The Shadow: Someone is Watching (Rahab's Rope Series Book 1)

by Kimberly Rae

  When the driver’s door opened, Meagan dropped the curtain back in place. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  Kelsey moved to take her place next to the window. “I’ll stay here. Let me know if you need anything.” She pulled her phone from the pocket of her flannel pajama pants and held it up. “I’m ready to call Nathan if...” She looked at Pops. “...if our visitor is a friend of his or something.”

  Meagan nodded and tried to keep from running on her way to the front door to check the deadbolt. Locked. Next, now out of Pop’s vision, she raced to the table in the hallway near the kitchen where she had stashed her purse earlier. She tore through it, mumbling at herself for not having sense to keep important items in one of the outside pockets. “There you are.” She grabbed hold of her cell phone, then her can of mace.

  She could hear the crunch of heavy steps on the gravel. Whoever it was had no qualms about being seen, or the person would not have left the headlights on. Be calm. Stop shaking. She snapped open the protective cover on her mace and positioned it to be ready if the need arose. The little defensive weapon seemed so insufficient all of a sudden. Should she get a gun? She hated guns. Didn’t know how to use one. And if she got one, what if Pops found it on a day his blood sugar was off and some tragedy occurred? Meagan would never forgive herself.

  “Meagan Winston!”

  The masculine voice rang loud and clear. Meagan’s stomach quivered and she clamped her jaw tight to keep her teeth from chattering. At the bolted front door now, mace in hand, cell phone in her other hand in case she needed to summon help, she called out, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “Meagan, it’s Cole. Come outside.”

  “Is that the handsome soldier?” her grandfather asked from the next room. “He’s here at a rather late hour. Kids these days,” he muttered, then grinned at her. “Go on out! Maybe he’ll serenade you.”

  That’s about as likely as the man getting down on one knee to propose. Meagan unbolted the lock and turned the knob, determined to only crack the door enough to tell him to go home. She pulled the old wooden door back and the sight that met her made her gasp. Cole Fleming stood several yards away. The headlights and porch lights illuminated blood and dirt all over his torn clothing. She yanked open the door and moved out onto the porch before realizing it.

  “What happened to you?” She tried to shove her mace and her phone each into her pockets, but remembered her fleece pants didn’t have pockets. She rushed forward but stopped at the edge of the porch. “Are you all right?”

  He swayed slightly and shivered where he stood. His jacket was nowhere to be seen and his white shirt was soaked on the left side, if not all over. His right pant leg was in shreds below his knee. Blood stains spattered the arms of his shirt, and several matted his face as well. The side of his face without blood was smeared with dirt. “I’ve been worse,” he said. “I’m glad to see you’re at home.”

  “You need medical attention.” She came down the steps. “Who did this to you?”

  “An old lady in a grey Oldsmobile.” His eyes, reflecting the porch lights, penetrated deep into hers, never leaving her face. “Anyone you know?”

  “What?” She had come close and reached a hand toward the largest cut on his cheek. “You think I had something to do with this?”

  “You tell me, Meagan Winston.”

  She dropped her hand. “I’ve told you since the beginning. I’m not part of this at all! How could you even think I would—would—” She looked him over. “What on earth happened to you?”

  “It’s a long story, but I need to get home.”

  “You need to get to a doctor!”

  He shook his head. “I can handle it.” She was shocked speechless when he reached out a hand and cupped her jaw, pulling her chin up until she met his intense gaze. He looked at her for several moments before saying, “I won’t tell you what job I do, Meagan Winston, but if you want to know, I can show you why I do it.”

  Breathless at his unexpected touch, the calluses of his fingers against her skin both comforting and disconcerting, she nodded once. “O-okay.”

  “I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning at seven.”

  When she revised his statement with, “I’ll follow you in my car,” he dropped his hand and turned away. As he walked out of the beam of the headlights, she looked past and saw he’d come in an unfamiliar car. Had he wrecked his? If he’d been in an accident, why hadn’t EMS workers on the scene taken him to the hospital? “Be careful on your way home,” she said, once it was out of her mouth realizing what a silly statement that was.

  At the door of the car, he turned and began to speak, but then, mouth still open, he stopped and stared. His gaze went from her flowered robe to her reindeer pants, all the way down to her fluffy bunny slippers. “Am I imagining things?” he asked.

  She wrapped both arms around herself, though it did nothing to hide her atrocious outfit. “If I said yes, would you believe me? And not remember this in the morning?”

  He shook his head and almost smiled, then got into the car and shut the door, soon making his way out of her driveway and onto the road again. Meagan took slow steps back inside, her mind swimming, questions overriding embarrassment. Who would want to hurt Cole? Why Cole instead of Steve? Even more pressing, why Cole instead of her?

  “You should have invited him in.”

  Meagan imagined her grandfather’s reaction had Cole come inside covered in blood and dirt. “I don’t think he wanted to come in tonight.”

  “Well, he’d better know that he needs to ask your old grandpa before he starts up anything official. You be sure to let him know that.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry, Pops.” She helped him stand and stabilize his weight, then they hobbled together toward the first bedroom.

  He chuckled as he dropped onto the bed. “I’m not so old I don’t remember that it’s more romantic outside, without having to make small talk with old folks. It’s tough pretending you came to visit them, all the time knowing you really came to get a goodnight kiss in the moonlight.”

  Meagan smiled as he began the familiar story of how he met Nana. He talked as she helped him through the bedtime rituals, making sure he took his final supplements for the day. She removed his slippers and set them neatly on the floor next to his bed. Would Cole get home safely? She did not even know where he lived, or how to contact him to check and see if he was okay. He had been a soldier, she reminded herself, and was more than capable of dealing with violent situations. Unlike herself. Was the person who set her up to take the blame for the drugs the same person who had harmed Cole tonight? Why? She thought of Cole’s assumption that she might be part of the attack. Just the thought that he would consider such a thing made her feel ill.

  There was no use trying to figure it out. Wherever Cole took her tomorrow morning and whatever he shared might help some of this make more sense. At least now she was fairly certain Cole was a person she could trust. Someone else must have left the note and, according to Cole, followed her for days. But who? And why?

  She pulled the covers up to Pop’s chin. Hopefully he would sleep hard and she would get a good full night’s sleep as well. She blushed with the hope that Cole would also sleep hard and not remember the bunny slippers or the rest of her getup in the morning, or at least have the grace to not mention them.

  “Did he kiss you goodnight?” her grandfather asked on her way out of the room.

  “No, Pops. He didn’t.”

  “Could be he doesn’t know how you really feel. You are good at hiding your feelings, you know.” Her grandfather smiled from the bed. “I could always tell when your Nana wanted to be kissed. She’d take just one step closer and lift her chin just a hair, or she’d run a finger across her bottom lip. That used to drive me distracted. You should try it with your man.”

  “Pops, I—”

  He coughed and Meagan reached for the glass of water on his bedside table. After she helped him drink, he sighed
deeply. “I just want you to know the happiness we knew for forty-nine years. Next to God’s love, married love is the best thing in the world.”

  She smiled at him. “Right now I just want to get some sleep.”

  His eyelids slid closed. “Sweet dreams.”

  Meagan left the room and found Kelsey watching the news back in the living room. “I don’t see anything on here about an accident or any kind of attack or anything,” Kelsey said. “But from what I could see, he looked pretty banged up. What do you think happened?”

  She told Kelsey as much as she knew, and after Kelsey agreed to return in the morning to watch over Pops, Meagan said goodnight and retreated to her own room. Weary in too many ways, she climbed into bed, certain her dreams would be far from sweet that night.

  21

  Saturday, January 3

  1:00 a.m.

  “Show your love with flowers,” the commercial said. Soft music played while the man on TV gave a vase of red roses to a woman. Her eyes shone. She kissed him.

  Lucias rolled to his side on the one twin bed in the trailer, irritated as always at the squeak of the broken spring underneath. His mother should have fixed that before she left, or replaced the whole bed. It sagged, and had rips in the mattress from that one year he’d found a stray dog and kept it inside. He’d named the dog Snap. The ungrateful creature tore the place apart. Snap had been Lucias’ first kill.

  Feeling a small twinge of pain on his ankle, Lucias threw off the sheet and reached down to slap away the eight-legged creature and scratch a new bite. That made three that night. He would have to make some changes before Meagan came to live with him. She wouldn’t want to sleep in a bed with spiders.

  He found his phone under an empty milk carton on the chair next to his bed. He’d bought it brand new, his first Smartphone, with the money from the big sale six months ago. It took forever to figure out how to use the dumb thing—it didn’t have any buttons, and the man who sold it to him said to swipe it but all that did was bring up more little square pictures of things. Four new holes got kicked into the wall before he figured out how to make a phone call. He dug around on the kitchen table for the phone book, looked up the nearest florist, and dialed the number, breathing hard as he waited, imagining Meagan’s face when she saw a vase full of flowers. He’d order a bigger vase than the man on TV had. Would she want to kiss him?

  “Hello?” he said when a voice reached his ear. “I want some flowers. Big ones. I—”

  The voice on the other line droned on about leaving a message. Lucias looked at the clock. They would be closed now. Disappointment ran through him like heavy rain. The recording ended and he heard the beep. “I want some flowers,” he said. “The best and biggest you have in your shop. I can pay. I have cash. Take them to Meagan Winston’s house.” He listed directions, but then decided he could not bear to miss seeing her face when the flowers arrived. He had to be there, and not watching from far away.

  This was it, he realized. The perfect opportunity. He would deliver the flowers himself. He would start out in disguise, just in case, but if she invited him in, or if she cried because she was so happy about the flowers, it might be the perfect moment, the time when he could show himself and tell her how he felt about her.

  “I’ll deliver the flowers myself,” he said. The rush was heady, and Lucias knew it wasn’t just leftover buzz from a hit. He was in love. It was wonderful. “I will come in the morning to get them. Bye.”

  He’d never be able to sleep now. Lucias tore out the page in the phone book with the florist’s address on it and set it on the kitchen counter near the door, placing his phone on top to keep it weighted down. Next he began to pick up trash and clear some of the dirty clothes piled high on the wall side of his bed. He emptied the sink of the dirty dishes, throwing them all into a trash bag and tossing the bag outside. He didn’t need dishes anymore now that he used paper plates and plastic silverware. It might take all night to get the trailer looking nice, but it would be worth it. If Meagan came soon to be with him, he wanted things to be good for her.

  Lucias could hardly wait for tomorrow morning. Three long years he’d watched and planned. It was finally time.

  22

  Saturday, January 3

  6:30 a.m.

  Cole’s alarm went off at six-thirty and he rolled out of bed with a moan. His whole body ached. A near scalding hot shower eased his muscles but lathering up caused the multiples cuts on his arms and legs to scream pain. He dressed in a high-collared sweater over jeans, covering most of the bruises and cuts, but there was no hiding the ones on his face, or the large slice across his left hand that looked worse this morning than it had the night before. Cole didn’t have time for an infection. He rummaged with his good hand through a drawer of forgotten first-aid supplies. Finding an expired tube of triple antibiotic ointment, he applied a liberal line of the goo over the cut, then wrapped his palm in gauze and taped it until it held. The makeshift result looked unsightly, but it was better than the flaring red cut.

  Military training had never taught him the skill of getting toothpaste onto his toothbrush using only one hand, but it had taught him how to bear pain, so he used his cut hand as he got ready, putting the thudding into a separate part of his mind. But without the pain overtaking his conscious thoughts, memories flooded in to fill the space.

  “You’re different than the others.” Her dark red lips curved and she leaned forward. “Or am I not attractive enough?”

  The woman defined seduction. She was as beautiful in movement as firelight, and as potentially destructive. Cole sat back in his chair and forced his eyes to remain on her face. “What is it you’re really after?”

  Her false smile dropped to a pout. “Why don’t you have a drink or two? You need to loosen up.”

  “Lose my sense of caution, you mean.” Cole put his hands on his knees, wired tight, alert to her growing frustration.

  Without transition, her eyes began to glisten and her tone dropped from a purr to a hurt and wounded sound. “You think I want to be like this?” she asked. “You think I want to be rejected by my family and my community, an object for men to desire but not to love?” She placed both palms on the table and leaned on them to stand. “They force me to be here, to act like a cheap whore. This isn’t who I am.”

  He stood and used his body to shield her from curious eyes. “Who is forcing you?”

  She had the eyes of a child in a woman’s face. “I can’t talk here, in public. They’ll find out and punish me.” Her whisper turned urgent. “Meet me in the old concrete building two blocks down, the one that got bombed out in the last raid. It’s empty.”

  “I can’t leave my barracks without—”

  She grasped his shirt. “All I need is one piece of information. If I get it, I can go free. Please,” she whispered. “Meet me at midnight and I will tell you everything.”

  Cole returned his toothbrush to its place with his injured hand, using the ache caused by the grip to force his thoughts into neutral territory again. Questions for the dead could not be answered. He turned his mind to a living woman, Meagan Winston. Why had he been willing to take her to see Sadie but not to tell her about his job? Wasn’t taking her to Sadie the higher risk?

  He analyzed himself as he awkwardly pulled his coat on—he needed to buy a new jacket as soon as possible—and found his keys. If Meagan wasn’t guilty of Steve’s accusations, then he wanted her to meet Sadie. If she was guilty, he’d be showing her the perfect spot to find future victims. But he could not stop thinking that, if she saw them, the victims, if she looked them in the eye and knew their names, it might make her pause the next time she made the choice to buy or sell.

  Meagan was already on the porch when he arrived. She sat on a rocking chair, bundled up against the cold. Smoke billowed from her little VW parked just off the drive. Her message was clear: he was not welcome inside her home. She didn’t trust him.

  He didn’t fully trust her either. They were quite
a pair.

  For a moment, as she rose and made her way toward his car, he determined that any woman who wore mismatched pajamas with bunny slippers couldn’t be a hardened criminal. The memory made him smile as he rolled down the window of Steve’s car. “Good morning. You look a lot different than you did last night.”

  She turned beet red and he wanted to laugh. “As do you,” she commented. She looked over his face and then noticed his bandaged hand. “Are you okay?”

  The fact that she asked, that she seemed to care, affected him more than was reasonable. “I’m fine. Ready to go?”

  She nodded. “Where are we going?”

  “Just follow me.”

  All along the twenty minute drive, Cole checked to make sure Meagan was behind him. He also made sure no grey Oldsmobile was behind her. The last thing he wanted was to lead the real drug seller to Shady Grove, Sadie’s secret place of hope and restoration, a place he would fight to protect if necessary. He felt his fight did, in a small way, help Sadie and the others within its walls.

  He pulled into the drive but veered off the path before they reached the security gate. Meagan mirrored his actions behind him and got out of the car. “You’ve definitely maintained your sense of mystery,” she said as he exited the car and joined her outside. “What is this place?”

  “It’s a recovery location for teens who’ve been victimized into drug or alcohol addiction,” he told her. “From here, would you ride with me? They don’t let in a lot of visitors, so it will be easier to explain that you’re with me if you are, literally, with me.”

  She glanced around, her face wary. Her gaze landed on the sign with the campus’ name and purpose statement on it. “Okay.” She locked her car and walked to Steve’s vehicle, commenting on Cole’s music once she was settled inside. “I wouldn’t have guessed you to be a Southern Gospel fan.” The guard waved them through the gate and she looked back. “Will my car be okay parked out there?”