Arie gasped. Her sleuthing had finally paid off. He had a leggy blonde on one side and a sultry brunette on the other. They were each vying for his attention, which he seemed content to divide between them equally.
“Good Lord, he’s in a menage a trois,” Chandra said, awestruck.
“He is not. He’s dancing with two . . . uh . . . ladies.”
“He just grabbed the blonde’s butt, and the other chick is trying to stick her tongue down his throat.”
“This can’t be happening.” Arie felt light-headed.
The trio spun on the floor, expertly weaving through the other, more conventional dance partners. The man, at least, seemed fairly well known. As they wove in and out of the crowd, several of the other dancers—the men, mostly—made laughing remarks as he passed. Although Arie was too far away to catch the words, it was obvious from the laughter and the tone that the comments were equal parts sexual innuendo and that strange form of male respect that displayed itself in coarse innuendo.
The turquoise boots never missed a step.
“Your grandpa’s a stud,” Chandra said.
Arie gagged and turned away.
“Chandra, if you value our friendship, you will never say that again.”
“Okay, what if he decides to bring one of them home tonight? Or both? They’re looking really frisky together.”
Arie put a hand to her throat and swallowed. She had a choice: switch to 7 Up and try to calm her heaving stomach, or drown all thought in alcohol.
What the hell? Chandra was driving. She caught the bartender’s eye.
“Give me a shot of Jagermeister, and don’t walk away.”
The shot didn’t help. Neither did the next two Leines that followed. To make matters worse, Arie’s eyes kept being drawn back to the spectacle of her grandfather and his two babes. Eventually, she was able to look past him enough to notice the babes in question were only about twenty years younger than their escort, making them all eligible for Medicaid, should the need arise.
It also became obvious that any one of the three would have been able to dance Arie under the table—if she knew how to dance, that is.
“They’re pretty amazing, aren’t they?” Arie said over her shoulder to Chandra.
“I would say so,” a low voice rumbled in her ear.
She knew that voice.
The band swung into Josh Turner’s “Your Man.” A hand reached down, took hers, and tugged her toward the dance floor. As he pulled her close, she finally looked up. O’Shea’s brilliant blue eyes were laughing into her own.
“How did you—?” Flustered, Arie broke off. Maybe he hadn’t known she would be here. After all, Bootz was forty-five minutes away from Oconomowoc. She herself had only come here to track down her wayward grandfather. There was no reason to think—
“A little bird told me,” he whispered in her ear.
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ALSO BY DONNA WHITE GLASER
THE LETTY WHITTAKER 12 STEP MYSTERIES:
The Enemy We Know
The One We Love
The Secrets We Keep
The Blood We Spill
COMING SOON: The Lies We Tell
THE BLOOD VISIONS PARANORMAL MYSTERIES:
A Scrying Shame
COMING SOON: Scry Me a River
The Enemy We Know: A Letty Whittaker 12-Step Mystery
Book One
CHAPTER ONE
I heard him coming. The hall funneled the sound of his rage, racing just ahead of the man. Our clinic’s manager screamed, “Letty! Watch out!” but he already filled the doorway. Despite training, I leaped to my feet. Waves of booze and the clamor of civilized people fumbling in the throes of chaos seeped around his mass. In the distance, the thud of running feet, objects careening into each other, and panicked versions of “what’s going on?” littered the air.
After the first instinctive reaction, my training reasserted itself, and I recognized the intruder as a client I’d just begun seeing. Now he stood swaying on the threshold, jean jacket straining at the shoulders, barely covering a ratty T-shirt which offered sexual favors to my sister. His bleary, pig-mean eyes stared straight through me. So different from the shy, hurting man I’d met with a week ago.
We’d met together twice for counseling. Despite an initial complaint of marital conflict, Randy had kept the focus squarely on a seemingly trivial dispute with his boss. At the time, I’d thought he was avoiding the real issue, but we were still getting to know each other. Any attempt on my part to bring the subject back to his troubled marriage was charmingly, but firmly, deflected. Maybe he was ready to talk.
He slammed the office door so hard I flinched and bit my tongue. Maybe not.
“Where is she?” The dead monotone scared me more than if he’d yelled.
“Who?”
“You bitch.” His teeth chewed at the word, turning his face into a lupine grimace. “You think this is a joke?” He pulled a hunting knife out from under his jacket, moving deeper into the room, still blocking the door.
“No, Randy,” I said, eyes locked on the weapon. My voice sounded high and thin, squeaking past my closed throat, a far cry from the professional calm I wished for. “I don’t think this is a joke. I can see how upset you are, but I don’t know what you want.”
“I want Carrie to stop this bullshit. Get that? Real simple. And I want you out of our lives. Where is she?”
It was hard to think. All the oxygen pumping from my thudding heart seemed directed to my extremities. My legs tingled in helplessness; flight was impossible.
My mind scrambled to mesh together the bits of information from our sessions with what he was saying now. “I thought your wife’s name is Debbie?”
“What?”
“Debbie?”
“Don’t play stupid with me. You knew the whole time, didn’t you? You knew why I was here, and you played me for a fool. You think I don’t know? The whole time you’re yapping about trust, and you and that bitch are setting me up behind my back.”
“Randy—”
“My name ain’t Randy!” he exploded. “Quit pretending.”
It finally sunk in that “Randy” had given me a fake name. So much for trust. I jettisoned any information gleaned from our previous sessions and pretended he was just an irrational stranger—which he was—leaving very little to go on. Just a name, really. The name of the woman I was supposedly conspiring with: Carrie.
It clicked.
Carrie, the client usually scheduled in this time slot, had canceled at the last minute. She and I had been working for the last four months on self-esteem issues, gathering her courage to deal with her relationship with her abusive boyfriend. She’d recently decided to get out and had begun making practical plans for her escape.
Guess who showed up?
His eyes darted around the room, hyperalert, as if he thought I had her stashed in the file cabinet. My office held an old metal desk, an ergonomically challenged chair, a tattered love seat, and a waist-high, two-drawer file cabinet sans escaping girlfriend.
Ethically, I couldn’t even acknowledge that Carrie was a client. Stacked up against the stark reality of the buck knife, however, confidentiality seemed like a vague, misty concept. Problem was, I liked Carrie, and I refused to draw a map for her asshole boyfriend. And there was the added issue of not h
aving a freakin’ clue where she might be.
“Where is she?” he repeated.
Drunk, dangerous, and impatient. The unholy trinity.
What the hell was his name, anyway? She must have said his name a half-million times, at least. She’d even divulged having it tattooed in the shape of a crescent moon on her left breast. Why should her boob tattoo flash into memory and not his name?
“Look, I know you’re upset. I want to help.” I worked to keep my voice calm, dropping it low and soft in direct contrast to his anger.
“Don’t you try that psych crap on me, you bitch! You’ve been trying to break me and Carrie up ever since she started seeing you.”
Well, not exactly, but I doubted what’s-his-name could distinguish the fine line between encouraging Carrie to make her own decisions and telling her to leave the jerk who kept throwing her against the wall whenever she disagreed with him.
“It’s not crap to tell you that the police are coming. You know that, right? You can make this so much better for yourself if you just give me the knife.” My eyes were glued to the weapon—it looked like something that could gut a deer with one flick of the wrist. My stomach rolled, the acids within sloshing loosely from side to side.
“Give you the knife? Why? So you can stab me in the back with it? You bitches are all alike. First chance you get, you kick a guy in the teeth.” The blade whispered evilly as he sliced it through the air. I hated that knife.
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” I said. Sweat rolled down my face, tickling.
“Bullshit! You’re taking Carrie away!” His face flooded with incredulity, and the next few seconds blurred as he charged forward. Flipping the desk chair aside like it was made of Styrofoam, he pinned me against the back wall, the knife a silver glint below my chin. Its tip nicked my skin, not cold as I had anticipated, but burning a slender line across the thin layer of flesh guarding my throat.
“You just don’t get it, do you? I love her. And you got no right coming between a man and his woman. That’s a sacred thing, and you can’t just—”
“I’m not taking Carrie away. She’s—”
“Liar!” Rage twisted his face into a grotesque mask, barely human. “You think I don’t know? You think I’m stupid because I don’t have a stinkin’ diploma stuck up on my wall?”
He smashed the knife into the glass frame above my head, shards splintering like frozen rain on my hair and the floor below. He’d just killed a cheap Monet print, but now didn’t seem like the time to point out the error.
“You think you’re so special, don’t you? Got your college education, and your tight little ass that you like to shake in front of all the men. Bet you make them crazy, huh? Make them come back for more, just ‘cause they got the hots for you. Do you wear that long, black hair up just so’s we wonder what you look like at night, when it’s down?
“And then you act all concerned about me, like you care. Just like her. I’m not stupid.” His voice dropped again to that frightening, raspy whisper. “I know what she’s planning. She’s been checking into those shelters like she thinks that’s gonna keep her safe. I bet you been workin’ on her, trying to get her to go to one of them places.”
The knife skimmed my throat again; I couldn’t even shake my head to answer without slicing it off. Tears of frustration pooled in my eyes, ready to fall. Carrie and I had talked about the possibilities of domestic abuse shelters, but that was weeks ago. At the time, she wouldn’t even take the brochure that I’d tried giving her, for fear that her boyfriend would find it. Was her cancellation today part of an escape plan that she hadn’t trusted me with?
“Did you try her at work?” The question popped out of its own volition.
“Huh?”
“Well . . . she canceled her appointment. Maybe she just got called in to work.”
Stopped him cold. Suddenly, as we stood there in a grotesque parody of an embrace, the wail of police sirens filtered through the office’s strip-mall thin walls of the office. No soundproofing, another cheap aspect of our working arrangement, but I loved it now. His eyes locked on mine, briefly, and a disturbing emotion rippled between us. He stood there only a few moments more, but it felt like hours; his breath fanned my cheeks while his body held mine hostage. Rearing his head back, he spit full in my face, then bolted for the door. Turning right, away from the front lobby, he ran toward the back fire exit. I heard shouts, and a thunk as something heavy tipped over. Seconds later, several police officers flew past the office door in pursuit.
Now that the time for panic was officially over, it took possession of my body, unhinging my knees, crashing me down to the floor. I cowered there, heart pounding, adrenaline turning my mouth tinny, shaking so hard my joints ached.
The sound of more running feet jolted me to my knees, but it was just my supervisor Marshall sprinting down the hall. The back door slammed, and then Marshall was at my side.
He guided me into the chair. I watched disinterestedly as his mouth made noises over me. My brain tuned him out until a shout of astonishment from him pulled me back to focus. Marshall knelt beside my chair, holding my right hand. For a brief spasm of time, I imagined he was going to propose. That is until I saw the bright red blood pooled in the cup of my upturned palm, seeping over the side and into his beneath like a water fountain in a particularly grisly park. My first instinct was that I’d been stabbed, but then I spied the glass shard sticking straight up, cleaving the pad of skin between my thumb and forefinger. I couldn’t stand the sight of the alien object stuck inside me. So I pulled it out. More blood.
Marshall’s noises grew more agitated, but this time a wave of dizziness blocked him out. A uniformed policeman pushed into my tiny office, crowding us, using up more air. My ears started ringing, and the cop pushed my head between my knees. I closed my eyes, concentrating on not throwing up, while someone squeezed the cut on my hand real hard.
“Wayne,” I said to my knees.
Someone’s head orbited into my vision. “What?” the someone said.
“His name is Wayne.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank Kindle Press and the Amazon Scout program for choosing A Scrying Shame for publication. And for all of those readers who took time to nominate Shame or to support my other books, you have my eternal gratitude!
To my friends and fellow authors: Marla, Madison (TJ Peacock & Lisa Rayburn Mysteries), David Tindell (Quest for Honor), Marjorie Doering (Ray Schiller series), Katie Mettner (Snowberry series), Helen Block, Darren Kirby (Coordinates for Murder). With every book I write, I become more and more indebted to each of you. There is simply no way I would have continued down this path without your support and encouragement. Your critiques keep me on my toes and our business meetings keep me motivated. You are all a blessing in my life, and I thank God for you all.
To Fiona Quinn, author of the Lynx thriller series and the writers’ resource blog ThrillWriting: Thank you for holding my hand and keeping my chin up during the Scout campaign. You were kind, generous with your time, and patient with my multitude of questions. I can’t thank you enough!
Finally, to Joe, Levi, and Leah. You are my world.
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