Page 10 of Falling for the Enemy

“Alice has a great sense of character, and she absolutely adores you. I think you must have let her stay up and eat candy all night and that's why you have brought about her loyalty. I have to get her from school in a little while and it would be the same situation as last night.”

“You mean the situation of you coming to me late in the night and asking for favors?”

“It's daylight this time, I must want to see.”

I had just been joking about the first part and then he had added the second and now I was really trying to figure out if we were talking about the same thing. Why was this guy so confusing? I told him that I was going to be home anyway, so he could just bring Alice over. It would give me a little bit of a distraction. I'd been around Frank for more than five minutes, and I needed one.

10

Frank

“When is mom coming back?” Alice asked with a worried look. I told her that I wasn't exactly sure, but she would definitely as soon as she could. I wanted to make her feel better, but she looked worried. It made me wonder if I should be worried too. My sister was flaky, but never with Alice. Sure, she’d drop her off with me from time to time, but that was usually so she could get a break and have fun with friends. I’d feel better if I knew that’s what this was about. This time she had been so opaque about it, it naturally made me wonder.

“She will be back soon, I promise.”

“What is she doing?”

“I think that she just needed to take care of a few things and she knew that you would have more fun over here.”

“We did have fun,” Alice agreed. She had made sure that I took her to a local fair that was running. If I knew Alice as well as I thought I did, she would probably talk me into a couple more trips there if she stayed with me through the weekend. I didn't mind having her, especially when I didn't have to work. I just wished I had a truth to tell her. She deserved to know. Lidia still wasn’t answering her phone either, so I really had no clue.

I asked her how she felt about staying with Amber for the night. She reported to me that Amber’s bed was softer, and one part of my theory of her loyalty had been right. I was just informed that Amber had snacks. I was also informed that I should get snacks.

Alice was on a roll for asking questions that I didn't have answers to about what she wanted to know about Amber.

“She is just a friend and neighbor. Do you remember Shirley, we used to go over to her house all the time?”

Even though she was younger, Alice remembered Shirley and likely remembered her chocolate zucchini bread as well. “Yeah, I remember her. She was very nice. Amber is related to her?”

I agreed and then instead of going into where Ms. Shirley was, I’d really walked myself into that one, I told her about how Amber was her granddaughter. I wanted her to feel like we were more familiar than we were. Even though my sister had taken off with no forwarding address, it did not mean that she was not going to ask just as many questions as her daughter when it came time to pick her up. She would, of course, think that it was some date that I was on or a girlfriend. They were always trying to match me up with people. I would tell my sister just like I told her daughter. We were just friends and that was using the term quite loosely.

Amber was so standoffish, I didn't think she would consider me that yet. I was growing on her though, I could tell. Alice talked for quite a while, and I told her we would talk more once I finished up my last day. She said it was unfair, which I would have to agree with.

I was shocked that I still couldn’t get ahold of my sister. I tried calling her nonstop, but now her phone was just going to voicemail without even ringing.

I figured that if I didn't get an answer by morning when I got off work, I was going to have to swing by Mark’s place to make sure everything was alright. I didn't have a bad feeling or anything, nothing that spurred me on to go over there at once, so I trusted my gut and left Alice with Amber.

Once Amber came out, Alice was quickly waving goodbye and telling me that she would see me in the morning. She was completely unfazed with my departure, which was a little hard to handle. She’d always wanted to be around me the most she said, but I think I was getting pushed out of that honor.

I looked at the closed door for a moment and felt like I was failing in some kind of way. I didn't know why I was complicating this. It really was a problem with me. I just needed to walk away. I had to go to work.

I had to repeat it to myself several times before I actually did just that. I thought of my sister, my niece, and Amber as I made my way to work. I was ready for a couple of days off. This would have been one of the nights that working for myself would have been a godsend. I wouldn’t have had to sneak out in the middle of the night, in the middle of important times that I could be spending with others, maybe even building relationships.

* * *

After workit wasn't as much of a rush as it had been in the morning before. Alice didn't have to go to school, and I wasn’t on a time crunch. I thought about the situation and figured that I had to at least go check on my sister. She hadn't even called to check on her daughter, which was very unlike her. She was a lot of things, but she was a good mother, and I couldn't imagine Lidia going this long without talking to Alice, telling her goodnight. It seemed out of character.

I really wasn't too worried about it, my nerves not overly worked up. I just needed to see with my own eyes that she was okay. Whatever she was doing, she probably just got sidetracked or something. I teetered between wanting everything to be okay and knowing that it was. When I got to her house though, the one that she was supposedly moving from, I felt differently.

I didn't all of a sudden think that everything was okay. There was a thickness to the air, and even this early in the morning, I could hear someone yelling and none of it made any sense. Whatever was going on, it wasn't normal and as I left the vehicle, I felt horrified that I hadn’t checked last night. What was going on? I kept a gun in my glove compartment, although I never really had a need to use it, but this time was different. This time the hair was going up the back of my neck and it didn't seem like anything good.

As I approached the house, there was angry yelling, and I could clearly hear my sister telling Mark that she wanted to leave. The sinking feeling that she had been trying to leave since she got there overwhelmed me and made me feel like a horrible brother. I should've come to check on her sooner. I was so sidetracked with the damn neighbor that I hadn't even come to check on her today. The day before. Could I have stopped this from happening?

Whether I could have or not, I was focused on stopping it now. I grabbed the gun and flipped the safety off. I moved toward the house, trying to remember the layout from when I had visited. At least I wasn’t walking in completely blind.

I debated between kicking the door down and yelling that I was there, to sneaking in to have the element of surprise. Her boyfriend, Mark, was a big guy, but if I got the drop on him, things would be better. I didn't want to kill somebody this morning, but I did want to get whoever it was away from my sister.

I moved to the door and tried the knob. It opened with ease and felt like a sign that this was the way forward. I didn't know it then, especially when I walked in and saw what was going on. My sister was in tears, and she had her bags packed. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought that she had waited until he went to sleep early in the morning to leave, but he had discovered her.

---