Promptly at five forty-five Friday morning, after less than three hours of fitful sleep, Olivia gave Spunky extra food and a hug. She locked her apartment door, leaving behind her whining pet. Halfway down the stairs, she realized something was amiss in the foyer. She could see light streaming from the entrance to The Gingerbread House. She was already keyed up. A break-in at the store was the last thing she needed. She eased down the steps, mentally preparing herself for whatever disaster awaited. A light thump-rattle sound came from inside the store, like someone bumping into a display table. Olivia froze five steps from the bottom of the stairs and reached into her jeans pocket for her cell.
“I thought those stealthy steps might be you.” Maddie’s face peeked around the doorjamb. “Cutting it a little close, aren’t we?” She wore black jeans and a black T-shirt. Her bright red hair hid underneath a large beret. Black, of course. “What, you thought you could sneak off on an adventure without me? Please. I’ve known you too long to fall for your feeble effort to pretend you’d changed your mind. I could tell the moment you decided to go it alone. So come on, we need to be hiding outside the dance studio in time to see Raoul leave for Mass. Otherwise, we can’t be sure he’s gone.”
Olivia heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh, Maddie, Maddie, Maddie. You’re my best friend, and you are totally nuts.”
“If that’s your way of admitting you can’t outsmart me, then apology accepted. Now, let’s get a move on.”
Maddie turned off the store light while Olivia poked her head out the front door. Except for one car, the town square looked deserted. That wouldn’t last long. Business owners would begin arriving anytime after six a.m., especially for the two restaurants, which opened at seven. “Let’s go out the back,” Olivia said. “I wish I’d thought this out better, but I was dead tired last night.”
“Not to worry,” Maddie said. “I’m at my best when I’m winging it. You did remember the key, right?”
Olivia felt the shape of it in her pocket. “Present and accounted for. That much I planned.”
They slipped into the empty alley behind The Gingerbread House. “Good thing it isn’t garbage day,” Olivia whispered. “Let’s go behind the stores instead of down Willow Road, then we can cut through that little park across the street from the dance studio.”
“Good idea,” Maddie said. “No one uses that park much, and it’s got lots of trees. Try to look like we’re out for an early morning walk, in case some obsessive store owner decided to arrive early to do inventory or something. You never know.”
Olivia and Maddie walked with brisk casualness down the alley behind the stores on the east side of the town square. They’d encountered no one by the time they reached the park that stretched for a block from Hickory Road to Willow Road. The wooded area wasn’t really a park, simply a large lot that had gone wild after two small houses burned down decades earlier.
Once they’d decided on a spot to hide and watch for Raoul to leave for Mass, Maddie asked, “What if he takes the back door?”
“No reason he would,” Olivia said. “Constance said he goes to St. Francis, which is on south Park Street. The greater danger is he might cut through these woods.”
“That’s so comforting.”
“That’s why we’re staying on the north edge.” Across the dance floor, Olivia saw a light flick on in the office at the rear of the studio. Instinctively, she drew back behind a tree, yanking Maddie with her.
“Ow,” Maddie whispered. “I think you dislocated my shoulder.”
“Sorry. Look, there’s Raoul in that little room at the back.” Within seconds, the light went out. For several moments, the dance floor looked deserted. Olivia moved out of cover of the tree to see better. “I think he did go out the back,” she said, cursing herself for overconfidence.
“No, I can see him,” Maddie said. “The front door is opening.” This time it was she who strong-armed Olivia out of sight.
Dressed in a light gray suit, Raoul looked exotically handsome. He glanced up and down the street before he crossed the lawn and walked to the north side of the studio. Maddie groaned. “Oh geez, what now? He’s supposed to go south.”
Olivia shifted several trees over to get a better view of the studio’s north side. She saw Raoul pause and look up at the top floor. “I think he’s checking at our ballerina’s window. Maybe he wants to be sure she’s asleep, not watching for him to leave.”
“Do you think he left her room unlocked?” Maddie asked. “We might be able to talk to her.”
“He’s leaving. I wonder if he was worried she hadn’t swallowed those pills I saw next to her bed. Okay, he’s out of sight, time to rumba.” Olivia glanced up and down Willow Road. “No cars,” she said. “This is a quiet area, thank goodness. Let’s double back to the end of the block and go up the alley in back of the studio.”
“Okay, but we’d better step on it.” Maddie’s strong legs took her quickly through the trees. Olivia had to rush to keep her in sight. Once in the open, they tried to look casual, especially when several cars drove past. By the time they reached the rear door, Olivia felt so wound up she fumbled as she tried to fit the key in the lock.
“Livie? Are you okay? Your hand is shaking.”
“Just excited,” Olivia said. “I felt a lot calmer yesterday when I had more time. Okay, we’re in.” She took a deep breath, which slowed her heartbeat. She couldn’t afford a case of nerves, not with Jason’s life on the line. She locked the door behind them and put her finger to her lips as she pointed to the staircase. “Our dancer is probably upstairs,” she whispered, “asleep or awake.”
Maddie nodded. “I’ll go check on the bedroom, if you want to get going in the study.”
“Thanks.” Olivia led the way upstairs. At the top, she pointed Maddie toward the bedroom. “I’ll be there,” she whispered, nodding toward the study. “Be careful.” Maddie grinned like a kid playing a game of international espionage, which triggered one of Olivia’s bad feelings. She told herself Maddie was reliable . . . for the most part. When it was important. Too late now, anyway.
In the small, littered study, Olivia realized at once that Raoul, though precise and meticulous as a dancer, had no organizational impulse when it came to paper. She headed for a wooden desk with two drawers. It looked old, battered rather than antique. Papers covered the top of the desk, the chair seat, and the bookshelves. There were papers on the floor and she didn’t see evidence of any attempt to sort them into piles. Olivia felt overwhelmed. She wondered if Raoul experienced the same emotion, having to deal with all this paper. She scanned the top of the desk and saw numerous invoices, apparently for medical treatments, many of them stamped PAST DUE. Would an itinerant dance teacher be able to afford health insurance, let alone such an array of medical bills?
Olivia checked dates and found a pattern. The oldest papers were on the floor, more recent ones on the bookshelves, and the newest papers covered the desk. She extricated a letter from the chaotic desktop. It was a brief description of a patient’s treatment progress, signed by a psychiatrist at The Psychiatric Institute of Washington in DC. Olivia was skimming through it, feeling guilty, when she heard a creaking sound behind her. She spun around to face the door.
“Hey, it’s just me,” Maddie whispered. “Wait’ll you hear what I found out. What’s wrong? You look like you’re about to faint.”
“This is me being excited. Read this.” Olivia handed the letter to Maddie.
“Wow,” Maddie said. “Patient has regressed . . . down from ninety to eighty-five pounds . . . appears to be hallucinating about being attacked again . . . reliving trauma. . . . The letter is dated yesterday. This must be where Raoul goes every Thursday.”
“I’d bet on it,” Olivia said. “I suspect that attack was no hallucination.”
“So Ida wasn’t imagining things.” Maddie took stock of the room. “Kind of messy, isn’t he?”
“Probably overwhelmed.”
“This patient,” Maddie said, peering at the papers on the desk, “is she named anywhere? She’s right down the hall, by the way. Sound asleep.”
“The bedroom door was open? She might hear us.”
“Not a chance,” Maddie said. “The door is bolted shut on the outside. But here’s what I wanted to tell you. There’s a covered peephole in the door, aimed right at the bed. I saw our ballerina. At first, she was facing away, all curled up like a little girl. Then she turned over, which just about stopped my heart. But I got a good look at her, and you were right. Being so thin makes her face look older at first glance, but she is young. I’m betting she’s Raoul’s daughter. If we could only find a name on one of these reports.... Do these guys ever say anything but ‘the patient this’ or the ‘the patient that’?”
“What you’re holding might be a copy of the doctor’s notes,” Olivia said. “There should be some identifying information on the bills, at least.” She shifted a few papers on the desk. “Here’s one. And there it is! Her name is Valentina. Valentina Larssen.”
“Yay!” Maddie clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I am subject to glee attacks. What do we do now?”
Olivia glanced at her watch. “We’re running out of time. I really want to know if Valentina talked to the psychiatrist about her dancing in town square, what she might have seen. Even if he thought she was hallucinating, maybe he recorded the details.”
“Where would we even start?”
“On the desk. That’s the most recent stuff.” Olivia was already riffling through the papers. In the midst of such disorganization, she told herself, surely Raoul would never notice anything had been moved.
Maddie peered out the window, which faced Willow Road. “The world is waking up out there. We’d better make it snappy.”
Precious minutes passed as they pawed through papers, looking for anything that mentioned Valentina’s night dancing. Olivia had become a woman obsessed, desperate to find evidence that might clear her brother. It was Maddie’s turn to exhibit frayed nerves. She briefly helped the search but soon gave up to check the window and the hallway. She disappeared once to make sure Valentina was still asleep in her room.
Olivia could feel her concentration flag, dragged down by despair. The psychiatrist seemed to dismiss whatever Valentina said as the imaginings of a damaged psyche. “I think I hate psychiatrists,” she muttered. Maddie did not comment. She was gone again, probably checking the shower to make sure Raoul wasn’t hiding in it. Olivia knew her time was nearly up, that she was tempting disaster by staying longer. Only a few papers left, she told herself. What if the evidence was right there, in those last unexamined reports?
Olivia heard Maddie arrive at the study door, but she didn’t look up. Her hand shaking, Olivia picked up a sheet of paper and skimmed the first paragraph. “This is it.”
“What was that?” Maddie asked.
“The evidence,” Olivia said as her eyes skimmed the page. “I think I’ve found it.”
“No, listen,” Maddie hissed. “What was that sound?”
Olivia’s body tightened.
“It’s a door opening downstairs,” Maddie said, staring at her with huge eyes in an ashen face. “We’re too late.”
Olivia raced to the window in time to see Raoul walk away from the front door, pick a newspaper off the lawn, and head back toward the studio. Her mind took off at a gallop. She and Maddie needed to be out the back entrance before Raoul could get upstairs to check on his daughter. Not even Maddie’s legs could move that fast without making a racket. It couldn’t be done.
The faint sound of whistling drifted upstairs. Raoul was inside now. The whistling grew louder; he must have been coming up the stairs. Maddie unfroze herself from the study doorway and stumbled into the room. Olivia zipped through a series of escape ideas, all of which led to their discovery and ultimate disgrace. Yet staying put would be equally disastrous. Raoul was likely to glance into or enter any upstairs room. There was no predicting which one or when.
“What are we going to do?” Maddie breathed in Olivia’s ear.
“We have to stay in this room,” Olivia whispered back. “No choice.” The door had been slightly ajar when they arrived. Maybe they could flatten themselves against the wall beside it, so they’d be hidden if Raoul entered the study. No, if he stayed to do some work, he’d eventually hear them. Olivia scoured the room for other ideas. She saw another door, also ajar, which she eased open. A storage closet, big enough to hold a small wardrobe . . . or two grown women.
They heard whistling nearby. Raoul was in the upstairs hallway. Olivia grasped Maddie by the upper arm and pulled her into the closet, leaving the door ajar.
The whistling stopped. Olivia sensed Raoul standing in the study doorway. She imagined him taking in the condition of the room. He might be noticing that his papers were not as he had left them.
Raoul began to whistle another tune, which sounded vaguely familiar. Olivia had heard it at her mother’s dance lesson. A rumba. He was in the room. Olivia realized she was still holding the psychiatrist’s notes she’d been so thrilled to find. The whistling stopped. Olivia didn’t dare move for fear the paper might crinkle. All she could do was hope that Raoul wasn’t searching for that one page.
The continued silence should have been reassuring, but Olivia’s imagination filled it with specters of an enraged Raoul about to swing the closet door wide while he called 911. Maddie shifted a bit. She was closest to the open crack and was trying to see into the room. Before Olivia could stop her, Maddie edged the door open a few more inches and peeked through. Nothing happened. Maddie pushed the door wider and poked her head into the room. Pulling back inside, she whispered, “I think I hear him releasing the chain lock on Valentina’s bedroom door. We could try to make a run for it.” She tiptoed toward the office door.
“Too dangerous,” Olivia said. “If she’s asleep, he’ll come right back out. Even if we get out of sight in time, he’ll hear us run down the stairs.”
Maddie peeked into the hallway, then hurried to the safety of the closet. “You nailed it,” she said. “I saw his foot step out of the bedroom. I can hear him coming this way.”
Olivia felt sweat collecting under the light bangs that waved across her forehead. At this rate, she’d need another shower before greeting customers.
“Okay, I think he’s on the stairs.” Maddie cracked open the closet door and listened. Olivia took the opportunity to fold the paper she’d been holding and stuff it into her jeans pocket.
“I don’t hear a thing,” Maddie said. “Maybe Raoul is downstairs. He starts teaching at nine, doesn’t he?” She checked her watch. “Yikes, it’s eight forty. How did that happen? We have no chance of escaping until Raoul is in the studio with a student, and we are supposed to open the store in twenty minutes. We’re doomed.”
“Probably,” Olivia whispered, “but not because we’ll be late opening the store. I called Bertha and Mom last night.”
“Whew. I may need to reconsider this thinking-ahead idea,” Maddie said. “Raoul must be downstairs getting ready to teach. I’m about to suffocate in here.” She pushed the door open wide enough to slide through. “All clear,” she said, checking the hallway.
Olivia left the closet and went straight to the window. “I don’t see a car parked in front,” she said, “though anyone who lives in Chatterley Heights would probably walk to a lesson.”
“Shh,” Maddie said. “I hear something.”
“It’s music,” Olivia said, “coming from downstairs. Which means Raoul could be in the office or out on the dance floor.” Her mind began to click off possible escape ideas, but they all involved going through the office. “How can we know for sure that Raoul is in the dance studio?”
“Only one way to find out,” Maddie said. Before Olivia could stop her, Maddie stepped into the hallway, leaving the door wide open. She looked down the hallway toward the staircase, as if preparing to sneak downstairs. Instead, she spun around ninety degrees and turned to stone. Olivia rushed toward the open doorway, her heart pounding inside her brain.
Maddie’s jaw slowly dropped. “Livie,” she said. “You’d better come out here.”
Olivia stepped out and joined Maddie. Light spilled into the dim hallway through the open door of the ballerina’s bedroom. An ethereal creature dressed in layers of pink chiffon watched them. Her body was so slight that for a moment Olivia thought she was a mirage. But her face was real, the scar on her cheek unmistakable. Her light brown eyes regarded Olivia and Maddie in a calm and incurious way.
Olivia breathed the name, “Valentina.”
“Yes,” Valentina said, “though Daddy calls me Tiny. I know who you are. You are the ones who make beautiful cookies. You saw me dancing in the park. Daddy told me.” Despite her size and childlike way of speaking, Valentina appeared to be in her mid-twenties.
“We just finished making some ballerina cookies,” Olivia said, “in your honor. You dance so wonderfully.”
A ghost of a smile touched Valentina’s lips. “I would love to see the cookies. Daddy tells me I have to eat more. He doesn’t know you are here, does he? If he did, he would have locked me in my room to protect me.”
“We wanted to meet you, Valentina,” Olivia said. “We need to ask you something important.”
“Daddy wouldn’t like that. You should leave before he sees you.” Valentina cocked her head, as if to listen. A thick lock of straight, white-gold hair fell across her face, nearly obscuring the scar on her cheek. Olivia realized how beautiful she must have been. “Daddy will be on the dance floor right now,” Valentina said. “He is warming up before he starts teaching. You can go out the back door. If you are quiet, Daddy won’t see or hear you. He is in another world when he dances.”
Olivia reached out a hand in supplication. “Please, Valentina, one question only, I promise. It would mean so much to me and my family. I have a younger brother, Jason. He is in trouble. The sheriff thinks he killed a bad man, but I know he didn’t. All I want to know is if you were dancing in the park a few nights ago . . . Tuesday, the night of the storm. If you were, did you see anything, anyone?”
Small as she was, Valentina shrank into herself. She turned her face toward her bedroom but did not escape into it, which Olivia found hopeful, yet puzzling. The psychiatric report Olivia had read described a frail creature so damaged that she couldn’t think or act rationally. Certainly, Valentina appeared to exist in a world of her own. However, the Valentina standing before her, though delicate and damaged, might make a credible witness.
Valentina turned to face Olivia. Tears bunched in her eyes. She blinked until they burst and trickled down her face, following the line of the scar on her left cheek. “I didn’t want to dance in the storm,” she said.
“But before the storm,” Olivia said. She could hear desperation in her own voice and took a deep breath to calm herself. “Did you see anything at all that night? Or anyone?”
Valentina’s frail body began to shiver. She reached up to her cheek and touched her scar.
“Please, Valentina. Jason is my baby brother. He doesn’t deserve this. I know he didn’t kill that man. You are my brother’s only hope.” It was too much pressure; she knew it as soon as she said it. Valentina’s face contorted in agony as she fled into her room. Olivia heard the click of a lock.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Maddie said. “Now!” She grabbed Olivia’s arm and dragged her toward the staircase. Olivia didn’t fight her. Her chance had evaporated, but she’d find another. Somehow.
With Maddie in the lead, they tiptoe-ran down the stairs. Maddie peeked into the kitchen and signaled the all clear. The tough part came next. The door leading from the kitchen into the dance studio stood wide open. A familiar waltz played on the CD player.
Maddie yanked her along by the upper arm. “It’s three minutes to nine, and that waltz is almost over,” she hissed in Olivia’s ear. “Raoul will be coming into the kitchen to set up music for his students.”
Olivia nodded and reached for the doorknob. It wouldn’t turn. She remembered she’d flipped the lock from the inside to keep Raoul from becoming suspicious. A good idea at the time.
Olivia whispered in Maddie’s ear, “The music needs to be loud enough to cover the sound of this lock.”
Maddie nodded. She grabbed the doorknob with one hand, the lock with the other. The music grew softer. Olivia held her breath. Maddie’s muscles twitched a split second before the music crescendoed. She timed it perfectly. The lock snapped, the door opened, and Olivia slipped through. Maddie was right behind her. She eased the door shut. “Should we lock it?”
Olivia shook her head. “Let’s get out of here.”
As they headed north up the alley, Olivia paused and looked back. She could see the second-floor window of Valentina’s room. A small figure, dressed in pink, was observing their escape. For reasons she could not name, Olivia felt a flicker of hope.