“It’s the wine women,” she explained shakily. “They came back with armloads of wine today and said they were having a party in their room this evening. Pajamas. Wear ’em if you’ve got ’em and come anyway if you don’t.”
Her knees gave way, and she sank onto the bed. He could count the number of times he’d seen her looking so vulnerable—generally only when they’d visited her family and gotten proof once again that she was just one of the multitude her parents loved. But that was a whole different level of vulnerability. That was purely emotional—tough, sure, but no one at Casa Spencer was actually dangerous.
RememberMe was. To Natasha. To Kyle. Maybe to Daniel himself. Unlike Kyle, Daniel had been warned. He was naturally cautious and made cynical by the job. He was suspicious of others, always alert, an excellent shot and difficult to catch off guard.
Even if Natasha’s appearance at the courthouse yesterday had done just that.
He wasn’t scared. He’d held his own in plenty of dangerous situations. Had always Tased or handcuffed or pepper sprayed the bad guy in those situations. A few times he’d even talked his way out of trouble, but RememberMe wasn’t the type to respond to reason and logic. If he was, he wouldn’t be stalking Natasha, she wouldn’t be here in Cedar Creek and Daniel would still be blissfully ignorant, thinking that he was totally over her and ready to move on.
Damn. He didn’t want to even consider that last thought.
“I should go,” he said, moving toward the door. “You’ve got my number. If anything happens...”
Still wearing that look of helpless fear, she nodded.
At the door, he hesitated. He couldn’t spend the night here. Wouldn’t. He was one of RememberMe’s targets; his presence in the hotel might drive the guy to take action, and Natasha or someone else might get hurt. Besides, one night of protection wasn’t going to fix things. The stalker had been hanging around for nearly a year, and he hadn’t gotten caught yet.
Still, it felt wrong, walking away, leaving her there alone. He did it—gave her a somber nod, closed the door and waited for her to lock it, and then he headed toward the stairs—but it gave him a vague feeling of dissatisfaction deep inside.
A door at the opposite end of the hallway opened, spilling light out onto the faded hardwood floor, and Claire Baylor appeared. Her face was flushed, either from the party behind her or the half-empty wineglass in her hand, and her smile was pretty. “Detective Harper,” she said, carefully enunciating the syllables, and he decided to place his bet on the wineglass. “Are you leaving?”
“I am. Do you mind coming down to lock up behind me?”
“I’d be happy to.” She swayed a bit on her feet. “But I’d be safer giving you a key to the doors. You’re a cop. I can trust you, can’t I?” Fumbling in her pocket, she pulled out a key, studied it front and back and then offered it to him. As he came close to take it, she leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Can you believe this is only my second glass? Compared to them, I am such a lightweight. The amount of wine those girls can hold would put me in a coma.”
He lowered his voice, too. “Then you’d probably better stop after this one so you don’t put yourself in a coma going down the stairs.”
“I will.” She nodded seriously, drained the rest of the wine, handed the empty glass to him and returned to the party.
Daniel set the glass on a table against the wall then headed down the stairs. He was glad someone was having a carefree evening. Too bad it wasn’t him.
* * *
Daniel had showered, crawled between warm sheets and made it through the opening credits of Arsenic and Old Lace when his cell phone rang. He wished he was an ignore-the-phone sort of person, mindful that people had survived for centuries without being available to talk at any time of day or night. But it wasn’t in his genes to not even glance at caller ID, and the name displayed there made him answer before another ring sounded.
“Flea?”
“Don’t make me come there and shoot you, Harper. My name is Detective Martin.”
“And to your friends?”
“That is my friends. Sorry I couldn’t return your call earlier. You know what it’s like out here. LAPD is saving money by working us to death.”
He settled more comfortably in the bed. “They still training everybody else’s police officers?” It had happened with their own academy class. Only a third of those who’d started had graduated, and most of them had left within two years for better-paying jobs with other police departments in the area.
“They are, which means I’m doing the job of three detectives. So you mentioned Natasha Spencer in your message. Please don’t tell me I was wrong and Mr. Aw-He’s-Harmless killed her.”
His gut clenched at the thought. No matter how angry or bitter he’d gotten with her, he couldn’t imagine the world without her in it. Not necessarily within his sphere of it, but out there somewhere. “No, he hasn’t hurt her. But he set her car on fire yesterday.”
“Damn. He didn’t happen to leave his driver’s license behind, did he? Or look at the camera pointed right at him? Maybe live stream it on social media?”
“Could we be that lucky?”
“Sometimes the gods smile on us, Detective.” Flea paused, rustling in the background, then cautiously asked, “How are you dealing with this?”
This was such an innocuous word to describe the upheaval in his life. But he ignored that thought. He was becoming very good at ignoring things. “I’m dealing. Is there anything you can tell me about your conversations with Natasha that she wouldn’t have passed on?”
“That I was skeptical from the start? Damn, Harper, I thought I was more professional than that. I never thought my personal feelings would get in the way. But here I was, dealing with real tangible threats against real innocent people, and in walks Miss Princess with her complaint about her latest admirer. I told her to change her phone number and her email address. I told her to be careful, to let me know if things escalated.”
“Did she tell you she’d already changed her phone and email?”
“No, she didn’t.”
Flea sounded abashed. Daniel knew the feeling was useless. A cop needed the whole story to do the job, but too many people left out pertinent information. I didn’t think it mattered. I forgot about it until now. It just seemed so trivial.
A sigh sounded before she went on. “I contacted the internet service provider, but that was a dead end. The guy was good at covering his tracks. The texts traced back to a burner phone. We checked the security cameras at the apartment complex where she lived, and we ID’d a guy leaving flowers at her door. He was paid in cash by some other guy, not too big, not too small, wearing shades and a baseball cap, and the delivery guy had the impression that the baseball cap guy had been hired by some other guy. The security footage only went back a couple weeks, so that was the only thing we saw. After that, like I said, I had a heavy caseload.”
So she’d put Natasha’s case out of her mind.
“Do you have anything at your end?”
Daniel pinched the bridge of his nose. “Nope. She came to town, told me I was in danger, planned to leave again the next morning, and her car, parked all by itself on the main drag, caught fire. The guy knows she’s here—he sent her an email last night—but he hasn’t tried to contact her since the fire. We’ve got her electronic devices. Our IT people are trying to find something.”
“Do you think he’s responsible for the first fiancé’s accident?”
“My gut says yes. He told her things about Kyle’s house, so he had to have been inside. Emailing her on the day Kyle fell couldn’t have been coincidence. He mentioned the rest of us by name. Yeah, I think maybe he wants to punish her or to punish us, because we had her—temporarily—and whenever he met her, he didn’t even register on her radar.”
“Has he tried to contact you?”
“If he were capable of facing you head-on, he wouldn’t be stalking. Daniel, I’m really sorry. I wish I could have done more—gotten surveillance footage from the areas where we knew he’d been, pinged the towers for his cell phone, interviewed more people. But I honestly thought...” She was silent a long time, and when she continued, despite her words, there was doubt in her voice. “I honestly thought he was harmless. And I honestly believe I wouldn’t have done anything different even if she’d been a total stranger. I do.”
Daniel considered it a moment. “I do, too, Flea.”
They talked a few moments longer—her husband and kids were fine, his fathers were fine, life was good—before ending the call. He leaned back against the pillows, staring at the image of Cary Grant frozen on the TV screen, wondering if he really wanted to watch a funny movie or if, maybe, he needed to, when a distant sound made him stiffen.
It had come from downstairs and outside. Not the elderly man who lived in the other half of the house; he was spending the week with his granddaughter in Texas. Besides, when he was home, he was in bed by eight. Early to bed and early to rise might not have made him wealthy and wise, he said, but it had gotten him through eighty-seven years of living.
The sound came again, a scrape of wood against brick, below Daniel’s bedroom window. Someone bumbling about in the dark on the patio, bumping into the chairs there?
He grabbed his cell and pistol, shoved his feet into running shoes and dashed down the stairs. He didn’t pause to yank his slicker from the hook but quietly opened the front door a few inches, eased out and headed toward the west end of the house. He knew where every planter was placed, where every shrub grew, knew not to trip over the downspout at the corner that was flooding the yellowed grass with rain.
Cold, soaked, wishing for something more than boxers and a T-shirt, he paused at the corner, drew a deep breath and darted a look at the back of the house. The only light was faint, what little seeped around the blinds in his bedroom windows, and it dissipated long before reaching the ground. He waited a moment, let his eyes adjust to the darkness then looked again. Nothing appeared out of place. No shadow seemed more substantial than any other. Nothing moved or stood unnaturally still. Nothing felt wrong about the scene.
Except the chair on the patio, moved only inches from its usual spot. It wouldn’t have been noticeable to most people, but at home Daniel, like his dad, was a little fixated with balance and symmetry. The chair nearer the house, normally aligned with its mate, was tilted now at an awkward angle.
Trying to ignore the goose bumps rising on his exposed skin, he stealthily crossed the patio, his gaze searching for any other sign of an intruder. He went around the far corner of the building, checking the other half of the house, and wound up a few moments later back at his front door.
It could have been a dog. The neighbor three doors down had a fat cat who was more than capable of rearranging furniture with her heft, and he’d seen plenty of possums and raccoons who could do the same. He could have bumped the chair himself when he’d last used the grill.
Could have been. But it hadn’t been a dog, a cat, a possum, a raccoon or his own carelessness. Deep inside, he knew.
While he stood there, willing his heart rate to settle, a form detached from the shadows of a tree across the street and trotted his way. “You’re getting awfully wet, Detective Harper.”
For an instant, Daniel’s grip on the gun tightened, but recognition set in quickly enough to relax it again almost immediately. “Have you seen anyone around here, Ozzie?”
“Just you and me, Detective. Everyone else is smart enough to be inside.” Ozzie pushed back the hood of his slicker to reveal his ever-present grin. He was a fixture in Cedar Creek: in his fifties, always cheerful, rambling his way around town for hours every day. Everyone knew him—nice guy, sweet guy, not quite right—and looked out for him when he let them. That wasn’t very often, which was why ornery was another description they applied to him.
“You’re getting soaked. You want my raincoat, Detective?”
“No, thanks, Oz.”
“I don’t mind. I’ve got another one at home. Maybe two or three.”
“No, really. I’m going in in a minute.” Daniel pushed his hair back from his face. “What have you seen, Ozzie?”
It was the man’s favorite question to answer. He’d once described a patch of ragweed in precise detail to Daniel, as if it were the most beautiful of all God’s creations. He was fascinated by trains and sirens and cracks in the sidewalk. There was nothing too small, too insignificant, to deserve his attention.
“I saw that car burn up this morning. But you saw that, too, ’cause I saw you there. You was talking to the girl that owned it. She’s from California, where the ocean is. Have you ever seen the ocean, Detective?”
“I lived on the beach when I was a kid.”
“You didn’t have a house? Gee, that’s too bad.”
Daniel dismissed the thought of explaining himself as soon as he had it. He’d tried it before, but it was anyone’s guess what Ozzie understood and what he merely glossed over because it seemed the right thing to do. “Have you seen anything else interesting?”
“More rain than I thought the skies could hold. Everybody hurrying to get where they’re going. Nobody takes the time to enjoy a walk in the rain anymore.” Ozzie tilted his head back and smiled toward the sky, blinking when water splashed in his eyes. “There are strangers in town. The girl who owned the car that burnt up. The wine women. Look what they give me today.” He reached into an inside pocket and removed a small canning jar, bearing the name of an Oklahoma winery and filled with wine-grape jelly. “It’s my favorite. They remembered from last time.”
People were kind to Ozzie—all the locals and apparently the visitors, too. “That was nice of them. Don’t eat it all on one piece of bread.”
Ozzie’s grin widened. “You’re teasing me, Detective. I didn’t know you knew how.” After carefully returning the jar to his pocket, he said, “Even with it dark out here, I can see you’re turning blue. Are you sure you don’t want my raincoat?”
“No, thanks, man. Do you want a ride home?” It was a question asked without much risk. Ozzie never wanted a ride, no matter the weather.
“Naw. That’s what God give me good feet and strong legs for.” He pulled his hood back in place, walked a few feet along the sidewalk then turned back. “And there’s the man who watches her.”
Daniel had reached for the doorknob. His fingers clenched it so tightly that it required conscious thought to let go of it so he could face Ozzie fully. “Who does he watch?”
“That girl. The one with the car.”
* * *
Sleep was overrated. Natasha could get by on two or three hours of restless tossing and turning. She’d done it in high school and college. So what if she was ten years older? And twenty years more tired. And thirty years more worried. A cup of coffee, and she would be fine.
She told herself that before meeting her haggard reflection’s gaze in the mirror and scowling. All the coffee in the world wouldn’t make her feel any better than she looked, and that was pretty damn scary. The shadows beneath her eyes had turned from bags to a full set of luggage, and the lines across her forehead and around her mouth looked as if they’d been etched with a chisel. Even her hair was limp, lacking the energy to develop a case of bedhead.
She showered, dressed and did her best with makeup to conceal some of the damage. She had no appetite, but her stomach was rumbling anyway, and though she was jittery enough on her own, that aforementioned cup of coffee sounded good. Not that she knew how to get a real breakfast. Should she ask Morwenna to play delivery person? Get Daniel’s okay to go to Judge Judie’s? Call the lovely Taryn who had an obvious thing for Daniel and ask he
r to send a meal over?
She would start downstairs. She could get coffee in the lounge, and maybe her stomach would be happy with a chocolate rush instead of the bacon and eggs it was starting to crave. After peeking out the door, she let herself into the hallway, locked up and headed down the hall. Halfway there, the sound of solid footsteps descending the stairs stopped her short.
A pair of feet came into view first, shod in clunky running shoes, showing only a thin line of socks above. Tanned and muscular legs followed, then a pair of faded black shorts and a T-shirt with the faintest remains of a logo. Dodgers. They had fans everywhere.
Rob Miller reached the landing, glanced her way and stopped. “Good morning.”
Her stomach was knotted, her chest tight. Everything inside her wanted her to run back to her room like a frightened little mouse, but she squared her shoulders and breathed deeply for courage. “Morning.”
Though he kept a polite distance, his gaze moved across her face, as if his blue eyes were cataloging her features on a checklist. It was a familiar interest, one she’d been aware of since she’d become aware of boys, and was usually pleasant, mildly satisfying, occasionally annoying and rarely thrilling. Like when Kyle had looked at her that way, or when Eric had. Or Daniel.
Oh, especially when Daniel had.
This morning, the interest made her feel vulnerable and afraid, wary and suspicious and all those ugly things she didn’t want to feel. Even if it was naive, she wanted to believe in the general goodness of people, the way she always had.
“Are you going down?” Rob gestured toward the stairs.
Instead of believing, she was doubting everyone. Instead of living her life, she was on the run, and instead of standing up to RememberMe, she was quaking in fear. But how could she stand up to a phantom?
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