Into The Light
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters in this fic!
Chapter Twenty-Five
With a loud sigh, Trixie carefully pushed open the door to the cafeteria, a large paper bag in her hands and her backpack slung over one shoulder. She stood in the doorway and glanced around the large room, glad to find it nearly empty, but she hadn't expected anything else. There were only a few stragglers left over from the earlier lunch wave while the smell of the tacos the cafeteria was serving for lunch permeated the air.
Much to her overwhelming surprise, her parents had offered to let her stay home from school for the morning. Their decision had been two-fold. It let her attempt to catch up on some much-needed sleep, as well as hear firsthand the latest news from Sergeant Molinson. They both had felt that their daughter had been put through enough stress and had surprised Trixie, as well as all three of her brothers, when they had announced the evening before that it would be fine with them if she were to skip her morning classes and stay home. Bobby had immediately started complaining, insisting that he needed to sleep in, too. Her mother had merely laughed, ruffled his curls, and ignored his pleas. She had sent him to bed with a disgruntled expression on his young face.
Trixie recalled the excuse her mother had written out for her to hand into the office. "Exhaustion," she mumbled to herself and laughed again. The secretary had accepted it with a look of disdain, probably thinking that she had forged it but Trixie knew that her mother couldn't have been more right. Her sleep last night had been fitful again, with images of sharp knives dancing dangerously through her mind. However, the few extra hours of rest, if not actual sleep, had helped her immensely. She felt as if she could actually make it through the rest of the day.
Trixie ignored the curious looks coming her way from the few students in the cafeteria and walked to the row of tables at the very back of the cafeteria, her head held high. It wasn't their usual spot but she figured that Di and Honey would forgive her. She wanted to be as far away from the rest of their classmates as she could. After dropping her backpack on the small circle table, she opened up the paper bag and started distributing the lunches. "At least we get to eat food from Wimpy's for lunch," she said aloud. It had been an unexpected treat from her brothers, who had insisted on driving her into school after their conference call with Sergeant Molinson had ended. She sat down, facing the wide expanse of the glass doors, and waited for Honey and Di to enter the cafeteria.
A few minutes later the doors blew open and a continuous stream of hungry high-schoolers entered the cafeteria, a laughing, talking and giggling crowd. Blending in with the group, Honey was the first one to spot Trixie. She answered Trixie's wave with one of her own but felt a frown settle across her pretty face as she hurried over to her friend, puzzled by Trixie's choice of seating. "Why are we sitting in Siberia today?" she questioned after pulling out a chair and sitting down, aiming a wistful glance towards their regular table.
"I figured you and Di would like to hear about my morning," Trixie answered calmly and gestured towards their lunch. She arched an eyebrow and grinned merrily. "Plus I didn't want to make the other students jealous. Our lunch is so much better than theirs."
Distracted by the smell of the delicious food, Honey opened the Styrofoam container in front of her, delighted that it held her favorite hamburger and French fries, courtesy of Mike. "Oh, delicious!" she exclaimed happily. "Hamburgers and French fries from Wimpy's! This is so much better than what I had planned to eat for lunch. Thanks, Trix."
"You don't need to thank me. Brian and Mart got lunch for us today," Trixie explained before taking a bite out of her hamburger. "They surprised me by stopping in at Wimpy's before dropping me off at school. I have to tell you, every now and then those brothers of mine do something really special."
"Well, it was very thoughtful of them." Honey took a delicate bite out of her hamburger and released a small moan of pure pleasure. "Hmmm. This has got to be the best hamburger I have ever eaten."
From behind them, Di stopped and gave a delicate sniff of the air. "Something smells absolutely wonderful," she put in as she took the only available seat next to Honey, her violet eyes taking in the bountiful lunch spread across the table. After tucking a loose strand of her hair behind an ear, she studied her friends and lifted one expertly plucked eyebrow. "It took me a minute to find you. I was rather put out when I saw that there were sophomores eating at our normal table," she commented lightly, gesturing towards their normal spot. "But then I got a whiff of this heavenly food and I knew it couldn't have been made by our cafeteria staff. It could only have been made by Mike! The smell brought me to you, I hope you know."
"Trixie brought us lunch. Or, more correctly, her brothers bought us lunch," Honey explained in case Di hadn't already figured it out. "But she is solely responsible for our new seating arrangements. She claims she wants it to be quiet so that we can talk." Throwing Trixie an expectant look, she waited patiently for her friend to offer them an explanation.
Di took a dainty bite of her hamburger and followed it with a sip of her milkshake. "Hmmm…strawberry. My favorite! How did you know?" she wondered aloud, tilting her head.
"I didn't," Trixie admitted but then smiled slyly, curious how her friend would react. "Mart must have known it was your favorite. He ordered it for you."
Di flushed to the roots of her dark hair, suddenly finding her napkin very interesting. She played with it, her perfectly painted fingernails displayed beautifully. "That's awful nice of him," she mumbled quietly, trying to ignore the teasing looks coming her way. She took another sip of her milkshake to prevent them from teasing her.
Taking pity on her, Honey quickly let her off the hook. She turned to Trixie and questioned, her lovely hazel eyes curious and a bit bewildered, "So, what happened this morning, Trix? I got your message last night saying that you didn't need a ride to school. But your message was rather garbled. All I could really understand was that you would be coming to school late and that you didn't need us to pick you up. You never said why," Honey finished with a slightly accusatory tone. Trixie always left the most frustrating of messages. She never gave a good explanation. It was a habit that drove Honey, as well as the rest of them, crazy at times.
Trixie put down her hamburger and glanced around. Except for the custodian mopping up a spill on the floor a few tables away and two nearby freshmen engrossed in their Biology books, no one was near them, exactly as she had wanted. She felt it would be safe for them to discuss her morning. "Well, my father was not very happy with what happened yesterday," she began slowly. She had only had a small window of opportunity to discuss with Honey about the incident at Mr. Lytell's store. Mart had been the one to share it with Di.
Both Di and Honey exchanged concerned glances. It had been the only topic of their discussion on the car ride to school. Jim had been uncommonly quiet, keeping his attention focused solely on the road, while he drove them to school, and hadn't joined in at all. "Yeah," Di replied, hating what had happened. She gave a small shudder of disgust. "Mart was not happy, either. He called and talked to me about it for almost an hour yesterday after dinner. He did most of the talking. I merely listened. He did mention that his car has been taken to the police station for further tests and that he won't be able to get it back for a few more days."
Honey had had the honors of sharing the incident with Jim after her quick talk with Trixie. She doubted if she would ever forget the expression that had come over his face. First shock, then anger. Then he had turned a furious shade of red and had high-tailed it down to Mr. Lytell's store, to see the results for himself. He had returned just as angry; the sight of the slashed tires had only added fuel to it. Honey knew him well enough to realize that fear drove the anger. "You should have seen Jim," she shared with the girls. "He was the maddest I have ever seen him."
"So was Brian." Trixie hadn't liked the look that had entered his eyes when she had told him about the tire slashing at Mr. Lytell's. He hadn't looked like the calm Brian she relied on. Instead, he had become someone different, right before her eyes, someone who was dangerous and not the least bit sensible. She rather hoped he never ran into the stalker. She didn't know what he would do if he did. Shaking away the unsettling memory, she continued, "Anyway, my dad decided that he wanted answers so he called Sergeant Molinson and made an appointment to talk with him over the phone this morning. My parents let me sleep in this morning and take part in the phone call. Mart even cancelled his morning with Dan. Then we had a conference call in my father's den, right after Bobby left for school."
"Did you find out who it is?" Di asked naively. The way she figured it, if they knew who the stalker was, then they could arrest him and put him behind bars.
"No, unfortunately," Trixie answered, dropping her head. It bothered her to know that there was some nameless, faceless person out there who had such ready access to her life. There seemed to be nothing she could do to prevent him from popping up and thrusting his unwanted mark on her life. "The sergeant has done a great job of crossing off everyone who it could not be. It seems that all of our enemies are accounted for, Honey. They are either resting harmlessly in jail, without any possible opportunity to complete any of the acts against me, or they are out on parole but are on regular speaking terms with their parole officers." She shrugged her shoulders. "So far, no one has been red-flagged as a suspect."
Honey threw up her hands, disgusted. It had to be a former nemesis. Who else could it be? "But that's impossible, Trix! Are you sure Sergeant Molinson is correct?"
Di considered the information and mentioned slowly, puzzled by what Trixie had said about the parolees, "I wonder about the ones out on parole. You don't suppose that someone could be fooling their parole officer, do you? I mean, what if someone is checking in regularly with them but are using their time for certain extra-curricular activities instead? You hear about things happening like that all the time on the news. It wouldn't be that far-fetched."
"Di, you would make an excellent police officer!" Trixie exclaimed proudly, her blue eyes twinkling. It was the exact conclusion she had come to. In fact, the sergeant had addressed it before the questions had completely formed in her mind. "Sergeant Molinson is on the same train of thought, too. He told us that he is having his police officers re-interview all of the parole officers again. This time, he's making sure that the questions are much more in-depth. He wants to make sure that no one has slipped through the cracks of the system, so to speak. The bad news is that it may take a day or two before everyone can either be cleared or become a person of interest. He promised my father that he will let us know as soon as he finds anything out."
"It's Friday now," Honey muttered, taking in all of the information. She bit her bottom lip, analyzed the information from all sides, and came up with an insightful but disappointing conclusion. "That may mean we won't know anything until Monday. Don't parole officers follow a normal Monday-Friday work week?" She tried to call on her meager knowledge of the criminal justice system but couldn't reach a definitive answer.
"That is a distinct possibility," Trixie replied but she wasn't too worried. "Sergeant Molinson said that he's not going to let the parole officers get away with refusing to answer his officers' questions, even if they have to ask them on Saturday or Sunday. He's not going to let them hide. He told my father that he has ways of getting their personal phone numbers so he'll be calling them at home, if needed, or even sending out officers to interview them personally."
Di broke a French fry in half and then ate it in small bites. "That sounds promising. It really does. Did this make your family feel better?" She remembered how worried Mart had been on the phone, once he had calmed down about his tires. She was not used to seeing Mart that way. He was always so carefree and fun-loving.
"They won't feel better until it's all resolved and someone has been apprehended." And neither will I, Trixie thought to herself but kept her concerns to herself. She wanted to put as good a face on it as she could.
"You know, everyone's making the assumption that it's someone we helped catch," Honey injected thoughtfully into a lull in the conversation, absently dipping a fry into a pile of ketchup. She dropped the fry and stared at Trixie. "But what if it's not? What if it's someone else entirely?"
Trixie jabbed her straw at the ice cubes in her cup, listening to the ice clink together. Leave it to Honey to ask the one question that had been unasked to Sergeant Molinson, as well as the one that was circulating through her mind. She hadn't wanted to bring it up, not wanting to add anymore worries to her family. Plus there was that feeling she had in her bones. It was someone she knew. It had to be. "There's always the chance that I managed to tick off someone else, without realizing it," she replied haltingly, choosing her words carefully. "It would certainly make it harder to identify the person, too, if it's not someone from our past. But I know it's someone from our past, even though all we really have to go on are the prepaid cell phones. That's it. There haven't been any fingerprints or sightings or, well, anything."
"Have they made any progress with the cell phone numbers?" Di wasn't usually so interested in mysteries but she was willing to make an exception, especially since the heart of the mystery seemed to be Trixie, herself, and was dangerously encroaching onto their sacred Bob-White territory.
"None." The knowledge had frustrated her family more than anything else. It was the only true lead the police had and it led absolutely nowhere. "All Sergeant Molinson could tell us was that the phones had been bought from different stores in the upstate New York area, as well as in New York City. They were able to track down a few receipts to some of the sales. So far all of the phones were paid for in cash." Which meant that they couldn't be traced.
The edge of Honey's lips turned down while she digested the information. "This person, whoever it is, has to be smarter than we give them credit for. He or she hasn't made a single mistake."
"You sound like Brian," Trixie noted with a small giggle, not surprised at all that Honey would come to the exact same conclusion as her older brother. "He said words to the same effect to Sergeant Molinson. The sergeant replied that the person must have really planned everything beforehand and must be feeling pretty confident now. He insists that the stalker is bound to make a mistake, sooner or later. The sergeant believes that the more confidence the stalker has, the less likely he is to be as careful. He's going to get cocky and that's going to cost him."
"You keep calling him as a 'he'," Di noted insightfully, frowning at Trixie. "Is that something you know for sure?"
Trixie shook her head, sending her blonde curls flying in charming disarray. "Nope, not at all. It's only another feeling I have, though, one that I can't shake. Somehow, I know that the person doing all of this has to be a man." She wondered if Sergeant Molinson thought the same thing. He also kept referring to the stalker as a man.
Honey knew better than to question her friend's instincts. She looked down at her meal, which was only half-eaten, and felt no desire to finish it. In fact, the smell no longer made her feel hungry. She felt slightly nauseous instead. The topic of their conversation had taken away a good part of her appetite. "Let's talk about something else," she insisted, pushing her food away. She reached across the table and tapped Trixie on the arm. "I've been practically dying of curiosity all morning, wondering where you were at. I had no way of getting in touch with you. I tried calling your house but I kept getting a busy signal." She lifted her eyebrows and sent an accusatory look aimed at Trixie.
Trixie smiled apologetically. "Sorry about that, Honey. With everything that's going on I forgot to tell you." She reached into her backpack and pulled out her borrowed cell phone. "Mart gave me his cell phone to use, now that Sergeant Molinson has mine. He thinks that I need it more than he does right now."
"I could have told you that, Honey," Di put it, astonished that she had known a piece of information that Honey had not. It didn't happen too much.
"That was nice of Mart." Honey quickly pulled out her cell phone. She called up her address book, surprised to see that she didn't have Mart's cell phone number programmed into it. His was the only Bob-White cell phone she was missing. "You'll have to give me Mart's cell number," she informed Trixie after searching through her phone book for it, to no avail. "I don't seem to have it programmed into my cell."
Di felt affronted on Mart's behalf. She drew back and teased, her violet eyes gleaming with mischief, "I bet you have Brian's."
Honey felt her cheeks burn but ignored her, certainly not going to admit that she did. "What is it, Trixie? I'm ready for it"
Trixie rattled off the number easily. "Wasn't it nice of him to let me borrow his phone?" He always came through, no matter how annoying he could be. Her almost-twin was very special, whether she liked to admit it or not. "Moms and Dad were ecstatic with him when I told them about it. It helped take some of the stress off of them a little." She turned on Mart's phone, glad that she didn't have to worry about the threat of odd hang-ups or unwanted text messages. "No messages or missed calls for me. Thank goodness! You can't begin to imagine how much better I feel, knowing that I can answer Mart's phone and not have to worry about it being that horrible unknown someone on the other end." She wasn't afraid to answer Mart's phone, not like she had come to feel about hers. "I'm actually surprised that someone from home hasn't called to check up on me, though. I've only been back at school for twenty minutes."
"They probably figure no news is good news," Di inferred correctly. "Plus they know we're not allowed to use our phones during school hours, except at lunch."
Honey repeated Mart's cell phone number under her breath as she plugged it into her phone. "All in, Trixie!" she announced happily. "Now, if I need to get in touch with you if you're not at home, I know exactly how to do it. How perfectly perfect."
Di cleaned up her spot and took one last sip of her strawberry milkshake. "We only have nine minutes left before our next class," she noted mournfully. "Doesn't it seem like lunch goes by much too fast while the rest of our classes drag on as slowly as molasses?"
"I think that's how every student in high school feels." Trixie couldn't wait to see the end of her high school years and felt awful that she couldn't appreciate the last remaining weeks, not with the threat of the stalker hanging over head.
"You know, I get a text message from my mother this morning," Honey inserted after her friends fell silent. "There have been heavy rainstorms and their flight out of England had to be postponed. My mother and father won't be able to make it home until tomorrow morning at the earliest, depending on the weather, of course."
"That's horrible," Trixie cried, feeling bad for her friend. She knew how much Honey had been looking forward to seeing her parents again. "I'm so sorry, Honey."
Honey waved her hands in the air, choosing not to dwell on it. There wasn't anything she could do to change it. "It'll be okay, Trixie. They will be home sometime within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, plus they do not have another business trip scheduled until after graduation, which I'm really looking forward to. But that's neither here nor there. You see, while I was in home-ec, I had an idea, an absolutely brilliant idea, if I do say so myself." She gave herself a playful pat on her back and waited for her friends to prod her.
Trixie balled up her garbage and put it in the brown bag. "All right, I'll bite. What's your brilliant idea, Honey?"
"I think we should have a sleepover tonight! Wouldn't it be wonderful?" Her honey eyes shone with excitement. "You could both come over for dinner. We could watch movies, stay up late, and talk all night long, if we want to. Doesn't it sound like fun?"
Di gave a moan of disappointment and slammed her hand on the table for good measure. "I can't!" she exclaimed, grimacing. "I have to babysit my sisters tonight. My brothers are spending the night at your house, Trix. They are coming over right after baseball practice tonight. I think your mom is picking them up from the baseball field."
Trixie shuddered at the thought. Three boys, in her house, having their preadolescent version of a sleepover. Oh, the horror, the unimaginable horror. There was no way she was putting herself through it, not if she had an out. "I would love to spend the night with you, Honey," she answered decisively. "I'm sure Moms won't mind. She'll have Brian and Mart to help her with the three little hoodlums." And if her mother seemed unwilling to let her out of the house, she figured she could probably beg for it and win. With everything that was going on, she seriously doubted her mother would tell her no. "I'll ask her when I get home from school but I know she will agree."
"Good." Honey glanced at the clock and saw that they didn't have a lot of time left. "Well, that's about it. We need to get cleaned up and get ready for our afternoon classes." She put her trash in the large brown bag. "I'll see the two of you later. Jim's picking us up at the end of the day."
Trixie was the last one from their table to join the line of students leaving the cafeteria. She got that eerie feeling, the one that she hadn't felt in a few days. Throwing a curious glance over her shoulder, ignoring the students who jostled her carelessly in their haste to get to their class, she scanned the area. But she came up with nothing. Again. "What on earth," she murmured to herself, a bewildered frown settling on her face. She had to be missing something. "But what could it be?" When no answer was forthcoming, she left the cafeteria, more puzzled than she had been before.