I didn’t know this at the time, but the door to the upstairs was left open, and our German Shepard Gretchen came down when Richard was in the bathroom. When he came out, Grech started barking like crazy and backed him into the corner of the hall.”

  “Oh no!” Carly said, laughing. “Did your parents wake up?”

  “Oh yeah, my dad was ex-military, and you would’ve sworn he heard gunfire the way he came down those stairs. He had his double-ought shotgun in his hand, and when Richard saw him, he went running out the back sliding glass door in his boxers and disappeared.”

  “In his boxers?”

  “All the way home,” Karen said with a distant smile.

  “Oh my god, that’s too much. What did your dad do?”

  “Well, my father wasn’t quite as ... understanding as yours is.” Karen tried to maintain the smile, but it faltered just the slightest bit as she remembered how she’d been beaten until she was choking on blood and could barely breathe.

  Carly picked up on it. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Ancient history now, but ... all that to tell you, I was a love sick girl once too.”

  “Hah!” Carly barked with feigned indignity. “I’m a woman now.”

  Karen nodded in the same half-joking spirit. “Well, you’re certainly becoming quite the lovely young woman. Some men—the kind we refer to as ‘pigs’—would say you’re old enough to be dangerous.”

  Carly gave her a melodramatic sultry look with pursed lips and one arched eyebrow. Karen laughed, but was struck by how beautiful the girl really was. It was such a tentative age, such a dangerous place to be. She just thanked God they lived in a small town where nothing too terrible ever really happened. Except, of course, for what happened to Carly’s mother.

  “Hungry?” Karen asked. “I’m cool, and I can cook.”

  “I’ll help.”

  Together they cooked up a pile of French toast, bacon, and fried eggs and had themselves a feast.

  * * *

&nb
sp; After they ate, Carly went upstairs to do her hair and put on make-up. Karen stayed in the kitchen with just the light over the sink and the overcast gray day illuminating the room. She did the dishes, straightened up, scrubbed the counters, swept, and ran a quick mop over everything.

  She chased away thoughts of her father with hope for a resurrection of her relationship with Gavin. She imagined him coming home and finding Carly and her together on the couch, playing cards or watching a movie, wishing that he could catch a glimpse of the possibility of a relationship between his daughter and the woman who yearned after his heart. And once again she recognized that she was going too far with it, that she had to pull herself above it and not let her feelings show right away. She needed to let Gavin take this in his own time, and all she needed to do was let him know she was here for him.

  She mopped the last bit of the kitchen floor, working back toward the sink so she wouldn’t have to walk on the part she’d just finished. She smiled at the clean scent of the lemony polish in the air, thinking that was a heck of an improvement over the scent of fetid dishwater and rotting food in the trash. All it needed was a woman’s touch.

  The room darkened. Outside the windows, clouds swirled and fog settled in. The snow wasn’t letting up. Karen still hadn’t turned on any other lights, so the kitchen was dull gray, muted with shadows, save for the golden sliver cast across the floor from above the sink. She was just finishing, rinsing the mop in the sink, when she heard Carly come back into the kitchen behind her.

  “Don’t step on the floor, Carly. I just mopped.” Karen twisted the mop handle and pushed on the end to drain the last of the dirty water. She rinsed it down the drain, sensing Carly behind her. “You could take out this trash for me if you have your shoes on.” Karen pulled the trash bag out of the can beneath the sink and turned.