Everything Changes

by Bybee, Catherine

  Everyone jumped at it.

  While the clock ticked down their five minutes of practice before they started their game, Grace picked up her ball and pictured where she wanted it to land on the lane.

  “You were in a league before?” Erin asked as the ball left Grace’s hand.

  Five pins fell.

  Grace rolled her shoulders and stood aside for Erin to practice while the pins were reloaded.

  “In college. I played for two seasons. Even came away with a third place trophy.”

  Erin’s ball ended up in the gutter. “Ugh.”

  “It’s okay. We’re just starting.”

  Grace stepped up again, lifted the ball to her chest, and remembered some of her tricks. Palm up. This time the ball hit the head pin and knocked down nine of them.

  Erin’s turn had three pins falling over.

  “The guys are going to depend on muscle. We’re going to out skill them.” Grace shifted her feet a tiny bit to the left and aimed for the right side of the head pin.

  When all ten pins fell with a satisfying roar, she did a little happy dance. “Sweet.”

  Erin smiled. “I’m glad I’m on your team.”

  “I love besting my brothers.”

  “Looks like you’re off to a good start,” Erin said.

  Grace watched while Erin threw the ball. When it ended up in the gutter, Grace moved beside her and lifted her hand, palm to the ceiling. “You’re crossing your body when you toss the ball. Start by holding your ball palm up, and just try and hit the second arrow on the lane.”

  “There’s arrows?”

  Grace pointed out the spot and waited while Erin threw another ball.

  Six pins down.

  “That’s better.”

  Erin turned back to her with a huge grin.

  As their practice session ended and their game began, they kept talking. “Guess who called me,” Grace said.

  Erin sat at the table waiting for her turn. “Does his name start with a D?”

  Grace nodded. “The guy is ballsy.”

  “I have a feeling he’ll be calling your office a lot. Mr. Double-Squeezer.”

  That had her laughing while she waited for her ball to return. “He didn’t call the office.”

  “Wait, you gave him your cell number?”

  Grace went into him calling via Facebook. Sure enough, Erin called him a stalker.

  “I think he’s determined and resourceful,” Grace countered.

  She left one pin standing and sat down for Erin’s turn.

  “All the qualities of a stalker.”

  Grace paused. “Am I that hard up for male attention I’m ignoring the obvious with this guy?”

  “You haven’t exactly been dating in the last six months.”

  “I’ve been concentrating on my work.” And avoiding the male species altogether.

  When Erin finished her turn, she sat down and picked up her cell phone. “What’s this guy’s name again?”

  “Dameon Locke.”

  While she looked up the man on the internet, Grace took her turn.

  “Ohhh! He is really good-looking.”

  Nine pins down. “I know. It’s unnerving.”

  Erin leaned back and read up on him. “Pretty successful for thirty-five.”

  “I know. The land his company purchased is not a tiny lot.”

  “Did you look him up?” Erin asked, waving the phone in the air.

  “I didn’t have to. His business profile is sitting on my desk.” She turned back to the lone pin and concentrated hard. It fell with one solid plop.

  Erin didn’t move. “Never married . . .”

  “What about a girlfriend?” Grace asked.

  “I’m looking.”

  Grace hadn’t gone that far. Refused to for fear of what she’d find. “You do that, I’ll get us a couple of beers.”

  “M’kay.”

  The bar was packed and it took forever. When she returned, Erin was deep into whatever she was reading. She glanced up and patted her hand on the table. “Listen to this. Locke Enterprises is only six years old. Which means Stalker Man started it when he was twenty-nine.”

  “Ballsy. I told you.” Grace sat and drank the foam off her beer.

  “Before that he was a general contractor. I found an article where he credits his father for his success.”

  She leaned forward. “Did his dad have money?”

  Erin shook her head. “I can’t find anything about him.”

  “Anything about a girlfriend?”

  “Nothin’. The guy is virtually off the grid. Very few articles.”

  “That’s good.” And it was. The man obviously had means but didn’t go out of his way to flaunt it.

  “Oh, that’s interesting.” Erin kept reading.

  “What?” Grace moved around to the other side of the table so she could see what Erin was oh-ing over.

  “Looks like Locke had some seed money early on and recently that bank account expired.”

  Grace looked at Erin’s phone and took it from her hands. An image of Dameon next to another man in a suit posing for a photograph at what looked like some kind of cocktail party. “Wonder what happened.”

  “Lots of businesses begin with investors. Often more than one. They tend to be on a board of some sort that has some say in the company. If this Dameon of yours parted ways from his extra cash flow, it means one of two things: there was trouble, or Stalker Man no longer needs the other company’s money.”

  Grace skimmed the article. “What do you think it was?”

  “I don’t know. What I do know is the next couple years will determine if Locke Enterprises can do it alone.”

  She lowered the phone and looked at Erin. “You know a lot about this stuff.”

  Erin shrugged. “This is my father’s life. I guess some of the conversations I overheard during the years stuck.”

  Grace couldn’t help but think that Dameon needed everything for his latest project to get off the ground. And quickly.

  And that made her question his motives for flirting with her even more.

  “Maybe you have it right. He’s a stalker.” She handed the phone back to Erin and stood. “Whose turn is it?”

  The bed dipped with the weight of someone sitting on the edge. A hand reached out and touched her leg. “Honey?”

  Grace opened her eyes. It was late, or really early. The sun wasn’t up. “What’s wrong?” She was in her childhood bedroom that had been converted into a guest room.

  Nora, her mother, turned on the bedside light, her eyes wide with fear.

  Very few things put that look on her mother’s face.

  Grace shook the sleep from her head. Her mom was dressed, but not in her usual state. It looked like she’d tossed on a shirt from her hamper and an old pair of jeans. “What happened?”

  “It’s Erin.”

  Grace froze, hanging on the next words that came from her mother’s lips.

  “Her husband found her.”

  Grace scrambled up in bed. Terror clenched her chest. “No. No. No.”

  “We have to go,” her mother told her.

  Grace flung back the covers and realized she was naked.

  Only she didn’t sleep naked.

  This was wrong. Something wasn’t right.

  “Where are my clothes?”

  “You don’t need them. C’mon.”

  Not right.

  Was she dreaming?

  “Mom, I have to put something on.”

  Nora was standing now, looking down on her. “Erin’s dead and he’s coming after you.”

  Grace shot straight up in bed, her hands clutching the blanket. Short scattered breaths racked her body.

  She was in her own bed, and light was peeking through the shades.

  She closed her eyes and dropped her head back on the pillow. “Just a dream.” Some of it, anyway.

  Grace had been at her parents’ house when they were woken in the middle of the night to hear
that Erin was held inside her home by her husband. Grace and her parents had scrambled into clothes and rushed to the Sinclair ranch, where Erin lived in Parker’s guesthouse. By the time they arrived it was all over.

  Erin had been loaded into an ambulance and rushed to the hospital while everyone else stood outside huddled together in shock.

  It could have been her.

  Grace could have been the one in that ambulance or worse . . . dead on the floor with a bullet in her head.

  Tossing back her blankets, Grace padded barefoot into her bathroom and turned on the light. A pale version of herself stared back.

  “You’re smarter now, Gracie.”

  Or was she?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Grace arrived to work on Monday forty-five minutes early. She had every intention of leaving at five sharp, if not earlier, so she could get over to Colin and Parker’s place now that they were home from Hawaii.

  Parker was anxious to open the wedding gifts and wanted her there. Spending time with family was a lot more inviting than being alone in her condo.

  She switched on the light in her tiny office, one she’d acquired less than a year before, when one of the senior staff vacated it and she was next up for a private space. It wasn’t big, and certainly not a corner office. But it was hers and she loved having a door she could actually shut.

  This early in the morning, however, her door was wide open since she was the only one there.

  After removing her sweater and tucking her purse into her desk drawer, Grace pushed aside Dameon’s file and attacked an earlier project that was going to take her out of the office at ten. At one there would be a group meeting she had to attend. Maybe in all of that she’d miss Dameon’s promised phone call.

  Slowly, employees arrived, and the office outside her door hummed with activity.

  Evan, another engineer in the office, poked his head around the corner with a sharp knock on the wall. “Hey, Grace?”

  She looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Mind going to the ten thirty without me? Richard piled a new project on my desk, and I need to do a site check.”

  “Glad to know I’m not the only one,” she replied.

  “Excuse me?” Evan stepped all the way in.

  “Nothing. Fine. I’ll make notes and bring them back in, and we can go over everything later.”

  Evan smiled. “I owe ya one.”

  “I’m keeping track,” she yelled after him as he walked away.

  By nine forty-five she was slipping down the hall and out of the office. The sky had turned gray and the temperature had dropped. Since her job often took her out of the office and onto jobsites, she had two pairs of shoes in her trunk: tennis shoes and a pair of rubber boots for sloppy weather. She had the ever-beautiful white hard hat and orange vest that were mandated whenever there was heavy equipment or construction in process.

  After filling up her gas tank and stopping for a real cup of coffee instead of the brown liquid they passed off as coffee at the office, Grace made her way across town.

  She arrived at the proposed site ten minutes early and parked her car on the shoulder of the busy road.

  Runoff on Sierra Highway had washed out several roads and driveways the previous winter. Most of the landowners jumped on repairs as soon as the rain stopped.

  Not the owner she was meeting with today.

  Mr. Sokolov, the owner of the mobile home park, had packed dirt and gravel over the ingress and egress of the only road into the place. Between the residents’ complaints and the fire department flagging the property, Mr. Sokolov was being forced to pave the road to current city standards.

  He wasn’t happy.

  At the first meeting, he’d done a fair amount of bitching and moaning about cost.

  While Grace understood financial limitations, it wasn’t her job to lower the cost to the landowner. It was hers to come up with an engineering plan to make the road safe for everyone involved.

  Knowing she was visiting the site, she’d thought ahead and wore slacks to work. She removed her high heels and tucked her toes into her tennis shoes before exiting her car. As she pulled her arms through her sweater, she scolded herself for not putting a warmer coat in her car.

  With a clipboard in one hand and site plans in another, Grace walked over the gravel path in question. No one was there to greet her.

  She pulled out the plans she and Evan had worked on together and walked the site to see if they’d missed anything. Ten minutes later, Mr. Sokolov drove onto the property and parked in a red zone. He pushed out of his Mercedes wearing sunglasses and a frown.

  From the passenger seat, another man, almost as round as the first, joined him.

  Mr. Sokolov looked around before his eyes landed on Grace. By now she was walking toward him.

  “You with the city?” he asked.

  Grace moved in front of him and extended her hand. “We met last month, Mr. Sokolov. Grace Hudson.”

  He looked at her and her hand like she was kidding. “Where’s Evan?”

  Grace dropped her hand and tried to let his slight go.

  It wasn’t easy.

  “Evan couldn’t make today’s meeting.”

  Mr. Sokolov finally removed his unneeded sunglasses and stared down at her. “I’ve been dealing with Evan.”

  Grace looked to the man at Sokolov’s side briefly. “You’re dealing with the city engineers, of which I am one.”

  Somewhere in his early fifties, he was as round as he was tall, which wasn’t more than five nine. Stocky as opposed to just overweight. His friend beside him wasn’t much different from his scowl to his girth.

  Mr. Sokolov’s gaze dropped from Grace’s eyes to her chest. He lingered there long enough that Grace knew the gesture was meant to make her uncomfortable. In any other situation she would have called him on it. Instead she kept her eyes on his face and waited for him to look away.

  “Do you have an office here where I can spread out the plans and show you what we’ve come up with?”

  He smirked, and she knew she’d chosen the wrong words. “I own the place, little lady, I don’t live here.”

  “Hudson. My name is Miss Hudson. Not little lady.” He was dancing on her last nerve.

  “Right.” He moved past her toward his car and tapped the hood. “You can spread them here.”

  Let it go, Grace.

  She unrolled the plans. “Would you mind holding that end?” she asked both of them since neither had moved to do so.

  Reluctantly, Mr. Sokolov’s companion, who they failed to introduce her to, did so.

  All three of them peered down at the drawings and calculations.

  The sketches were minimal, but the dimensions were precise. The only reason they were looking at the city drawings instead of her looking at his was because if he didn’t cooperate and do the job himself, the city was going in to do it for him and charge him accordingly. This was a public safety issue, and the warnings had gone out months ago and were ignored. This meeting was the last attempt to get the man to cooperate before they took action.

  “As we pointed out when we met last month, the road has to significantly increase in size to accommodate the use and efficiency of the location.”

  “Which is bullshit. The road has been the same size since I bought the place,” he argued.

  “And had the road been maintained with the right material, it may have withstood last year’s storms and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  He glared at her. “What are you suggesting?”

  “Nothing.” She made her point before placing a finger on the drawing. She explained the depth of the excavation, the amount of rebar that needed to be placed, and the weight of concrete or asphalt needed.

  He asked where exactly the crossing needed to start.

  She walked over to the approximate point and stopped.

  Mr. Sokolov sputtered something she didn’t quite hear, and his friend finally spoke. “Isn’t that excessive?”
>
  “Not when you have to get emergency response vehicles in and out of here in bad weather.”

  “Last year was an anomaly.”

  “And when years like the last one happen, the city is forced to go back to the drawing board and make sure we’re prepared for the next one.”

  “Stick it to the little guy.”

  As she saw it, there was nothing little about Mr. Sokolov.

  “You have thirty-three residents in this community. Many are retired and elderly. First responders are called here no less than four times a month. The fire department needs access.”

  “This is going to cost a fortune.”

  The man sang the same tune he did the first time she was on-site.

  “It will cost more if you don’t hire someone yourself,” she assured him. “We don’t shop contractors. We hire big crews to come in, do the job, and hand you a bill.” And considering the lack of respect he was showing, she’d have no problem suggesting overtime to get things done faster. After all, it did smell like rain was on its way.

  “You’re enjoying this,” he accused her.

  “I’m doing my job.” Between the cold and the adrenaline the conversation was pumping in her system, Grace shivered. She walked back to the car, rolled up the plans, and handed them to Mr. Sokolov.

  He slapped them against his thigh and said something to his friend in a language she didn’t understand.

  When the other man laughed, she assumed an insult had ensued.

  “You have a week.” She gathered her papers.

  “What the hell?”

  “You’ve had months, Mr. Sokolov. The first letter was written to you in May and every four weeks after that—”

  “I told your office I didn’t receive any letters.”

  “Yet you managed to get the one where we told you action was imminent.”

  He glared and leaned forward. “You’re calling me a liar.”

  She held her ground, lifted her chin. “Just stating facts, Mr. Sokolov. If you fail to meet the timeline we’ve laid out, the city will expedite a crew and begin right after the New Year. Weather permitting.”

  “I need more time.”

  “We’re already into our rainy season.” She held her hand up as if catching raindrops. “The city will not be held responsible for a lack of action. One week. We’ll expedite permits since Evan and I have already been on-site and know what needs to happen. Keep in mind our holiday hours.” Grace looked between the two of them and hiked her purse higher on her shoulder.