Final Breath

'Who--' Eli started to say. But he couldn't get the words out. He was too scared. He swiveled around and hurried toward the parking lot. Threading through the mob of people, he kept glancing back to see if the man was following him. Eli didn't spot the guy among the crowd, but he couldn't be sure.

He remembered what Marcella had told him: 'I see dangerous forces all around you, Eli.' Now he wondered if he should have given her the damn twenty bucks.

Up ahead in the distance, he saw the celebrity stage platform by the ValuCo store, but a bunch of people were milling around on it, and he couldn't see his mom among them.

At the edge of the parking lot, Eli paused and looked back again. He tried to catch his breath. He didn't see the weird guy in the beige jacket anywhere, but Eli took another minute to survey the crowd. His heart was pounding furiously.

Then he recognized his mom's voice coming over the loudspeaker: 'Eli McCloud, please meet your mother at the platform by the ValuCo front entrance...'

He let out a grateful laugh. Ordinarily, he would have been utterly humiliated to have his mother paging him this way. But right now, he smiled at the sound of his mom calling out for him.

Eli took one last long look at the fairgrounds. The smile disappeared from his face. He saw someone duck behind a phone pole at the edge of the lot--someone in a beige jacket.

'Leave me alone!' he screamed--with what little breath was left in his lungs. 'I can see you! Stop following me!'

A moment later, a woman in a beige pullover emerged from behind the phone pole. She was waving out a match and puffing on a cigarette. Apparently, she didn't hear him, thank God. She didn't even look his way, though several people in the parking lot did.

Eli felt like an idiot. But he wasn't any less scared, not after what Marcella had told him.

His mother made the announcement again. Her words boomed over the speakers posted throughout the parking lot and fairgrounds. He knew she was somewhere on that crowded makeshift stage, calling for him.

Eli turned and ran like hell toward the sound of his mother's voice.

CHAPTER NINE

Sydney checked her rearview mirror again.

She wasn't sure what she expected to see behind her on Highway 167. When she'd pulled out of the ValuCo parking lot fifteen minutes before, at least a dozen cars were leaving at the same time. The man in the navy blue 59 T-shirt could have been driving any one of those cars. If he was following her right now, she wouldn't have been able to recognize his car anyway. Besides, she and Eli were headed home, and the olive-skinned stranger had originally been lingering outside their driveway gate. Trying to elude him wouldn't do any good. He already knew where they lived.

Her grip tightening on the wheel, Sydney glanced over at Eli in the passenger seat and tried to smile. He wasn't listening to his iPod, for a change. The Moody Blues played on an oldies station on the car radio, and he seemed to enjoy 'Nights in White Satin.'

To Sydney's utter amazement, Eli hadn't given her any flack for paging him at the fair. Earlier, when she'd spotted him in the parking lot headed her way, she'd hurried down from the stage and hugged him. He hadn't balked or asked why she was acting so weird. Instead, he'd hugged her back. He'd seemed kind of relieved to see her, too.

Later, on their way to the car, Eli had dug into his pocket and tried to give her the three dollars and some- odd-cents left over from the twenty-five bucks she'd given him for fun fair rides.

'Keep the change, honey,' she'd told him, patting his shoulder. 'I didn't feel like driving all the way out here by myself. Consider it mommy-sitting money.'

Sydney didn't want to think about what might have happened if she'd left him alone at home this afternoon--what with that man loitering around the place. She would have to warn Eli about this potential stalker character.

Swell, she thought. The poor kid had enough troubles--what with his parents separating, and living in a strange, new place that was haunted, for crying out loud. Now she had to tell him about this possible nutcase.

Sydney looked over at him again. Slouched in the seat with his knees on the dashboard, Eli pensively gazed out the windshield.

'Are you feeling okay, honey?' she asked.

'Yeah, I'm fine,' he answered listlessly.

Sydney sighed, then turned her attention to the road ahead. She couldn't tell him about this stalker business right now. Maybe she'd invite Kyle over for a pizza tonight and he could bring one of his DVDs. Then she could break the news to Eli later.

She glanced over at him once more. 'You sure you're all right? I've seen that look before. You're worried about something.'

'Or somebody,' he said.

'Who's this somebody you're worried about?'

'Dad,' Eli murmured. He sighed. 'I know you're probably sick of me talking about Dad.'

'I'm not, honey. Go ahead. Why are you worried about him?'

'Well, I got to thinking earlier. Remember how you used to get all bent out of shape every time he had to work at night on one of his special assignments? I mean, you used to pretend you weren't nervous, but--c'mon, duh--I could always tell you were kind of scared something might happen to him.'

Sydney cracked a sad little smile. She kept her eyes on the traffic.

'Anyway, now that we're living here, we don't even know when he's on a special assignment. He could be on one right now, doing something really dangerous. Anyway, I'm worried about him. If Dad got hurt or something, how would we find out?'

'The same way we'd find out if we were still living with Dad in Chicago. Someone would notify us right away. Listen, Eli, if you're worried about Dad, then give him a call when we get home.'

'Okay. But he wouldn't tell me if he was in trouble,' Eli murmured.

Sydney sighed. 'He wouldn't tell me either, sweetie.'

They drove in silence for a while.

Sydney remembered back in March, when Joe had refused to admit anything was wrong. So she'd started her own investigation into the death of Arthur 'Polly' Pollard. She searched the Internet for more stories about him, but there wasn't any follow-up to that first Tribune article about Polly Pollard's body being discovered in a Woodlawn alley Dumpster.

Two days after Joe had told her, 'It doesn't concern you,' while Sydney was out shopping at Dominick's, she used a pay phone in front of the supermarket to call the Woodlawn police precinct. She asked if they had any updates on their investigation into the March 14th murder of Arthur Pollard.

'Who's calling, please?' asked the cop on the other end of the line.

'Um, Ellen Roberts with the City Beat section of the Tribune,' she lied.

'I'll connect you with Lieutenant Mullen.'

But Sydney got Mullen's voice mail and hung up. She couldn't leave a number for him, not without giving herself away. She made four more calls from pay phones over the next two days and always got Lieutenant Mullen's lousy voice mail.

'Hey, hon?' she casually said to Joe while he was in the shower. She stood in front of the bathroom mirror in her slip. Her cosmetic clutch was on the side of the sink. They were getting ready for the wedding of Joe's cousin, another cop--in Evanston. 'I was just wondering, did they ever find out who killed that Polly character, the one who called here?'

She saw Joe's nude silhouette behind the foggy shower curtain. He stopped scrubbing his chest for a moment and turned toward her. 'What?'