She put her ear to the door and tried to hear if Hugo was moving around inside, but she couldn’t even hear a TV rattling in the background.
“Hugo!” she said louder, out of breath. “Please, open the door!”
The elevator door dinged.
Maeve spun and froze; she could hear feet walking across the tile in a slow, deliberate pattern, and she knew she had to move further down the hall. An alcove for a drinking fountain appeared on her left and she ducked into the space, holding her breath.
The footsteps didn’t follow her down the hall, but Maeve didn’t feel safe enough to move. She stretched out her feet and rested her elbows against her legs, lowering her head and feeling cramped. After what felt like an hour, she stood and peeked down the hall. It was empty.
Maeve had nothing with her—no phone, no wallet, no keys to her apartment, and as she stood and tried to breathe slowly, she heard the front door of the complex open. Someone walked in—and in that moment, someone emerged from the elevator area, dressed all in black, and sped out.
“Good evening,” she heard a voice say and echo toward her.
Maeve closed her eyes and braced herself for violence, but when she heard the door shut, keys jingle, and the sound of fast moving feet on the tile, Maeve opened her eyes and watched.
When Hugo rounded the corner, a grocery bag in one hand and Roger padding along happily on a leash in the other, she burst into tears.
The police found no sign of forced entry and as they left, Maeve knew they didn’t believe her until she mentioned the exiting stranger and said they could ask her Night Manager.
“How does your dog keep getting out?” one officer asked, his posture incredulous, eyeing her door.
“The door used to be impossible to lock from the inside. If he turned the knob, he’s out. A clear design flaw. But Hugo put new locks on. If he got out tonight, someone let him out.” She crossed her arms over her chest, unwilling to argue the owner’s cheap door problem was more of the issue that her wandering boxer mix or the man who was actually inside her apartment that night.
“Crate him,” the officer suggested with the subtle shake of his head.
“Barks like a demon,” she replied and threw up her hands. It felt like an inopportune time to give her pet advice. “A man was in my apartment tonight. Dressed all in black. Hiding in my bedroom. Jingling my dog’s collar like an insane lunatic. He followed me downstairs and was waiting in the lobby when my Night Manager, Hugo, returned.”
“And he probably got in easily because your dog can open the door,” the officer replied and Maeve’s shoulders slumped.
“Do you feel safe in your residence tonight, Miss?” officer one asked, back on track.
“No, not really,” Maeve replied with disdain. Her beautiful, amazing, secure apartment. Okay, her beautiful, clearly not-so-secure apartment.
“And is there someone you can call to spend the night?”
Immediately her mind went to Derek, whom she was angry at for his ill-timed departure, leaving her to face the intruder on her own, and yet there was still no one else she’d rather have with her, holding her. Derek was comfort, she felt that.
And she couldn’t call him.
“Yeah,” Maeve answered with a swallow. “I do.”
“I don’t want to fucking stay here,” Millie said as she tore into the apartment and brandished her matching pink mace out in front of her, ready to spray it in any direction if someone surprised her.
“Put that away. The police went through everything already. There’s no one here.”
“Why didn’t you spray the fucker? That’s why we got the matching maces! You had prime mace opportunity and you didn’t catch him.”
“Easy,” Maeve said, weary of her sister’s attempt to victim-blame anyone in any situation. “Flight or fight. I guess we know which one will usually win for me. I just ran.”
“You hid next to a water fountain,” Millie asked with a frown.
She nodded.
“I’m so disappointed in you. Okay, let’s take you back to my place.”
“I hate your roommates. Don’t make me do it.”
“Don’t make me stay in an apartment with an intruder who is going to kill me.”
“Two things. One, you’re starting to sound like me. Two, there’s no intruder anymore.”
Millie made a face and sat down on the couch. The lamp in the corner was glowing brightly again next to the pile of Woodstock Killer information. The police had rifled through the pictures briefly, but she was sure they’d seen people with far more embarrassing hobbies as they wandered through homes unannounced after an emergency. In a life or death situation, she wasn’t pausing to hide her vibrator.
“Do I get to ask why you called me and not the boy?” Millie asked as an attempt at a throw-a-way, but the question was heavy and loaded. Maeve felt a lump growing in her throat and the pressure of tears behind her eyes as she tried to verbalize the horrors of her evening before she found the man dressed all in black.
“He wasn’t a fan of the…crime scene work,” she choked out, closing her eyes and bracing for her sister’s painful I told you so. “I almost had to call you for break-up food.”
Instead, Millie got up and wrapped her sister in a hug.
“Aw. I have fresh cheese curds already! I must’ve known. No, no. He has a right to feel overwhelmed by this, Maeve. It’s a lot,” Millie said while keeping Maeve close. “He’ll appreciate it when he’s ready. Did you see my face today when I walked in here? And I’m not sleeping with you.”
“I think I ruined it already,” Maeve confided. She didn’t want to let herself start to cry for him, she was afraid she’d never stop bawling.
“Did you tell him about grad school?” Millie pushed.
Maeve huffed and stayed still; her non-answer was loud enough.
She wondered if she was the most confidently insecure person in the world. She believed in who she was and what she loved, but she couldn’t imagine getting to be the girl who ended up with Derek Shelton. She felt like chasing him and running to him, throwing herself at him out of desperation. And deep down she knew she would tell him, “I’ll never crack open another true crime novel or attend another meeting if it makes you want to end it.” Then her brain would yell: Don’t change for him, bitch. And those two halves warred between what she wanted and what she thought she knew about herself.
Maeve would regret texting him, but every neuron fired in rapid bursts told her to reach out, tell him she cared. Tell him about the intruder. What was the harm?
At any rate, she was still planning most of his father’s memorial, which was on Saturday. He couldn’t avoid her until after then, at the very least. That gave them a small respite to recover from the photo fiasco and give her a chance to see herself as Derek must’ve seen her.
Sexy Emergency Room nurses grown from childish fixations did not have to settle for murder obsessed under-employed creepos. Her internal monologue shifted like the tides toward and away from her amazingness to her awfulness. She deserved him. She was brilliant and her mind was a machine. She was fucking funny and beautiful, and he…was probably used to dating girls prettier than she was, and she was definitely not as funny as she thought she was, and he was pretty smart—they were equally smart, he wasn’t impressed by her quickness.
Her brain hurt.
“You want to go out?” Millie asked.
Maeve shook her head. “And risk someone sneaking in while we’re gone? Hell no.”
“You want to stay here? In the same place where that someone already was?”
“I need to stay put,” Maeve answered. She couldn’t explain it and she hoped she didn’t have to. With Millie, she could feel safe. “I do.”
“Then we stay.” Millie stayed still and watched her sister with an expression of curious detachment. “You want to talk about it?” she asked and raised an eyebrow.
Not with her sister, Maeve decided. Her best friend and biggest ally co
uldn’t always see things from her perspective and she was too exhausted and scared to try to explain anything.
“I’m fine,” she lied. “I’ll call him in the morning, tell him about the intruder, and it’ll be okay.” Tell him about the man who tried to lure me with my dog’s collar, she thought, and the emotion and stress of the day poured out of her and she cried. She rested her head on Millie’s shoulder, and held nothing back—it was a cry from the soul, and Maeve knew she needed to embrace it instead of turning the grief away. Grief, she learned, was a cancer to which temporary bouts of remission was the only cure.
Chapter Twenty-Two
He heard about the break-in on the news first. A homeless woman was strangled and killed only two-blocks away from Maeve’s apartment and the police, in an off-handed way, added that a suspect matching the same description had possibly been spotted in a woman’s apartment the night before.
The woman, who declined to comment on camera, was identified as a mid-twenties food service industry employee. The news had fancy terms for waitress, it seemed. A woefully inadequate way to describe Maeve, Derek thought.
Derek reached for his phone and anxiously scrolled through his calls and texts.
It was absurd she hadn’t reached out after something so traumatic. So, then he thought it was another tenant, and while the notion comforted him from feeling neglected, he still wondered why she hadn’t reached out.
A murder.
Two blocks away from her? And a potential break-in inside her own complex?
Maeve, the girl he’d met, would’ve called him literal seconds after the police left.
And Maeve, the one he knew and liked, would be looking to move immediately, no matter how rent controlled her little block was. Certainly, that prompted a text—even something witty and light?
Then he thought of how he left her and that look of stricken terror on her face; worried about offending him, forever-walking-on-egg-shells, the hurt piling upon hurt. He knew why she hadn’t called.
He’d scared her away.
But he couldn’t face his demons and he didn’t know if he had to apologize for that.
He opened up his phone to send a text. And just as he opened up her name, a text from Maeve popped into the thread. He read it immediately, eagerly, and with a bit of trepidation.
She said: Last night was rough. Watch the news. Apartment was mine. I’m sorry I hurt you and I’m deeply embarrassed that I walked you into a situation where you had to leave. I understand and I have a lot to say; including an apology in person. Not through text. Will you meet me?
Her apartment.
It had been her apartment.
Derek fixated for one second on the idea that he’d had inklings it was Maeve’s apartment and he was right. He didn’t respond to the text right away. He opened his computer and searched for details of the murder and the break-in; several of the online websites carried the story. No one saw anything. Person was dressed all in black. Had been seen crawling across the young woman’s floor earlier. It couldn’t possibly be.
And from Maeve’s place first—where she’d eluded him, outsmarted him—a place where she was actively conducting an amateur investigation of the Woodstock Killer. Derek grabbed his phone and shot off a quick reply: Where are you now?
She, too, must have had her phone in her hand. She replied: Hiding at the Alibi.
Be there in ten, he said.
Derek paused, put the phone down, and stared at the hotel room, the curtains closed, the dim loneliness of it all. The place reeked of stale air and lemon-freshener, and he’d wondered all night if he’d overreacted. Or if he was justified in viewing her obsession and obsessiveness as a red flag to the relationship he wanted.
However, unlike Maeve, he’d slept like a rock only to wake up sweaty, his mind mulling over his actions in slow snippets over coffee, a bagel, and the news. In the ER, he could make snap medical decisions all the time when it was needed. In relationships, it appeared he needed more time. It wasn’t until the news hit that he even wondered if she’d texted. Of course, once reminded that she hadn’t, he felt jilted. And he didn’t have a right to.
So, that was that.
He took a breath and slipped into some new clothes, splashed some water on his face in the bathroom and took a look at his two-day beard. On Prom night in high school, one of the moms there to take pictures and gush about how grown-up they all were, turned to Derek and said, “Boy, you scare me. You’re gonna break so many hearts.”
He wasn’t escorting that woman’s daughter, and his own date blushed and told her friend over the unaccompanied dinner, something at the time that felt so grown-up, so independent—the opportunity to eat and buy a fancy meal without an adult. A chance to fully pretend.
Ruggedly handsome, she said to him later, and patted him on the shoulder. She also said he could call her when he was eighteen. When Derek told his own mom, already cancer-riddled and tired, she was outraged, and only through her lens could he see how inappropriate the exchange seemed when told without the level of pre-prom excitement and mirth.
Atmosphere was everything. In the sterile room where his mom was dying, the tale of a middle-aged woman harassing her seventeen-year-old baby sounded like torture. She wanted him to see the good and the bad in people, and weigh them not against where they started but how they grew along the way.
If that was his mom’s advice, then he knew she’d not only encourage him to give Maeve a second chance, but she might have been royally pissed if he didn’t. Derek thought he’d pissed off enough ghosts for the week and he didn’t feel like inciting any others to revolt.
He was going to let Maeve apologize, he was going to apologize, and then he wanted to be done with the whole thing.
He called a car. The white sedan, a white male driver, pulled up to the hotel less than two minutes later as the cars all swarmed around that stretch of Portland—hotel row.
He climbed into the backseat and didn’t say a word as the car rolled away. The driver took the cue and kept silent, too, following his phone’s GPS across the bridge and to the eastside, the buildings of Portland at his back, and the hope of atonement ahead.
“I’m sorry, too,” Derek said. He’d waited until after her rehearsed spiel because it seemed so important to her to get it all out, but then he had to tell her that she wasn’t the only one who made a mistake. They sat across from each other at a booth, the candle flickering between them, a group of soon to be karaoke singers filling in around them.
He noticed her. She’d made an effort to put her mass of brown hair up into a messy bun, and despite the dark, tired bags under her eyes, and the sleepy redness, too, evidence of a night of insomnia, she was still stunning.
Glamour never suited him much.
There’d been too much of that in the world his father craved. Derek knew he loved simplicity and authenticity. Maeve brought authenticity, and while her look was simple, her attention to it wasn’t and nor was she simple in action or thought.
He wondered inwardly if she was smarter than he was and it seemed likely. It excited him to think of them together, exchanging whip-smart observations, engrossed in debates and spending time in a world they saw similarly. She’d never cringe over ER stories.
Maeve started to contest his apology, but he put a hand up and said, “No, seriously. Let me apologize to you. I didn’t assume you had the best intentions…I assumed the worst.”
Maeve lowered her head.
“It wasn’t you,” Derek said. He reached out and tapped his index finger on the table. She scooted her own finger out to the middle and hooked it up with his. She looked at him, cringing. “Don’t make that face. When you’re me…” He paused and took a deep breath. “It’s easiest to think people are out there to take advantage.”
“I can see that,” she said. “That’s not me, though. I would never.”
“I was surprised,” he tried to explain. “I was just surprised, that’s all. I don’t know how to go into th
is. I’ve always walled myself off from it and I don’t know if it’s possible to embrace it fully…”
Maeve reached across the table and grabbed Derek’s hand. “The attacker from last night, Derek—”
“Was the Woodstock Killer,” he finished her sentence.
He felt certain and empowered.
It was either the killer or someone close to the killer who was performing acts in his stead. Regardless, the person was dangerous. His heart hurt for the innocent homeless woman; she was a rushed slaughter substituting the plans he had for Maeve.
“He was waiting for me in the lobby. Booked it when Hugo came back with Roger,” she said. “They crossed paths. I’d hidden for an hour by the drinking fountain. An hour.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“Honestly, Derek, he was hiding in my bedroom. And he had to have been there when you were here. What if…what if we just…went in there and didn’t notice.”
“Shit,” Derek said and nodded. “You think the plan was to get both of us? Together?”
The idea of being murdered while having sex wasn’t the worst possible thing that ever flitted through his mind. It also wasn’t part of the Woodstock Killer’s repertoire of methods. He pushed the thought away as quickly as it appeared; it would be difficult to get hard if every time he went to bed with Maeve he thought of a crazed murderer jingling her dog’s collar and crawling across the floor.
“This person knows things about my life and your life. That’s not random. That’s targeted.”
“Did you tell that to the police?”
“That I thought the attacker was possibly a resurrected Woodstock Killer?”
He waited, eyebrows raised and eventually she shook her head.
“No,” Maeve said. “They didn’t want to believe me at first anyway. My story only became important after the news that followed.”
“And nothing was missing from the apartment?”
She shook her head.
Forgotten Obsessions (The Love is Murder Social Club Book 1) Page 18
