“I’m right about the case, aren’t I? You’re not supposed to be working it,” I asked, still half-fighting a losing battle with the door.
“How did you find out?”
I gave up on the door. “I found an article online.” I watched his expression.
His jaw flexed a couple of times. He was fighting his own reaction and it hit me, why he worked so hard to keep up the joking, two-dimensional personality. How hard this must be for him, how I hadn’t stopped to think about any of it from his perspective. Involuntarily, I put my hand on top of his. I was as surprised by the gesture as he was.
“I’m sorry you’ve had to live with this.”
He turned his hand over, so our palms touched, then he placed mine back in my lap. “Don’t go soft on me now, Night,” he said, his voice catching as he said my name. He hit the unlock button and put the car into drive. Rocky bounded out of the Jeep and pulled me toward the back door.
Tex backed the truck up and pulled next to the door. “And Night? Those other cops are wrong. You’re nothing like any of my conquests. You’re in a class all your own.”
He drove through the narrow driveway to the north side of my building. I unlocked the back door, locked it behind me, and started up the stairs to my unit.
“We’re home, Rocky. Finally.” Rocky bounded ahead of me, yipping in my direction when he reached the door. I gripped the banister and stepped slowly up the carpeted treads. “How does spaghetti and meatballs sound? I think we deserve comfort food, don’t you?”
I turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open. Rocky ran ahead of me, into the darkness, yipping with excitement. “I didn’t know you’d be so happy to get home,” I said. My hand clumsily sought the switch to the lamp, and a hand clamped down over my mouth from behind and pulled me tightly against a rigid chest.
NINETEEN
I tried to fight against the strong cage of arms but couldn’t. And then I heard the voice.
“Madison, Madison, ssshhhhh, it’s Hudson. It’s Hudson, it’s Hudson. Don’t fight me. It’s Hudson.”
Like yesterday, when he’d found me in front of his house after being attacked, the repetition of his soothing voice calmed me. I relaxed slightly, but not entirely. He removed his hand from my mouth. Moments later he turned me around to face him. My own fear reflected in his eyes.
“Madison, I’m not going to hurt you.”
My chest heaved and fell with deep penetrating lungs filled with air. “Get your hands off me,” I said in a low, gravelly voice, my heart pounding in my chest from the surprise.
He let go and held up his palms facing me like he was proving he wasn’t a threat. I took two steps backward to put distance between us. Rocky yipped around our ankles like we were playing. He put his front paws on Hudson’s jeans and stared up at his friend’s face, not understanding that sometimes friends were not to be trusted.
I reached in the bag slung across my chest and pulled out my cell phone. “I’m calling the cops.”
“Madison—”
I put a hand out palm first in front of me to stop him from closing the space between us.
“How did you get in here?” I asked.
“You gave me a set of keys when you asked me to do maintenance on the building.” He reached into the pocket of his black jeans; I took another half step back. He extracted three metal keys that still hung on the cheap key ring the locksmith had used when he’d cut the set. Gently, Hudson set the keys on the low wooden hutch.
“Please let me explain.”
“Damn it, Hudson!” I yelled. I dropped the phone. My fingers splayed like I was holding an invisible basketball and my hands jabbed forward like I was looking for a teammate to pass the ball to. “I can’t live like this,” My breath caught. “This is not a normal life!” I pushed fingers into my temples and the tasseled hat fell off my head. I felt my face contort with emotion. “People are chasing me and jumping out at me. Everybody knows more than I do and nobody is telling me anything. I can’t live like this!” I repeated.
Before he could speak there was a knock on the door. Instantly we both went quiet.
“Ms. Night? It’s Kirsten from Apartment B. Are you okay?”
I remained silent.
“Ms. Night? I heard you yelling. Do you want me to call that police officer who drove you home? He gave me his card when he was here on Wednesday.”
Hudson had a finger up to his mouth but her last words made his hand drop. It was do or die time. I took a deep breath to steady my voice.
“Kirsten, it’s okay. I’m on the phone.”
I watched the shadow below my door stay steady then retreat. “Okay, sorry to bother you. Give Rocky a kiss for me!”
I suddenly pushed Hudson against the wall behind the door and opened it. “Kirsten, can you do me a favor? Can you take Rocky out one last time tonight?”
“Sure!” she replied. “I have a Milk Bone for him, too.” Rocky was all too happy to follow her down the hall to the front door. I shut the door behind her, but didn’t turn the lock.
“Thank you,” Hudson said.
“You’ve got about two minutes, maybe three, before she gets back. Start talking,” I said.
“Remember I told you I saw someone hanging around my house?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I don’t know if it’s the person who attacked you or not. I’m starting to think it might be a reporter from the Dallas Morning News. He’s watching me. Taking pictures. I work in the garage but it’s getting to me, being watched. I can tell he’s there, I can hear the shutter of his camera. I tried to confront him but he took off and now he stays farther away. I can’t concentrate. I’m sorry, Madison.”
“Why are you apologizing to me?”
“It’s about the job you hired me to do.”
“You’re under surveillance by a reporter who wants to write some kind of expose on you and you came here to tell me you can’t finish a job?” I asked.
He didn’t answer my question. “I was in the garage, working on the table legs. Mortiboy was sitting on the driveway one second but the next second he was gone. I found him halfway across the street. The last thing I need is for him to get into a fight with another cat or start tracking a squirrel so I went after him. When I got back to the garage, the stuff was gone.”
“What stuff?”
“I had a couple sheets of paper on the workbench. Your name was written on them, along with the address of your studio. Dimensions of the table and what I needed to do to the legs. When I got back the papers were gone and the table leg was on the floor. The wood was chipped like it had hit something hard. I don’t know if it can be fixed. If it can’t I’ll reimburse—”
“Hudson! Forget about the table leg.”
“When I realized the invoice was gone I drove to your studio. You weren’t there. I got worried and came here looking for you.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I’m not sure. I left the lights off.”
“Where’s your truck?”
“I parked it on a side street and walked. I thought it was best not to be seen.”
My mind raced in a thousand directions. If Tex had taken two minutes to cruise the side streets around my apartment building looking for something suspicious, he would have seen Hudson’s truck. Whether I was high up on Tex’s radar or not, he was a cop first, and I doubted a detail like that had escaped his vision.
Before I could talk, there was a knock on the door. “Madison? It’s Kirsten.”
Hudson stepped back into the shadows. I hobbled to the door and opened it. The teenager handed Rocky to me.
“Why are you carrying him?”
“I don’t know. He seems awfully tired. We got outside and he just wanted to sit by my feet. Are you sure he needed to go?”
“No, just thought it would be a good idea. Thanks, Kirsten.”
“Anytime. Good night!” She bounded back down the stairs to her apartment below mine. If she’d
heard Hudson and me earlier, no doubt she’d hear two sets of footsteps all night if he stayed and that would raise more questions than I was ready to answer. Including whether or not I was capable of allowing Hudson to spend the night.
When I locked the door behind me I heard Hudson opening and shutting the freezer. He returned with a Ziploc bag filled with ice. “Your knee. You’re hurt. Sit down.”
“Not now.”
“Madison, you can’t keep going like this. Ice it.”
I sat down and held the ice bag against my joint. The shock of cold against my skin shot through my whole body but I fought the instinct to pull it away.
He was right. Icing it for fifteen minutes was the best thing I could do for the painful, inflamed joint right now.
“I shouldn’t have come here but I had to warn you that someone out there might be coming after you. I don’t think he took anything else.”
“Could it have been the person who attacked me outside of your house?”
He nodded. “I thought of that, too.”
“You can’t stay here tonight.”
“Madison, I’m not looking for that.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I don’t think you should go home yet, but too many people could become suspicious if you stay here with me. I have an idea.”
“I don’t want you getting any more involved with me than you are right now. Someone’s trying to bring up a lot of dirt from a long time ago and you don’t need to get muddy, too.”
“Hudson, I am involved. I don’t know how or why, but I’m fairly sure one of the victims was supposed to be me. I was attacked outside of your house. I was chased away from Thelma Johnson’s house today. As much as I like you, I’m not getting involved purely for your benefit. Whatever this is about, I want it to be over, too.”
“What’s your idea?”
The man who rented the last apartment on the first floor, opposite Kirsten’s, was away on business. Luckily, the apartment above his was vacant. Hudson could stay there, undiscovered. I instructed him to wait for me inside while I got a few things together to help him get through the night.
Rocky was exhausted, more so than I’d ever seen. He padded his little furry feet to a spot under the low coffee table and lay down. I moved through the apartment, opening closets and stuffing items into a suitcase: pillow, blanket, overnight kit. When I finished I pulled it across the hall and opened the door. Hudson stood by the back window staring out over the parking lot.
“Still no car?”
“Still no car.”
“New rental?”
“New rental.”
“Madison, I wish you weren’t involved,” he said, turning to face me. I was embarrassed that my personal boundaries kept me from inviting him to sleep on my sofa, but I wasn’t there yet. I needed space and control, two things I was used to having. The past few days had shaken me up more than I wanted to admit to myself and I was clinging to whatever I could.
“Here’s a pillow, comforter, and blankets. There’s some other stuff in the suitcase. I know it’s not much. The water’s on so you can shower or...” my voice trailed off. “I should just—”
“Don’t. I’m fine here. This is more than I expected. Thank you.”
There were several feet separating us, unlike last night when his arms were around me, yet our eyes connected in a way that made me feel like we were inches apart. I wanted to cross the room and have him fold me into his embrace to comfort me but knew that was little more than a selfish thought. He needed comforting, too.
“Hudson, I need to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“What were you doing at White Rock Lake the night Sheila Murphy was killed?”
His head dropped and he stared at the bleached wood floor. I was afraid of the question and afraid of his answer, but it was something I had to know. I waited. He pushed one leg out farther than the other and rested the heel of his sneaker on the floor, his toe pointing up, then nervously bounced it a couple of times.
“I was going through a rough time. Getting desperate and thinking about doing some stuff that would have been a really bad idea. I was out of work and needed someone to talk to. She was right there, and it had been a long time since I talked to anyone the way I talked to her. I didn’t want to wait until morning so I broke in.”
I didn’t like what I heard but if he’d been with someone, a woman, then he’d have an alibi. All he had to do was say who she was.
“So you had an alibi. Whoever she is, whoever you’re trying to protect, wouldn’t she confirm that you were with her?”
Unless he was with a married woman who had more to lose than to gain. It was the only scenario I could imagine, the only reason someone wouldn’t defend him or give him something to cling to during the murder investigation.
“Hudson, why can’t you ask this woman to tell the cops you were with her?”
“Because she’s dead, too.”
My head started to spin.
TWENTY
“I was visiting my grandmother’s grave,” Hudson said. “I was low, lower than I ever remember being, that night. You know, you try to do the right thing, you work hard and think being honest and having integrity is going to get you somewhere, but it doesn’t. My friends were getting into some bad stuff, stealing and holding up convenience stores. I broke away from them before I got pulled into their shit, but it was tough. They thought I was going to turn on them. I thought about it, you know. I was at rock bottom, I thought I was going to lose the house, lose everything I had. So I went to her grave in Cox cemetery.”
He laid back and reached a hand into the front pocket of his jeans, and pulled out a pristine white linen handkerchief that he unfolded. Nestled inside was a decorative silver hat pin.
“This was hers. I carry it around with me as a reminder of what it was like before—before. She was the only person I had.” He stared at the hat pin for several seconds and I didn’t interrupt him. He rolled it between his thumb and index finger, as though it had special powers, and for a moment I started to wish that it did.
“It was the first time I’d been there since she died. I didn’t like looking at that headstone and thinking about her under the ground. But that night I went to the cemetery and sat next to her plot and talked about everything. I told her what my friends were up to, and how I thought about doing it, too. It felt like I was talking to her. I could hear her voice. I could feel her presence. It was like I wasn’t alone anymore, like someone was there to make sure I made the right decisions.
“When I left I felt better than I had in a long time. I drove home and saw a woman running down the side of the road and stopped to help her out. You know the rest.”
“Hudson, why didn’t you tell me that the lieutenant was her boyfriend? It was in the papers. You must have known.”
He stared at the ground. “I’ve got my own demons. If I want people to move on, it’s not my place to dredge up somebody else’s.”
I couldn’t leave him alone, not now, not after he’d opened up to me about that. “Wait here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
When I returned to the apartment it was with another pillow and blanket under my left arm and a tired dog draped over my right shoulder. I set everything down and set up camp next to him. Rocky’s eyes were only half-open. He walked toward Hudson and sprawled on top of his blanket and promptly fell asleep.
“Madison, go back to your apartment.”
“Not yet. I want to talk to you.”
He reached a hand out and pushed a piece of blonde hair away from my forehead. I didn’t want to think about how I looked after the day I had. His finger was rough, calloused from working with his hands, but gentle as it traced down my cheekbone and under my chin. He pulled his hand away as if he realized what he had been doing and thought I’d find it inappropriate. The fact that I hadn’t stopped him should have clued him in that I didn’t mind.
“Hudson, what did you and Sheila talk about duri
ng that ride?” I asked.
He lowered himself to the floor and untied each of his sneakers, then set them along the baseboard before answering.
“Not a lot. She was scared, but she didn’t want to talk about it. I asked her if she wanted to go to the cops and she said no. I got the feeling she knew who was chasing her and wanted to handle it on her own. I know he didn’t hurt her, not before I found her, only shook her up and took her clothes. She tried to act brave but when she flagged me down, she looked terrified. I’ll never forget the look on her face. Think about it, she was alone by the lake. Some weirdo in a mask shows up and chases her through the woods.”
“And takes her clothes. She wasn’t hurt?”
“Not that she said. And she didn’t look like she’d been touched. Just panicked. Like she didn’t know if she should run or not, if it was some kind of a joke. I think that’s why she didn’t go to the cops. She’d been drinking at the party, and someone in a mask shows up and demands her clothes? Almost doesn’t sound real.” He sank down under the light sheet and rested his head on the pillow.
He was right, it didn’t sound real. Something was missing from the puzzle, but I couldn’t focus. The ice had helped my knee significantly, but my body and my brain were slowing down with the lack of sleep. I wanted to keep talking. There might be something he knew that I didn’t, but all I wanted to do was close my eyes. I folded the light comforter around me like a soft taco shell and rolled onto my side to face him. His eyes were shut and his even breathing blended with Rocky’s own puppy breaths. Whether or not I could keep myself awake enough to keep talking, Hudson was out cold.
My internal alarm clock woke me first, and it took several seconds to figure out where I was. My joints were stiff. I looked at Hudson, still asleep, with his arm draped over Rocky’s fur. It was the most peaceful sight I’d seen in days. I cocked my head to the right and looked at the watch still strapped on Hudson’s wrist. Five-ten.
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