Page 32 of I Dream of Danger
Abandoned on the lowest day of her life. Left alone in a cold, empty house the day after she buried her father. Looked at it that way—well, it wasn’t pretty. Because lots of bad things could happen to people felled by a blow when they were already low.
He hadn’t been worried about her the entire op. The only thing he’d been really worried about was his usual—a) get the mission done, and b) come home alive. Elle had been there like a lollipop he was going to give himself when he’d done his job right.
He’d willed himself into making sure they got their mission done and he could bring his ass home safely, and he knew that as soon as he got the chance, he was going back to Lawrence.
But there was another scenario possible. And in that scenario, Nick leaving was just too much for her to bear and she?—
Don’t go there.
But he went there anyway.
Because what was burning inside him so much he leaned forward in the helos as if he could make them fly faster and he drove almost double the speed limit once he was on the ground, was a very clear image of what might be in that house that wouldn’t show up on IR.
A skeleton.
It was nearly dark when he raced up the driveway, stumbled out of the car, forgetting to close the car door, and limped as fast as he could to the front door. Nobody answered the bell. At that point, he wasn’t expecting anyone to. The front door lock was a joke. Inside of a minute he was walking into the atrium.
He stepped inside on full alert, every sense alive. There was, of course, no light. Just to be thorough he tried the switches but of course nothing worked. It was okay. He’d brought some of his kit, and part of that kit was a military issue flashlight that lit everything up just fine. Not that there was anything to see. But there was something he smelled. Something awful. Something…dead.
Oh God. He’d smelled death before and this one, thick and rancid, was one of the worst. He followed his nose into the kitchen, heart thundering, and stood on the threshold, flashlight panning over the room.
Not Elle. Not dead. The smell was that of meat that had rotted for three months. Spread out on the floor was box after box of groceries, bearing the logo of the supermarket he’d stopped at. A couple of boxes were opened but as far as he could tell, nothing had been put away and certainly nothing had been eaten.
He checked room after room, his feet leaving tracks in the otherwise untouched dust, everything in exactly the place it had been three months before.
The desk in what had been the Judge’s study showed a neat pile of bills with a checkbook on top. The stubs of the checkbook matched the bills.
The huge stand-alone safe’s door was open. Inside it was completely empty. The Judge used to keep significant amounts of cash there. He remembered the time the safe had been emptied because the Judge had given him everything in it. At the time, beside the cash, there had been a few gold ingots and stiff, engraved documents—stocks and bonds. Now there was nothing.
He checked the rest of the study, but it was totally void of clues.
The stairs were hard for his leg and he climbed like old people did, one stair at a time. He ignored the pain and lifted his head and flared his nostrils, pulling in air, dreading the thought of smelling a cadaver up here. Nothing horrified him the way the thought of smelling Elle’s corpse did.
But there was nothing. Just cold, dead, empty air. He checked every room, leaving Elle’s room for last. Finally, he pushed open her bedroom door, heart knocking against his ribs, barely able to cross the threshold.
It was exactly as he left it, down to the unmade bed. He flared his nostrils again and thought he could smell those long ago smells of Elle and sex, though that was crazy, of course.
There was nothing here. Here was where he fully accepted that Elle was gone. She’d always been so neat and the fact that the room was a mess, hadn’t been cleaned up, was like the final nail hammered into a coffin.
He checked the closet, wincing at how few clothes she had. She’d once had the wardrobe of a princess. He used to tease her about her clothes and she’d laughed him off. She’d been young and pretty and rich. Of course she liked clothes. Now her wardrobe was whittled down to a few cheap everyday items and that was it.
He had no way of knowing if she’d packed a bag, no way of knowing what was missing. No way of knowing if she had walked away empty-handed.
There was utter despair here, he could feel it, could smell it over the faint smell of rotten meat coming from downstairs. There’d been brief joy here when they’d had sex, but it had been replaced by hopelessness. Nick could almost see Elle roaming the empty house looking for him.
Not finding him.
He touched the unmade bed, walked around it and that was when he found his note. On the ground, face down. Had she seen it? Whether she had or not, she’d let it flutter to the ground, left it behind. Whatever. She hadn’t waited for him.
His leg buckled, it simply couldn’t hold him up any more.
He made it to the bed and collapsed.
Elle had no relatives. Nick knew that. No aunts and uncles, no cousins. It had just been the Judge and her. He’d got it that the Judge’s illness had separated her from the rest of the world. If she had friends to bolt to, he had no idea who they were. Her laptop was gone. From what he could tell, it was basically the only thing she’d taken with her.
He had no clue where she was. For all he knew, she was starving in the snow somewhere. That thought was wiped right out of his head, pronto, because it was too painful to even contemplate. But the echo of it remained. One thing for sure—wherever she was, she was hurting.
So was he.
