The Getaway Bride

by Gina Wilkins

  Gabe pushed his emotions aside and studied the photos, trying to concentrate on the unfolding story. “Who is she?” he asked, motioning toward the woman with the baby.

  “Jessie Carpenter. She was a very close friend of mine from college in Alabama—the only one who supported me during the ordeal there that I told you about. She’s holding her youngest child, Amelia, who was born a couple of months before I met you. Jessie sent me pictures when Amelia was born, but I couldn’t understand why this one was enclosed with a snapshot of you.”

  “You didn’t connect it to the telephone call?”

  “Not immediately. Mrs. Dooley came over just then to give us a loaf of her bread. She and I talked for a few minutes, and then the phone rang. I answered it, and she motioned that she had to go. She left just as I realized the caller was the same man who’d called before.”

  “What did he say?”

  “When I realized who it was, I was going to hang up again, but then he said something about your near-miss at the bakery job. He said it hadn’t been an accident He told me he’d been responsible for that beam falling and that he could just as easily have killed you with it.”

  “That beam fell because a piece of equipment broke,” Gabe protested.

  She stubbornly shook her head. “He said it was his work. And then he asked me if I’d gotten the photographs. When I said I had, he told me that my friend had two sweet young children. He said something about how vulnerable children are. How easy it is to harm them.”

  Gabe felt a cold chill slither through him. He began to understand how horrified Page must have been by the mysterious, cold-blooded threats.

  She cleared her throat and twisted her fingers in her lap. “I asked him what he wanted. He said again that he wanted me to be alone, as he was. He said I had to leave you, or you would die. He said if I told you about the call, or tried to stop him, I would pay—by losing you.”

  “So you ran.”

  She looked him in the eyes. “I ran,” she said simply.

  He wanted to shout at her, to demand again to know what right she’d had to make that decision for him. With an effort, he restrained the resentment. “Where did you go?”

  “I just started driving. A couple of days later I was sitting in a hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee. I wanted to call you then. I knew you must be upset—”

  “Upset,” he murmured tonelessly, wondering if she had any idea how little resemblance the word bore to his actual reaction.

  She darted him a nervous glance and continued. “I had my hand on the telephone to call you when it rang. It was him—again. He asked how it felt to be alone. He told me I’d made the right decision—that I’d been within twenty-four hours of becoming a grieving widow. He told me he’d know if I tried to contact you or the police. And that he would make sure someone I loved would pay for my mistake.”

  “He followed you from Austin to Nashville?”

  “Apparently. I was so frightened by then that I almost believed he knew my every action—my every thought I begged him to tell me why he was doing this, what I’d done to him. Who he was. He only warned me again not to get close to anyone. And then he hung up.”

  “And you changed your mind about calling me,” Gabe said with regret.

  “I dialed the number,” she whispered. “You answered, sounding so distraught and anxious that it broke my heart But then I pictured you being hurt or...or worse, because of me—and I couldn’t handle it. I hung up.”

  “Damn it, Page.” He breathed the words through emotion-clenched teeth. “You should have told me.”

  She closed her eyes. “I was too afraid. I loved you so much. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to keep you safe.”

  Had she loved him? He couldn’t help but ask himself the painful question. He could accept that she’d felt responsible, frightened, confused...but could she have walked out of his life that way if she’d really loved him?

  Unable to respond to her statement, he went on with his gruff interrogation. “You had no idea who the guy was?”

  “None,” she answered, spreading her hands. “As far as I knew, I didn’t have an enemy in the world. The only man who’d ever had cause to resent me was dead. I couldn’t think of anyone else who would do this to me.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I kept moving. I tried to make sure I wasn’t being followed, but of course I had no experience in that area. I ended up in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I was running out of money, so I found a job as a stockroom clerk, where my public contact was minimal. I used a false name. I thought it would make it harder for him to find me. I found an inexpensive apartment where I wasn’t required to sign a lease. I thought I could hide there until I decided what to do next. I had a telephone with an unlisted number installed so I could call the police if...well, if someone tried to break in. At the time, I thought there was some chance that my own life could be in jeopardy.”

  “Go on,” he said when she paused.

  She’d gone colorless. “I was so lonely. So desperately unhappy. I found a stray kitten on my way home, from work one evening, and I took him in, craving thecompanionship. He...” Her voice broke.

  Gabe leaned automatically closer to her. “What happened?”

  She seemed to gather her courage. “I came home one evening, unlocked the front door, and...and found the kitten in my kitchen. Dead.”

  She swallowed audibly. “The phone started ringing almost immediately. I knew who it was, of course. I didn’t want to answer, but I was afraid not to. He said I shouldn’t have gotten the kitten. I was to have no companionship in my life. No love. Not even a pet. He added that he could just as easily kill a person as a cat, so I should picture you or Jessie’s children dying like my kitten if I dared disobey him again.”

  Gabe almost reached out to touch her. He resisted the urge with some difficulty.

  He couldn’t afford for either of them to be distracted again now, not while she was finally talking. “I’m sorry, Page.”

  She nodded. “I called the kitten Buddy,” she murmured inconsequentially. “He was very sweet”

  She drew a deep breath. “I couldn’t stay there after that, of course. I...cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, so there would be no reason for anyone to be suspicious of my leaving, and then I turned in my key to the landlord. I gave him a phony story about my father being ill, and I left. I stopped on a country road to bury Buddy beneath a big tree. I couldn’t just throw him in a Dumpster like a piece of garbage.”

  Gabe wondered what else she’d buried in that roadside grave. Hope? Courage? The lighthearted spirit of the happy woman she’d been before?

  She continued without being prompted. “I went back on the road. I spent a few weeks in Joliet, Illinois, a month in New York City. I met Detective Pratt in Richmond, Virginia, one evening when I had a flat on the side of a highway. He helped me change the tire, and then he gave me a searching look, handed me his card and told me to call him if I ever needed help again.”

  Gabe could feel his tension building. Page’s voice was emotionless now, but her eyes...her eyes spoke of a woman in torment. She hardly moved as she spoke. Her chin was high, her shoulders squared, her hands locked in her lap. She had the air of someone bravely facing a firing squad.

  “You called him?” he asked.

  “I called him. It was two days later. I’d been waiting tables at a grubby little diner for ten hours and I was exhausted. I was sitting in a dump of an apartment, alone, tired, depressed, hopeless. I went out for a walk and I found myself standing at a pay phone, Detective Pratt’s card in my hand. I thought of you, and of Jessie and her children. I prayed that I wasn’t making a mistake you would all have to pay for. And then I dialed his number.”

  She jumped suddenly to her feet. Startled, Gabe stood, too, ready to block her if she tried to bolt:

  “I’m thirsty,” she said. “I have to have a drink”

  He motioned toward the kitchen. He was right on her heels when she t
urned and walked to the fridge. He wasn’t letting her out of his sight again.

  The fulminating glance she shot over her shoulder told him she knew what he was thinking and resented it, but he ignored it. Impatience simmered through him. It was all he could do to restrain his questions until Page had rummaged through the fridge and pulled .out a soft drink. She closed the refrigerator door without waiting to see if he wanted anything.

  “What did you tell Detective Pratt?” he demanded as soon as she’d taken a long swallow. “What did he say? What happened to him?”

  Page turned to look out the window over the sink, though Gabe suspected that she wasn’t really seeing the moon-washed scenery outside.

  “He wasn’t very old. Early-thirties,” she murmured. “Your age. He had a warm smile and an infectious laugh. He had a wife and twin children he loved dearly. I’m sure they miss him desperately.”

  Her voice had thickened. She cleared it before she continued. “We met at a coffee shop close to my apartment. He bought me coffee and listened to my story without saying a word. I was sure he thought I was just another nutcase with a wild tale created for attention. He didn’t. He believed me.”

  She took another sip of her drink, still staring blindly out the window. “He asked me to let him call you, so you would know that I was all right. It was just over six months after I’d left Austin, and he suggested that you would still be sick with worry. He thought we should warn you that there was reason to be concerned about your own safety. I almost agreed—but then I pictured Buddy’s poor, mangled little body and I begged Jim not to involve you. The caller had told me you were safe as long as I stayed away from you, and I felt I had no choice but to believe him. Jim didn’t fully approve. .He said if I were his wife, he’d want to know everything, whatever the risk, but he accepted my decision.” “I had a right to know the truth.”

  She shrugged, as though silently pointing out that they’d been over this already. And then she went on. “He promised to help me. He was afraid there wasn’t enough evidence to convince his superiors, since all I had were a few relatively innocent-looking snapshots and an improbable-sounding story He said he would work the case on his own time until he came up with something more concrete. I don’t know what he did after that. Made some calls, I suppose. Dug around in may past, trying to find something...anything...to provide a clue.”

  She set the cola can on the counter and looked at Gabe with tear-filled eyes. “A week to the day after I called him, he was dead.”

  7

  GABE LAID a gentle hand on Page’s shoulder. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  She allowed him to guide her to the table, where she sat stiffly in a chair, her eyes staring into a painful past.

  “What happened to Detective Pratt?” Gabe asked, keeping his voice low.

  “I came home from work one evening and found an envelope that had been slid beneath my door. There was only one photograph inside. It was Jim Pratt—with his wife and children.”

  Gabe remembered the shot of the happy-looking young man with a woman and twin toddlers. Detective James K. Pratt and family.

  “I panicked,” Page whispered. “I rushed to a pay phone and called the police station. I had to warn him that he was in danger...that the man stalking me had somehow discovered that Jim was helping me. They...they told me...” She choked.

  Gabe reached across the table to cover her icy hand with his own. “What were you told?”

  “I learned that Detective Pratt had died the evening before in a car accident. Half in shock, I bought a newspaper, and read that the accident had happened under very strange circumstances. There was evidence that he’d been deliberately forced off a very steep curve, though there’d been no witnesses. The chief of police was calling for an investigation, but I...I knew they wouldn’t find anything. I knew Jim had died because of me. Because he’d wanted to help me. I killed him when I made that call,” she whispered.

  Gabe’s fingers tightened around hers. “That’s ridiculous,” he said roughly. “Even if this lunatic did kill Pratt, you can’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “James Pratt died because of me,” Page insisted. “His wife and children and parents and siblings grieved at his graveside...because of me.”

  She caught her breath on a sob and forced words out “I couldn’t deal with it. I ran. When I couldn’t drive any longer, I got a motel room. I don’t even know what town it was in. I took a sleeping pill and fell into bed, still in my clothes. I didn’t want to think. The phone rang in the middle of the night, waking me.”

  Gabe didn’t have to ask who was calling. “He told you he’d killed Pratt?”

  “He was furious. He told me he’d almost gone after everyone else who had ever mattered to me. You. Your family. Jessie and her children. All of you. He told me if I ever went to the police again, I was signing your death warrants. He said he’d start with the children—because they’d be easy. He told me he might be taken out along the way, but not before he’d gotten to someone I loved. Someone else who wouldn’t deserve to die.”

  She swallowed another sip of her drink, her. hand unsteady as she lifted the can to her pale mouth. The cola seemed to burn its way down her throat, judging from the face she made.

  “I begged him to leave you all alone,” she said after a moment. “I asked him to kill me, instead. He knew where to find me. It would be so easy. He only laughed—an ugly, vicious laugh. He had no intention of killing me, he said.”

  “And?”

  “I told him I would kill myself,” she whispered. “I told him I’d rather die than have him hurt anyone else because of me. I told him he’d left me nothing to live for, anyway. I was fully prepared to do it that night.”

  Gabe felt a cold rush of horror go through him. It was caused by the look in her eyes, the tone of her voice. He believed absolutely that she’d been prepared to go through with her threat. To end her own life.

  “He wouldn’t have liked that,” he said, imagining the man’s reaction to the threat of having his victim permanently removed from his sick games.

  “He started screaming at me. Cursing me. He said if I dared take the easy way out—the self-serving way out, he called it—everyone I’d ever cared about would die, as well. And he would be angry enough when he killed them that he would make sure they suffered.”

  “He’s insane.”

  Page snorted with a spurt of the spirit she’d subdued since she’d begun her tale. “What was your first clue?”

  “And you have absolutely no idea who he is?” They’d been over that question before, but Gabe was still finding it hard to believe someone could hate her that much without her even suspecting who it was.

  “I don’t know,” she repeated flatly. Believably. “If I did, I would tell you. I’ve told you everything else.”

  “Everything?”

  She shrugged. “You know the rest of the story. I’ve kept moving, changing identities, cities, finding work when I ran out of money, doing my best to keep from endangering anyone else along the way. I lied, of course, when I told you I’d been with other men. There were no men. No friends, no lovers, no one. I tried so hard not to let anyone get close enough to be endangered just by being near me.”

  Rubbing a weary hand over her face, she said, “Everywhere I went, he found me, no matter how well I thought I’d covered my tracks. Sometimes it took him a few weeks or months, but there was always a day when an envelope arrived in the mail or beneath my door.”

  She moistened her lips. “The day you found me, in Des Moines, I had just received two more photos. One of you. One of the woman who managed the apartments where I was living. I hadn’t befriended her, but I liked her. She was kind to me, no matter how often I rebuffed her friendly gestures. Her kindness had put her in danger. I knew I had to run again, to protect her.”

  “And you ran straight into me.”

  She groaned. “Yes. I was horrified to see you. I knew if he found out you were near me
, that you had entered my life again, he’d...”

  She couldn’t finish that sentence.

  “He always finds out,” she whispered. “He’s the devil, and he can’t be stopped.”

  Her eyes turned wild again, her voice frantic. “Gabe, please. Let me go. Get away from me—as far as you can. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.”

  He was a bit shaken by her passionate plea, but he shook his head. “If you’re asking me again to go home and forget about you, don’t. I won’t do it.”

  She made a strangled sound—half sob, half growl—and shook her hand free of his. “Don’t you understand?” she shouted. “This man is a murderer! And you will be his next victim if you don’t do what I ask.”

  “Not if we find him first.”

  From her reaction, he might as well have suggested they sprout wings and fly to safety.

  “It’s too dangerous,” she whispered. “He’s too good at this.”

  “He’s a man, Page, whatever exaggerated delusions you’ve concocted over the past couple of years. He can be stopped.”

  Shaking her head, she stood and backed away from the table, her hands raised in a gesture of pleading. “I...we can’t. He’ll kill you, Gabe. Or if not you, another innocent bystander. He has no conscience, no mercy. He doesn’t care what he has to do, as long as it makes me suffer.”

  Gabe almost asked her why she would suffer if he were killed. Because she couldn’t stand the guilt of another death on her behalf? Because she’d once cared for him enough to marry him?

  He knew now that her reason for leaving him had been noble, at least in her own mind. Maybe she really had convinced herself she’d had no other choice, that the sacrifices she’d made had been necessary. Selfless. Maybe some people would consider her a martyr to love, a heroine of epic proportions.

  Gabe was still hurting too much to see her in that light. As much as he had loved her—as much as he suspected he still loved her—it still hurt him that she hadn’t come to him the moment her problems had begun. That she’d run without a word of explanation to him.