Page 13 of Daddy's Little Librarian
As quietly as he could, Kurt crept across the tiled foyer toward the carpeted stairs leading up. It was surprising how fast that old ‘cop’ feeling returned. He could almost feel the weight of his utility belt, the coolness of the flashlight he no longer carried in one hand and the textured grip of the gun at his hip in the other. This wasn’t an emergency call, though, he reminded himself. And he no longer had a badge on his chest. He had to remember that.
He was just stepping up on the first stair when suddenly the light above him flicked back on again. He snapped around to find Scotti, not on the spot he’d placed her on, but just inside the door, her hand still on the light switch and her wide eyes locked on the ceiling.
Bounding back to her, he slapped the light back off again, grabbed the front of her librarian’s blouse and shoved her back out onto the porch. “What are you trying to do?” he demanded in a whisper. “Get me killed?”
“Don’t you need to see where you’re going?” she stammered.
“All that light is going to do is illuminate a nice open target—me—so your ex can start shooting!”
“Yes, but then you can see him too, and you can shoot back,” she argued, sounding both small and frightened. She was trembling and clinging to herself.
She’s just your type, Grams had said.
And God, right now in the dim glow and shadowed darkness on her porch, staring down into those fear-filled eyes, he could see it. It was the helplessness. He’d always been drawn to small, scared, and helpless.
Kurt shook himself. This was not the time or the place, not when there was a potential intruder upstairs.
“I,” he told her very slowly and clearly, “do not have a gun. That would be a violation of my parole. I would get put back in prison.” He pointed at her. “Stay put,” he repeated. “Stay quiet, and let me do my job.”
For the second time, he left her there in the doorway and quietly approached the stairs. Halfway up, he heard another sound. It was soft, just a whisper of a footstep on carpet, but when he cautiously turned the stairwell corner and peeked above the top landing, he saw nothing. Nothing but a hallway, with three open, shadowy doorways and a Disney princess nightlight splashing the colorful heroines of its movie Frozen up on the ceiling and walls. He waited, listening, but whoever might be up here with him was quietly listening back.
Climbing the last few stairs, his back to the wall, he approached the first open doorway. Without looking inside, he closed it. If the intruder up here was in that room, then they were now blinded to his movements and would have to come out in order to commit to their next intention. They wouldn’t be able to do it quietly; the opening of this door would be his warning. He’d worry about that when and if it happened. For now, he’d closed off one potential avenue of attack. There were two left.
The next open doorway was a few feet down and across the hall from him. It looked like a bathroom. The gaping shadow-filled archway at the very end of the hall offered a little more detail. The faint paleness suggested lamplight from the street below, filtering in through a window. He could just barely make out the shadow and shape of a bed beyond the cover of the partially ajar door.
He switched walls, putting that one to his back as he moved up to the edge of the bathroom threshold. He closed that door, too. There was only one potential avenue of attack left open to him.
As he slipped past the bathroom, something caught his eye. Directly across from him, the wall appeared to be creased. Thinking it first a trick of the shadow and nightlight, he reached out far enough to touch it, letting a stroke of his fingers tell him what his cop’s brain had suspiciously determined already. Someone had carved a line in the sheetrock three-fourths of the way down the length of the hallway, from the first door he’d closed, all the way to the bedroom at the end.
Scotti’s bedroom? He moved a little closer to the open door. The shadows on the bed were moving. A whisper of a cool night breeze brushed his face. He peered around the threshold just far enough to see the fluttering curtains of her bedroom window, moving in the darkness, showing the escape the intruder had taken when whoever he was—Kurt was fairly certain he could solve that mystery in one guess—had heard them unlock the front door.
The bed looked weird.
Lumpy. The only un-neat thing he’d so far seen in Scotti’s house. Admittedly, he hadn’t seen much of it. Just the foyer downstairs, a glimpse into the bathroom, in which he’d noted the orderly counters and towels tidily hung up, and then this room. Where there was nothing on the floor. Her dresser drawers were closed, with nothing on top but a hairbrush and what looked like a handful of Lego superheroes having a choreographed battle. She had a second dresser, long and low, plus an overstuffed rocking chair in the corner by the window, both of which were buried under a small mountain of stuffed animals.
The mountains were neat, though. The Legos were neat. The dressers were neat.
The bed was lumpy.
The intruder was gone, so Kurt turned on the light.
The bed had been stabbed and slashed, the pillows destroyed, the blanket and sheets shredded.
“Gopher, my friend.” Kurt didn’t realize he was going to say anything out loud until he heard himself growl, “You’ve just fucked up.”
* * * * *
Someone was definitely in the house with them. Hovering on the porch where she’d been left, for one perfectly terrifying moment, Scotti couldn’t think what to do. Should she stay here? Should she go inside just in case Kurt needed her? Her heart was beating so hard and fast. She pressed her sweaty palms flat against her thighs. This was it. The moment of confrontation with her ex, which she had been dreading ever since she told him she didn’t think it was working and he told her, “Well, isn’t that just too damn bad?”
That had been almost a year ago, and, here she was, standing on her front porch like a petrified rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.
Dredging up a slim slice of courage, she took her first hesitant step into her own house. Then she took another. She kept her eyes trained on the stairwell, but all she kept thinking was how neither she nor Kurt had anything with which to protect themselves if this went bad. Gopher was getting braver.
She wasn’t. She definitely wasn’t.
One of them really ought to be armed, and if Kurt couldn’t do it, then that only left her.
Her home didn’t have a fireplace, so there were no iron pokers, and she was too scared to go as far as the kitchen. The garage was even further, but the bathroom was right by the bottom of the stairs. Gathering the shreds of her courage, she grabbed the only thing she could think of—an aerosol can from under the sink. Without any lights to see by, she didn’t know what she had. Probably sink cleaner. By the time she was back out and at the base of the stairs, her nerves were jittery. To the point that when she heard an ominous creak from the hallway above, she almost dropped her can.
