She bent and inspected the gap. Huh. The shelves had a hollow behind the trim work and beneath the bottom shelf.
“Umm.” Kaine’s perplexed pause earned her an echo off the ceiling. Her finger felt the edge of something. A leaf? Paper? Curious, she wedged her thumb into the gap and struggled to reach it. Finally, she grasped it and tugged, maneuvering the paper through the inch-wide gap. It was larger than she’d expected and folded into a long strip.
Kaine pulled it toward her. It was a page from a very old book. She carefully unfolded the page and pressed it against her jeans-clad leg.
Great Expectations.
A page from the old classic by Dickens. Kaine curled her lip. She’d never liked Dickens. He took four pages to explain one setting when he only needed a paragraph. She noticed faded ink in the page’s margins, scrawling, as if someone had taken notes on the story.
Kaine held the page toward the light coming from the bay window.
I am not meant for this life.
Weird.
He will come and take me, and I’ll never find my way home again.
Kaine swallowed. The same anxious feeling she was running from washed over her with renewed vigor. It was as if the words on the page reflected her own soul.
He’s always watching. My life is no longer my own. Hope is difficult to find in the darkness.
Kaine turned the page over and focused on the handwriting in the margin.
But there is hope. I will remember that tonight when he comes for me.
Kaine stared at the page of Great Expectations scarred with the feminine handwriting. When? Who? Someone had hidden this message behind the warped bookshelf. Someone had chronicled a brief moment in her life. One of quiet desperation, and a mirror of Kaine herself.
She folded the paper along its original seams and slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans. With a quick sweep of her gaze around the musty library, Kaine lurched to her feet. She needed to shake this—the feeling of being watched. It was all supposed to be left behind in California. The suspicions, the memories, the unproven break-ins. But the note from decades before fed the emotion that Kaine once again jammed under the surface calm she tried to etch on her face. Even though no one could see it, she needed to sense that power, that control. She was in control of her life. Not him or whoever it was who had made her existence post-Danny a nightmare that no one could share with her.
Kaine speed-walked from the library as if at any moment the apparition of the one who had written the message would appear. She narrowed her eyes at the broad, winding staircase in the entry. She could almost envision the pre-Civil War-era owners in their silks and cravats, but her vision disintegrated as she noticed half the banister was tilting to the left, as if it were about ready to give up its ghost and die. She was going to have to start a to-do list.
Thumbing to contacts on her iPhone, Kaine selected to FaceTime Leah. Her sister was the queen of organization with her colored pens, notecards, planners, and neon Post-it notes. Unlike her own bad habit of jumbling must-haves, to-dos, and should-haves in her mind. Maybe Leah could help Kaine find a reference point at which to begin—or at least pick a color scheme for her list.
The data connection was sketchy. Leah’s face appeared on screen, albeit pixelated and delayed.
“Wha-for the-wallpaper-pretty.” Leah’s sentence was so broken, Kaine tapped the End button on the video-chat. So the house sat in the black hole of LTE wireless activity as well, huh?
Figures.
Kaine sagged against the wall. Her lack of confidence was synonymous with being alone. She was never good at silence.
Her phone pinged.
Text message from Leah. No data?
Nope, Kaine texted back.
Phooey. Call. Or get Wi-Fi stat. I need to see this place.
Wi-Fi was probably not going to happen here in the boonies. And yes, Leah did need to see this place so she could help Kaine file a complaint on this revered agent who was so honest he would never sell a ramshackle house to a grief-stricken widow.
The sarcasm oozed into Kaine’s thoughts like a poison. She would call Leah. But not now. She would say something she’d regret, and in the end it wasn’t Leah’s fault that Kaine had been this stupid. The house closed in around her like a coffin. Danny would have been on his tablet right now, tapping out a to-do list for renovations in Evernote. Kaine was out of her depth . . . and out of her mind.
Footsteps on the front porch jerked her attention from her melancholy. She was startled at the outline of a man in the doorway. For the split second between the confirmation that her stalker from San Diego really had followed her here and the moment she recognized Artsy-Probably-Lives-With-Mom man from the gas station, Kaine realized how truly susceptible to danger she was.
This was not what she’d wanted from Foster Hill House. She had wanted to regain a desire to live. Instead, death continued to chase her.
Chapter 6
Why are you here?” Kaine hoped the apology showed as much on her face as she felt it in her heart. Her fear added an element of defensiveness the man from the gas station didn’t deserve. Or did he? Kaine wished for a front door. But then, if this guy was a threat, he’d probably just kick it in and have his way with her. Yes. She needed that dog. A vicious guard dog. As well as a case to clip her can of pepper spray to her jeans and Captain America for a bodyguard. Or maybe the Green Arrow. Yes, definitely Oliver Queen.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay.” Good-looking artsy boy shrugged and extended his hand slowly in greeting. “After almost running you over at the station.”
He cast a cursory glance into the house over her shoulder. Kaine reached out and took his hand. Firm handshake. Show you’re confident, even when you’re not. Eye contact. All the years of coaching and counseling battered women entered her mind. Now she was coaching herself.
“It’s not like I was critically injured.” She couldn’t refrain from sarcasm. It was still running rampant through her.
“I know,” the man admitted with a sheepish shrug. His blue flannel shirt gave him a casual air. Instinct told Kaine he posed no threat. Logic told Kaine she’d be dumb if she trusted her instinct—look where it’d gotten her so far.
“Joy sent me,” he continued. “She was worried about the new owner of Foster Hill House.”
“Ahh.” Kaine offered up a hesitant smile.
“Grant Jesse.” He still held her hand. So this was the man who sometimes watched Joy’s daughter.
“Kaine. Prescott.” She yanked her hand back when she realized she had been squeezing his far longer than a casual greeting. “Kaine Prescott,” she repeated.
“Yep. Got that.”
“Joy sent you?” Kaine tried to wrap her mind around the fact the station attendant was concerned about her. But, maybe the older woman felt she owed Kaine in exchange for the daffodils?
“When Joy calls, I answer.” Lopsided grin warmed hazel eyes. Gracious. He reminded Kaine of some actor she’d seen in a TV show. One who married the heroine, and then turned into an ogre, and then morphed back into a hero. Unpredictable at best.
“Some place you got here.”
Well, he’s a good fibber. The house was a wreck, and Grant Jesse knew it.
Kaine offered a plastic laugh. “Yeahhhhh. It’s a castle.”
“You’re not really going to stay here?”
Kaine eyed him. Why did he want to know? “I—sure. Yes.” She wasn’t really, but he didn’t need to know that. Kaine tugged at the bottom of her sweater and crossed her arms in front of her. It was the third time she had done that.
“There’s a nice mo—”
“Motel,” Kaine interrupted with an edgy laugh. “Yeah. I know. Joy told me.”
“Ahh.” Grant moved back a few steps as if he read her nerves. He searched her face, and a small, knowing tilt to his mouth told her he had drawn some sort of conclusion. Obviously the correct one, she determined, when he backed away from the doorway to stand farther
out on the porch. Giving her space. Smart man. But he was lucky his foot didn’t go through the floorboards.
“You might want to take Joy up on the offer of that motel.” Grant tipped his head back to look up at the dilapidated house. Kaine caught a whiff of deodorant or cologne, she wasn’t sure which. It was crisp, masculine, and reminded her of the marina in San Diego.
She followed him onto the porch. “I’m fine, thank you. And thank Joy as well, please. I’ve camped before, and this place isn’t so bad.” Let him believe she was fearless instead of planning on cowering under the covers at the motel—with her can of pepper spray. Where had she set it, anyway? This was why she needed organizer Leah around.
Grant’s smile broadened and created crinkles in the corners of his eyes. Kaine could tell he knew she wasn’t being honest. He shifted, and his heel caught a nail sticking up from the porch floorboard.
“You have supplies, then? Sleeping bag, food, camp stove?”
Darn. He was calling her bluff. Kaine pursed her lips and matched his cross-armed stance.
“Porta Potty?” Grant tested her sense of humor.
Very funny. “Actually, the plumbing here works okay. I’ll be fine. Thanks.” Kaine bit the inside of her lip. The guy made her want to smile at the same time she narrowed her eyes, trying to read him.
Grant bent and yanked on the offending nail. It came out with a minor tug. Old, rusted, worthless. He handed it to Kaine. She reached for it, and as her fingers closed around it, Grant kept hold of his end, forcing her to look at him.
“Going to be one heck of a house to restore yourself.”
Kaine raised an eyebrow. “I like a challenge.”
Grant released the nail. “So do I.”
It was a new day. Sleep helped, Kaine had to admit. The Oakwood Motel was a strip of five small rooms available for overnight or long-term rent. A double bed with white sheets and a bedspread made of shiny polyester from 1994. The walls had wooden-framed pictures of the ocean, something Kaine found to be quite ironic since she had fled that very scene. A sink, a toilet, a digital alarm clock on a nightstand, and about the only up-to-date thing in the room: a flat-screen TV with cable. And Wi-Fi. She’d gotten in some blogging for Leah’s husband and answered a few emails. A client referral proved to be good, so she sent a contract of agreement to consult for them. More money would be essential.
Not far from her thoughts for the evening was Grant Jesse. Joy too. The only people she’d met in Oakwood, outside of the red-lipped teenager who’d registered her at the motel. They’d been kind, really. She needed to work on relaxing now and allowing herself time to process Danny’s death from two years before while not constantly looking over her shoulder. It was hard to swallow that justice wouldn’t be meted out on Danny’s behalf, but maybe it was time to put it aside. Since she was the only one who kept alive the idea that he’d been murdered, not just killed in a random car accident.
Foster Hill House greeted her in the morning, not looking any friendlier than the day before. But, Kaine mustered her will to continue and focused on the good memories of Danny. His satisfied grin when he finished a project. He would be proud of her when she completed restoring this place.
Kaine tried to remind herself of that as she looked up the stairwell to the second floor. She felt for her back jean pocket. Pepper spray. Check. God help her. She was a paranoid mess. In another life she could see Danny right now, as if he were beside her. His brown eyes would be sparkling with anticipation for the latest hands-on project. His brown hair would be ruffled and his tailored shirt untucked over blue jeans. But it was more than the attractive life that radiated from him that first caught her eye at the church she’d visited at the behest of a fellow social worker. It was his love of everything. Unabashed. Uncorked. Even for her. She held her secrets to herself, yet he gave her the room to do so. Even when her career began to drain every last ounce from her, he watched her go each morning, waiting . . .
She swallowed the lump that crowded her throat. She owed him this. For the morning that she didn’t come back when he stood there at the door and asked her to stay. For the kisses she shrank away from. For the day that he died.
The stairs creaked beneath Kaine’s feet, but they held. That was a plus. One check mark in the pro column of Foster Hill House. She let out a breath as she reached the top of the stairs, where a long, dank hallway, as creepy as a horror movie, met her. It was barren, with the exception of more spider webs, another large mouse nest, and a disintegrating painting that hung askew midway. She tiptoed over to it, the walls closing in and suffocating her with the presence of imaginary ghosts. What footsteps had walked these hallways? Young, old, child, elderly? The note-riddled page from Great Expectations was still in her pocket. She felt for it. Had the person who left it walked this hall?
Kaine’s skin crawled and goose bumps rose on her flesh as if she were being watched. She rammed her hands into her yellow hoodie’s front pocket as though that would somehow make her invisible.
The painting was so covered in dust, Kaine couldn’t make out much color, let alone figures. Running her hand across it, she regretted that choice immediately and swiped it against her jeans, attempting to wipe the grime off her palm. It was weird there was still a painting in this house, as if all previous owners had been afraid to take it down.
A face stared back at her from the cracked, peeling canvas. An ancient woman in a black dress that appeared to be from the Civil War era. Kaine tipped her head, locking eyes with the vacant dark browns of the woman long dead. She couldn’t be more than forty. Her face was average, her lips pulled tight. Maybe from sitting so long while the painter painted her? Kaine wondered what she had been thinking or what her eyes had seen. The war, newspapers with Abraham Lincoln in bold letters and quotes, maybe death? Kaine swallowed. She could connect with this woman, if only by that one thought alone.
Her cellphone shattered the chilling stillness. It flipped from Kaine’s hand as she jumped at the sound. Catching it in midair, she rammed her finger down on the screen’s green answer button.
“Leah. Sheesh!”
“Are you all right?” Leah’s voice, so familiar, brought reality rushing back to the historic tomb into which Kaine had wandered.
She wrinkled her face in disgust as if Leah stood in front of her. “I’m creeped out, that’s what. This house—it’s sketchy.”
“That bad?”
“Well, it’s not good,” Kaine countered, biting back the added accusation that the realtor Leah had sworn by had, indeed, scammed Kaine.
She gave the woman in the painting one last study. Kaine could almost feel her gaze searing into her back, begging her to step back into time and rescue her. That was it—the woman looked afraid.
“Are you going to stay?” Leah’s question followed Kaine into the first room. A bedroom, empty and cold.
“I have to. I’m saddled with the place now.”
“No, you don’t. Come home to San Diego if it’s so horrid. We can put it back up for sale and you can live with us until you get back on your feet.”
“No one but me would be stupid enough to buy this place. Besides, you know why I left San Diego. I can’t come back. I can’t—”
“Are you sure there isn’t an element of truth to what the police said? Maybe you really do need to take some time and just rest. Get more counseling. It was helping you. I could tell it was and—”
Kaine froze in the doorway of bedroom number two. “Don’t, Leah.”
Silence.
“I just—” Leah paused—“I just want you to be sure.”
Kaine sagged against the doorframe and stared into the empty room. Be sure? Of what? That her life as she’d known it was over the day the police showed up on her doorstep and said Danny had been in a wreck? Or how about when the police told her the witnesses said his driving had been erratic? Like he was drunk or falling asleep at the wheel. Danny’s autopsy ruled out alcohol, but Kaine knew that the drugs they found in Danny coul
dn’t be the full explanation. He’d never used. He wasn’t that type of man. They closed the case as accidental, and they labeled her the crazy wife who insisted her husband wasn’t an addict and that someone had drugged him. Why did she think that? They had asked. But she didn’t have an answer. So it was post-traumatic stress disorder, they assumed. Because of the accident. Because of the violence she’d witnessed in her career, maybe even in her own past. A past Kaine had no desire to remember, let alone admit to. So no, Kaine wasn’t sure. Of anything anymore. It had been years since she had been sure.
“Don’t question me now, Leah, please,” Kaine whispered to her sister. She could picture Leah’s eyes, large and earnest, filled with concern. She probably thought she was coming alongside her, urging her forward with baby steps. Instead she was whacking Kaine across the face with every doubt, angst, and wound Kaine carried inside.
“Kaine, you ran out of San Diego like a cat out of a dog kennel.”
“I was scared. I still am.”
More silence. As if Leah was choosing her words carefully. “You need to talk about it, Kaine. About Danny, about the break-ins . . . about your job.”
“I left my job behind.” Kaine held the phone away from her face and glared at it, pacing out of the empty second bedroom toward the third and final room. Leah had to bring up her job? It had sapped every ounce of life from her before Danny died. It was her passion, her mission, even her ministry, if she spiritualized it. The women she had helped, the stories . . . the violence.
Kaine put the phone back to her ear. “Listen, Leah. Please—give me some time, all right? I need to find my life again. I need to stabilize. Explore our roots and do something for Danny.” Because she hadn’t done enough when he’d been alive. The hours away, the lack of romance, the slow drift apart. Six years of marriage, and now here she was.
“You know I love you, and I’m proud of you.” Leah always needed affirmation, so that’s what she usually offered too. Kaine could use something more tangible.
“I love you too.”
The House on Foster Hill Page 5
