Chapter Sixteen
Instead of taking a Christmas holiday, Bella stepped up her stalking campaign with threatening notes and those middle-of-the-night phone calls I’d come to dread. Still, with a few changes, we went about our lives as always, even sometimes taunting Bella by waving to her. Once I left a sack of cookies on the front porch with her name, and it disappeared. I didn’t think a stray dog got it. In a way, I’d come to accept her presence as a part of my life, an unpleasant part but still just part of my day.
The notes, often slipped through our mail slot, were disturbing, sometimes predicting doom and gloom on a certain day, sometimes talking fire and destruction. To my surprise, these were all handwritten in a neat, concise hand, properly punctuated and with correct spelling. Bella was no dummy, and somewhere along the way she’d paid attention in school. I forbade the girls to open such notes, and as far as I know, they obeyed. I don’t think they wanted to know any more about Bella.
The phone calls were less specific and therefore less scary. Mike took to answering the phone and always simply heard the click of a hang-up. If I did happen to answer, I mostly heard heavy breathing. The calls were, however, a major annoyance when they came in the middle of the night, sometimes at twenty-minute intervals—just long enough to get back to sleep before the next one. We disconnected the phone, and Mike kept his cell handy in case of an emergency call. I made sure Mom had that number, with strict orders to keep it confidential. Nonetheless, Bella found out that number and began to call. Mike and I were both suffering from sleep deprivation—another of Bella’s tactics to wear us down. It worked, and we were too often cranky in the morning. Didn’t Bella ever sleep?
I had shared, in confidence, our situation with Susan Smith, the principal, and now the girls waited for me every day in her office. They were allowed on the playground during recess only with strict supervision. None of this pleased them, and they fussed until Mike sat them down and had a talk with them.
Bella knew better than to claim she had been sent to pick the girls up for me, but there was the day the school nurse called to say that Em was in her office throwing up. I rushed up to the school and burst into the nurse’s office.
“Where’s Em?” I demanded.
Caroline Patrick, the nurse, looked at me blankly. “Em hasn’t been in here today. Far as I know she’s fine.”
Frantic now. “But I got this call. She was in your office, throwing up.”
Caroline laughed a bit. “Thank heaven, no. Haven’t had one case of the throw-ups today.” Seeing that I was coming unglued, she suggested gently, “Why don’t you check her classroom?”
Of course. I did. And there she sat, head bent over whatever she was working on. I watched for a minute, but she didn’t look up, never saw me, and I slunk away. I did manage to go back to Caroline Patrick and report that all seemed well and stumble through an apology.
She was puzzled. “I don’t know who called you. They didn’t use my name, did they?”
I nodded. Yes, they had used her name, but I knew darn good and well who had called. When I got into my car and checked my cell phone, there was a message from Bella: “Glad the little one was okay.” A chuckle. “Hope she stays that way.”
The implication was all too clear.
I could not, I repeated to myself, let her get to me. This was less a physical threat than a battle of the wills. I went by the Fiesta Market and bought a small pork roast, pre-seasoned, some new potatoes to do in the oven with rosemary and olive oil, and Romaine lettuce for a Caesar salad. We would eat well tonight and pretend Bella didn’t exist.
“What’s the occasion?” Mike asked as he cut the small roast into slices.
“Nothing. I just felt like fixing a good dinner.”
He and the girls wolfed it down and raved about it, and I was glad I had done it.
“Next time you get this urge, we really should call Nana,” Mike said. “We don’t see enough of her. And the girls don’t see her enough.”
“Sure,” I said. “You’re right. Let’s talk later and plan something.”
“Later” came after the girls were in bed and, I hoped, asleep. “Mike, Mom wants the girls to spend Friday night at her house.”
“Great. A night alone for us.” He tried his best to leer at me but his interpretation of a leer left a lot to be desired.
“But with this Bella business, I’m just not comfortable with that.”
Mike didn’t answer right away, and I was relieved that he didn’t just brush away my hesitation. “Okay. What can we do to make it work?”
Finally I said in a questioning voice, “Keisha?”
“I’m okay with that, if you are. And if Nana and Keisha are. We’ll have to coordinate schedules.”
Keisha was actually delighted. Mom resented having to have a babysitter watch her when she thought she was babysitting, but she acquiesced, and it was arranged that the girls would spend the next Friday night at Nana’s. My mom pumped them up with plans for things to do—make homemade ice cream, bake cookies. What child could resist? I tried hard to quiet my worries, and Mike tried equally hard to reassure me.
“Bella is not going to burst in there with a gun and start shooting,” he said. “And Keisha can more than handle everything else. I’m fine with it.”
“Okay. I am too.” I said it with a bravado I didn’t really feel.
That Friday night Keisha drove the girls to Mom’s, after much hugging and kissing and assurances we’d meet each other in the morning for breakfast at
Ol
’ South.
After they left, Mike grumbled, “For Pete’s sake, it’s not like they’re leaving for a month. They’ll be home in the morning.”
“I know. But they haven’t spent many nights away from me, and with Bella in the picture, I’m still nervous.”
“Quit worrying. Let’s go see if we can get a table at
Nonna
Tata.”
We did. Took a bottle of red wine with us, held hands across the table while we waited for our pasta, and had a real, grown-up “date” kind of an evening. I only called Mom twice during dinner and once after we got home, when she assured me the girls were sound asleep. She and Keisha were watching TV and José had been by three times on his rounds. They were safe. No sign of Bella.
Keisha’s parting words were, “You two stay safe.”
“You too,” I said, thinking it was just a nice way of saying goodnight. As it turned out we weren’t safe. We just didn’t know it.
About three, the sound of breaking glass woke both of us, bringing Mike to his feet too rapidly. He fell, and I struggled to help him to his feet.
“Get me the walker,” he said. It had scooted away when he fell. As I pulled it back, he used the bed to pull himself up and said desperately, “I smell something. Living room.”
I flew ahead of him down the hall until he said, “Stop, Kelly. Let me go first.” He had his service revolver in one hand and used the other to clump the walker along. I ran back to the bedroom for my cell phone.
“Smoke bomb,” he yelled. “Go out the back door. “
“You can’t make it down those steps, and the front door is closer.”
“Kelly, go out the
back
door now!” His tone told me not to argue with him, and I fled to the back door, hearing the walker behind me. Once outside I turned to help him, but he brushed me away and between the walker and the railing, he made it into the yard.
Only then did I call 911 and yell “smoke bomb.” The operator, doing as she’d been trained, tried hard to keep me on the phone, but I didn’t listen. I gave her the address and set the phone down. My focus was on Mike.
Winded by his exertion, Mike finally said, “Sometimes a smoke bomb is meant to scare you out in the open where you’re a perfect target. Like tear gas.”
Bella wouldn’t shoot us —or would she? She didn’t carry a gun. I heard sirens approaching then José’s voice calling our names.
“In the back yard, José,” Mike called.
He came bursting through the gate. “White smoke is pouring out of your house. Doesn’t look like a fire.”
“No fire,” Mike said. “Smoke bomb. You didn’t pass a battered green Mustang did you?”
“Man, I don’t know what I passed. Once the call came through
HiHHis
I just drove like hell.”
“José, can you go through and open the front door, so the fire guys don’t break it? Grab a wet paper towel in the kitchen for your nose.”
José took off and apparently just made it to the front door in time. In seconds, the house swarmed with firemen opening doors and windows. One of them had disarmed the bomb, and it was taken for evidence. The fire captain came out and reported to Mike that it was homemade, but in a canister that fragmented when it exploded. If anyone had been in the living room, they’d have been hit by flying fragments of metal. I made a mental note to examine the furniture and call poor David Summers, my usually patient insurance agent. José reported that the fire guys had set up giant fans inside.
We waited outside, shivering, but José finally brought us coats that smelled not like smoke but strangely chemical.
“I’ve got to call Keisha,” he said.
“Don’t wake them all up. They don’t know anything’s wrong.”
“Keisha will know,” he said archly, and he was right. She did. He handed me the phone.
“I knew I shouldn’t have left tonight. Knew something would happen.”
“Keisha, you couldn’t have done anything.”
“Don’t be so sure. I’m gonna catch that girl red-handed one of these days. You just watch.”
“Are the girls still asleep?” I prayed for a yes but got the opposite.
“Can’t you hear them? They’re standing right here, demanding to know what happened. Heard the phone ring. They want to come home.”
Sigh. “Tell them home is too smoky—not fire smoke but something that smells awful. I think we’ll sleep in the apartment, if you don’t mind.”
“‘Course I don’t mind. Doubt you’ll sleep much anyway, but you try. We got work to do tomorrow, and I may have to do some
detectin
’.”
She put the girls on, and I assured each one that Mike and I were freezing and frightened but okay.
“Can’t we come home?”
“No, Em, you’re better off with Nana and Keisha.”
“Nana’s crying and talking about moving back to Chicago.”
That’s all I need! Mom would harp on this for weeks.
Finally I got the girls to go back to bed. “Keisha, tell Mom I’ll talk to her tomorrow. I don’t have the strength for it now.”
She chuckled. “Miss Cynthia gonna be fine. I’ll take care of that. You sleep now. You’re safe.”
I had to believe Keisha once again seemed to have that pipeline or sixth sense or whatever.
Mike finally thought to ask José what he was doing on patrol so late. His shift should have ended hours ago.
“You know that girl that’s been stalking you? I arrested her tonight for loitering—outside
Nonna
Tata. I’m guessing that’s where you had dinner.”
I stared at him. “If she’s in jail, she didn’t throw the smoke bomb.”
“
Naw
, she made bail about one. I was sort of footloose—Keisha being at your mom’s and all, and I just hung around playing poker with a couple of the other off-duty guys.” He looked anxious. “Don’t tell Keisha. She doesn’t like me to bet.” That was the farthest thing from my mind right then, but I promised.
Mike was mumbling to himself, “She could still have done it, but she had to have help. You search her car when you hauled her in?”
“Sure. No smoke bomb.”
“So somebody brought it to her. She’s got help. She didn’t have time to make a bomb, even if she knows how.”
“Her brother?”
Mike shook his head. “I don’t think he’s a big enough player. He sure isn’t smart enough to make a smoke bomb. My gut tells me someone else is pulling these strings. Bella may not have done this at all.”
That was a disquieting thought.
I wanted to tell him to ask Keisha but instead I asked, “How do you make a smoke bomb?”
Mike looked at me briefly. “Combination of chemicals—and simple things like sugar and sodium bicarbonate. Usually use potassium nitrate—probably what you smell.”
It was five before everyone left. The fire department had boarded up the broken window and left someone to keep watch because they left the doors and windows open. As we fell into bed, I said, “Mike, Conroy didn’t show up tonight. That’s a first.”
“Maybe no one called him,” he said and was instantly asleep. I almost hated him as I fought to clear my mind and let sleep come.
We slept until almost ten and might have slept longer if someone hadn’t pounded on the apartment door. Mike and I looked at each other. At least we knew it wasn’t Bella—this person was not at all stealthy. Still as I said, “I’ll go,” Mike’s hand reached for his revolver. Having no robe with me and sure that Keisha’s caftans would swallow me, I put on the coat I’d worn last night and called, “Just a minute.”
It was Buck Conroy, as we both should have known. “Getting your beauty sleep?” he asked as he barged in.
Mike sat up in bed. “We were up a good bit of the night.”
“So was I. Tracking down where Bella Garza is and where she went after she posted bail.”