California Demon (25 page)

Especially considering how baffled he looked, I figured I could cut David some slack. I’d trust him. For now. But I’d also keep an eye on him.

l Spent the drive from Cutter’s place to Timmy’s day care thinking about demons and David and how I still had more questions than answers. David might not be a demon, but something was definitely up with that man. And I still had no clue who the Tartarus demons were talking to. Or, more important, why.

All in all, I didn’t like the score, and I had a feeling time was running out.

I forgot all about that, though, when I saw Timmy. He looked up, beamed, then raced into my arms. I swung him around, generating peals of laughter from my little man.

“What did you do in school today?” I asked him as I strapped him into his car seat.

Silence.

I gave him Boo Bear and tried again. “Nothing, Momma,” he said, then shoved his thumb into his mouth.

I shut his door and moved around to the driver’s side. Once we were back on the road, I tried again. “Come on, sport. I know you must have done
something.
Tell me about your day.”

In fact, I knew they’d played with shaving cream, because that’s what the little note in his cubby had announced. Timmy, however, guarded that fact like it was a state secret.

“Can’t tell you, Momma. I’m sucking my thumb.”

“Right,” I said. “That makes sense. Maybe you could take your thumb out long enough to clue in your mom?”

More silence, except for the mild slurping sounds associated with rampant suckage.

“Timmy? Come on. I really want to know.”

I adjusted my rearview mirror so I could see him. The thumb came out of his mouth, and his eyes got wide.

“Momma,” he said, his exasperated voice a little too familiar. “I
told
you. Is a secret!”

“Right. A secret.” What the hell? I smiled to myself and decided not to press. After all, I knew all about secrets.

I was still grinning when I opened the door that leads from our garage into the kitchen. Timmy barreled inside, yelling about
Blue’s Clues
at the top of his lungs. I followed him in, my smile fading as I saw my daughter sitting at the kitchen table, her eyes puffy, her cheeks flushed, and tearstains marring the thin layer of powder she’d dusted onto her cheeks.

“Allie? Sweetheart, what is it?”

I dropped my purse and went to her side, trying to put my arms around her. She twisted away, avoiding my touch. Since I can take a hint, I pulled out one of the other chairs and sat facing her, my heart pounding in my chest as I waited for my daughter to tell me what was wrong.

“Allie? Is this about a boy?” I didn’t believe that it was, not really. But I hoped. Oh, how I hoped that it wasn’t my secret that had brought tears to her eyes.

“A boy,” she said, then shook her head. “No, I guess it’s not really about a boy.” She looked up at me, and from my new, closer vantage point, I could see just how bloodshot her eyes were.

“Sweetheart . . .”

She cut me off, waving a piece of paper. “It’s from Daddy.”

I froze, the blood in my veins turning to ice. “From Stuart?” I asked, pushing my words out as if through molasses.

But I knew the answer. Even before she spoke. The letter was from Eric. And somehow, someway, our daughter had found it.

Thirteen

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Allie said.

I shook my head slowly, too shell-shocked to say anything at all.

“Mom? I’ve got a right to know. If there’s something weird going on about my dad, you have to tell me.”

“That’s a letter from Eric?” I asked, my eyes never leaving the paper.

She pressed her lips tight together, her eyes blinking fast. “Yeah.”

I held out my hand, and she passed me the note. This is what I read:

I finished reading the note and set it on the table, ignoring the tears that ran down my cheeks. “Where did you find this?”

Allie shook her head. “Nuh-uh. No way, nohow. Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

“Alison Elizabeth Crowe, don’t you dare play games with me. I’m really not in the mood.”

“Yeah? Well, I’m not in the mood, either,” she shouted. She stood, snatched up the letter, then waved it in front of my face. “This is my father writing this! I have a right to know what’s going on!”

I knew I should step in, remind her that I was the mother and she had no right talking to me like that. But part of me said that she
did
have a right. That this was about Eric. And that she deserved to know the truth. If not all, then some.

From the living room, Timmy started wailing.

“Coming!” Allie tossed the letter at me, then stalked out of the room. I just sat there, numb, taking deep breaths as I tried to regain my equilibrium.

Finally, I pushed back from the table, then went into the living room where Allie was rocking Timmy on her lap. She looked up at me, then immediately back down at the floor. “I scared him,” she said. “I shouldn’t have yelled.”

“He’ll be okay.” I sat down on the couch and put my arm around them both. I don’t know what I’d planned to say, but when I opened my mouth, it all seemed so simple. “I don’t know why yet,” I said. “But I think your father was murdered.”

She stiffened in my arms, but stayed silent.

“I found a note the other day. That key? It led to a safe-deposit box. I didn’t remember Eric and I getting it, but we must have, because my name was on the box, too. And all that was inside was a letter to me.”

“Why didn’t you tell the police?”

“And say what? The note was cryptic. A lot of nonsense, really.” I didn’t say that the police would probably be useless. Eric had been a Demon Hunter. Once upon a time, I’d believed his death was unrelated to his work. I didn’t believe that anymore.

“The note didn’t tell the whole story,” I added. “And I didn’t know where to go next.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

I looked at her, comprehension dawning. “You’ve seen the first letter.” It wasn’t a question. I was absolutely positive I knew what the answer would be.

She nodded guiltily. Timmy took that opportunity to squirm free. Allie scooted to the far side of the couch, then hugged a pillow close to her chest, looking at me over her intertwined arms. “When I got into your purse at McDonald’s,” she said. “I didn’t mean to snoop, honest I didn’t. But I could see some of it, and I recognized Daddy’s handwriting, and I—”

She squeezed her mouth shut, blinking furiously.

“It’s okay, sweetie. I understand.” I don’t believe in all that subconscious psychobabble BS, but I
had
left the note in my purse. And I had let my daughter rummage her little heart out. If anyone was taking the blame here, it was me. Not Allie.

“But how’d you find that note?” I asked, pointing toward the kitchen, where I’d left the new note on the table.

“Daddy told you where it was,” she said, in the same tone she might use to tell someone they were an idiot.

“Apparently Daddy told
you
where it was. I had no clue.”

“ ‘The best of us’,” she said. “That’s what Daddy used to call me, remember?”

I did remember, and as soon as she said it, the answer was obvious. “Your baby box.” I’m not much of a scrapbooker, but I do keep trinkets in an old hatbox. Baptismal souvenirs (the church program, the baptismal candle), birth stuff like the now-dried pink mum the hospital had hung on the door of my private room. Her first pacifier. The hospital baby blanket I’d smuggled out in her carrier. Stuff.

And not stuff I ever go back to look at, either. It’s just there, in the closet, ready to be pulled out and examined when the time was right. Like when Allie has a baby of her own.

“It was wrapped around the candle,” she said. “And the candle and the note were both in the candle box.”

“I’m impressed,” I said.

“So when are we going to Los Angeles?”

“Excuse me?”

“The teacher guy,” she said, tapping the letter. “You’re going to go talk to him, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “
I
am.” I hadn’t seen Father Oliver for years, but I was certain that’s who Eric meant.

“I’m coming with you,” she said.

“Allie, in case you’ve forgotten, you’ve got this thing called school tomorrow.”

“I’m totally ahead in all my classes.”

I didn’t even bother to hide my disbelief. “
All
your classes?”

She sucked in her cheeks, then blew out some air. “Well, not life sciences, but, I mean, like why do I care about photosynthesis anyway?”

Since I wasn’t entirely sure what photosynthesis was, much less why she should care, I decided to avoid the question entirely. “You can’t skip school on a whim, Allie. And you can’t not study something just because it doesn’t involve boys or cheerleading.”

“I like algebra,” she said.

I gaped at her. “Are you sure you’re my daughter? Because I’m thinking you’re a pod person.”

She made a face. “Don’t even try to change the subject. I’m coming with you tomorrow, and that’s all there is to it.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back in her chair, looking so much like me at that moment, that it was eerie.

“I really don’t think it’s such a good idea.” What if Father Oliver blurted something out about our demon-hunting days?

Her body seemed to sag, and I was certain I’d won the battle. “It’s just . . . It’s just that I’m starting to forget him.”

My heart started to break around the edges. “Daddy?”

She nodded, then wiped the back of her hand under her nose. She looked small and young and lost, and I couldn’t bear the thought that she’d ever,
ever,
forget her father.

“I don’t want to, but I was only nine, you know? And I look at pictures and it all comes back, but I’m really afraid, Mom. What if I look at a picture someday and that’s all it is?”

“Oh, baby.” I was crying now, too, and I opened my arms wide, hugging her close. Timmy lost interest in his television show and came over to join us, crawling up on the couch between us and snuggling.

I still wanted to say no. So help me, I wanted to scream no at the top of my lungs. But in my heart, I knew she had to come with me. If Allie found out the truth tomorrow, I’d deal with it then.

After all, I thought, isn’t that what this whole parenting thing is all about?

Because Allie WAS anxious, she woke me up at the crack of dawn—even before Stuart had rolled out of bed.

He sat up, blinking in the dark. “Wha—?”

I kissed his forehead. “Go back to sleep,” I whispered. “You still have twelve minutes before your alarm goes off.”

By the time I was showered and changed, Allie was waiting at the kitchen table, Timmy’s lunch already packed, and the boy himself eating dry Honey Nut Cheerios and drinking milk out of a sippy cup. “Can we go?”

I melted into one of the chairs. “Administer at least one dose of coffee intravenously. Then we’ll talk.”

“Mo-om.”

“Tim’s day care doesn’t even open for another fifteen minutes. I have time for one cup.”

“Fine. But I’m putting it in Stuart’s commuter cup. If you’re not done with it in five minutes, you can take it with us.”

Exactly five minutes later, we were in the van, the Star-bucks cup tucked into the console beside me. We got to KidSpace with three minutes to spare, and ended up waiting in the parking lot for Nadine to unlock the doors.

“Why can’t you do this on a school day?” I asked, as soon as we were underway. “Do you have any idea what a hassle it is getting you up in the morning?”

She just rolled her eyes, then kicked her feet up onto the dashboard. “Can we drive through McDonald’s for a sausage biscuit?”

“What about your no-fat, wholly organic, must-be-a-paragon-of-food virtue diet?”

“Road trip, Mom. I can bend the rules for a road trip.”

“Right.” And since a sausage biscuit sounded pretty tasty right then, I pulled into the first McDonald’s I saw. Why not? With this latest insurgence of demon activity, I was burning an insane number of calories. And besides, we had a long drive ahead of us. More than an hour without traffic, but since Los Angeles’s morning rush hour covers a four-hour window, I expected that we’d be moving at the speed of lethargic snails once we hit the outskirts.

Since I didn’t want to spend the entire day in the van, we avoided the Coast Highway, picking instead the significantly less scenic 101. Allie, naturally, dozed off about ten minutes after she finished her biscuit, leaving me to my mishmash of thoughts and questions. All familiar territory. What were the demons up to? Which demon was their master? What secrets would Father Oliver reveal to me? And the biggest question of all: Why had Eric kept secrets from me?

Around and around the questions spun until I was so sick of my own thoughts that I clicked on the radio. A CD was in, so the first thing I heard was “Hot Potato.” I actually listened through the entire song and the beginning of “Shaky Shaky” before I remembered that when Timmy wasn’t in the van, I wasn’t required to listen to his
Wiggles
CDs. I switched over to the radio and tuned to an oldies channel, letting Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” fill the car.