’Tis the Season Read online

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “We were just looking. My sister’s an idiot.”

  “I am not! I am not!” Gracie shrieked, bouncing up and down and zigzagging around the yard. “It’s a ghost! It’s a witch!”

  The woman laughed. “I’m not a witch. Meet me around by the back porch and you’ll see for yourself.” She turned from the window and walked away.

  Billy snagged Gracie on one of her sprints around the yard. “It’s just a lady, you moron,” he told her, giving her a small shake to get her attention. “She’s meeting us at the back porch.”

  “She’s a witch. She’s gonna eat us,” Gracie whimpered.

  “Don’t be stupid. She’s not gonna eat us. She wouldn’t wanna eat you, anyhow. You’d probably make her puke.”

  “You’re mean!” Gracie shouted, yanking her arm free and scampering to the back porch. She must have decided she’d be better off with a witch than with her own brother.

  He used the s-word again. Leave it to Gracie to act like such a jerk.

  By the time he reached the rear of the house, a porch light was on, spreading a bright yellow glow across the porch and down the steps. The woman stood on the top step, and Billy could see how, at a glance, Gracie might have taken her for a witch. She was wearing a sweater so long it came down nearly to her knees, and a skirt that came down to her ankles, and black boots. Her hair was long, dark and kind of ripply, and huge earrings that resembled lots of little silver coins woven together dangled from her ears. Around her neck hung a necklace on a black cord. The pendant was shaped like the moon, a silver crescent on top of a circle, as big around as the lid on a jar of mustard.

  But staring up at her face, he knew she wasn’t a witch. An angel would be more like it. She was really, really pretty.

  “I’m Fil,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Fill?” Gracie scowled. “What kind of name is that?”

  “It’s short for Filomena. What’s your name?”

  “Filomena?” Gracie echoed. Billy, too, was amazed by the name. He’d never heard a name like that before. It sounded like an angel’s name.

  “That’s right. What’s your name?”

  “Gracie. That’s my brother, Billy. He’s an idiot.”

  “Hello, Gracie. Hello, Billy,” the lady said gently. “It’s kind of late for you to be out, isn’t it? It’s past eight-thirty. And you, Gracie, you’re in your pajamas! You must be cold! Why don’t you come inside and warm up?”

  “Don’t go in,” Billy warned, reaching out and grabbing Gracie’s arm. The lady might look like an angel, but Billy knew better than to go anywhere with a stranger. “We’re just going home,” he said, even though she was so pretty he didn’t want to leave her.

  She gazed around. “How did you get here?”

  “Through the woods,” Gracie told her.

  “In the dark?”

  “It’s easy,” Gracie bragged, although Billy was thinking his sister would have gotten totally lost if she hadn’t been following him. “We live on the other side of the woods.”

  Filomena stared into the trees, then shook her head as if she wasn’t quite sure she believed this. “Maybe I ought to drive you home. Your parents will be worried.”

  “Our mommy is gone,” Gracie explained, “and our daddy is playing poker.” From screaming and acting like a ninny, she’d turned into a regular chatterbox.

  “He could still be worried,” Filomena insisted. “Let me drive you home—or at least phone him and tell him you’re safe.”

  “No,” Billy said quickly. If she called Dad and told him where they were, they’d be in such deep trouble they’d never be able to climb out of it. “We can get home ourselves. Thanks anyway.”

  “I’m not going to let you go tramping through those dark woods,” Filomena said. “Gracie, you’re wearing bedroom slippers. And oh, they’re beautiful. That’s Minnie Mouse, isn’t it? I love Minnie Mouse.”

  Gracie grinned. Swell. In another minute she’d be following the strange-named lady into the house. “We’ll be fine,” he insisted, because he knew how dangerous going into her house might be. They’d had classes in school about this stuff—not trusting strangers, not going places with them and that kind of thing. Dad had also lectured him and Gracie about safety with strangers. “We don’t want a ride home. We can’t go in your car anyhow.”

  Filomena mulled that over, then nodded. “Well, then, I’ll walk you through the woods, just to make sure you get home safely.”

  “We can get home okay.”

  She scooted toward the door, her skirt swirling around her. “Let me just blow out the candles and get a flashlight. Oh, and you know what? I think I have something of yours, Gracie.” Before Billy could stop her, she was in the house.

  Billy and Gracie exchanged a glance. “She’s beautiful,” Gracie murmured.

  “Five minutes ago you thought she was a witch.”

  “I think she’s a fairy godmother.”

  “What does she have of yours?”

  Gracie shrugged.

  Billy stifled a groan. If she had something of Gracie’s, maybe she was going to do something awful, like make them pay to get it back. Or burn it in a voodoo ritual—he’d seen some kind of ceremony in a movie Scott’s parents had rented last summer. It involved a big bonfire and lots of weird singing and dancing, and people wearing face paint. “We are in so much trouble,” he muttered. “If she walks us home—” if she didn’t hex them with the voodoo ritual “—Dad’s gonna kill us.”

  “Not if we go in through the window.”

  “How are we gonna go in through the window if she’s with us?”

  Gracie didn’t have an answer for that. And anyway, Filomena was already back, carrying a flashlight and a scarf. She heaved the door shut behind her, flicked on the flashlight and came down the porch steps. “You look cold, Gracie,” she said, wrapping the scarf around her. It was too big, and it went three times around Gracie’s neck and shoulders and dangled down to her knees.

  Gracie’s smile was so gigantic it practically split her face in two.

  “Are you going to trip on it? Maybe I should carry you so you don’t trip.”

  “Okay. What do you have of mine?”

  “I don’t know if it’s yours…” Filomena dug into a pocket of her skirt and pulled out something small and pink.

  “My butterfly clip! Where did you find it? I thought I lost it in my room, ’cuz my room is kind of messy.”

  “I found it outside the window you were peeking into tonight.” Filomena handed the barrette to Gracie. “I guess you’ve been peeking into that window before, hmm?”

  Oh, boy, were they in trouble. Billy wasn’t sure, but he’d bet there were laws against people peeking into windows. And now she had evidence—Gracie’s stupid butterfly hair clip. She could take the clip to the police and have them thrown in prison for looking through her window. If only Gracie hadn’t kept following him around, none of this would have happened. It was all her fault he was going to wind up spending the rest of his life in jail.

  “There you go,” Filomena said, pressing the barrette into Gracie’s hand and then lifting Gracie into her arms. “Hold on tight. And don’t drop the barrette.”

  Billy bit his lip. He didn’t like the idea of a stranger carrying Gracie, no matter how nice the stranger acted. But he figured he could tackle her if she tried to do anything evil. He knew his way through the woods better than she did, with or without her flashlight.

  They started down the path, Billy one step ahead of Filomena, who had Gracie arranged so her butt rested in the bend of Filomena’s elbow and her arms were wrapped around Filomena’s neck. The beam from the flashlight speared ahead of Billy on the trail, illuminating roots and rocks. He had to admit walking the path like this was a lot easier than counting on the moonlight to reach all the way through the branches to light the ground.

  After a few minutes they arrived at his backyard. “This is our house,” he said quietly. “Thanks. You can go home
now.”

  Still holding Gracie, who was all snuggled up in her arms with her head resting on her shoulder, Filomena studied the rear of the house. “I’d like to say hello to your father.”

  “Uh, no, that’s okay. I mean, he’s playing poker now. He wouldn’t want to meet you.”

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I think it would be better if I met him. So he won’t be worried that you were with me.”

  “Well, he doesn’t have to know about that,” Billy explained.

  “If I were your father, I’d want to know.”

  “He’s just playing poker, anyway,” Billy argued. He wished she would just leave so they could sneak into the house before they got caught. “Really, it’s okay. You should go back to your house and light your candles, okay? I mean—”

  At that instant, the sliding door shot open and his father came charging out, looking half-insane, his eyes flashing and his hair a mess. “Oh, my God! Are they okay? What happened? Are my kids okay?” He froze a few steps from the lady, his breath puffing in the cold air and his panic slowly fading, replaced by a frown as his gaze shifted from Billy—who was obviously just fine—to Gracie, snuggling up against Filomena, to Filomena herself.

  His frown deepening, he asked, “What the hell is going on?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HE WASN’T SURE what had prompted him to leave the game and check on the kids. Maybe it was that the lack of noise upstairs had seemed unnatural. Maybe it was that when he’d stood at the foot of the stairs, he’d felt a chilly draft blowing down from Billy’s room. Maybe it was that Gracie’s door had been standing wide-open. When he’d tucked her in fifteen minutes ago, he’d left her door open just a crack, the way she liked it.

  “Hey, Evan, are you in?” Murphy called to him from the kitchen.

  “Not this hand,” Evan shouted over his shoulder, already halfway up the stairs. He barged into Billy’s room and saw the window up, the screen unhooked from its frame. Leaning out, he saw no sign of Billy.

  He abandoned Billy’s room for Gracie’s. Her blanket was rumpled, her night-light on, her favorite stuffed animal—Pokey the elephant—propped on her pillow. She was gone.

  Exerting superhuman self-control, he refrained from screaming, cursing or punching a hole through the wall. Inhaling and exhaling in an even tempo—this took some effort—he left Gracie’s room. From the kitchen rose the sound of laughter. Apparently Tom had attempted to bluff his way through the hand, and the others were ribbing him about it. It amazed Evan that Tom could be a private investigator, a profession that presumably required a flair for bluffing, but he couldn’t bluff his way through a hand of five-card draw.

  Evan’s friends seemed a universe apart from him, their laughter an incomprehensible language. He staggered down the stairs, searched the family room, crossed to the glass slider, turned on the patio lights and surveyed the backyard. Empty. No children. No children.

  “Evan?” Levi called from the kitchen. “Are you going to join us?”

  “My children are gone,” he shouted—only, the words emerged as barely a whisper.

  “What?” Levi appeared in the doorway, tall and craggy and bemused. “Something’s wrong with your kids?”

  “They’re gone.” Evan stood in the middle of the family room, his heart pounding so fiercely that he was surprised his sweater wasn’t fluttering with each beat. “They climbed through Billy’s window and ran away.”

  Murphy pushed past Levi and joined Evan in the family room. “Your kids ran away? You’re joking, aren’t you.”

  Evan shook his head.

  “Should we call the police? When my kids got in trouble—”

  “Forget the police,” Levi broke in, gesturing toward the windows overlooking the backyard. “I think Evan’s kids changed their minds about running away.”

  Evan spun around and saw Billy coming across the dead grass, followed by an unfamiliar woman carrying Gracie and shining a flashlight. Billy was leading the way.

  Evan absorbed the scene, then shoved open the slider and hurled himself outside, wanting to weep, wanting to throttle the kids, wanting to sink to his knees and thank God for bringing them back safe, and then ask God to wreak vengeance on their miserable little souls for having come so close to giving him a heart attack.

  He stared at them. Billy met his gaze for less than a second, then glanced away. Wrapped in a thick colorful muffler of some sort, Gracie peeked at him from her perch in the woman’s arms, evidently trying to gauge his mood.

  He started babbling, asking if they were okay, asking what the hell was going on, tossing in a few profanities for good measure. When no one answered, he paused to catch his breath and directed his attention to the woman.

  He’d never seen her before. If he had, he would have remembered. She appeared mysterious and exotic and altogether riveting. Black hair flowed halfway down her back, framing a face of huge dark eyes, chiseled cheeks and full lips. Her skin was tawny in the diffuse light from the outdoor fixture, and her clothing struck him as arty, too big and bulky for her slender build. Her jewelry—flamboyant earrings and a moon-shaped necklace—was oversize. Her feet were encased in clunky boots.

  He wondered what she would look like without all that oversize apparel hiding her. An image—a very erotic one—of her in lacy lingerie flashed across his mind, and he chased it away. Now was not the time to entertain adolescent fantasies about the stranger holding his daughter.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  She smiled and extended her right hand, practically blinding him with the flashlight. “Oops!” She clicked it off and handed it to Billy, then presented her hand to Evan again. “Filomena Albright.”

  Filomena Albright? Quite a mouthful, he thought as he shook her hand. “Evan Myers,” he introduced himself. “What are my kids doing with you? Why are you holding Gracie? Gracie, why are you running around outside in your nightgown?”

  “I’m not running around,” Gracie corrected him. “Fil is carrying me.”

  “That’s very nice of her, and she’s probably going to send me a bill from her chiropractor once she assesses the damage to her back from hauling you around.” He reached for Gracie and eased her out of Filomena Albright’s embrace. Gracie immediately lowered her head to Evan’s shoulder. It was way past her bedtime. She was probably exhausted. “How did you wind up with my kids?” he asked Filomena. He was beginning to calm down; his voice was no longer edged with hysteria.

  “They showed up in my yard,” she explained. “I’m not sure why, but I thought they needed to be brought home.”

  “They should never have left home in the first place.” He glared at Billy, who glanced everywhere but at Evan. “I can’t believe you climbed out your window.”

  Billy peered up at the open window above the garage roof—one more place he could look to avoid meeting his father’s gaze. “The screen snaps in and out real easy,” he mumbled.

  “Too easily. Why did you do that? What the hell were you thinking? You could have fallen off the roof and gotten killed!”

  “It’s not that far to the ground. And anyway, the oak tree is right there.”

  “I’m having that tree chopped down tomorrow,” Evan snapped, although of course he wasn’t going to do that. It was a beautiful tree, older than Evan and the house combined. It deserved to live.

  Which was more than he could say for his children at the moment. “Okay,” he murmured, then sighed, trying to keep his rage from erupting. “I don’t know what’s going on, but…” He caught Filomena’s eye and managed a feeble smile. “I’ve got to get the kids inside. Would you mind coming in for a minute? Maybe you can help me make sense of this whole thing.”

  “All right.” Something in the woman’s smile befuddled him even more than the situation with his kids did. Her smile was dazzling, intoxicating. It overwhelmed him as the thought of his kids climbing through an upstairs window overwhelmed him. It made him just as breathless, but in a different way. It ma
de his heart pound, not with fear but with something else.

  Too much adrenaline. Too much anger, too much relief that the kids were home safe. What he was feeling right now had nothing to do with Filomena Albright.

  She took her flashlight back from Billy and gave his shoulder a nudge, steering him toward the back door. Evan was grateful for her protective gentleness toward his children. If he’d been the one to give Billy a nudge, he’d probably have shoved the boy hard enough to flatten him.

  Gracie was growing heavier on his shoulder. He twisted his head to look at her and found her fast asleep.

  They entered the family room, and Evan used his free hand to close the door. “Upstairs,” he ordered Billy. “Now.”

  Billy headed straight for the stairway, not daring to argue.

  Turning to Filomena, Evan murmured, “I’m going to take Gracie upstairs, too. Please don’t go away. I’ll be right back.”

  “No problem.” She smiled again. His heartbeat kicked up another notch. He blamed it on the physical strain of carrying his daughter’s dead weight.

  Following Billy up the stairs, he tried to sort out his thoughts. He didn’t know any Albrights in the neighborhood, and he knew most of his neighbors. Where had she and the kids come from, anyway? One minute the backyard had been empty, and the next they’d materialized as if teleported there. Why hadn’t they come to the front door? Had Billy intended to enter the house the way he’d exited, through the window?

  Evan paused at Billy’s door. Billy was seated on his bed, wrenching off his shoes. “This was bad, Billy,” he said grimly.

  “I know.”

  “It’s late, and you’ve got school in the morning. So wash up, brush your teeth and go to sleep. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.” Billy still wouldn’t look at him.

  Sighing, Evan lugged Gracie to her own room, unwrapped the muffler from her, slid her jacket down her arms and off and tucked her blanket around her. She looked so sweet and angelic when she was asleep. Evan snorted. There wasn’t a single sweet, angelic cell in her body.