Relentless: Three Novels Page 8

  “Hello? Hello, it’s me.” Nikki heard her dead mother’s voice coming from the toy phone into her ear. Nikki screamed dropped the toy phone to the floor in shock and crumpled into tears.

  Katie climbed onto the couch and put her little arms around Nikki’s neck. “Don’t cry, Mama. Grandma loves you.”

  Through her tears, Nikki asked, “Did she say that?”

  “Uh-huh. She did.”

  Chapter Four

  There was no way on earth that Nikki could go to sleep after that.

  For the rest of the day, Nikki remained quiet. Had she really heard her mother’s voice on the other end of the telephone? Had Katie? The idea was crazy. How could that even be possible? The telephone was a toy and her mother was dead. How could she have gotten hold of her dead mother on her old toy phone?

  Nikki decided she had been so tired in the past couple of weeks from her night classes on campus that she’d probably had imagined the whole thing. Realizing that it was almost time for her husband, Brad, to come home from work, she began to make dinner. She decided on spaghetti and meatballs, her husband and daughter’s favorite meal. Nikki pulled the large pot from underneath the sink and placed it under the tap to fill it with water. She placed the pot on the stove to wait for it to boil. And then, she got her homemade meatballs and sauce out of the freezer and put the container in the microwave, loosened the lid and turned it on. She made her way into Katie’s bedroom to find her daughter pretending to read to her teddy bear.

  Nikki gave Katie a proud smile. “You are reading so well, baby girl.”

  “You taught me to read. Now I read my books to my bear,” said Katie, “and I teach him to read.”

  Nikki tousled her daughter’s silky hair. “What are you reading to him?”

  Katie looked down at the book and said, “I read Booty and the Beat.”

  Nikki laughed at her daughter’s interpretation of Beauty and the Beast, Katie’s favorite book. “You know it’s not called that.”

  “Bee-yoo-tee and the Beest,” Katie sounded out. “I used my phonics.”

  “Very good!” Nikki said.

  “Thank you, Mommy.”

  Every night, she had made her mother or father read it to her before bed, even though now, she could read it herself.

  Just then, Nikki heard the front door open and close.

  “Brad, we’re back here,” she called out to her husband.

  “I’m in the kitchen, throwing spaghetti in your boiling water,” he yelled back.

  “Thanks! I forgot,” she called. “Can you add a pinch of salt?”

  “Sure can!”

  Brad made his way to his daughter’s room and found his wife and daughter sitting on Katie’s Disney Princess bedspread. “How’s it going, my lovely girls?”

  “It’s going good, my lovely Daddy. We are reading to my bear,” said Katie. “And using phonics.”

  “Phonics are fun!” Brad smiled at his young daughter and gave her a kiss on the top of her head.

  “Can I play with my dollhouse now?” Katie asked.

  “Sure,” Nikki said.

  Katie jumped off her bed and headed to her dollhouse as Brad sat next to his wife and gave her a kiss on the mouth and stroked her hair.

  “How was your day?” asked Nikki.

  “It was actually productive for once. Everyone showed up for work today, and did their job. So, that made my job a lot easier. For one thing, I didn’t have to run the forklift and unload the lumber truck.”

  “Yay, because I know that you hate that.”

  “Yes, I do, and I’m not good at it.”

  “Crunch those numbers, Brad!” she teased. “Supervise those guys. Order more inventory! Do payroll!”

  “Now you’re talking my language,” he replied. “People should do what they are good at.”

  She nodded. “And what makes them happy.”

  “I like my job. No worries, there, sweetie. I just want you to like your job as mom, wife and student.”

  She grinned. “I do.”

  “I’m glad, baby. You work very hard,” he told her. Brad was a manager for his uncle’s hardware store in their small town, the same small town where Brad and Nikki were born and raised. The couple had known each other their whole lives. They didn’t start dating till high school, and now, in their early thirties, had been together ever since.

  “Did you have a good day?” he asked his wife softly, always concerned that she was a little fragile.

  “It was okay, nothing too eventful.” Nikki thought back to the haunting phone call on the toy phone and a chill ran down her spine. She wasn’t quite sure why she didn’t just tell him. It had to have been her imagination. She had been very sleep-deprived lately with night classes and staying up late to finish her homework. And getting up early to study. School and Katie pretty much consumed her life. Poor Brad got the leftovers of her life. And he was such a good sport about it, too.

  “I want to make some time for us tonight before I run off to campus,” she said softly.

  “In that case, I’m going to hop in the shower before dinner and wash off the stink of hundreds of bags of fertilizer that got unloaded and stacked just outside my office,” Brad said.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Now that you mention it…” she teased.

  “Hey, hey! You should probably stir the spaghetti before it boils over.”

  Nikki nodded at her husband and headed back to the kitchen to finish preparing dinner.

  After the family ate dinner, they put Katie in the bathtub and then to bed.

  Nikki forgot about making special alone time with Brad. Instead, she reviewed the homework she had completed. She had to leave soon for class, but she wanted to make sure everything was correct. She opened her laptop and re-read the paper she had written. She was taking a history class and she’d had to write about the hidden agendas of the Civil War. To the best of her knowledge, everything looked correct. She made sure to save her paper one more time to her computer, and then, for extra insurance, she emailed the paper to herself. She printed out her paper on the wireless printer, turned off her laptop and placed it into her school bag. Getting up from the table, she gave her TV-watching husband and sleeping daughter a kiss and made her way out the door to night school.

  It wasn’t until she was about a mile from home that she realized that she had not made any private time for her and Brad before she took off for school. She sighed. She was forgetting everything lately. Studying took up a lot of her time because it took her forever to remember things. And she felt like she was struggling against her meds. Or had she even taken them today? She couldn’t remember.

  The drive to the campus took about 15 minutes. Nikki used this time to free her mind of the daily troubles, and to concentrate on what was going on at school that night. Then she started stressing out about school, so she turned up the radio and began to sing along to a Lady Gaga song. She was so into the song that she almost didn’t stop at the red light. At the last second, she realized she was about to speed through the intersection. Nikki panicked and stepped on the brake pedal fast and hard. The brakes screeched and the tires laid a long scratch over the crosswalk lines. She couldn’t believe how careless she had been. She was normally such a careful driver. Her heart pounding in her chest, she took a deep breath and let it out. She watched a mother and her young son cross the crosswalk, hand in hand. This made Nikki even more uneasy about her driving. She realized that her night vision wasn’t so hot either.

  Then she noticed a beautiful woman walking behind them. The woman had long bright auburn hair, like her mother had. It glinted under the streetlight. She even seemed to have the same figure as her mother did at the time of her death. The woman took off her glasses and looked Nikki straight in the eyes. She looked just like Deborah, her dead mother. Nikki tried to back out of the crosswalk and accidentally hit the gas pedal while she was in “drive”—her car lurched forward, bumped the woman and knocked her flat.

  Chapter Fiver />
  Nikki screamed, threw her gearshift in park and jumped out of her car to check on the woman. “Mom, is that you?”

  The woman turned around and yelled at Nikki, “Who are you calling Mom? I’ve never seen you before in my life. And what the hell is wrong with you? You just hit me with your car!”

  She struggled to get up and Nikki gave her a hand. The woman grunted and got up, then tested her legs and arms and said, “Nothing seems broken, no thanks to you.”

  “You…you gave me a dirty look and I panicked. I tried to back up from the crosswalk but I was in ‘drive.’”

  “Are you on recreational drugs or something?”

  “No!” Nikki said.

  Realizing that this was not her mother—in fact, the woman didn’t look much older than Nikki—she said, “I’m so sorry. I was also startled because I thought you were someone else. My mom. You look just like her.”

  “So, you thought I was your mother and then you hit me with your car?”

  “No, that was an accident. I was very startled. Are you really okay?”

  “I’m fine. You barely hit me. Just enough to scare me a little. And tick me off.”

  “I’m very sorry. Do you need me to call an ambulance?”

  The woman brushed off her long overcoat and said, “I’m fine, but now I’m even more late. I have a test on campus and I cannot miss it or I will fail my class.”

  “Do you need a ride?” Nikki asked.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding. Just get in your car. You’re holding up traffic. I’ll take a shortcut across campus on foot while you are still searching for a parking spot. Loser! Get a clue!”

  Nikki turned around to see a group of cars honking and angrily driving around her car as they yelled obscenities at her. She had been so worried about the woman that she hadn’t realized the delay she’d caused. Nikki turned back at the woman to apologize one more time, but she had already left the scene of the accident. Nikki was going to be late for her class, too. So, she did the same thing. Left.

  Finding herself shaking in fear, Nikki pulled her car to the side of the road where she sat crying for fifteen minutes, and then realized that she was going to be late to class. She sped there, angry with herself for losing it.

  Luckily, her class went off without a hitch. Unfortunately, she was pretty nervous about driving at night now. She couldn’t believe she had hit a pedestrian. The pedestrian had run off and so had she. She hoped she wouldn’t later be arrested for a hit and run.

  Just chalk up another thing you can’t even tell Brad.

  Chapter Six

  The next morning, Nikki took Katie to her sister Tara’s bakery. A few years ago, Tara had inherited it from the estate of her dead ex-husband. Before Tara had taken it over, it had been just a little rundown shack that sold baked goods, mostly nothing but three or four kinds of breads and a couple types of sandwiches with packages of chips. It wasn’t a very popular place and the food was known for being terrible.

  In the four years that Tara had owned it, she had remodeled the whole building. She’d decorated it with old Victorian furniture and paintings. She’d changed up the menu so that not only did the bakery sell baked goods, but also a full variety of breakfast and lunch items. Finally, she had changed the name from “The Old Bakery” to “Tara’s Old-Fashioned Bakery and Diner.”

  Nikki and Katie sat in a small booth, waiting for Tara to arrive to join them for breakfast. One of the waitresses had given Katie a kids’ menu and crayons to occupy her. Nikki examined the menu and couldn’t decide on whether to get pancakes or a Denver omelet. She picked up her head from her menu and watched the door open as Tara strutted through the swinging doors from the kitchen.

  Tara was the beautiful sister. In case Nikki didn’t know this, everyone reminded her. It didn’t really bother Nikki because she was never one to care about hair and makeup like her sister. Tara got their mother’s striking looks. The long, bright-red hair and big blue eyes and the hourglass figure that most women had to starve themselves for, all of that came naturally to Tara. Tara ate pastries for breakfast on a daily basis and never gained a pound, though she was on her feet all day in the bakery.

  All Nikki had to do was take a bite out of a donut and she’d gain a pound.

  The sounds of two men shouting came from the kitchen.

  Tara waved at her sister and niece and put up her index finger to them to indicate that she was going to be one minute. Nikki nodded as her sister made her way back into the kitchen. There was some more muffled shouting and the sounds of pots and pans crashing to the floor.

  “Where’s Aunt Tara?” asked Katie.

  “She just had to run to the kitchen for something. She’ll be back.”

  Katie smiled at her mom. “Maybe she had to go pee-pee?”

  “No, honey. I don’t think she would go to the kitchen for that.” Nikki laughed at her daughter. A few minutes later, Tara came out of the kitchen with a glazed donut in her hand and a white wax paper bag with two more donuts in it. She made her way to their booth and sat down, handing the bag to Nikki. “Sorry, loves. There was a problem in the kitchen. It seems that two of my bakers broke out in a fistfight.”

  “A fistfight? Oh, no, is everything okay?” Nikki asked.

  “Yes, everything is fine. They were fighting about whose pie crust was flakier. I tell ya, pastry chefs are so neurotic,” Tara said, giving Katie a kiss on the head. “How have you been, little Princess?”

  “I’ve been good. What’s neurotic?”

  “It’s something you don’t want to be, Katie.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I won’t.”

  Tara looked hard at her sister. “Nikki, how are you? You look frazzled.”

  “I’m still a little frazzled from last night.”

  “What happened last night?”

  “I accidentally hit a woman in the crosswalk with my car.”

  “Oh my God, did you kill her?” she squealed.

  “No, Tara I didn’t kill her.” Nikki shook her head at her sister’s hysterics. Where did that come from? It was just like Tara to imagine the absolute worst in a situation.

  “What happened?”

  “I was stopped at the crosswalk and, it was the craziest thing. This woman walks across the street and I could have sworn it was Mom. I tried to back up to let her have the whole crosswalk, but I was in ‘drive’ and boom, I hit her.”

  “Oh, no. Not again, Nikki. You’ve got to stop seeing Mom everywhere, and in everyone with long red hair. She’s gone. Let it go!”

  Nikki knew exactly why her sister was saying that. Right after their mother had been murdered, Nikki used to think she saw her everywhere. “It wasn’t her obviously. I just thought it was her and got a little startled and accidentally hit the gas. I hit her, but I barely hit her. She did fall to the ground, but got up, gave me attitude and disappeared. I think the incident was just enough to scare us both.”

  “So, you know it wasn’t Mom then, right?”

  “Yes, Tara.” Nikki began to get annoyed with her sister.

  “I’m just worried about you, Nikki. It took you a lot of years of therapy to get over Mom’s death and you are definitely taking a step back toward Crazyville again.”

  “It wasn’t that bad.” She glanced at Katie, hoping Tara would ease up on the conversation.

  “Says you. You must be impossible to live with. Your Brad is a saint! A saint!”

  “Shut up. He has it pretty good, too, with me.”

  “I know he does. I’m just giving you a hard time because you’re scaring me. It’s like you fell off the sane wagon all over again.”

  “Shut up. I’m fine. The funny thing is, I really forgot about all those episodes of seeing Mom everywhere until you reminded me of them just now.” Nikki began to laugh, but it was a bitter, sad laugh.

  “I guess that’s a good thing then. Okay, well, as you know next week is Ted’s birthday.” Ted was Tara’s new boyfriend of a few months who was twenty years her s
enior. Nikki didn’t approve of him at first, but lately, she and Brad had been spending a lot of time with the two of them. Nikki and Brad were growing very fond of him. He seemed to balance out her sister’s life. Tara was very uptight and tended to be anal about things. Ted was the opposite, very carefree and easygoing. Nikki could definitely see a positive change in her sister’s behavior since they had been dating.

  “Do you want to double-date for Ted’s birthday?” Nikki asked. “I could get a sitter for the munchkin.”

  “Hey, my name is Katie, not munchkin!” Katie said and they all laughed.

  “Actually, Nikki, I was thinking that maybe we could give him a surprise party at your place. Like a barbeque?”

  Nikki thought for a moment. “Well, I don’t see why not, but I will have to check with Brad first.”

  “Oh, thank you, little sis.”

  Nikki hated when Tara called her that. It just sounded so lame to her. Nikki wanted very much to tell her sister about the toy phone incident and hearing her mother’s voice on it. But she was afraid if she did, Tara would convince Brad to put her back in psychotherapy again. She was already on too many drugs to keep her from flipping out when she saw a red-haired woman who wasn’t Tara. So, Nikki decided to keep it to herself about the haunted toy phone.

  “I have one other thing to talk to you about, Tara.”

  “What? I’m kind of busy. Gotta run.”

  “Wait. The house that’s for sale, the one I texted you about…” Her voice trailed off and they both eyed Katie.

  “Oh, no. I don’t want to buy it. Do you?” Tara said.

  “I don’t know, and it would be a stretch because we have money set aside for all-day kindergarten next year, not for a house. Anyway, this weekend, I am going to get some things from it.”

  “What do you mean…get some things?” Tara asked.

  “Our things.”

  “You gotta be kidding me. Our stuff is there?”

  “Our stuff is there, Tara. Our family’s stuff. I was hoping you would help me box some of it up before the house is sold.”