They got up and Tony walked her back to the car. She thanked him for all his help and wished him luck, both in his work and in his forthcoming marriage. After she had gotten into Sam’s Porsche, he leaned down to the window.
“There are a couple of us who get together to try to find an answer—you know, why we seem to work better than other programs. If we come up with anything, I’ll give you a call. I still have your card.”
Kate thanked him and drove off, trying to decide if she should spend the time to find out the name of the hospital or clinic in Pennsylvania. It seemed pointless, and yet she was still unwilling to let go of this story—perhaps because it was her story, and not Sam’s.
She started down the winding mountain road, wishing that she were going back to Washington, instead of returning to the cabin. She loved the place, but it made her feel so vulnerable. For some reason, the memories were even more powerful there than in the house they’d shared. As Sam had once said, the cabin was their sanctuary—the one place where they never let their arguments intrude.
Suddenly, there was a loud bang and the Porsche immediately began to pull sharply to one side, just as she approached a sharp curve. Kate fought the wheel, operating on pure instinct as she gripped it and pumped the brake pedal. On one side of the curve was a steep bank some twenty feet high, and on the other was an equally sheer drop of perhaps a hundred feet—with no protective guardrail.
The Porsche slewed across the road, rocked back and forth a few times and then came to rest scant inches from the edge of the drop-off. Kate sat staring in horror at the precipitous slope, at the bottom of which were several huge trees.
She had known almost instantly that a front tire had blown, but now, as she scrambled across into the passenger seat and then got the door open, she wondered how on earth a tire on a brand-new—not to mention darned expensive-car could have blown like that.
She walked around to the front of the car and stared at the ragged tatters that had once been a tire. It didn’t make sense. Even if she’d run over something, the steel bands should have prevented it from penetrating. The only possibility was that the tire itself had been defective.
After checking the car’s exterior and determining that no damage had been done, she opened the trunk to get the spare. Now all she had to do was to figure out how to put the jack together, not to mention move the car away from the edge.
She heard a sound behind her and turned to see a pickup truck pulling off the road. Two men got out and asked if she needed any help. If this had been Washington or its suburbs, Kate would have been terrified, but since it was rural Maryland, she felt only a welcome relief. She explained what had happened as they examined the shredded tire.
“Must have been defective,” the one man said. “I’ll go set up a couple of flares in case anyone’s coming up the mountain. You just pull it out onto the road and we’ll get the tire changed for you.”
Kate thanked them profusely and did as told, then waited as they removed the ruined tire and put on the spare. As she stood there, another pickup came past, slowed down, then moved on. Kate caught only a brief glimpse of the driver, but thought for a moment that he looked familiar.
She dismissed that thought, however, as the men tossed the ruined tire into the Porsche’s trunk and told her that she should take it back to the dealer.
“Seems like they ought to make good on it,” the older of the men said. “It looks brand-new, from what I saw of the tread.”
Kate assured them that she would, then offered to pay them for their assistance. But they waved away her offer and climbed back into their truck, which she saw was complete with a rifle rack. Good country people, she thought—just like the kind I grew up with and then ran away from.
SAM SAID NOTHING for a long time as he stared at the remains of the tire. Kate began to bristle, half-expecting that he was going to blame her for what happened.
“It wasn’t my fault, Sam. I wasn’t even going fast.”
Then he surprised her. He drew her into his arms and stroked her gently. “No matter how fast you were going, you couldn’t have been responsible for that. And all I care about is that you weren’t hurt. If this had happened in your car…”
She’d already thought about that herself. Only the superior handling ability of the Porsche had saved her from careering down that embankment. At the moment, though, she wasn’t thinking about that, or about anything else, except how good it felt to be in his arms and how she’d wanted that and thought about it the whole way back.
Then Sam let her go, and there was that moment of awkwardness she’d felt before on several occasions—a sudden surge of tension as they silently acknowledged their changed situation. It felt like being fast-fowarded from a better past to a difficult present.
Except that it wasn’t a better past, Kate reminded herself. Three years ago, she’d decided that she couldn’t live with this man.
SAM WAS WAITING FOR HER when she arrived home the next evening after a long and mostly frustrating day. Her colleague from the Times had called to say that she hadn’t been able to reach Newbury’s former staff member because she was on vacation and wouldn’t return for two weeks.
She’d also struck out in her attempt to find out the name of the hospital or clinic that New Leaf was affiliated with. She could have simply called Ted Snyder, the New Leaf director, but her instincts told her to proceed cautiously here, so instead, she’d called the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the state licensing authority for all such facilities.
The woman there had been kind enough to fax her a list of all psychiatric facilities licensed in the state, and Kate had gotten out a map, certain that she would be able to identify it immediately. But the only facility listed for that entire region served only the elderly and, according to their receptionist, had never served any other clientele.
As a result, Kate was left with the equally unpalatable choices of forgetting the whole thing or calling Ted Snyder. “When in doubt, put it off” was her motto, so she did nothing.
She walked in to find Sam polishing the furniture—his furniture. She bit off an acid comment designed to forestall any comment on his part about her housekeeping habits when she remembered that Sam had never criticized her for that in the past. It was another of those strange moments when she was forced to realize that her perceptions about their marriage might be faulty. And that did little to improve her state of mind.
After he’d greeted her, Sam announced that he’d made an appointment at the vet’s for Reject.
“How did you know it was time for him to go?” she asked.
“I saw the postcard on your desk while I was working on the computer.”
“Is there anything else I’ve missed?” she inquired archly.
“Yeah. The dentist says you need to come in to get your teeth cleaned, but I can’t do that for you.”
“However have I managed for three years without a secretary?”
Sam stared at her. “My infallible instincts tell me that you’ve had a bad day. Let’s order a pizza.”
“Large, with everything,” she said, thinking about the container of yogurt she’d swiped from the staff refrigerator for lunch and would now have to replace.
“Except anchovies,” Sam reminded her, and picked up the cordless phone to place the order.
She changed into a T-shirt and gym shorts with a vague notion of going running later, then joined Sam in the kitchen when the pizza arrived. He eyed her attire.
“Were you planning to go running?”
She nodded as she bit off a mouthful of pizza.
“I’ll go with you.”
“Since when do you like to go running?” she asked. He’d always said it was about as exciting as cutting your toenails.
“I don’t, but you’re not going alone.”
“Sam, I’m not going to change my life just because some nut is following me around.”
“I think that things have gotten more serious, Kate,” he said in
a tone of voice that brought her up short.
“What did Jason have to say?” she asked, suddenly recalling that he’d planned to meet Rep. Malcolm Spotts’s aide after work today.
“Nothing. He had to cancel. We’re getting together tomorrow. I took the tire back to the dealer.”
“So?” she prompted when he said nothing more.
“I really didn’t want to go into this now, since it sounds like you had a bad day.”
“I hate it when you do that! You always say just enough to get me upset, then quit.”
“Is that why you divorced me?” he asked with what appeared to her to be genuine curiosity.
“No, that isn’t why I divorced you, but it’s going to be grounds for assault and battery if you don’t tell me what you weren’t going to tell me.”
“The dealer sent me over to a tire dealer who sells that brand…and he says that the tire wasn’t defective.”
“So now you’re blaming me?”
Sam shook his head. “Someone shot out the tire, Kate. He even found the slug. It’s a miracle that it didn’t fall out, considering what was left of the tire.”
Kate choked on her pizza and Sam reached over to pat her on the back. She swallowed some beer and stared at his grim expression.
“Someone shot at me?”
He nodded. “Or they shot at the car at any rate. Maybe they thought it was me in it.”
“B-but I didn’t see anyone,” she protested. “I told you what that road was like, and there weren’t any houses at all around where it happened. It was all woods.”
“Then whoever it was must have followed you when you went to see that counselor and waited in the trees for you to come back. Did you see any cars parked anywhere in the area?”
“No. Sam, are you sure about this?”
“I saw the slug, Kate, and once we’d found that, it was pretty easy to see where it had penetrated the steel band. The guy I talked to said it must have been a high-powered rifle, and apparently the shooter was a pretty good marksman, especially if you were going as fast as you usually do.”
“I told you I wasn’t going that fast. The road was too bad for that.” She frowned, remembering the men who had stopped to help her. She’d seen two rifles in their truck. But wouldn’t they have found the slug and taken it, so she couldn’t know that they’d shot at her? She told Sam her thoughts.
“Yeah, it seems likely they would have taken it,” he agreed.
“And if they’d wanted to kill me, they could have done it then,” she added with a shudder.
“They could have, but it sounds to me like they wanted to make sure it would be seen as an accident. If you’d gone down that bank, the chances are that there wouldn’t have been enough left of the car for anyone to question how it happened.”
Kate stared at the pizza, then picked up another slice. Her appetite was gone, but she didn’t want Sam to know just how scared she was. “Are you going to tell Damon?” she asked.
“That’s up to you.”
His response caught her by surprise. So did the calm, matter-of-fact approach he seemed to be taking to all this. The Sam Winters she knew would have been trying to persuade her to disappear for a while and let him sort things out.
“I don’t want to tell him,” she stated firmly.
“Then we won’t. The one thing we have going for us is that they obviously want it to look like an accident—and that takes some doing. But we can’t just be looking for a dark van anymore. They’re apparently using other vehicles. I kept an eye out the whole way out to the cabin for a dark van and didn’t see one. But they had to have followed us out there.” Sam restlessly drummed his fingers on the table. “The one thing that really bothers me is why they’d suddenly decide to try to get rid of you or me—or both of us. Up to now, they’ve been content just to follow us around. So what did we find out that could have scared them?”
They reviewed everything they’d done, seeking an answer. They sat on the small patio behind the house in the soft darkness and talked until it became clear that they were getting nowhere. The only decision they reached was that Sam would go the next day to a car rental agency and arrange to have something available whenever either one of them had an appointment out of town. That way, they could decrease the likelihood that they would be followed.
Kate went off to bed, tired and deeply troubled. She undressed, put on a nightgown and climbed into bed, thinking about the other time her life had been threatened. It was just after their marriage and she’d been assigned to the metropolitan beat. She was working on a series about corruption in the D.C. housing authority, and had begun to receive threatening phone calls and letters. Knowing exactly what Sam’s reaction would be, she’d tried to keep it from him. Then a caller had left a threatening and obscene message on their answering machine, and Sam had listened to it before she came home.
The result had been their first serious argument—an argument Sam had won because he’d gone to her editor and demanded that she be taken off the story. Since Sam was the paper’s biggest star, the editor had done just that, despite her protests. And the story, which had been taken over by a veteran reporter, had been nominated for a Pulitzer.
Had he learned his lesson, or was he merely faking his current attitude to avoid a scene? She wasn’t sure.
She began to drift off to sleep, her mind turning once more to that near-fatal accident. She’d been wracking her brain, trying to recall how far away from the scene the nearest house was, and whether she’d seen any vehicles there. Tony had said that most of the homes along that road were weekend getaways, as his own home had once been.
And what about the two men who’d stopped to help her? She just couldn’t see them as being killers, despite the presence of rifles in their truck. City types might find that suspicious in itself, but Kate had grown up in a rural area where half the pickups had rifles or shotguns in them all the time.
Then suddenly, just as she was about to fall asleep, a memory surfaced. She sat bolt upright in bed. The other pickup! She’d nearly forgotten about it. It’d come by while the men were changing her tire, slowed down and then driven away, presumably because he saw that his assistance wasn’t required. Or so she’d thought at the time. But what she now recalled made her view it differently. She was certain that there’d been a rack with a gun of some type in his truck, too—and the driver had looked familiar!
She jumped out of bed and ran downstairs, thinking that Sam might still be up. But the first floor was dark. Realizing that he must have gone down to his little-used apartment, Kate ran down the steps, eager to tell him what she had remembered and get his reading on it.
Chapter Six
“Sam!” she called as she ran down the stairs to the apartment, certain he couldn’t be asleep yet, even though she could see that the small living room was dark.
By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, a light had gone on in the bedroom and Sam was standing there in the open doorway. For one brief moment, Kate nearly forgot what had brought her down here.
This was the Sam Winters who had haunted her dreams for three years. His dark brown hair was slightly disheveled and his blue eyes somehow managed to look both sleepy and alert at the same time. And he was naked except for a pair of dark briefs.
“I just remembered something,” she announced, hoping he wouldn’t notice the slight huskiness in her voice. “I didn’t think you’d be asleep yet.”
“Would it have mattered if I was?” he asked, arching one dark brow as amusement tugged at the corners of his wide mouth. “That never stopped you before.”
His teasing words fell into the space between them, making the past a powerful presence. She often came up with her best ideas when she was balanced on the edge of sleep, and more than once, she’d awakened Sam to tell him about them. Old habits apparently died very hard.
“I think I might have seen the man who shot at me,” she told him, still fighting the incipient meltdown of every bone in her
body.
Then she told him about the other pickup and the driver who’d looked familiar. Sam sat down on the sofa and she perched on the arm of an old overstuffed chair across from him.
“I only got a very brief glimpse of him, but I’m sure I’ve seen him before. You know I never forget a face.”
Sam nodded. “It’s only names you have trouble with. I don’t suppose you got the license number of the truck?”
“No. I just assumed that he had slowed down to see if anyone needed help.”
“Do you remember the plate at all, what state it was?”
Kate closed her eyes and tried to visualize the truck. It was black and relatively new, she thought, although she was no expert on pickups. “It was a Ford, I think, but I can’t remember about the plate.”
“Try to think where you might have seen him,” Sam urged. “Was he wearing a suit or casual clothes when you saw him before?”
She thought about that for a few moments, then shook her head. “I just know that I’ve seen him before.”
“Why don’t you call your counselor friend in the morning and run the description by him? You said that there weren’t many houses along that road, so he might know if it was just a neighbor.”
She nodded, wishing that she could call Tony now. But waking up your ex-husband was one thing and waking up a casual acquaintance was quite another.
“I really think he must have been the one who shot at me,” she said. “Why else would I recognize someone in a place like that?”
“It’s possible that you’ve just seen him around when we were out there. That’s the downside to your memory for faces.”
She nodded. Sam had a point. But she hadn’t been out to the cabin much in the past three years and even her excellent memory had its limits.
Sam stood up, yawned and stretched. She apologized for waking him up and rose from her perch to leave. Their eyes met and Kate knew immediately that she wasn’t going to go. She wondered vaguely if she’d known that when she came down here.
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