SHE WAITED UNTIL Calvin was splashing in the tub, steering his ducky through floes of bubbles, flicking an occasional bit of foam toward Jake, who shook his head in bafflement at the way it disappeared whenever he closed his jaws around it.
She’d put extra bubble bath in the water and brought out a toy she’d been saving for a special occasion, a plastic tugboat that sucked up water when squeezed, then squirted it out when squeezed again. She wanted him relaxed and distracted as she chatted away about mundane things—school, his friends, Jake.
“Where’d you go today, anyway?” she asked, finally getting around to what truly interested her.
“To school.” Squirt! The ducky took a direct hit in the eye. Calvin crowed in triumph.
“No, after school. In the park this evening.”
Calvin cast her a doubtful look. Sometimes he was a little too smart for his own good. She grabbed the duck and clobbered the tugboat with it. “Take that, you mean boat!”
The resulting naval war left Julia nearly as soaked as her son. She tried again. “Where did you say you went? Hey, look, the duck is getting away.”
He grabbed for it, and she put up a brief fight before letting him wrest it from her.
“Jake runned away.”
“Ran away. So you chased him?”
Another sideways glance.
“Because you were worried about him,” she reassured him. “Just like I was about you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How did you catch him?”
Bubbles slid from his shoulders as he hunched away from the question.
She tried again. “Where did you catch him?”
He brightened. He knew this one. “By the creek! Man helped.”
He caught himself and looked away again, chin trembling.
“Calvin, what is it? Did something happen? Did the man do something?” Her mind pinwheeled through the awful possibilities, heightened by Hayes’s warning about sex offenders camping along the creek.
He was sobbing, tears mingling with the bathwater, his toys forgotten.
“Oh, Calvin. It’s all right.” Even though it wasn’t. “You can tell me.”
“You told me … you told me …” Calvin blubbered. “No strangers.”
Oh God. “Did the man touch you? Hurt you? What did he look like?”
She would find him, this faceless, nameless man. If it took the rest of her life. She would find him and confront him and with her bare hands she would …
“He looked like …” Calvin twisted his lips, one side drooping. “Funny mouth.”
The tugboat fell from Julia’s hand.
She drew an imaginary scar across one corner of her lips. “A line here? Like this?”
Calvin nodded, his smile returning. He’d gotten something right.
Julia turned away so he wouldn’t see her face, the horror written there at the thought of Mack Coates in any proximity to her son.
“He was nice!” Calvin crowed behind her. “He givved Jake back.”
“Gave.” Julia rearranged her face and turned back. The bathroom’s steamy heat bordered on discomfort, but she suppressed a shiver. She sat back on her heels, trying to see it. Jake on the spinner, maybe seeing a bird or a squirrel—or maybe being lured by a grinning man with a treat—leaping after it, Calvin in pursuit as she stared oblivious into her phone. The man, once safely out of Julia’s sight, grabbing the leash, offering it to Calvin, waiting with that same crooked smile as the boy came close.
“Did the man say anything to you?”
Calvin shook his head firmly, happy to cooperate now that he could tell he wasn’t in trouble. “Police lady came.”
But Hayes had been in her running gear—and that damn sweatshirt.
“Calvin.” It took an extreme effort to keep her voice low and calm. For good measure, she took up the toys again, filling the tugboat with water and squirting it toward Jake, who sneezed and shot her a look of betrayal. Calvin rewarded her with a cascade of giggles.
“How did you know she was a police lady?”
“She told me.”
Julia’s breath caught. Hayes could have been anyone.
“And I ’membered her. From before. When we saw the people with the fire.”
“The people under the bridge! Yes! You remember them and her!” In her relief, she was babbling. “That’s good, Calvin. That’s really good. But the next time someone tells you they’re a police officer, make sure they have the police uniform. And the badge—the shiny star.” She struck her chest. “And if Jake ever runs away again, don’t you chase him. You call me and I’ll chase him for you. My legs are longer and I can run faster.”
She lifted him from the tub and wrapped him in a towel, her sweet boy, safe in her arms, slippery and wet as a seal.
“Mom! Stop kissing!”
She released him, and he ran naked to his room, Jake at his heels, the two of them making the kind of joyful racket that never would have been tolerated in Beverly’s house.
It took her four readings of “Strega Nona,” his current favorite, before his eyelids grew heavy and he finally slept. Thanks to Strega Nona, she had to sing over the stove whenever she cooked pasta, with Calvin blowing the necessary kisses before she drained it.
She sat with him a long while after he fell asleep, stroking his hair with one hand, the other wrapped around his arm, unwilling to let him go, as though he might disappear again when she turned away to go to her own room.
“Stay,” she finally commanded Jake. “And bark like hell if anything happens.”
What did she think might happen? That someone might lean a ladder against the house and whisk Calvin away before the motion sensor lights had fully awakened her?
She walked through the house, checking the locks, pulling the drapes tighter, the shades lower. She checked her phone app for the security cameras. Peered through the peepholes in the front and back doors, just in case.
But when she finally fell into bed and closed her eyes, the paired images of Cheryl Hayes and Mack Coates rose before her. She’d entertained the possibility of coincidence the day Hayes had shown up at Coates’s initial hearing. Again when she’d seen him emerging from the tea shop where she’d found Hayes.
How’d the saying go from that old James Bond movie? “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.”
She’d brushed aside as fanciful her notion of Hayes and Coates being involved in some sort of criminal operation, just as she’d given no more than a cursory follow-up to Wayne’s broad hints about the woman.
No more.
Time to take action against the enemy.