Orchids and Stone by Lisa Preston

with one arm over the old lady, the other hand holding a brown Carhartt jacket.
    Daphne winced. The jacket held her phone. And her wallet.
    They would know who she was, where she lived.
    And they had taken the old lady. They had taken Minerva Watts. Again. Daphne abandoned hope of the best-case scenario or a happy answer—that strangers were having a bad day with a difficult older relative. She bolted for Vic’s car, not thinking about what she’d do if they saw her and came after her again.
    She gunned the engine, slam-shifted to spin the Honda around, and floored the accelerator, chasing the man who had chased her.
    Fleeing straight down Eastpark, the navy Town Car was already more than a half mile ahead. Daphne rolled through two stop signs, checking left and right fast as she cleared the intersections. The other car was still pulling away, making her wonder if they’d blown the stop signs, too.
    Get the license plate at least. Not having the license plate for the police officers last night was one of her failings.
    She drove faster than she’d ever driven through a residential area, ever. She grimaced through it, held her breath. The neighborhood gave way to small businesses. More traffic would be coming with the University District.
    Catch them, she willed herself, all attention on her forward pursuit.
    They were approaching a green light at the top of a hill. She wouldn’t be able to see which way they turned if they cleared the intersection without her. She pressed harder on the accelerator, city blocks whipping by as she gained on the escaping car.
    The light turned yellow and the Lincoln vanished down the hill as the traffic signal loomed red.
    Staring at the license plate in the bumper’s center, Daphne stomped the accelerator. Less than a split second later, she gasped at the sight of a car coming at her left rear fender and another at her right front. Then the screaming of tires, the crunch of metal, people shouting, and glass breaking all jumbled in her head as the Honda spun a full circle in the intersection.

CHAPTER 7
    Nausea welled up in Daphne’s belly. An adrenaline spike shook her hands. Sweating and pimpled with goose bumps, she gulped in the breeze drafting through her shattered driver’s window.
    A man in a Seattle Sonics jacket came to her door as she turned her head like a swimmer needing a breath, her mind needing contact and help. “You fucking idiot,” he said, his chest leaning into her window as he braced his hands on the Honda’s roof. “How red they gotta be for you to stop?”
    “I, I need a phone. I have to call the police.”
    “Jesus!”
    Daphne closed her eyes. If the man’s epithet had been any other, it might not have sent her mind crashing back to Suzanne’s funeral. Jesus. Jesus. It was a name a Mayfield girl knew better than to say without respect. In her sheltered childhood, Daphne knew no one who spoke in such terms. Even her father never uttered any kind of curse until after Suzanne’s body was found, then he cursed every unmoving stranger. Daphne first considered the notion of propriety at eleven, when Ross Bouchard spoke out of turn at the altar and sang strange things about Jesus and Suzanne.
    “Did you see that car? The navy blue Lincoln Town Car?” Daphne asked without looking at the man, her face turned to her lap, a swimmer no longer breathing, drowning. Her head swirled, remembering the Bouchard boy croaked something about how drowning men could see Him. She turned her head and gasped, “Did you get the license? Someone must have seen it.”
    “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, and pushed himself away from her car with enough force to rock it.
    She clutched her shaking hands in her lap, wanting to clap them over her ears to quell her father’s voice. Someone must have seen . . . someone saw something.
    Then she exploded, forcing the door open, wrenching a metal groan of protest from Vic’s car. A horn bitched behind backed-up traffic. The Honda was still