by Angie West
“Okay, get in the house,” he told her, feeling magnanimous all of a sudden.
“Um…” She wrung her hands and shifted her insubstantial weight from one foot to the other, alternating wide, fearful eyes between the house to the left, and him.
“Is that your house?” he asked, forcing some softness into his tone.
She nodded. “There’s someone over there.” She shivered and her terrified gaze settled on Jaxson.
“Come on, get in here and we’ll call the police,” he sighed, leaning forward to clasp his hand lightly over her arm, wincing a little at the sight of his glittering bangle bracelets next to her gold-dust skin. He drew her into the house, glanced around one final time, but there wasn’t much to see. The street was quiet; the rest of the neighborhood was in bed for the night. “The phone’s this way.”
He let go of her and passed through a set of French doors to the living room, without waiting for her to follow. She did, though, and he met her halfway, a white plastic cordless phone held in his outstretched hand. “Are you…okay?” he asked, noticing the way her hand shook when she accepted the phone and sank to the sofa.
He watched her squeeze her eyes shut, nod and dial 911, and he felt like an ass for not asking her sooner. Standing there watching her fingers turn white around the handset of the phone, light gold-and-brown hair falling forward to obscure part of her face, he felt most of his anger begin to cool and fade. She looked so small, almost fragile, sitting there on the couch, curling around herself, one arm wrapped tight around her middle as she spoke into the phone.
“I’d like to report, I mean, I need to report,” she took a deep breath, “a break-in. My house was broken into tonight.” Her voice became stronger as she listened to the dispatcher on the other end of the line and then recited her address.
A second later, she was looking up at Jax again with those wide eyes. Gray, he noticed. Her eyes were gray, maybe blue. The only light in the room came from a single china-blue lamp that sat perched on an antique-looking end table. Briefly he thought about flipping the switch for the overhead lighting but immediately decided against doing so. The woman in front of him looked freaked out enough as it was. Flooding the room in a sudden brightness probably wouldn’t do a whole hell of a lot for her nerves, and the last thing Jaxson needed was a hysterical female… Clearly, she was already on the edge.
“They’re on their way,” she told him. “They said to stay on the line…”
“Okay.” He nodded and dropped to the seat on the opposite end of the couch. She glanced at him and her hands began to shake. Jaxson carefully unwrapped her fingers from around the telephone receiver and easily plucked the object from her grasp.
“We’re going to stay on the line, but I’m setting the phone down until the cops get here,” he told the dispatcher.
“Thank you,” Kate murmured when he’d place the phone facedown between them on the white-and-purple flowered sofa.
“Ah, I’m…sorry, about earlier.” His lips twisted. “It’s been a long day, ya know?”
“Yeah.” She exhaled, then crammed her hands between her knees and trembled, her gaze a thousand miles away.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you, on the porch, okay?” he blurted, forcing the words out through lips that suddenly felt awkward. “I’m having a shit day and it was wrong to take it out on you.”
“Oh.” Her eyes darted to his. It was clear he’d managed to surprise her again. Considering the circumstances, he thought with a grimace, staring down at his cocktail dress, he’d have figured the woman would be beyond surprise, at this point.
“I’m Jaxson, by the way,” he said without holding out his hand.
“Kate,” she murmured, giving him another small, tense, not-quite smile. “I’m sorry I’m bothering you tonight.” She paused and sucked in a deep breath. “I can’t believe this is happening. We just moved in.”
“We?” Jaxson shifted uncomfortably on the couch and entertained dark fantasies of ripping off his pantyhose and putting the damn things through a shredder.
“My sister Lilly lives with me,” she answered before her spine stiffened. “Oh, my God, I need to call her.”
There was panic in her voice, and Jaxson reached into the beaded evening bag on the end table at his elbow. “Here.” He shoved his cell phone at her. “Use this.”
He watched as she punched in a number, her fingers appearing marginally steadier.
“Lilly?” She cleared her throat. “Are you still at Alexandra’s? I need you to stay there, okay? I know you’re spending the night, don’t come home until I call you again. Yeah, no, everything is…fine, but…someone broke into the house, tonight.” She held the phone away from her ear, and Jax heard the screech from the other end of the phone, clear on the other side of the couch. “No, I was at work. I came home and the door was open. And then I thought someone was chasing me. I think whoever broke in was on the porch with me, yeah, around the side of the house. I heard a noise. Yeah. The police are on their way. I’m fine, Lilly, I promise. This is the neighbor’s phone, I’m next door. Listen, I’ve got to go, but I’ll see you in the morning, okay? I’ll just meet you at Alexandra’s. Love you, too.”
The deep tones of a doorbell reverberated through the house as she handed the cell phone back to Jaxson.
“The police are here.”
Chapter Four
Inside Out
“I’ll get the door.” Jaxson sighed and rose from the couch.
Kate watched him disappear from the room. This time, she valiantly tried not to stare—tried and failed. He was wearing a dress. The thought was enough to wring a smothered giggle from her and briefly, she wondered if she was becoming hysterical. She didn’t know what to make of her neighbor. Jaxson.
The name seemed to fit the man; the dress did not. He was tall and looked on the strong side of average, build wise. She hadn’t seen a hint of his real hair beneath the frizzy blonde wig, but his brows were dark brown and well-shaped without crossing into feminine territory.
The rest of him, though… Kate swallowed and peered at the doorway he’d recently exited. She heard voices in the other room and took a deep breath, wiping damp, clammy hands on her pink hospital scrubs. Jaxson stalked into the room then, glowering at her before his expression softened infinitesimally. Two men followed close behind him. They were garbed in dark blue uniforms, with chunky black radios clipped to their belts; both wore shoulder holsters.
Kate nodded at the police, feeling a rush of relief at their larger-than-life presence in the sitting room. Everything would be all right now. Tension uncoiled within her, and she rose to her feet to greet the officers. The younger of the two returned her smile and stood just inside the doorway while the older cop took a seat next to Kate on the couch.
“Your…neighbor, here,” the man’s eyes flickered to Jaxson, an unreadable expression on his face, “tells us you’ve had some trouble tonight.”
He doesn’t know what to make of Jaxson’s appearance, either. “A man broke into my house.”
“You saw the intruder?” This from the cop at the head of the room.
“Well…no.” Kate wet her lips with the tip of her tongue, her eyes seeking out a silent Jaxson for a split second before she returned her attention to the officer’s question. “I guess I just assumed it was a man.”
“We’ve got a couple of our guys over at your place right now. If anyone’s still in the house, we’ll find ’em.” He patted the couch cushion between them before flipping out a small, rectangular notepad and pulling a pen from somewhere inside his vest. Brusquely, he clicked the back of the pen and began to ask questions, pen scratching across paper with each response she gave.
Slowly, Kate began to relax even further. She told the men about her new job at the hospital, about her sister’s recent graduation from high school, and explained how, a month ago, she and Lilly had inherited the house from an aunt, ending with how they’d moved in only today.
Against her wil
l, Kate’s gaze frequently sought out her neighbor. Each time, she found his own gaze already resting on her. But while Kate was becoming increasingly at ease, Jaxson looked anything but. His eyes were glacial pools, and she couldn’t help but wonder at his sudden change of mood from the few moments they spent sitting together on the sofa while they’d waited for the police to show up.
True, even then he hadn’t exactly been Mr. Congeniality, but had at least apologized for his terse, rude statement when he’d first opened the door to find her standing on his porch, gasping and in the full grip of panic.
Kate still didn’t know what to make of that, despite his apology. She’d had her own share of bad days, but she couldn’t imagine opening her door at eleven o’clock at night, finding a distraught woman begging for help on the porch, then slamming the door on said woman, after telling her to call a cop. Her attention shifted to Jaxson’s floral-print dress and dark beige pantyhose. The Florence Henderson look was at direct odds with his gruff demeanor and downright surly expression. There was a great deal she didn’t understand about her neighbor. Well, at least he’d stopped scowling. Intuition prompted her to add “for now” to the assessment.
Once the police had her statement, it was time to walk through her house, accompanied by the officers, of course. The last thing she wanted to do now was go home, but they needed to shadow her from room to room in order to determine if any of her and Lilly’s personal property had been taken. The cop who’d sat beside her put a hand to the side of his radio when it chirped loudly in the otherwise silent room.
“Go ahead, Gabe.”
“All clear over here, Benson.”
“Ten, four. We’re bringing the home owner now.”
“They didn’t find him?” Kate’s lips turned down at the corners.
The officer shook his head. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yes.” She wasn’t, but didn’t see the point in admitting so to the three men in the room, or in delaying the inevitable. That was her house next door, hers and Lilly’s, and she’d have to go back sooner or later. Might as well be now, she reasoned, climbing to her feet and following behind the two officers. Jaxson took up the rear, but paused at the front door.
“Aren’t you—” she broke off abruptly, biting back what she’d been about to ask. Of course he wasn’t coming. He was her neighbor, not her friend. Her problems had nothing to do with him, and he’d been the first to make that abundantly clear.
“Do you want me to come with you?” he asked with a sigh.
Kate forced her mouth to close. “Uh, no, that’s okay.” she finally said, her hands reaching up to twist and re-tuck a lock of hair that had fallen over her right shoulder. “I mean, not unless you want to. If you’ve got something else to do…” She knew the hopeful expression on her face was obvious, clear for him to see. Beyond the front porch, the night was dark, ominous, and suddenly she didn’t care if she sounded desperate or not.
Jaxson stared down at her for several long beats before he nodded. “Let’s go.”
* * *
The house was empty and looked marginally less creepy than it had a half an hour ago when she’d first returned home from work. Absently, she noted the street light was back on; it illuminated their block in a hazy neon glow. Storm clouds continued to roll in from the west, and the night still had a slightly unreal, creepy quality.
Kate forced herself to put one foot in front of the other, trudging up the walkway off of the porch. Jaxson walked silently beside her, lending his comforting, if strange, presence to her wavering sense of calm assurance. Everything was okay. Logically, she knew that. Jaxson was beside her, and four cops waited up ahead on the enormous wrap around porch.
They’d already told her nobody lurked within the confines of her house. But maybe that was the problem. They hadn’t caught the man—the person—who had invaded her space, and that was seriously unsettling. Kate tamped down visions of knife-wielding strangers returning in the middle of the night to ravage and maim her.
The image that dwelled deep within her mind was undeniably graphic, dramatic, but she felt that her concern was a valid one. Who was to say the intruder wouldn’t come back? The more she thought about it, the more sense her theory made. Whoever had violated her space tonight had essentially just gotten away with it. What was to stop him from coming back?
She shivered and inched closer to Jaxson. If someone had told her that by this evening she would be tromping up her creaky porch steps with a police escort on one side and a transvestite on the other, she would have laughed it off as pure fiction. Her arm bumped against the soft fabric of Jaxson’s gown, and she was reminded that sometimes truth was definitely stranger than fiction.
He made her feel safe. Heat infused her skin and she ducked her head, holding out her hand to take her set of keys from the officer who had picked them out of the grass beside the front porch. She didn’t even remember dropping them. Considering the panic she’d been in, and her mad dash to Jaxson’s front porch, it wasn’t a surprise that her keys had been the last thing on her mind.
Kate had been running for her life—and then he’d slammed the door in her face, she reminded herself. Her next door neighbor was a transvestite who apparently suffered from mood swings. He shouldn’t make her feel safe. Kate knew that wanting him here with her right now probably spoke volumes about her mental state…
But she didn’t want to be alone. Not tonight. And he had helped her, after all, so he couldn’t be all bad. A little odd maybe, she cringed when he adjusted the blond wig and stepped over the threshold of her home. Was transvestite the proper term for what he was? She wondered, looping the cold steel key ring over one finger and following him through the door.
“Have you been feeling well, lately, Miss Delaney?” A tall, dark-haired police officer asked the moment she walked into the foyer.
“Um.” Her tongue snaked out, nervously licking her bottom lip. What did this man care how she’d been feeling? She met the man’s intent stare and nodded briefly. “Yes, I feel fine, except for the fact that someone just broke into my house. Why?” she asked, the word coming out stilted, unsure.
“You haven’t been experiencing any unusual stress?”
Stress? What was he getting at?
Jaxson had paused at the entrance to her living room, and Kate watched him turn and frown at the officer. The cop noticed Jaxson staring at him and returned the disapproving look with interest, his eyes skimming disdainfully over the ladies clothing and the bleached, teased wig.
“I haven’t been under stress,” Kate answered, stepping forward and blocking his view of Jaxson. “Why do you ask?”
“Then are you playing some kind of joke, tonight? Do you have a history of mental illness, Miss Delaney?”
“Wha—mental illness?” she croaked.
“What’s the word, Carl?” One of the officers who had been with her next door asked, coming into the room. It was the young one. The one who’d remained by the arched doorway to the sitting room while Kate was being questioned.
“I’ve got a few questions for Miss Delaney,” Carl told the other man. “We didn’t find anyone in the house. There were no signs of forced entry.”
“But my front door—” Kate began, shoulders tensing.
“Oh, there was damage to your front door, all right.” Carl’s lip curled. “The lock had been picked; from the inside.”
The tarnished steel key ring bit into the palm of Kate’s hand. The lock had been picked from inside the house? How? How was that even possible?
“That can’t be. It doesn’t make any sense,” she argued, unconsciously taking a defensive stance.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.” Carl fixed her with another one of those disconcerting, measuring stares. “Reporting a false event is a crime.”
“I didn’t make it up.” The words left her lips in a rush. “Someone really did break into my house tonight. He was waiting for me when I came home. I heard his footsteps on the porc
h and then I ran. The front door was open, he’d definitely been in the house.”
“Is anything missing?” Carl countered, though why he asked, she couldn’t say. He’d seen her walk in just now. He had to know she hadn’t yet had time to walk through the house.
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s look now,” Jaxson interrupted, crossing the room and taking her hand in his much larger one. His rings pressed into her fingers, the chill of the silver and gold dragging her out of her dazed state.
“Jaxson, I don’t get it,” she whispered fifteen minutes later.
They’d gone through both floors of the house, painstakingly checking each room, especially the bedrooms and the kitchen. Granted, she and Lilly didn’t own anything that could be considered extravagant, but there were a few pieces of jewelery each had brought with them from Atlanta, and Aunt Viola had left them a set of sterling silver cutlery. Neither of which had been touched.
Beyond that, they owned the typical household items—a couple of televisions, a VCR, a DVD player, I-pods and a handful of movies. Nothing that couldn’t be tossed into the back seat of a car.
The art on the walls was antique and the furniture was of good quality but those were not things that any average, run-of-the-mill petty thief worth his salt would bother making off with. Regardless, everything was in its place, arranged just as Kate had left it when she’d locked the door behind her that afternoon.
“Well, at least nothing was stolen, right?” Jaxson shrugged and headed down the stairs to join the officers who waited impatiently in the front entryway. “So…what’s with the mirrored room?”