Don't Turn Around

by Hunter Morgan

  “This is Casey McDaniel. I just got your letter in the mail and I don’t know why you sent it, but I want you to know that I am not going to be intimidated.”

  “That right?” James said.

  “That’s absolutely right. I’m warning you. I see you again, I see you following me, you show up at my office, I get any more of these letters in the mail, and I’m calling the police. I’m calling the police and I’m having you arrested for harassment.”

  “Wait. Who is this?” James asked, suddenly more interested.

  Charlie swiped at his brother. “Gimme the phone.”

  James leaned against the driver’s-side window, out of Charlie’s reach.

  “You know very well who it is. Casey McDaniel,” she said. “I was Linda’s counselor at the hospital. You can’t intimidate me, Mr. Gaitlin. You’re going to be arrested again for Linda’s murder very shortly, and I intend to be a witness against you at the trial. I intend to see you go to jail for the rest of your life for what you did to Linda.”

  The other end of the line went dead.

  “Who was that?” Charlie asked.

  James threw the phone down on the seat beside him. “You sendin’ shit in the mail?” James asked. “Some friend of Linda’s? Casey somebody.”

  “She wasn’t Linda’s friend.” Charles pushed his hair out of his eyes. “She was that woman at the hospital who tried to get Linda to tell the cops that I punched her. That bitch is crazy. She says I’m, like, following her and shit.”

  “She does, huh?”

  “Yeah. She called the security cops on me at the hospital the other day when I went in to see Willy. She told them I was harassin’ her.”

  “Did she?” James stared straight ahead, both hands on the steering wheel. “That’s funny, Charlie, because it sounds to me like it’s the other way around.”

  By the time Casey got home with her groceries, she was feeling a lot better. After talking to Gaitlin, she’d called Adam’s office and left a message for him to call her about Linda’s case. She wasn’t going to ease up on Gaitlin; she wasn’t going to let him slip through the system.

  She put a homemade marinara sauce on to simmer and Jayne showed up only half an hour late to take their father.

  “Call me when you’re on your way back,” Casey told Jayne as she helped their father into his coat.

  “I’m thinking it’ll be close to ten. I told the babysitter ten.”

  Casey placed her father’s hat on his head. He adjusted it.

  “Call anyway,” Casey said.

  Jayne lifted an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Casey murmured, leading Ed to the door.

  “And here I was trying to think of a way to delicately bring up your emotional well-being. You know, the holidays approaching and all. ’Tis the season for depression,” Jayne said cheerfully.

  “I’m not depressed and I have no intentions of becoming so.”

  “Be sure Frazier has water,” Ed instructed as he tottered toward the door. “And keep an eye on him when you let him out to urinate. I don’t want him running off again.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on him, Dad. You have a good time.” Casey rested her hand on his shoulder before letting go. “Enjoy the ballet. You and Mom always liked the ballet.”

  “Come on, Dad. Joaquin is waiting. He’s got the car running.” Jayne, all bundled up, glanced at Casey. “Is he always this slow?”

  “Always.” She waved at them from the front door.

  Half an hour later, Lincoln arrived with two bottles of wine.

  “Whoa, there,” Casey said, meeting him at the door.

  He wrapped his arms, the bottles in his hands, around her and kissed her long and hard.

  Breathless, she pulled away and laughed. “Two bottles? I told you, I’m a two-glass girl. You give me more than that after a long day at work and I’ll be asleep before eight-thirty.”

  “Can I watch The Weather Channel while you’re sleeping?” He gave her a quick kiss, then released her and closed the front door.

  Casey locked it. “Absolutely not. I’m seeing rainfall reports in my sleep. I helped a client fill out a form for his insurance company today and wrote ‘heavy snowfall expected’ where I was supposed to print his address.”

  Lincoln followed her into the kitchen. “Smells great.” After putting the bottles down, he took off his coat. “Sounds like you had a long day. Want to talk about it?”

  Casey picked up a wooden spoon to stir the marinara. “Nah,” she said, ever the cheerful one. Her job was to listen to people’s troubles; she wasn’t that comfortable talking about her worries, certainly not with a new boyfriend.

  “You sure?” He reappeared from the laundry room, minus his coat and scarf. He wrapped his arms around her waist as she stood at the stove still stirring the pot. “I’m a good listener.”

  Casey shook her head, dead set against talking about work. But when Lincoln turned her around, took the spoon from her hand, and gazed into her eyes, something inside her crumbled.

  “I really did have a bad day,” she said shakily. “I had this client, Linda…”

  The next thing Casey knew, Lincoln had taken the sauce off the stove, poured them glasses of wine, and they were sitting on the living room floor in front of her gas fireplace, their backs against the couch. He took her high-heeled shoes off her feet, made her slip her black tights off from under her skirt, and massaged her bare feet as she talked.

  She told him about Linda. About the horrible night Linda had called her. About the nol pros and Gaitlin being released and about how nice Adam Preston had been to her. How hard he was working on the case. But she didn’t tell him about her suspicion that Gaitlin might be following her or her fear that her father might have seen him in the window or about the drawing she received in the mail. She didn’t want him to think she was paranoid or crazy. And she didn’t mention Billy, who was probably the real reason why she was paranoid about Gaitlin. Sleeping with a man was one thing; telling him about your stint in a mental ward was something entirely different.

  Lincoln was a good listener. He rarely interrupted. He let her take her time telling him about Linda’s case, didn’t seem to mind how neurotic she must have sounded, or how much she skipped around, inserting little tidbits about her father here and there.

  “Well, I’d say you had a bad day, all right,” he said when she was finally done. He brushed his lips against hers.

  “You think?” She lifted her chin and met his mouth with hers.

  “Yeah,” he whispered.

  With the shoes and tights already off, it didn’t take that long to shed the sweater. Casey and Lincoln sat face-to-face, knees to knees as she slid the sweater over her head. He pulled off his.

  He kissed her hard, taking her breath away. He rubbed her back, her shoulders, her bare arms, covered with goose bumps more from desire than from being cold. By the time he slid the strap of her lacy bra over her shoulder, her breasts were aching so badly to be touched that she thought she’d rip her bra off herself if he didn’t hurry.

  Lincoln was a gentle lover, but certainly not a dull one. He seemed to know when to kiss softly, and when to push her down into the carpeting. He didn’t say much, but the few words he spoke came off sexy and sweet, not silly the way it always seemed in books she read.

  He gave her time. He definitely understood foreplay and a woman’s body. He stroked her, kissed her. He let her set the pace.

  Eventually, it was Casey who was tugging at his clothes. He removed his cord jeans and boxer briefs before helping her shimmy out of her new skirt and the pale teal panties that matched her new bra.

  Casey was so glad she had taken advantage of the Victoria’s Secret fall catalogue sale. She wouldn’t have been caught dead lying in the living room in front of her fireplace in nothing but her old, beige, cotton Wal-Mart panties with the saggy elastic.

  Casey stretched out on the carpet under Lincoln, her arms over her head. She closed her eyes, enjo
ying the feel of his hands on her body, the scent of him. She let herself relax every muscle, set every worry aside, every thought free.

  It had been too long since she’d made love. It was funny the way she had forgotten just how much she enjoyed it. Or was it just better with Lincoln?

  When he finally pushed inside her, she was practically clawing at his back. Suddenly, she couldn’t get enough of him. Enough of the feel of him, and she lifted her hips again and again against his.

  Balancing his weight over her, he covered her face with kisses, forcing her to slow down. “It’s not a race,” he teased in her ear.

  But in a way, for Casey, it was. She had needed this for so long. Maybe her whole life.

  She was so afraid to be hopeful.

  And yet she was.

  Maybe saying her orgasm was earth shattering was an exaggeration. Maybe it wasn’t. Casey sank her nails into Lincoln’s bare shoulders, wrapped her legs around his, arched her back. Tears filled her eyes as the waves of pleasure lapped over her. A second later, he was done.

  Lincoln gently slid out of her and rolled onto his side, beside her. He pulled her into his arms and she rested her cheek on his bare chest.

  “Are you sad?” he asked, stroking her temple.

  Not trusting herself to speak, she shook her head.

  “Too soon?”

  Again, she shook her head no.

  “Just ‘great sex’ tears?” he ventured.

  This time Casey laughed. “Yeah,” she whispered, holding him tightly. “Just ‘great sex’ tears.”

  Emma stirred, rolled onto her side, and reached out to put her arm around Richard. She was met with nothing but a tangle of blankets. Half asleep, she remembered he was still out of town at the conference. Usually, she went with him on his trips; she didn’t find lectures on new technology in urology all that interesting, but she did enjoy exploring new cities, revisiting old ones.

  But their youngest daughter was overdue with her first baby and Richard and Emma had agreed that Emma should just stay home and wait for “the call.” She’d be too nervous to have a good time in Vegas, anyway. Once the baby was actually on its way, Richard would fly home.

  Now more awake, Emma rolled onto her back and checked the clock beside the bed. It was two-thirteen. She closed her eyes and rearranged her pillow, refusing to give in to any form of insomnia tonight. She had a busy day tomorrow.

  A sound in the hallway startled Emma, and she sat straight up in bed. It sounded like the lamp on the table at the top of the stairs. If you bumped into the table, the lamp rattled. Richard was always running into it in the dark, always complaining that his wife needed to move it.

  Had Richard come home early? It wasn’t like him not to call. But maybe he had called and she hadn’t heard the phone.

  As Emma listened, her heart raced.

  She heard nothing but the hum of the heat pump. The drip of the water faucet in the master bath. Two more weeks and they would close up the beach house for the winter. It was really already too cold down here—the rooms were drafty—but Emma enjoyed the house so much that she always dragged her feet in the fall when Richard said it was time to pack up and return to Dover for the winter.

  Hearing nothing more, Emma took a deep breath. Had she imagined the sound of the lamp?

  She lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes.

  But there was no way she was going back to sleep. She sat up, threw her feet over the side of the bed, and pushed her feet into her sheepskin slippers. Richard teased her about her slippers because she never took them back to Dover with her; they were her beach slippers. She didn’t just wear them with her pajamas. When it grew cool in the fall and she dragged them out of the closet, she wore them to the bakery in the morning to get fresh croissants. To the grocery store. To the neighbor’s house. In the summer, they would be replaced with her favorite flip-flops, also worn only at the beach.

  Emma walked halfway across the bedroom, in the dark, then considered turning on the light. But she knew the house with her eyes closed. If there was an intruder, which she certainly doubted, wouldn’t she be safer in the dark? She would know her way around and the stranger wouldn’t.

  The door was partially open and she listened through it. Later, when she’d pick Richard up from the airport and tell him about creeping around in the house in the dark looking for burglars, he would chastise her, saying that a sixty-two-year-old woman who was about to be a grandmother for the fourth time shouldn’t be walking around the house in the dark.

  Richard had always been like that, so protective. It was one of the reasons she had always stayed with him, even in the years when they worked entirely too hard building his practice and made love entirely too infrequently.

  Emma pushed the door with her finger. It glided noiselessly.

  The hall was very dark, even darker than the bedroom; it didn’t have the benefit of the glow of the bedside digital clock.

  Emma didn’t see anything. She didn’t hear anything. But something in the hallway didn’t feel right.

  The little hairs on the nape of her neck stood up and she rubbed her hand against them. She kept her salt-and-pepper hair, now mostly salt, in a short, fashionable haircut. Richard called it the sassy grandmother look. Emma wondered now if her beautician had shaved the hair on her neck closely enough. The hairs felt prickly.

  Emma took a step toward the staircase. The phrase “inky black” came to mind. There must have been no moon tonight, no stars, because very little light shone in through the skylights over the vaulted living room ceiling.

  She moved along the open, loft hallway squinting.

  She thought about calling out, but what would she say? And if there was somewhere there who shouldn’t be, did she really want to talk to him?

  Emma’s slipper hit something on the floor. Something that didn’t belong there.

  Her heart leapt upward, lodging in her throat. She froze.

  Still no sound.

  She wiggled her toe in her slipper. The something on the floor in the middle of the hallway was lumpy, hard. Stuff in a cloth sack of some sort. She started to lean over to feel what it was but halfway through the motion realized how stupid that was.

  Someone was in the house!

  Emma knew she had to get to the phone. She had to dial 911! But first, she needed to get into the bedroom and lock the door.

  Just three or four short steps and she would be back in the bedroom.

  Emma almost made it.

  She heard an odd swish. Felt the air move at her cheek.

  Suddenly her head seemed to explode with pain. Lights flashed behind her eye sockets. She grunted, fell forward, crying out in agony. In terror.

  He hit her again and she tried to protect herself with her arms, attempting to curl into a fetal position on the floor. She lost one of her sheepskin slippers. Her flannel pajama top rode up, exposing her breast.

  “No, please,” she sobbed. “Take what you want. Take it all.”

  She still couldn’t see him. Blood stung her eyes.

  “Please,” she moaned. He hit her again. Kicked her. Emma screamed once more, maybe twice. But he kept hitting her, kicking her. She didn’t know how long it went on. But thankfully, the pain began to fade until at last it was gone and she sank into a black abyss.

  Chapter 12

  “I appreciate you meeting me.” Casey walked to one of the small, wrought-iron tables in the coffee shop, carrying her soy latte. “I apologize for bothering you; I know how busy you are.” She took a chair.

  Adam sat across from her, setting down his double cappuccino with a shot of hazelnut syrup.

  “But I really needed to talk to you about Linda’s case.”

  “And I thought this was a date,” he teased. “I thought you called me because you couldn’t live another moment without me.”

  She met his gaze across the table, giving him her best “I’m being serious” look. Fortunately, he had a good sense of humor. He smiled. “I’m sorry.
You were saying…”

  “I needed to see you because I need to know what kind of progress you’ve made. How soon do you think Gaitlin can be arrested again?”

  “Soon.” He sipped his coffee.

  “How soon?”

  “Casey, these things take time. I warned you of that. We’ve got to have our ducks in a row when we go to prelim next time. No more screwups in my office. Because there won’t be a third chance. Judges don’t appreciate lawyers or the state wasting their time. I absolutely have to get the indictment the next time we stand before a judge.”

  Casey held the thick paper cup of coffee between her palms, savoring the warmth. It was bitterly cold outside for November in Delaware. She’d actually seen snowflakes this morning on her way to work. She had even tried to call her father to tell him, but he hadn’t answered the phone. She rested one hand on the table, then slid it toward him. “I have a bad feeling about this man, Adam. I know that sounds ridiculous. I know you deal with facts, but he…he’s a bad person. I…I’m scared to death he’s going to do it again.”

  He watched her carefully. “You all right?” He slid his hand across the table, covering hers. “Because you don’t quite seem all right. Has something happened?”

  When she told Lincoln about her concerns about Gaitlin, she didn’t tell him that she also suspected he might be harassing her, stalking her, whatever you wanted to call it, but sitting here, she wanted to tell Adam. He knew Gaitlin. He knew what kind of man he was and she sensed that he would understand. She felt as if she and Adam were in this together.

  “Casey, what’s Gaitlin done?” Adam questioned.

  His hand was warm and reassuring.

  She hesitated.

  “Casey, please.”

  “I think…” she began slowly. “I think it’s possible he’s following me.”

  He picked up his cup of coffee. “Have you called the police?” He set the coffee down without taking a drink. It was obvious he was trying to restrain his anger. “That son of a bitch,” he said under his breath, making a fist.

  “Adam”—she laid her hand on his clenched fist—“I have no proof, but I also got this hand-drawn picture in the mail.” She quickly explained about the drawing of the eye and what Gaitlin had said to her in the parking lot.