by Rachel Lee
“Address, too?”
“Yes.”
“So what you’re saying is this guy may have taken great steps to ensure he can’t be traced. No DNA, no fingerprints...”
“That’s a hunch based on the fact that he wouldn’t have had to lick the envelope. But what does it mean, anyway, Gage? How likely is it that if you got a print or DNA off those letters that it would be useful? You know most of that stuff is only of use once you have the perp.”
“But it does make me wonder about the intent behind the notes. Anything else?”
“We thought we smelled beer on one of the notes, but it was so faint we couldn’t be sure. That means about half the population.”
“Great.” Gage again drummed his fingers briefly. “We have similar backgrounds, you and I. If your nose and mine agree, we’re going with our noses.”
Austin nodded. “I’ll keep sharp. I definitely don’t like the way this smells.”
“Me, neither, but I’ve been wrong before.”
“Let’s hope we both are.” Austin rose, but Gage stopped him just before he opened the office door.
“Austin? When she was in high school, Corey took gym classes in the martial arts or something. I won’t go into all the psychological claptrap about why she probably did that. I’m sure you can figure it out yourself.”
“Pretty much. And?”
“There’s a gym over at the high school and another at the junior college. Try to persuade her to refresh a bit. Maybe with you. Just let me know, I’ll make sure she can use one or the other during off-hours if she doesn’t want to be in a crowd.”
That was a good idea, Austin thought. He was sure he could talk her into it. He was starting to get the measure of Corey.
Then he thought of the child Gage had described, nearly catatonic, not speaking for days, hiding from everyone. A crack opened wide in his heart. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen children who had suffered similar experiences. The world was full of them. But to do his job, he’d had to keep his focus on other things. Trust other people to take care of the world’s waifs.
Now he had a waif of his very own. He was absolutely certain that Corey would hate knowing he thought of her that way for even an instant, though.
She’d be right, of course. Hunkered down though she might be, she was no longer that traumatized seven-year-old. She’d built herself a decent, if limited, life and seemed to handle things very well.
But there was still a monster in her closet, and all of a sudden, for no evident reason, it seemed to be trying to creep out.
Damn, what was going on here?
* * *
Austin had evidently decided that whether she liked it or not, he was through keeping out of her way. He was in the kitchen when Corey got home, and delicious aromas filled the house. Dropping her sewing bag near the door, she wandered in and found him at the stove, wearing a bibbed barbecue apron. He turned when he heard her and flapped it at her. “You like? I thought about getting one covered with tulips because I liked the pink frill around the edge...”
Her laughter interrupted him.
“Okay, I guess this was the better choice. How was your day?”
“Great,” she said, actually touched that he’d asked. “We started a new quilt. It’ll be embroidered butterflies, each set in a white block edged with blue. The butterflies are going to be a challenge, but it’ll get more of my ladies involved.”
“Why is that?”
“Because we’ll have the sewing group make the butterflies, the embroidery group decorate them and the quilting group piece it all together.”
“That sounds like some kind of project.”
“It’s going to be auctioned for charity, so it’s worth it. Plus, everyone is having fun. I like it when we come up with projects that everyone can participate in.”
“You forgot your knitters and crocheters.”
“They’re working on a different project. What are you making?”
“A feast. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m craving my native cuisine again. Tamales tonight, along with chili con queso, guacamole and some corn chips.”
“Um, wow.”
“I hope that’s a good um.”
“It is. What’s in a tamale?”
“Basically cornmeal. Think of them like dumplings, except I found some chorizo to add to them.”
She sat with a thump. “You found chorizo here?”
“Like I said, you have a very friendly grocer. Now he’s asking me for recipes.”
She gaped at him. “You should have gotten the apron with the tulips.”
He laughed so hard she thought she saw the sparkle of a tear in his eyes, and she joined him, holding her sides.
“Actually,” he said when he caught his breath, “I may be in danger of being asked to give cooking lessons at the market. I made extra tamales so I can bring some by in the morning.”
Amazement filled Corey. Conard County was a friendly place, but it generally took strangers a little while to knit themselves in, and a lot of them never came to be regarded as “locals.” This guy had been here just a short time and the grocer was asking him for recipes? Food as an international ambassador, she thought. She realized she was catching a glimpse of the man who had gone south of the border undercover. He’d had to knit himself in there, too.
She supposed that ought to make her suspicious of him, the ease with which he fit himself in, but she actually admired it. This was her hometown, yet she had never felt as if she really fit. More like a puzzle piece that didn’t quite press into the hole that it had once been part of.
“He also got me some poblanos, too. They’re a mild pepper, and I may make chiles rellenos tomorrow. That recipe goes back maybe five thousand years, but it hasn’t lost any flavor in the meantime.”
She giggled again, and gave herself up to the experience.
“Although,” he added almost ruefully, “I might have gotten carried away with tonight’s dinner and we may have a lot of leftovers.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Cooking for my family did not teach me how to cook for two.”
Another little laugh escaped her.
“I hope you don’t mind me taking over the kitchen,” he said.
“I thought kitchen privileges were part of the deal. I just didn’t expect to enjoy the fruits.”
“Well, I’m certainly not going to go to all this trouble just for me. In fact, if you want to invite some of your friends over sometime, just let me know and I’ll put out a spread.”
“Is that part of your culture?”
“It was how I was raised. If you get a group of us together, it’s an excuse for a party, and everyone brings something. Potluck. Anyway, none of this is terribly difficult or I wouldn’t be doing it. I have limits.” He glanced at her again. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor?”
All of a sudden she felt uncertain. Guarded. “If I can.”
“I need to work out. Walking and a few calisthenics aren’t doing it for me. I feel like rust is creeping into my joints.”
“What a description. We don’t have a commercial gym. Do you need some special kind of equipment?”
“Not really. Gage said he’d get me the key to one of the school gyms if I wanted to get in when they were closed. I mostly need space to practice my martial arts, limber up and all. It’d be great if I could find a sparring partner, too.”
She hesitated a few moments. She was sure there were plenty of people around town who knew something about the martial arts, most of them former Special Ops, and they were probably rusty, too. A lot rustier than Austin, maybe. But for some reason those creepy notes wafted up to the front of her mind, and on impulse she said, “I can spar with you. I haven’t really kept up with it for the last few years, though, so I might not be good eno
ugh. I mean, I took it as a high school gym class.”
“Really? That would be great. I wasn’t especially practicing when I was in Mexico. I got in some, but not enough, so the rust is probably burrowing deep by now.”
What in the world was she thinking? Butterflies settled into Corey’s stomach as she realized what she’d just offered to do. Spar with a strange man? Spar with any man? She looked at her hand and realized it was trembling. She tried to find words to say she’d changed her mind, but something prevented them from emerging.
He wasn’t really a stranger anymore, she told herself. He’d been open about his family, more open than she had been. Whatever problems he had from all that time undercover, she couldn’t see them.
Those notes. She kept flip-flopping about them, sometimes dismissing them as an ugly joke, sometimes getting frightened, wondering if someone who knew her past was stalking her for some reason. But it didn’t make any sense. After all this time?
She looked at Austin, who was humming almost under his breath as he wrapped dough and sausage in corn husks. He made her want new things. He made her aware that the life she had created for herself was missing important elements, no matter how hard she tried to tell herself it was a perfect life, exactly what she had planned.
So she sat there, her mouth a little dry, anxiety filling her, and faced the fact that in some ways she was a total failure. She’d built a life all right. Half a life.
That didn’t make her feel exactly proud. So, okay, maybe it was time to take a step out of her cocoon. Austin provided a way, a relatively harmless way. Gage knew who he was. Sparring with him at one of the gyms should be safe enough. It wasn’t as if they’d be the only people there. Surely other students would be there if they went early enough in the day.
“What kind of martial arts did you study?” Austin asked, rolling yet another husk around some dough.
“Well, not exactly martial arts,” she said. “I might not be a very good sparring partner for you. I tried dribs and drabs of things, but I was mostly interested in self-defense.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “That’s cool. I didn’t exactly go black belt in anything myself. For my job I needed to be good at things like street fighting. Some martial arts went into that, some self-defense... Anyway, the important thing for me is that I need to work some kinks out and get my reflexes back in the zone.”
“Have you been home that long?”
He paused, then wiped his hands on a paper towel and turned to face her. “I told you I was beaten. I spent some time recovering from broken bones. Ribs, my arm. Everything’s okay now, but I was moving more gingerly than a hundred-year-old for a while, thanks to the ribs. It even hurt to breathe.”
She winced in sympathy. “I’ve heard that’s terrible.”
“It’s certainly not comfortable. I had what they call flail chest. I had three broken ribs and had trouble breathing. There was also some organ damage. So I spent time in the hospital, went through a bout of pneumonia because I wasn’t breathing right, and when they finally let me go I was breathing but hurting.” He shook his head and gave an almost puckish smile. “Some way to end a storied career.”
“But your career isn’t over, is it?”
His face turned hard, almost flat. “That part of it is.” Then he turned back to cooking.
Whoops. She guessed she had put her foot in it. “I guess I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, it’s okay.” But he didn’t look at her. He just kept wrapping methodically until he had a baking dish full of tamales. “I apologize if it sounded like I was snapping. I guess I have some issues. It’ll pass.”
Hers hadn’t passed very well. She hoped his did.
Regardless, when he was done rolling the tamales, he returned to the easygoing guy she was getting to know. The smoothness of the switch made her nervous. Who was the real Austin Mendez?
“So everyone is excited about the quilting project?” he asked.
She recognized deflection when she heard it. After all, she did it often herself. “Very,” she said. “We even got started cutting the pieces. I think I’ll go change.”
She didn’t say she’d be right back because she wasn’t sure she would. Or could. She needed to think about what he’d told her, but mostly she needed to think about that sudden change in him.
She had thought she was getting to know him. Now she wondered if anyone could truly know this man.
Chapter 6
Several days later, the man sat at his computer again, looking over the list of possible notes he could send to Corey. Evidently the first two hadn’t even rippled the surface of her life. She hadn’t changed one thing. She still walked to work, stayed late, walked home, all by herself.
At least she didn’t have a lover living with her. He’d thought that last college student might have been, they spent so much time together, but now she was gone and there was a man living there.
Well, she rented out her upstairs. That didn’t mean a thing, not against the number of women who had lived there. Fast and loose was the way he had evaluated her. Always girlfriends.
No, the guy didn’t count. He was a friend of the sheriff’s according to word around town, just looking to stay a few months. Between jobs, they said. A lot of people were “between jobs” these days.
So the guy had no connection with Corey at all. They didn’t go anywhere together, didn’t do anything together. That meant he wasn’t wrong about her.
Because it was very important to be right. He couldn’t preserve decency and condemn sin unless he was right. There were rules, ways to keep himself pure so he didn’t become a sinner himself. A lot of people didn’t understand that, but he did. Unless he remained pure, he couldn’t sit in judgment.
He reached for the one beer he allowed himself each day. Some thought alcohol was sinful, but he’d read about it right there in the Good Book. The important thing was moderation, so he moderated.
Unfortunately, he might have been too moderate in his first few notes. Part of the punishment for iniquity was to understand your sin. To be faced with it and know you were about to pay for it.
It did no good to claim the penalty from someone who didn’t understand why it was being meted out. Her mother had understood. He was sure of that. She’d gone running to Denver to escape her punishment.
At first he’d felt sorry the child had to see the mother’s punishment, but later he’d come to understand why it had happened that way despite his plan. It was so Corey would be steered to the path of righteousness.
But that hadn’t happened.
Like mother, like daughter.
Those words seemed to glow brighter than others on the screen. He wondered if she would get it then.
There was still a chance she could change, see the error of her ways. It was always possible. Maybe if she saw that, she’d change her life, save herself.
But he didn’t believe she would. Her mother hadn’t changed, she’d just run. With a child. A misbegotten child from a loveless or unnatural coupling. He wasn’t sure which, but it didn’t matter. Corey’s mother had been selfish enough to want a child despite her perversion.
Perhaps that was an even greater sin, having the child. But whether or not it was, it had brought yet another perversion into the world, one that had to be erased.
He had watched long enough to be sure he was dealing with the same thing. He had waited patiently, hoping the child would grow up decently. It wasn’t as if she had come from a tainted family. Not until her mother.
But she evidently hadn’t escaped the snare. She was discreet, but so had her mother been. In fact, it had actually been harder to figure out her mother, but the child...well, these times were so much more brazen.
But Corey might not know about her mother. Might not have any idea what she had been.<
br />
Still, the words that glowed brightest on the screen arrested him. They appeared to be the next step. Vaguely threatening, but nothing overt. Not enough to call the police. Or if she did, not enough to alarm them. But he hoped they’d be enough to alarm her.
He settled on them, highlighted them and started the printer. It was old and sluggish, but the message was short. He reached for his beer, taking only a small sip because he had to make it last.
He needed to remain a fit instrument of judgment.
* * *
Corey looked at the envelope with horror and growing fear. She recognized it now: plain, white, no return address, computer printed with her address. There was no question there’d be some kind of message in it, and she didn’t want to know. Her hand shook as she held the envelope, then she dropped it quickly on the hall table.
At this rate, she thought bitterly, she was going to let the mail pile up outside the door and never look at it again.
Why would anyone want to do this to her?
That bothered her more than the messages. Someone wanted to scare her and unnerve her, and she couldn’t imagine why. Out there in this friendly, familiar town was a sick mind. No longer could she think it just a teenage prank. She’d reacted in no way to these letters, and surely any “fun” wouldn’t have gone out of it by now.
Yet another one had arrived. She stood at the counter, trying to collect herself, trying to think this through in some way that would make sense. Some way that would make her feel less threatened. Because she was feeling threatened. Stalked. The object of some kind of awful intention.
Part of her wanted to run back to her shop, the only place she felt safe, truly safe. After all these years, only being surrounded by people, women, could make her feel safe. But the shop was closed now, the sewing circle had finished early, and it was after six. How would she find safety there?
Just because it wasn’t here, where the letters kept arriving? That was stupid. If he knew where she lived, he knew where she worked. Everyone in town did.
