“Enough,” I said. With enough force to shut him up. Or maybe he’d just been brought up to be quiet when a lady’s talking. Rafe looked at me, too, and I was happy to see enough amusement in his eyes to know that he wasn’t really angry. “Go sit in the parlor. Both of you. Have you had dinner, David?”
“No,” David said, with his lower lip stuck out. “I had to cause a scene and be sent to my room without supper in order to get away.”
“Of course you did.” I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes, but just barely. “For the record, I hope Ginny and Sam ground you for real when they find out what you’ve done. Is chicken and rice all right?”
“Fine,” David said, with another of those angelic smiles that popped out every so often. “I’ll eat anything.”
“Then go sit in the parlor and I’ll bring you a plate. Are you going to call Sam, Rafe?”
Rafe sighed. “I guess I’d better.” He glanced at David, who was smiling brightly as if all was well with the world. “And I agree with Savannah. I hope your parents ground you for a month when you get back home.”
“That’s mean,” David said, but without rancor. The two of them headed for the parlor, with Pearl dancing in front of them, while I walked back toward the kitchen to dish up another plate of chicken casserole.
David bedded down in Dix’s old room for the night. By then, he knew as much about the case—as he called it—as we did. He realized, because Rafe had taken pains to explain it to him, that his showing up here tonight had made him more of a target rather than less, but that didn’t seem to faze him much.
“She’s not going to be interested in me,” he’d said confidently. “I’m bigger, and hard to manhandle, and I know who I am. I can tell anyone who asks my name and my social security number and who my parents are and where I live. If she’s after anyone, it’s Carrie.”
We all looked at the baby, who was kicking her feet on the floor. Small, easy to grab, and with idea who she was or who she belonged to. If someone wanted to take her, there’d be nothing stopping them. Except us.
“Nonetheless,” Rafe told David, “I’m taking you back home tomorrow, and I want you to promise me you’ll stay there.”
He waited. David squirmed. “Fine,” he said eventually, when it became clear that Rafe wouldn’t accept any other answer. “Can I at least stay long enough to see the rest of the family? I don’t have to be back at school until Monday morning.”
We agreed that that would be acceptable to us if Ginny and Sam said it was OK, and Rafe got on the phone.
“They already knew he was gone,” he told me later, after David had been installed in Dix’s room and we were in our own, getting ready to sleep. “They were about to call, since they figured he’d be on his way here.”
“It’s not exactly the first time he’s pulled this stunt.”
Rafe shook his head. “He’s getting better. Or more diabolical. Before, he always left on foot, or on his bike, and it would take him hours, if not days, to get here. This time he called a car, and was here in an hour. They barely had time to figure out he was missing before he arrived.”
“He’s a smart kid.” I lifted the comforter and crawled in before I added, “A little too smart for his own good, maybe.”
Rafe nodded gloomily. “I’m gonna leave the door to the hallway open. Just in case he’s in there thinking about sneaking out. I don’t think he wants to go back to Nashville before this is over.”
That was the very distinct impression I’d gotten, too. And he might be thinking that he could run away from us and go to ground somewhere and flush out the stalker himself. I wouldn’t put it past him. “He’s amazingly like you for having been brought up by someone else.”
“All my worst qualities,” Rafe said, and climbed into bed next to me after leaving the door ajar.
“I wouldn’t say that. He’s brave, and clever, and determined—”
“And stupid,” Rafe said, “if he thinks he can get past me and outta here.”
Right. “There’s a back staircase, you know. The servants’ stairs. They fetch up in the kitchen. He doesn’t have to come this way to get downstairs.”