“It’s fine. I’ll go by myself,” he snapped and actually made it to the door before I caught up to him. The anger in his voice caught me by surprise, even though it probably shouldn’t have, but there was no way in Hell I was letting him go in there alone.
Alex went to one of the chimes hanging on the porch, reaching into the thin metal tube and pulling out a hidden key. Not a bad hiding spot and one he wouldn’t have been able to find so easily without Jaime’s guidance.
“Alex, wait.”
He paused on the front step, key in the lock, but didn’t look back at me. “I’m going to help her.”
“I know. I’d feel better if I went first, but I’m more worried about those.” Finally, Alex glanced at me and I nodded toward the toys on the porch. “Are her kids in there?”
Alex paled, the connotations of those toys finally sinking in. He looked to his right, where I assumed she stood. “Jaime? Are Misty and Levi inside?” He waited a moment, then closed his eyes, pain written all over his face.
“They are, aren’t they?” I asked, and he nodded. This made things so much more complicated.
“Levi is fourteen,” he whispered. “She got pregnant our senior year. Misty is only three.”
“We can’t just go walking in there. If we wake up the kids, we don’t have a good explanation for why we’re here. If he calls 911, we’re fucked.”
“If you’re that worried about getting in trouble at work, you could have just stayed in bed,” he hissed, and I’d never heard such anger in Alex’s voice. Not directed at me, anyway. “She needs me, Donovan. She doesn’t want her kids to find her like this, and I’m not going to let her down. I’d rather scare them for a second than let them live with the trauma of finding their mother dead.”
“I’m not saying we won’t help her, just that we need to think about this and come up with a plan.”
“I have a plan. I’m going to help her.”
Before I could stop him, Alex had the door unlocked and he was past the threshold. I could either stand out here spinning my wheels or follow him inside, protecting him like I’d promised I would.
I made sure to close the door behind me when I stepped inside.
Even in the darkness, Jaime’s touch could be seen in the small home. Bright paintings hung on the walls and soft blankets covered the worn couch, adding a touch of warmth to the space. Shelves dotted the walls between paintings and I could just make out the shapes of crystals and little statues. A tiny child-size table sat tucked against the half-wall separating the kitchen from the living room, covered in paper and crayons. The kitchen itself was neat and organized, with only a few dishes in the sink.
From the door, a small hallway went right, leading to three doors. One stood open and I could make out hints of a bathroom. The other two were closed. One had a giant needlepoint sunflower hanging from it, while the other held a poster of some band I didn’t recognize. Those had to be Levi and Misty’s bedrooms.
Alex silently made his way left, across the living room, to another small hallway, and I followed. There were only two doors down this way, one of which was another bathroom. The door at the end was also closed, displaying the delicate ivy painted on its face. He didn’t wait for me to catch up, just opened the door and slipped inside, leaving me with no choice but to do the same.
The smell hit me the second I stepped into the small bedroom. During my years working up the ranks in Chicago, I’d seen my share of drug overdoses. Death is never pretty, but overdoses were always especially ugly. Jaime Smalls was no exception. Her final moments had been frantic and messy and I could only hope whatever drugs she’d taken dulled the pain of her passing.
“I won’t, I promise,” Alex murmured. He didn’t look at the bed where Jaime had breathed her last. Instead, he addressed her ghost, who must have been standing near the window. “They’ll be alright.” He paused again, then smiled, so sad it broke my heart. “I don’t know what comes next, but I think it will be beautiful.”
For a moment, I could have sworn I saw a faint pulse of light, just a brief flicker, then Alex turned back to the bed. He’d gone pale and there was a faint blue cast to his lips that I didn’t like. As angry as I was, my worry for him came first. When I reached for him, though, he neatly sidestepped me to go to the nightstand.
“Don’t touch anything,” I warned when he reached for the drawer beneath it. “If this gets investigated, we don’t want your fingerprints anywhere on the house.”
“Too late for that.” He pulled open the drawer anyway, carefully withdrawing an envelope buried inside. “She wanted to make sure her dad got this letter.” Alex put the envelope on top of the stand and up close, I saw an address written in neat cursive. Creases marred the letter, the ink faded, as though it’d been handled over and over. “Besides, you and Will would be the ones investigating. Are you going to arrest me?”
The sarcasm in his words reignited my banked anger, battling with my concern for him.
“Of course not, but any officer can look at evidence. What do you think will happen if someone gets bored and looks through the files and sees that I ignored my boyfriend’s prints at a scene he shouldn’t have been at?” I shot back, barely remembering to keep my voice down. The kids’ rooms were on the other side of the house, but the walls were thin.
“I told her I’d make sure it got to her dad and I am. Would you rather I mail it and have people wondering how she sent a letter after she died?”
A truck rumbled to life, breaking the tense silence that followed. Now wasn’t the time to fight about this.
“We’ll talk about this later. We need to get out of here before someone finds us.”
“Fine, but we’re only going outside. I promised her I wouldn’t let her kids be the ones to find her like this.” Alex finally peeked at the bed, eyes shuttering with grief. “She’s my age. We went to school together.” The words were little more than a whisper. Before I could respond, he walked out, leaving me with no choice but to follow, carefully closing the door behind me.
All thoughts of our argument fled when I walked into the living area just behind Alex and found a teenage boy standing there, fear in his eyes and a rifle in his hands.
“Who the hell are you? What did you do to my mom?”
