Chapter Nine --

 

“Mmm....” I didn’t trust myself to speak. Instead, I surreptitiously wiped away a stray tear. Time to pick myself up with my bootstraps, before I completely crumbled under the weight of the past. I headed back into the office cubicle to compose myself. It must have been the trip to the emergency room last night that triggered all these memories. I still could remember Aunt Pinkie and the hospital security guards escorting me into the brightly lit room, the doctor gently checking me over for injuries, giving me a shot, probably penicillin. He was kind, apologetic. All the adults were. They kept telling me it wasn’t my fault. But if it wasn’t my fault, whose was it? Someone had to be responsible. Someone let that man do horrible things to me.

“Only child?” Doc was watching me from the doorway and his voice startled me.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” I wanted to know.

“Not much in the way of family after your mother died. Not much in the way of support.”

“I did okay. Aunt Pinkie was a great comfort. She took very good care of me,” I said defensively.

“Of course she did. But she was only one person, Cady.”

“What’s your point, Doc?” I snapped, feeling like I was under the microscope.

“You’re not used to people helping you. You’re not used to having anyone really do for you. I saw that look on your face. I just want you to know that what happened back when you were a kid was terrible. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. It won’t ever completely disappear. But what you learned was real. That’s what drove you to the door last night, to check on Daisy. You prevented her from having her childhood snatched away from her. You did a good thing.”

“Sure.” I put a hand up to my brow, trying to keep Doc from looking into my eyes.

“The pain of a traumatic event never really goes away, Cady, until you confront what happened to you, you mourn it, and you make your peace.”

“Like you?” I snapped. Did Doc really know so much about the subject? He was acting like he was an expert. I just wasn’t sure I wanted a lecture from someone who had never walked the walk. It’s hard to explain how hard it is to get the stink of an assault off of you, no matter how much soap you use or how long you stay under the water. Long after the sweat of my assailant was washed down the drain, I could still smell him on me every once in awhile, like when I showed up at the hospital emergency room twice in a week. I felt like I was reliving the horror of those days, and most of all, that hole in my heart because my mother was gone and I was alone.

“It’s the only way you can go on living. Otherwise, you’re just going through the motions. My last tour of duty, I lost twenty guys. I just couldn’t save them from their catastrophic wounds. I couldn’t patch up their broken bodies. Two of them bled out on me as I stitched them up. I took me awhile to understand that their injuries were bigger than my skills. Even a team of surgeons wouldn’t have been able to save those boys. Doesn’t mean I’m okay with it.”

“But don’t you ever get mad that it happened?” I searched those green eyes for answers.

“I learned a long time ago that life isn’t fair, Cady. You do the best you can with what you’ve got. In a perfect world, every kid would have a shiny bike and ice cream coming out the ying yang and two parents who adore her. But that’s not always what life turns out to be, is it? When you look back, you have to look not only at the bad, Cady, but at the good. Those experiences make you the person you are, even as horrible as they are. The answers aren’t always pretty, but if we can’t find ourselves in what we do as people, we’re just disconnected from what makes us human. That guy took something precious from you when he attacked you, but he probably wasn’t even thinking about that. He was in search of someone to hurt because he felt justified in hurting another human being. It doesn’t necessarily matter why he did what he did. It’s enough that he did it. But when you look back, see what really made you vulnerable. And when you do, maybe, just maybe, you’ll stop being angry with yourself for not preventing it. Maybe, just maybe, you didn’t have the skills to save yourself.”

“What?” Stunned, I sat back in my chair.

“You’ve spent decades beating the young Cady up for not being smart enough or fast enough to get away. Now no one ever gets close enough to you to actually hurt you because you think that’s what will keep you safe. You have a sweet candy shell around a soft middle, but that shell is pretty hard and pretty thick. That middle is the one place no one ever really goes, isn’t it? You’re kind, you’re good, but you’re alone, and you like it that way.”

“How...how dare you!” I sputtered, wanting to push Doc into the street, maybe even under a bus. Here was a man who just showed up one day, and before I knew it, he was baking my cakes and roasting my coffee beans and saving Daisy from a man who wanted to do her harm.

“How dare I? I dare because I’m the pot calling the kettle black. Takes one to know one. And I’m still working it out.” And with that, Doc turned around and went back to the kitchen, leaving me dumbstruck in my office chair.

By six, the kitchen was all cleaned up and ready for Walter when he arrived in the wee hours of Friday morning. The coffee beans were in their airtight containers, ready to be ground up. Daisy had decorated the wedding bell cookies and they were in their own boxes, waiting to be bagged for Saturday. And Doc was nowhere to be seen.

“How are we going to get home?” I wondered aloud to the only other person in the shop.

“He said we should chill out, he’d be back.”

“Oh.”

“Did he say where he was going, Daze?”

“Nope.” She was busy texting her friend. “Vicki says hi.”

“Tell Vicki I said hi back,” I told her, peering out the front window. There were a few people on foot. There was a light rain coming down, leaving the night shrouded in mist. The day had been warm and now the temperature was dropping. Across the way, the lights went out in Ben Johnson’s accounting office. I watched him lock up before he strode down the street to his car, his tweed fedora keeping his head dry.

At ten after six, I considered calling a local cab, but decided to give Doc a few more minutes. It was just as well. At six-fifteen, he was banging at the front door, a large package in his arms.

“Sorry,” he told me, squeezing past me as he came in. “I had some trouble picking it up at the UPS office.”

“What is that?” I wondered.

“The flowers for the wedding cake. The UPS guy was late last night, so he left the slip on the front door.”

I had completely forgotten about the package with the gumpaste decorations. How had that happened? Daisy had been attacked.

“Thank you, Doc,” I told him.

“Don’t thank me, Cady. It was Walter who pointed it out to me. He found the slip when he got here this morning.” I made a mental note to thank my baker tomorrow. “Where do you want these?”

We took them into the kitchen to inspect them, on the off chance I would have to order more if we had a box of broken decorations. I was pleasantly surprised. All of the delicate flower sprays looked fabulous. The Henslacker cake was sure to be a hit.

“Shall we pick up pizzas on the way home?” Doc asked.

“My mom made dinner already,” Daisy sighed. “Fish. Ugh. Boy, pizza would be really good tonight.”

“We’ll do it another time,” was Doc’s reply. “We’ll have a little party after we deliver the wedding cake to the bride and groom. But we should get going before the roads ice up. The weather report is calling for more freezing rain.”

Daisy sat on the air mattress in the back of the van on the way back to the Soundings. I sat up front, next to the determined driver. The windshield wipers kicked out a steady rhythm as they cleaned away the tiny sprinkles that hit the glass surface. Doc hit a couple of patches of black ice. I knew because I saw how tightly he gripped the wheel and steered into the skid.

“Am I going with you on Saturday to deliver the cake?” the teenager asked.

“Why? Did you want to go?”

“Are you kidding? It’s the Saybrook Point Inn. That place is gorgeous!”

“Well, I...we could use your help,” I told her. Doc took his eyes off the road long enough to give me a wink. “Besides, don’t forget we have to bag all those cookies and tie them with the gold ribbon.”

“Are you going to be able to do the royal icing, Cady? That cake is supposed to look like lace, remember.”

“We’ll see. It depends on how my shoulder feels.”

Doc pulled into a parking space in front of my unit. Daisy popped out of the back, text books in hand, and slid the van door shut. “See you guys tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Doc replied.

“Good night, Daisy,” I called after her. She threw a hand up in the air as she practically skipped down the sidewalk. “What did you tell her about the man you grabbed last night?”

Doc looked at me, standing a few feet away. And then he shrugged.

“I told her we delivered a message, that he was to stay away from Daisy and her family or my buddies and I would hunt him down.”

“And she didn’t want to know why you didn’t take him to the cops?”

“Nope.” Doc pulled his raincoat closed. Raindrops fogged up his glasses as we stood there.

“Doc, why didn’t you?”

“You want to go out for a bite?” he asked. “It’s either that or we get inside, before one of us catches a chill.”

I unlocked the front door, flicked on the living room lights, and felt Doc’s hands carefully removing the coat from my shoulders. He hung it up in the hall closet, along with his oversized raincoat.

“You want to know why we didn’t bring that guy down to the local police department?” I nodded. He sat me down on the sofa and plunked down beside me. “It has to do with what the bastard told us before we took him for that little drive up north. We caught him peeking in the windows. He was there to do surveillance. It seems Daisy’s stepmother hired his buddy to kill her.”

“What?” One look at Doc told me he was telling the truth. Mimi hired a couple of guys to kill Daisy. “But why?”

“The bastard said they didn’t know. His buddy got three thousand bucks upfront, and he was supposed to get ten thousand more when they delivered the proof Daisy was dead.”

“You have got to be kidding me!” My hands felt cold and clammy on my lap. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to kill that poor girl. But Mimi? Why? She got Doug. She had her triplets. She even had her career as an attorney. If anything, she had it all. Why would she want to kill a teenager? And why not Dylan and Carole, while she was at it?

“Cady?” Doc was looking at me with concern. “You okay?”

“I just don’t understand it.”

“We’re going to get to the bottom of it, believe me. There’s a sting in the works. You remember I told you we took the driver of the pickup for a ride? That’s because he flipped on his pal. We got the second guy and dragged him...er, convinced him to accompany us to the police station and make a confession, because he was the one who did the actual assault and collected the retainer for the hit. He confirmed his buddy was just along for the ride.”

“So, what happens now?”

“We give Mimi a new hitman to hire to finish the job. She doesn’t know the first one got caught. We’re going to lure her to Connecticut, so the local cops have jurisdiction. We’ll record everything.”

“We? You mean you’re going to pretend to be a hitman?”

“I was a medic on a special forces team, Cady. I have the chops to be a really scary guy. Besides, the local cops are all well-known, and Mimi used to be on the Board of Ed. She might reach out to her contacts and ask around. That would blow the whole deal. We don’t want to let her off the hook.”

“True,” I agreed. “But what if she doesn’t take the bait?’

“Oh, she’ll take the bait,” he insisted. “By the time I’m done, she’ll even ask me to whack the rest of the family.”

“What?”

“For another five grand, I’ll be happy to take out Carole and Dylan.”