by Winnie Reed
Mom lowered her brow. “No, my grandchild will have crib all its own. It won’t be using its uncle’s crib. Besides, Georgie would be too young by then to move to a bed.”
I lifted a shoulder. “What do I know?” I could change a diaper, handle a feeding, or calm a tantrum with the best of them. But I didn’t have that hands-on knowledge of development and milestones and all that sort of thing.
That was as good a time as any to duck out and head next-door, while Mom muttered all sorts of things about Sharon and furniture and being presumptuous. Once we were inside the store, I set up Lola’s bed in my tiny office. “Now you be a good girl today. Don’t make me regret bringing you over here to be my little watchdog.”
No, she wouldn’t do much damage to anyone if they decided to attack. But she would definitely raise a fuss—for such a small dog, she had a fearsome bark going on. Sometimes, that was enough to frighten a person off. Or so I told myself, so I needed to believe.
I straightened up, watching as she made herself comfortable and arranged things the way she liked them. “You’re very particular, aren’t you?” She sat there, gazing up at me, her tail going back and forth at warp speed. “I sort of wish your mommy had told me I’d have you for another few days, but you’re no trouble.” Lucky for both of us.
Becca came in earlier than usual and found me hunched over my laptop. “How are you feeling?” She placed a steaming cup on the counter. “Peppermint tea. In case your stomach was still bothering you.”
“I swear, I don’t know what I did to deserve you.” When I caught her frowning, I winked. “That’s a good thing.”
“It’s just that I’ve heard you say that about your mom and your sister so many times, and it didn’t sound like a good thing.” She craned her neck for a glimpse at my screen. “What are you looking at?”
“You’re here just in time, actually. I wanted to go over the list of people who got links to last night’s meeting. Is there a way to see who clicked the link in the email you sent?”
“Sure.” I turned the machine so it was facing her. She glanced up at me while navigating using the trackpad. “Right, you were concerned about somebody last night. Did I do something wrong?”
“No, not at all. This has nothing to do with you. There was a name I didn’t expect to see.”
“Jane Brooks, right? She left not long after you did.”
I did what I could to hide knowing this already. “It’s just that I wouldn’t have expected her to be there. That’s the reporter who wanted to do the interview, remember? But she couldn’t.”
She snapped her fingers. “Of course! That’s where I heard that name before. It was bugging me.”
“She didn’t come to the store, did she?”
“If she did, she didn’t introduce herself to me.” She pulled up the list of people who’d received the email. “Now in this column, you can see who clicked the link. It looks like around fifty people did, and a little more than half of those people actually made it to the meeting.”
“Is that good?”
She shrugged. “That, I don’t know. But at least the people we had were engaged and interested in the material. Besides, I don’t know if I could have handled many more people at once.”
“Yeah, I imagine it would be a lot harder to wrangle everybody. But you did a great job of it.” I could tell she was pleased, and she deserved to be.
I scrolled down the list of addresses and immediately dismissed any I recognized. There were a handful that had been added just yesterday, including one that was nothing but letters and numbers. There was no name included.
Becca pointed to that entry. “This one was funny.”
“Funny how?” I had to tell myself not to overreact.
“Chloe, one of the girls who works over at Breanna’s studio, came in after you left yesterday and we were talking about the meeting since Breanna had mentioned it to her. She wrote down her email address for me to add to our list.”
She tapped her chin, eyes going narrow like she was trying to remember something. “There were a few customers in the store at the time. When she left, a couple of kids asked a question about the graphic novels we have in stock. So I went over to that area to help them, and when I got back to the counter, somebody had written down an email address on the back of one of our cards.” She patted the display we always kept near the cash register.
“This email address?” I pointed to the screen.
She nodded. “I didn’t get a bad vibe from anybody in the store, so I figured it was just somebody who overheard me and Chloe talking about it and wanted to join us. I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Do we still have the card?” I looked under the counter and found an empty wastebasket.
“No. I took the trash out to the bin in the back yesterday.” We shared that bin with the café, and no way was I about to go digging through bags that might’ve burst open. “I’m sorry. I only did what I always do when I close up.”
I could hear Becca’s nervousness building and felt sorry. “Really, I’m serious, you don’t have anything to worry about. It’s just that I don’t see Jane’s email address anywhere in here—not her work address, anyway, though I guess she could have used her personal address.”
“What is it about her? Why are you so concerned?”
I waved a hand. “It’s nothing. I just thought it was funny that she didn’t say anything. Her camera was off all the time, and she never piped up. It sort of struck me as odd.”
“Maybe she was observing. Reporters do that.”
“I guess you’re right.” I knew then that we needed to abandon this topic, fast. Becca was right, it didn’t make sense for me to care this much. At least, not from her point of view. I wanted to keep it that way.
The part of me wondered if I should warn her. Somebody had already come to the store looking for me. I had no doubt. They knew where I worked. It wasn’t that I didn’t know it. I had expected them to come sniffing around, after all.
But expectation was one thing. Having the facts thrown in my face was something different.
I doubted Becca would recognize the man in question if he came back into the store. That was the thing about our business. Regulars were one thing, but tourists came and went all the time. It was impossible to keep track of all of them. And if I spent any of my already thinly stretched attention on trying to memorize faces, I would never get anything else done.
Maybe it was time to start thinking about security cameras. If anybody had told me there would come a day when I would think security cameras were necessary in a quiet town like mine, I would’ve laughed it off.
Sadly, facts were facts, and Cape Hope wasn’t as idyllic as it appeared.
It was full dark by the time I took Lola for her last walk of the evening. I hadn’t managed to get in touch with Emma yet, but I knew better than to worry. If there was ever a place she was safe, it was with Joe and his family. If anything, after nearly a week with them, she was probably itching for something exciting to happen.
It was clear as we rounded the corner that Lola meant business. She found a likely tree and squatted without fuss, then kicked at the dirt the way she always did afterward. “Good girl.” We continued on, and I couldn’t help but laugh softly at how proud she seemed to be. “I guess if I got praised for doing the bare minimum, I would prance around like a little queen, too.”
My laughter ended when I heard footsteps behind me.
People took walks at night all the time. I told myself this even as my pulse picked up speed. My heart pounded, almost deafening me to the sound of footfalls on the sidewalk. My eyes darted back and forth as I sized up my surroundings. Nothing but houses like the one I shared with my neighbors, many of them already darkened for the evening. It was past ten o’clock, and a lot of the people living in my section of town were early risers like me.
I could easily open the gate to any one of these homes and stroll up to the porch like I lived there, so that was a p
ossible escape route. My house keys were in my right hand, which I held close to my belly so whoever was following wouldn’t see me threading keys between my clenched fingers. One of those little tricks most women learn at some point or another.
The footsteps grew louder. He was closing in. Suddenly, there was a hand on my shoulder.
I reacted before I had time to think. My right arm snapped up and back, elbow pointed out, and I made contact with something.
I spun on my heel, ready to jab the guy’s eyes out with my keys.
Only to find Ethan Crosby standing there, one hand over his nose.
Chapter Fourteen
“What’s your elbow made of?”
I stifled a laugh for the sake of his pride. “It’s one of the strongest points on the body. Actually, the strongest if you’re trying to defend yourself with a quick move. A good smashing of the instep is another method, but I acted before I could think about that.”
Ethan hardly looked interested in my self-defense lesson. “Let me guess. Dad taught you that one.”
“No, he didn’t.” I dabbed away a little blood that had crusted above Ethan’s lip. “It’s just the sort of thing girls learn. If they’re lucky, anyway.”
“Lucky?” He raised an eyebrow.
“You know what I mean. Not all girls are taught how to defend themselves when somebody attacks them from behind, so they might not be able to—”
His thick, dark brows knitted together over his nose, currently covered by a bag of frozen veggies from my freezer. “Attacked? I didn’t attack you.”
“No, but you came up behind me and put a hand on me. I realize that for a man, that might not be considered threatening behavior, but I’m not a man. We women have to be more careful about these things.”
“Then why were you walking the dog at ten o’clock at night?”
I had half a mind to hit him again, on purpose this time. “Why should I not be allowed to walk a dog who needs to do her business? Or should I let her pee on my throw rug just in case some psycho decides he has the right to hurt me?”
“Okay, okay. You’ve made your point. And I’m sorry for startling you.” He touched tentative fingers to his nose, which even to my untrained eye looked a little more swollen than usual. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”
I shouldn’t have so much as snickered at his rueful tone of voice, but I couldn’t help myself. “That’ll teach you about coming up behind a girl without saying a word.”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s just that I was walking and noticed you halfway down the block. I only wanted to catch you.” He lowered his brow. “What’s with ignoring me?”
That knocked me off-balance. “How could I be ignoring you if I didn’t even know you were behind me?”
He scowled. “I’m not talking about tonight. I’m talking about the message I sent you last night, that you ignored.”
The sad part was, I had to comb my memory. I then smacked my forehead and turned away from where I’d left Ethan standing by the kitchen counter. “Right! I’m sorry, that wasn’t on purpose. You caught me at maybe the worst possible time. Honestly, I’m not making this up.” I found my phone and pulled up his message. “You wanted to talk to me?”
For a second, he didn’t say anything. He settled for staring at me, almost like he wasn’t sure whether I was telling the truth. Finally, he spoke, his words coming out slowly. Like he had to force them out one at a time. “Yes. I did. I still do. Does that surprise you?”
“Well, it doesn’t surprise me, per se. Though usually a person explains why they want to talk to somebody instead of being all cryptic about it. I hope it wasn’t an emergency.”
“Good thing it wasn’t.” He rolled his eyes, then shifted the ice pack around a little.
“Well? Are you going to tell me why it was so important that we talk right away? Is it something to do with the store?”
“You know, there is more to life than work.”
I snorted at his imperious tone. “Look who’s talking. You are the one practically burning the midnight oil, working in the kitchen until all hours when your store is closed.”
“And how do you know about that?”
Darn it. For some reason, I always ended up saying just a little more than I should. “Lucky guess.” No, he didn’t need to know about me walking past his store for no particular reason. He didn’t need to know that my feet had carried me there without my meaning them to, at least not consciously.
“Do you mind if I take a look at this in the mirror?” He walked past me, taking it upon himself to enter my bathroom. I was never so glad to have tided it up recently—though honestly, if he wanted to barge in like that, maybe he deserved to see hand-washed panties hanging over the shower curtain rod.
I waited outside the door, watching and trying to hold back yet another grin as he examined himself. “Maybe we should take you to the emergency room.”
His gaze was no less withering in the mirror than it would’ve been if he’d turned to me. “Very funny. You could have broken it, you know. You could have killed me, come to think of it. It doesn’t take all that much force to drive the bone right up into a person’s brain.”
I grimaced, shivering. “Thanks for that. But honestly, don’t you think you’re being a little dramatic?”
“Says the woman with the lethal elbow and key claws that almost ripped into my face.”
This was getting us nowhere. “You never did tell me why you wanted to talk last night. What’s going on?”
He continued his self-examination, though part of me wondered if it wasn’t his way of avoiding the topic. “It seems to me like you’ve been ducking me lately. You’ve made yourself scarce. A man can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t because of something he did.”
Of all the times for him to bring up something like that. My brain was already working slowly enough thanks to the overload of questions, fears, and information. No wonder it took me a second to catch up with his train of thought.
I could have reacted better. But what was I supposed to do? To say he took me by surprise would be a massive understatement.
Which was why I covered my mouth with one hand and stared at him from over top of it with wide eyes, hoping against hope to muffle my surprised giggles. “That’s what you think this is about? You think I’m avoiding you?”
“Wow.” He turned away from the mirror, looking me up and down with obvious disapproval. Or was it disappointment? Either way, he wasn’t happy. “Make a joke out of it.”
“I wasn’t trying to. I’m sorry, if you knew what I’ve been through these past several days, you would understand better.”
He looked skeptical. “Try me.”
“It’s extremely complicated.”
“When is it not with you?”
“Fair enough.” Yes, I had been wanting to tell him about this, hadn’t I? Besides, it was the best and truest excuse I could come up with for having been so quick to attack out there on the street. I wanted him to understand how scared I was.
So I told him everything. The attack, the email, the fact that whoever it was had shown up at the book club meeting. Our little conversation afterward. By the time I finished, we were sitting on the sofa with Lola between us like my little personal guard dog.
Ethan blew out a long sigh, lips pursed. “No wonder you tried to break my nose. Man, how do you manage to get yourself into these situations?”
“I honestly don’t know. Trixie even had me believing I should let it go. When I couldn’t find anything about the attack and I couldn’t get in touch with Jane, I was going to move on. I really was. Until I got that email.”
“And you said you took pictures of your screen? Did you find anything in them?”
“I can’t believe it!” Lola jumped off the couch, startled, and even Ethan’s head snapped back. “Sorry, but I completely forgot to even look at them. Your text came in literally within moments of the call ending, which I think is what made me forget I even took them.”
“I’ve always had great timing.” Yes, hadn’t I thought something similar at the time? He scooted a little closer to me so he could see what I pulled up.
Which wasn’t much. It was easier to see the shelving behind him, but that was it. There was nothing out there that I could use to identify him, at least not at first glance. Ethan grunted. “He was careful, wasn’t he? Though from what I’m seeing, I put him at around six feet tall, the upper hundreds in terms of weight. He’s not muscular.”
“No, he isn’t. But it doesn’t take much to overpower a girl as small as Jane.”
“I guess not.” He looked away from the phone, turning to me. “I guess I don’t have to ask whether you told your father about this.”
“Why do I have to tell him?”
“Because he’s a detective? Semi-retired, from what you’ve told me, but still. This is serious, Darcy. This man is stalking you know. You have reason to believe he came into your store, looking for you. Casing the place, at least. There’s got to be a line drawn between your concern for others and concern for yourself.”
Instinct—or was it a habit—had me wanting to argue with him. To tell him he was wrong, that I could handle this on my own.
All I could do was lift my shoulders and let them fall. “I know. But honestly, this is nothing but threats. No, let me finish.” I stopped him before he could argue with me, which it was clear he was about to do. “I know a little something about these things. I’ve overheard more than I was supposed to, let’s put it that way. This man, whoever he is, hasn’t actually done anything to me. They would have nothing to charge him on.”
“He’s using Jane’s email address and her Zoom account. Doesn’t it stand to reason that he stole her laptop?”
“He could just as easily say he found it in the garbage.”
“That’s still no reason to not at least pursue something against him. Don’t ask me how you would find him, I’m not a cop. There has to be a way, doesn’t there? I refuse to believe there’s nothing to be done.”
