The Obsession

by Nora Roberts

  As she picked up the rest, Tag barked as if dragons burned down the gates.

  “Car’s coming,” Xander called back. “I’ve got it.”

  “He’s got it,” she murmured. “That’s the problem. Why am I mostly okay that he’s got it?”

  “Easy, killer,” Xander told the dog, and opened the front door. He recognized the official vehicle just pulling up beside his truck, and the chief of police behind the wheel.

  “Relax, he’s one of the good guys.” Xander stepped off the porch, carted the equipment to his truck. “Hey, Chief.”

  “Xander. Is that the stray I heard about?”

  “Yeah. That’s Tag.”

  “Hey there, Tag.”

  Chief of police Sam Winston, a toughly built man with a smooth face the color of walnuts and a Waves cap on his close-cropped hair (the high school football team where his son stood as quarterback), crouched down.

  Tag, nervous, crept close enough to sniff.

  “He’s a good-looking dog.”

  “Now, he is.”

  Tag accepted the head scrub, then immediately ran back to Naomi when she came out.

  “Ma’am.” Sam tapped the brim of his cap. “I’m Sam Winston, chief of police.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I’m not sure about that. I’ve been meaning to come up, introduce myself. It’s good someone’s back on the bluff, and from what I hear—and can see for myself—you’re giving the old girl a face-lift. She needed one. You got Kevin Banner and his crew on it, I hear.”

  “Yes.”

  “You couldn’t do better. Looks like I caught you two on the way out.”

  “Naomi’s going to take some pictures of the band.”

  “Is that so?” Sam hooked his thumbs in his thick Sam Browne belt, gave a little nod. “I bet they’ll be good ones. I don’t want to keep you, and it saves me time to find you both here. It’s about Marla Roth.”

  “If she’s trying to push an assault charge, I’ll push back. Again,” Naomi said.

  “I can’t say if she’d go there. We can’t seem to find her.”

  “Still?” Xander put in, turned back from stowing the equipment.

  “Nobody’s seen or heard from her, the way it looks, since Friday night. Not long after your scuffle with her, Ms. Carson.”

  “If she’s still pissed about that, she could’ve taken off for a few days,” Xander began.

  Worn boots planted, Sam gave the bill of his cap a little flick up. “Her car’s at her house, and she isn’t. Chip finally broke in the back door this morning, then came back to see me. She didn’t go in to work yesterday, isn’t answering her phone. She could be in a snit, and it’s most likely she is, but Chip’s worried sick, and I need to look into it. Now, the story I’m getting is she went at you at Loo’s on Friday night.”

  Missing could mean anything, Naomi assured herself. Missing didn’t mean an old root cellar in the deep woods. More often, much more often, it just meant a person had gone somewhere no one had looked yet.

  “Ms. Carson?” Sam prompted.

  “Sorry, yes. That’s right. She knocked into me a couple of times, then shoved me a couple of times.”

  “And you clocked her one?”

  “No, I didn’t hit her. I took her wrist, gave it a twist—leverage, pressure point, so she went down. So she stopped shoving me.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I left. It was annoying and embarrassing, so I left and came home.”

  “By yourself.”

  “Yes, I came home alone.”

  “About what time do you think that was?”

  “About ten thirty.” Just doing his job, Naomi reminded herself, and took a deep breath. “I let the dog out, walked around with him for a while. I was angry and upset, and couldn’t concentrate on work.”

  “And I got here about twelve thirty.” Though Xander leaned negligently back on his truck, irritation edged his voice. “The dog got us up just after five, and I left about seven thirty, maybe a little before. Come on, Chief.”

  “Xander, I’ve got to ask. Patti’s been screeching about Ms. Carson attacking Marla—she’s the only one with that take,” he added before Xander could speak. “And even she’s backed off that mark. But the fact is, Marla stormed out of Loo’s in a temper about twenty minutes after Ms. Carson, and as far as I can determine, that’s the last anyone saw her.”

  Sam huffed out a breath, petted the dog, who now apparently found him delightful. “Did either of you see her with anybody, somebody she might’ve taken it into her head to go off with?”

  “She was sitting with Patti.” Xander shrugged. “I try not to notice Marla too much.”

  “I saw her at her table, with her friend, earlier in the evening.” Tense now, Naomi rubbed her neck. “I was sitting with Kevin and Jenny. I really wasn’t paying attention to her, until Jenny and I got up to dance and she . . . I don’t even know her.”

  “I understand that, I do, and I don’t want you to worry about this. She probably went off with somebody she met at the bar, to lick her wounds and get Chip worked up.”

  Naomi shook her head. “A woman who’s pissed off and upset? She’s going to talk to her girlfriend.”

  “They had a bit of a falling-out after the incident.”

  “Regardless. Even if she called this Patti to argue, or at least send her a bitchy text.”

  “We’ll be looking into it. I’m not going to keep you, but I’d like to come back sometime, see what you’re doing inside.”

  “Yes, sure.”

  “You have a good day. I’ll be seeing you around, Xander.”

  Naomi’s insides twisted as Sam got back in his cruiser.

  “Will he really look?”

  “Yeah, of course. He’s the chief.”

  “Has anyone else ever gone missing?”

  “Not that I know of, and I would. Hey.” Xander put a hand on her arm. “Marla’s the type who looks for trouble, likes to cause it. It’s just the way she is. The chief will do his job. Don’t worry about this.”

  He was right, of course. Marla was a troublemaker and had very likely hooked up with some guy for the weekend to boost her wounded ego.

  Not every woman who went off that way ended up raped and murdered. It had never happened here before, Naomi reminded herself. Hadn’t she checked into just that after she’d fallen for the house?

  Low crime rate, even lower violent-crime rate. A safe place. A quiet place.

  Marla would probably show up before nightfall, pleased she’d worried her ex-husband, her friend, had the police out looking for her.

  She put it out of her mind, as much as she could, as Xander pulled away from the house in the truck, with the dog riding with his head out the window and his ears flying in the breeze.

  LIGHT AND SHADOW

  Where there is a great deal of light,

  the shadows are deeper.

  JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

  Sixteen

  When he’d realized she was serious about taking pictures in his place, Xander had considered pulling the Simon Vance book off the shelf. He’d done so long enough to read it again, refresh himself, then had nearly tossed it into the box he kept for donations.

  He didn’t want to see that dull, stricken look on her face again.

  In the end, he decided pulling it off gave it too much importance. She knew it was there, and would wonder why he’d taken it away.

  Weighing the stress factor, he figured it at fifty-fifty, and opted to leave it alone.

  She’d tell him when she was ready. Or she wouldn’t.

  He helped her haul her equipment up the steps, where she paid more attention to the equipment than what she intended to shoot. She pulled a tripod out of a case, telescoped it, did the same with a light stand.

  “I’ve still got that wine you like if you want.”

  “Thanks, but not when I’m working.”

  As he subscribed to the same rule, he got them both a Coke
.

  She nodded, ignored it as she pulled out a light meter. “Can I have one of those chairs over here for the laptop?”

  “I’ll get it.”

  She attached a camera to the tripod, eyes narrowed now on the wall of books.

  “That’s an impressive camera.”

  “Hasselblad, medium format. Larger media, higher resolution. I’m going to shoot digital first.”

  She took a back from her case, attached it to the camera. When he looked in the case, the bag—the lenses, backs, cables, attachments—he understood why everything was so damn heavy.

  How the hell did she haul all that stuff around?

  He didn’t ask because he recognized focused work mode.

  She peered through the viewfinder, used a remote to switch on the light, switch it off. She popped an umbrella out of the bag, screwed it onto the light stand, then shielded that with a screen.

  She checked everything again, changed the angle of the tripod, walked it back about an inch.

  If she thought about the book, she didn’t show it.

  He figured it took her a good thirty minutes to set up and take a couple of test shots. Halfway through it, he decided she didn’t need him, got a book out of his office, and settled down at the table to read while she worked.

  “Is there a system to the way you shelve the books?”

  He glanced up. “Where they fit, why?”

  “You have Jane Austen beside Stephen King.”

  “I don’t think either one of them would mind, but if you do, you can move books around.”

  “No, that’s part of the point. It’s a wall of stories. Take out any one, go anywhere. It’s . . . Storyland.”

  She pulled him into watching her again. Shoot, study, adjust, test, shoot. Curious now, he got up to take a look at the laptop screen.

  The colors bloomed deeper, the light a little dreamy. Somehow she made some of the tattered spines appear interesting rather than worn.

  Another popped on. He couldn’t see the difference, but apparently she could as she squinted at it, said, “Yeah, yeah.”

  She took half a dozen more, making minor adjustments, then crouched down to slideshow through all the shots.

  “How come it looks better in the picture than in reality?”

  “Magic. This one, yeah, this is the one, I think. It looks great in reality. Light, shadow, angle, that’s just atmosphere.”

  “You made art.”

  “I captured art,” she corrected. “I want to take some film.” She took the back off the camera and switched it with something out of her bag.

  “That camera does both—digital and film?”

  “Yeah. Handy.”

  He wanted to ask how—wanted to see how. But she had that in-the-zone look about her again.

  She went back to work; he went back to reading.

  She pulled him out of his book when she switched backs again, changed lenses, and took the camera off the tripod. She moved to the side, took a picture of the books from a sharp angle. Checked the result, adjusted the light, took a few more.

  When she lowered the camera, moved to the shelves, he thought for a moment she meant to pull off the book about her father. But she pulled one from a higher shelf, carried it to the table.

  “I want you with the Austen. Can you bookmark what you’re reading?”

  “I’ve read it before. I can pick it up where I left off if I want.” He felt more than a little foolish. No one would ever term him shy, but the idea of taking pictures of his hands?

  Weird.

  “You’re serious about the hand thing.”

  “Deadly. Tough man’s hand with classic novel written by a woman, one a lot of people consider a woman’s book.”

  “A lot of people are stupid.”

  “Either way, it should work.” She took out her light meter. “And the light’s good right here for what I want. Good, natural light through that window. Especially if you just . . . scoot your chair to the right, just a couple inches.”

  Once he had, she checked the light meter again. Apparently satisfied, she went back for her laptop, set it on the postage-stamp corner of counter.

  “Just hold the book open, the way you would if you were reading it. Not the first page—you’ve been reading it awhile. About a third of the way through.”

  He felt ridiculous, but he did it. He’d give her five minutes to play around.

  She shot over his shoulder so that sultry summer scent spilled over him.

  Maybe ten, he considered, while she shifted behind him, leaned in closer.

  “Turn a page—or start to, don’t turn it all the way. Just—stop, hold it. Good. It’s good. But . . .”

  She straightened, frowned at the laptop image. He had to twist around to check it himself, and what he saw surprised him.

  “I thought you were crazy, but it looks like an ad in a high-class magazine or something.”

  “It’s good, but it’s not quite there. It needs . . . Of course.”

  She pulled open his refrigerator, took out a beer. When she spotted the opener, she popped the top, then to his shock, poured a good third of it down the sink.

  “What? Why?”

  “Tough hands, a beer, and Pride and Prejudice.” She set the beer on the table, framed it, moved it closer to the top right edge of the book.

  “You didn’t have to pour it down the sink.”

  “It needs to look like you’re drinking a beer and reading Austen.”

  “I have a mouth, and a throat. We could have poured it in there.”

  “Sorry, didn’t think of that. Left thumb under the page, turning it, right hand on the beer. I need you to cover the label—I’m not looking for product placement. Hand on the beer like you’re about to pick it up, maybe even lift it a half inch off the table.”

  Since there was no use crying over spilled beer, he followed instructions. Picking up the beer, setting it down, turning a page, not turning a page, until she lowered the camera again.

  “Perfect. Just exactly right.”

  He turned to see for himself, saw the beer had been inspired. It gave the shot a cheerful edge, and added balance.

  “Real men read books,” Naomi said. “I’m going to offer poster