Safe by His Side. Linda Conrad
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air draft curled around her ankles and brought Blythe’s head up from the stacks of travel plans and touring accommodations. Was there an open window somewhere? Both Ashley and the housekeeper knew better than to leave a window or a door ajar in inclement weather.
The house had felt especially gloomy ever since forty-year-old Melissa Davis, Ashley’s mother, had been moved. Along with her twenty-four-hour nurses, Melissa now resided in the guesthouse on the other side of the pool, where she no doubt was sleeping off another round of chemotherapy treatments. Melissa would continue living out there for the remaining months—or weeks—of her life.
At some point after her mother passed away, little Ashley would be free to open windows and invite friends over and be as loud as she wanted to be in her own house again. Blythe wished for Ashley’s sake that a miracle would happen and her mother could be cured. However, the most renowned physicians in the country had said there wasn’t any possibility of Melissa surviving her illness.
Life did continue in this house, regardless of the impending death of its owner. Melissa had seen to that. The three other females still living in the house continued to work every day and dreamed of their futures, while Melissa continued to organize everyone and everything to her exacting standards from her deathbed.
According to her mother’s wishes, Ashley would finish two more days of filming on the current season of her television show and then she would leave on the promotional tour for her summer movie. Mrs. Jenson, their housekeeper, would continue cleaning and cooking and taking care of the place as she had since the days of Ashley’s first TV appearance. And Blythe herself would begin taking full responsibility for Ashley’s personal well-being. Melissa wanted things to be that way.
Blythe had agreed to remain as Ashley’s guardian after Melissa was gone. It was a long-term commitment, she knew, but Blythe had been both ready and happy to sign up. She’d grown to love Ashley over the last two years, and she would stand beside her in grief as she stood beside her in all of life.
Tired of the omnipresent depression that seemed to hang over the house, Blythe got up from her desk and went to search for the origin of the draft. She couldn’t imagine where it might be coming from, but she supposed that seven-year-old Ashley’s room might be a good place to check. She started down the long hall.
The house felt too quiet.
By this time of day, the housekeeper usually could be heard downstairs either making dinner or ordering out. As Ashley played in her room, her muffled giggles would dance gaily down the halls. And oftentimes the sounds Ash made as she memorized her lines along with the taped version the director sent over would provide a low-key and happy buzz to the atmosphere.
Not this particular late afternoon. This afternoon, you could almost hear the foggy mists creeping in through unseen cracks. As Blythe reached Ashley’s half-open door, chills were already riding down the back of her neck. She eased through the doorway, half expecting to see her little star catnapping on the bed, though Ashley hadn’t been interested in taking naps since before she’d turned five.
“Ash?” Nothing. The bed was littered with coloring books and stuffed toys, but no sign of a droopy seven-year-old fast asleep on top of the covers. And the French doors to Ashley’s private balcony appeared to be closed up tight, too. So where was the draft coming from? And more important, where was Ashley?
Blythe stepped farther into the room for a closer inspection of the bathroom and the balcony. She needed to keep a closer eye on the little girl now that her mother had become incapable of most personal supervision. Especially now that the child star had begun receiving a few very odd pieces of fan mail.
Didn’t it always work that way? Just when things looked darkest, something came along that had the potential for making it all so much worse. Ashley already had been dealing with her mother’s illness and the somber reality of it when her guardians had been forced to cut off her Internet and free access to her fan mail because of a series of nasty e-mails and vague threats. Good thing Ashley was one tough kid.
As Blythe walked toward the bathroom, her attention was caught by a flashing dot at the top of Ashley’s computer screen. When they’d cut off Ash’s Internet, the technicians had set up an intrahouse circuit so that all the computers in the mansion could instant-message one another. But only one computer in the whole place—Blythe’s—could still receive and send via the Internet.
To Blythe’s surprise Ashley hadn’t really minded the change. She’d learned to like having her own personal message system direct to the housekeeper and to her mother. And what made her the happiest was that she still had the ability to play all her video games.
So who was trying to reach Ashley via internal IM now? Was it the housekeeper, wanting Ashley to come down to dinner? Or could it be the girl’s mother? And if so, was it something that Melissa Davis would need attending to right away?
Curious, Blythe sidestepped the bed and pressed the Enter button to read the message. There, against a cobalt-blue screen, came a six-line message in bold bloodred.
Twinkle twinkle little star
I don’t need to wonder where you are
Come down to me from up on high
I promise you the world and sky
Don’t fret, little girl, we’ll be together soon
Come to me, Ashley, and I’ll give you the moon
Blythe’s stomach turned over and her palms grew clammy. This was the same kind of rhyme, done in the same chilling colors and with the same icky connotation, as Ashley had received before. The earlier ones were awful notes that usually ended with disturbing lines, sounding a lot like the overtures of a pedophile on the prowl. The police hadn’t liked the tone of the letters and e-mail, but they’d said their hands were tied until the sender made an overt move.
To appear on Ashley’s computer, this particular message had to have originated from somewhere within the house. That seemed pretty overt to Blythe. Someone was here. The evil had broken in despite their efforts to keep it out.
Oh, Ashley, where are you?
Ethan Ryan checked his watch as he kept one hand on the steering wheel of his rental car. He waited with his usual impatience for his sister to answer her cell phone back in Texas while he sat in L.A. rush-hour traffic.
“Where are you?” His sister Maggie was always in too much of a hurry for the niceties. No “Hello.” No “How was your flight?” Just get right to the point. But that was okay by him. His own limited patience was legendary. It ran in the family.
“Sitting on the freeway in L.A.,” he said grumpily to the baby sister who was, at least temporarily, his boss. “But I’ve got plenty of time yet. My appointment to meet with our new client isn’t scheduled until seven thirty. I called you to double-check on—”
“Ethan, you have to get there now.”
“What’s up, sis?” Ethan approved of his sister’s and brother’s efforts to save their deceased grandfather’s business by turning his run-down private investigators’ office into a security firm that specialized in guarding children. It was poetic justice, if nothing else. That’s why Ethan had agreed to use his expertise to help them out. Well, that and the fact that he’d had to leave the Secret Service.
“You didn’t move the appointment time up without checking with me, did you?” he blurted, not letting her answer the first question. “We were lucky the plane landed on schedule. This is the big city, Maggie. Not Texas. You just can’t schedule things too tight. As it is, traffic will keep me on the freeway an extra—”
“I don’t care how you do it, brother. But you have to be at Ashley Nicole Davis’s house right now.”
“Have you heard something new from her manager? That, um…Grandpa Ryan’s old college friend, what’s his name?”
“His