Читать книгу Claim of Innocence - Laura Caldwell, Leslie S. Klinger - Страница 18

S omeone was in her house. Valerie Solara knew it as soon as she stepped through the front door, her arms around a brown grocery sack of baking supplies.

It had made her feel normal, going to the store. She’d decided to make a torta de chocolate, the Mexican dessert her father had taught her. It would be a treat for Layla, and baking the torta would make her feel normal, too. She wasn’t exactly sure what had given her the motivation to bake for the first time in at least a year, but she knew it had something to do with the new lawyer. Izzy, her name was.

At first, when Maggie had told her she wasn’t sure if Martin would be back, terror had flooded in. Martin was one of the few men that Valerie had ever trusted in her life, and once the feeling of terror had covered her, it was hard to see or hear around it. Technically, her eyes watched Izzy sparring with a state’s attorney about some objection. But the image of Izzy’s white suit, her red hair—all that was far away, as if seen through a telescope. The sound was muted, like it was in the next room.

But then Izzy—so charged up and cheerful—had started verbally tussling with a juror, a muscled man in a baseball cap that read Semper Fi, and she was distracted away from her panic. Izzy had won, the man was dismissed, and Valerie felt oddly optimistic. Later, Izzy talked to her, really talked to her, suggesting they meet outside the courtroom. And just like that a bolt of something—air? space?—had come in. The optimism flamed.

But now this feeling. The front door opened into a hallway and she moved down it, listening, hearing nothing. She stepped into the small living room, walked past the stairs that led up to the bedrooms and entered the small kitchen. Again she felt it—that sense that someone was there or had been there.

“Layla?” she called loudly into the still of the room.

“Yeah?” she heard her daughter’s faraway reply from upstairs.

She felt relieved. “Nothing,” she called back.

She expected the feeling to go away then, but instead it returned.

She put the bag on the linoleum counter and looked around. Everything seemed fine, the same as she’d left it—the ugly brown linoleum countertops, the old, yellow fridge—but then she saw it; a black crack running alongside the bottom of the back door.

The door was open, she realized. As if someone had just left. She felt her mouth form an O. Startled and wordless, she made her feet move toward the door. That door was always locked, something Valerie insisted upon, because it led to an alley behind the apartment, a squalid, unlit space where a person could easily hide behind the electric posts or in darkened doorways. The alley had spooked her since they’d moved in, so much so that she’d forbidden Layla to go out there. It was always Valerie who took the garbage to the Dumpster and hurried back into the kitchen.

Yet the door was open. There was no doubt about it. Quickly, she moved to it and opened it farther, ignoring her fear, and looked out at the alley. As usual, she could see little and so she slammed the door shut.

Should she call the cops? But that was the last thing she needed during a murder trial—more problems with the police.

She turned her head. “Layla!” she yelled again.

“Yeah, Mom?” She could tell Layla was at the top of the stairs, closer now.

“Did you go outside in the alley?” she asked, not needing to yell any longer.

“No.”

“Was someone here?”

Silence. Then, “No.”

Valerie locked the dead bolt. She yanked at the door once, then again to make sure it was locked.

She turned back to the horrid kitchen, so different from the one she had when Brian was alive. She looked at the sack of baking supplies, hoping, somehow, they would calm her. She thought of Izzy. But nothing could soothe her. The panic, the nerves, the questions; they were all there to stay.