Five in a Row

by Jan Coffey

  “That’s okay.” Emily went back to the fridge, grabbed an open bottle of wine and got two glasses off the shelf. She sat across from her sister. “It’s good for you to say it. To hear yourself. Who knows, but maybe one of these times you’ll learn something from it.”

  “You’ve always done well without all the crapola,” Liz said. “You’re your own person. You don’t need men. You even do without sex…as far as I know.”

  “Hmm…yes, sex. I recall the word,” Emily said with a smile, splitting the wine between the two glasses. “But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you.”

  “See what I mean? You’re always happy. Content with your life, with everything around you. Why can’t I be more like you?”

  Emily knew the truth. Liz couldn’t be like her. Liz’s spirit wouldn’t survive. They were two years apart in age, but from early childhood, they had taken very different approaches to life. Emily had been the bookworm. She had been at the top of her class in high school and had gone to one of the top universities in the country. Liz’s social life had kept her too busy to bother with studying. She’d barely finished high school and had taken a couple of classes at a local community college. From there, she’d decided to travel across country. Their parents gave up on the rebellious younger daughter when she was still in high school, and then moved to Arizona themselves once the girls were on their own. The two sisters’ lives had drifted apart, but Emily had stayed in touch. She loved Liz and knew that her wild sister would one day slow down and realize she wanted some sense of security. Some sense of family.

  Sure enough, it had happened. Emily’s divorce from David had coincided with the end of one of Liz’s more lengthy relationships. This time, the boyfriend had been the owner of a club in Los Angeles where she tended bar. When that came to a crashing halt, Liz had been ready to move to the other side of world. So Emily and Conor and Liz had moved to Connecticut.

  “What is it that makes you so happy…or at least content?” Liz asked again.

  “Having Conor helps. He gives my life direction. But you know better than anyone that things aren’t perfect. I have stuff that terrifies me. But I do something about it if I can.”

  “Yeah, like moving to the boondocks with me. Like helping me start this business.”

  “We helped each other in this. And the boondocks was what I wanted for Conor and me.” She reached over and took Liz’s hand. “Which brings me to something that has been nagging at me for a while.”

  Liz looked concerned. “What?”

  “It’s important that we put it on the table. Today, tomorrow, next month, whenever…if you ever think that starting Eatopia Café was too much, that living in Wickfield is not all you thought it would be, then we need to just step away from it. The business is yours to do as you—”

  “No. Never.” Liz shook her head adamantly. “You have Conor. I have that restaurant. I’m thirty-four years old. Starting that place and keeping up with it is the first thing I’ve done that I’m really proud of.” She squeezed Emily’s hand. “But I need you to continue having faith in me. I won’t blow your investment. I—”

  “I’m not worried about the money. I’m proud of you, too. In fact, let’s forget what I said. We’re happy with Wickfield. Done deal. Now the question is, how could we improve on its limited social circles.”

  The phone rang. Emily reached over and picked it up on the second ring. “Hello.”

  There was silence on the other end. She could hear someone breathing.

  “Hello?” she said again. Nothing.

  She was about to hang up when she heard the voice. Not much more than a whisper.

  “Em.”

  “Who is this?” she asked, sliding off the bench. A chill washed through her body.

  The person on the other end hung up.

  “Who was that?”

  Emily shook her head. “I think it was a crank call. Some heavy breathing. But he knew my name.” She shivered.

  “How many times have I told you to get caller ID?” Liz asked, standing up and reaching for the phone.

  “What’re you doing?” Emily asked as Liz started punching numbers.

  “You’ll pay more for it than it’s worth, but I’m doing a call-trace.”

  Emily thought about all the gifts she’d been receiving in the mail and the feeling she’d had earlier in the hospital parking lot. There had to be a connection. Emily grabbed the wineglass off the table and poured it into the sink. She stared through the small window into the dark backyard. If this were the same person, then he had her phone number. That meant he knew where she lived.

  “That’s not good.” Liz’s worried tone whirled Emily around.

  “What’s not good?”

  “Whoever it was, the creep was calling you from the café.”

  Eight

  Gray patches of clouds raced across the sky. Rain fell in sharp needled bursts for short periods and then stopped, only to start again a few minutes later. Ponchos and umbrellas and tents of every color covered the milling crowds of spectators gathered for the North Atlantic Road Racing Championship at Lime Rock Park. The weather forecast for the day had warned of periods of rain for the early morning, giving away to partially sunny skies by midday.

  Ben opened up an oversized umbrella above Emily’s head as they stepped out of a huge tent beside the paddock and headed toward the Insider’s Club. He glanced up at the threatening skies. They had the first half of their prediction right, he thought.

  “They might postpone the start time if the rain doesn’t ease up.”

  “I don’t think Conor will care at all. He’s on cloud nine already.”

  Ben had hooked the fourteen-year-old up with two of his old racing buddies. One was giving him a tour of the cars in the paddock and explaining the different races they held there each year. The other was actually going to drive him around the 1.53-mile track in the pace car.

  “I have to admit, this is all a surprise to me.”

  “You mean you’re enjoying yourself?”

  “Well, yes, but that’s not what I meant. This is so…I don’t know…civilized, I guess. It looks like a family place.” She stepped closer to him to avoid sloshing through a puddle. “Definitely not what I had expected.”

  “How is it different?”

  “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I was expecting something along the lines of some very low-rent, transient-type trailer park with lots of shirtless, beer-drinking men and their biker babes. I thought it would be one big loud crazy party.” She shrugged. “You know what I mean. I was just thinking in terms of stereotypes.”

  “I knew it.”

  “You knew what?”

  “You’re disappointed. You wanted to see some skin.”

  Emily smiled up at him.

  “That’s the first one of those I’ve seen today. Much better.” Ben nodded toward the fields outside the gate, where acres of RV’s and trucks were parked. “Actually, there’s probably an oversized puddle out there where a group of partiers—and Conor—are watching some mud-wrestling right now.”

  She shot him a narrow glare.

  “I’m just teasing.”

  She slapped him on the arm, but he saw that preoccupied look come back into her eyes.

  Ben had seen that look on her face when he’d picked them up this morning. Emily had seemed mildly upset. He held on to her arm and pulled her closer to his side as a jovial group of four men approached.

  Dressed in a pair of jeans, flat shoes and a red parka that hung below her hips, she still drew men’s attention. She was a little thing. Her large, dark brown eyes were almost black, and she had a delicate, perfectly proportioned face that could have been right off of some classical sculpture. She was beautiful even without any makeup. Her skin was pale and it looked as soft as silk. She wasn’t afraid to look you right in the eye, either. Not to flirt, but to ask intelligent questions.

  “I didn’t want to ask when Conor was with us,” he said, “but i
s everything okay this morning?”

  She nodded, then shook her head. “I shouldn’t…”

  “You shouldn’t what?”

  “It seems like, just because I work with computers, people feel almost obligated to tell me all of the troubles they have with their equipment. I don’t want to do that to you.”

  “People do that?”

  “Of course. And it doesn’t matter if it has to do with downloading their e-mail, or that the disk drive on their PC won’t eject. One little old lady wanted to know if the computer had to be on for her to plug her vacuum cleaner into the little three-hole plug in the back of the tower.”

  “Were you able to help her?”

  She smiled. “I told her that even though it was a little more convenient, she’d do better using an extension cord to a wall socket.”

  Ben closed the umbrella and placed one hand on her back, ushering her ahead of him into the chaletlike building on a hill overlooking the S-turns. The Insider’s Club was one of the best places to watch the races from.

  “Well,” he said, “now I really want to know what’s bothering you.”

  “The police are already working on it.”

  “Is it that serious?”

  She peeled off the dripping parka. She was wearing a black cashmere sweater underneath. Everything about her was soft—except her mind, and he knew those brain cells were clicking along right now.

  “It might be. I don’t know. Actually, it’s probably nothing. But since I live in Wickfield, where the annual crime rate generally consists of someone taking someone else’s bike for a joyride, it’s a little nerve-racking.”

  “Now I have to hear it.”

  They got a table by the windows overlooking the paddock and the track. She ordered coffee, and Ben did the same. Emily stared outside at the throngs of people sitting in chairs and on grandstands both inside and outside the track.

  She’d piqued Ben’s curiosity. He reached out and touched her hand.

  “Em, what happened?”

  She let out a deep breath before answering and then looked at him.

  “Somebody broke into the restaurant last night. He came through the back door and without any difficulty at all, it seems, disarmed what we laughingly call an alarm system. He didn’t bother with the three-hundred-plus dollars we had in the cash register, he didn’t touch any of the food or equipment and he didn’t destroy or vandalize anything in the front of the café. His only interest seemed to be in checking out my office and my computer, stealing a couple of my pictures and then calling me at home from my own office.”

  It took a couple of seconds for everything to sink in. “You talked to him?”

  “Some heavy breathing, he whispered my name and then he hung up.”

  “Did you recognize the voice?”

  “No.” She rubbed her neck. Her expression once again showed the stress she was feeling.

  “Could it have been your ex-husband? An old boyfriend? Somebody you might have ditched recently?”

  “That’s what the police asked me.” She shook her head. “My ex-husband, David, is happily married and lives in San Francisco. He has no interest whatsoever in my life.”

  “How about recent relationships?”

  She shrugged. “You have to have boyfriends before you can ditch them.”

  Ben tucked his curiosity about Emily’s personal life away and watched her nod pleasantly to the waitress who served their coffee. She waited until the young woman had moved out of the earshot.

  “I have an uncomfortable feeling that this break-in last night might be related to some strange things that have been going on in my life for a while.”

  “What strange things?”

  She tore a sugar packet open and poured it into her coffee. “Gifts. I started getting small gifts in the mail this past summer from some anonymous sender who just signed himself, ‘A Fan.’ No address that I could trace, but they were all postmarked from Albany, New York.”

  “Did you report this?”

  She shook her head again and grabbed another sugar packet. “The gifts were small and thoughtful. Stuff I might have mentioned in my online classes that I was looking for or that I’d enjoyed. So I figured, whoever this person was, he or she had to be one of my students.”

  “Is there a registration list of the people who take your classes?”

  She stirred the second pack and shook her head. “No. We don’t charge anything. I collect a fee from the company who sponsors them. Advertising money pays for it. Anyone can show up in the chat room on Monday nights and read as I type away. Then we have question-and-answer sessions that really turn into discussions.”

  “There must be a log kept of the participants.”

  “I’ve been doing this chat for quite a while now, and that list would probably be pretty long. Thousands, I’d bet. And a lot of changing addresses. Don’t forget, these are computer people.”

  “Do you have regulars that you’ve come to know?”

  She gave another halfhearted shrug and grabbed another sugar packet. “It’s tough to pay attention to who comes and goes when you’re typing a hundred and twenty words a minute. Also, there’s always a moderator who handles the protocol. I do download the text of the lesson afterward, but unless the person had a question or made a comment, their ID wouldn’t show up on what I keep.”

  “These gifts.” His eyes followed the movement of her hand as she dumped the contents of yet another sugar pack into her coffee. “Were they personal? Do you know if he’s…well, physically attracted to you?”

  A deep blush crept into her cheeks, but one dark brow went up in amusement when she finally met his gaze. “A flower bulb, some chocolate, a computer manual, an old watch. I’ve been out of the loop for a while…are these things in or out as date gifts?”

  “Definitely in. And I think I could learn a few things from this guy.” He took a sip of his black coffee. “What I was trying to get at was whether this guy is dangerous or not. There’s a big difference between someone wanting to mess with your head and…well, wanting something more.”

  “Everything seemed so harmless before. I never felt threatened at all.” She reached for two packs this time. She tore them in half at once and dumped them in. “Last night was…is…something new. He’s in my space now, and I can feel it.”

  “Did you report all of this to the police?”

  “Not all of it. There’s only so much you can explain at midnight, especially when it doesn’t look like any damage was done.”

  She absently stirred the spoon in the cup. Outside, she was calm, but he knew her nerves were wired just beneath the skin’s surface.

  “So you didn’t tell them about the gifts?”

  “No, just about the phone call to the house.”

  “And your missing pictures?”

  “I didn’t notice them gone until the police had left. And even as I was talking to the patrolmen, I realized my home number is on speed dial for the phone on my desk. It could have been accidental. I’m unlisted.”

  “How did they leave it?”

  “He was going to file the report, but he went away thinking it might have been some high school kids out looking for mischief. You know, just checking things out. Seeing if they could get in.”

  “And leaving the money in the cash drawer?” he responded skeptically.

  She shrugged again.

  “If you agreed with that hypothesis, you wouldn’t be feeling like this, would you?”

  Her dark eyes came up. “You’re supposed to be calming me down, telling me there’s nothing to worry about, that this is all the product of my wild imagination.”

  “I’d tell you that if I thought it was nothing.” Ben took hold of her hand when she reached for another sugar packet. “By the way, how do you like your coffee?”

  “Milk, one sugar.” She followed the direction of his gaze at the mess she’d made of the torn and crumpled sugar packs. She frowned. “Great. That shows real composure, does
n’t it?”

  He smiled and motioned for the waitress to take away the coffee. She asked for a fresh cup.

  “I’m not sure a caffeinated drink is the best thing for you right now.”

  “I got less than two hours sleep last night. Trust me, you don’t want to deprive me of coffee.”

  Ben was glad that she had decided not to cancel the outing. Whether lack of sleep was the cause or not, he was also pleased that she felt comfortable enough to tell him what was going on.

  “What are you going to do next?”

  “Nothing,” Emily said. “The two cops that showed up at the café last night took down the information. I think that’s the last Liz and I are going to hear about it, though.”

  “Jeremy Simpson, the detective in town…he looked like a friend of yours.”

  She nodded noncommittally. “I wouldn’t abuse my friendship with him. I read in the paper a few weeks ago that he’s working with a state police task force on something. He’s got plenty on his plate, as is. As for the rest of them, this will probably not even be a blip on the radar screen.”

  Ben watched Emily wrap her hands around the new cup of coffee that was placed in front of her. “It’s not a favor to talk to him about it. It’s Simpson’s job to look into these kinds of situations.”

  “But there’s nothing to look into. There have been no threats on my life. And there’s no proof that there’s any connection at all between those gifts and the break-in last night.” She looked up wearily. “The more I talk about it, the more I feel like a fool even bringing it up with you.”

  “You shouldn’t feel that way.”

  “But I’ve totally destroyed your image of me as a highly desirable potential colleague. You must have already changed your mind about making me a job offer.”

  “No chance.” He reached across the table and took her hand. “Don’t try to diminish what may potentially be going on here. You don’t know who you’re dealing with. You have no idea how dangerous this weirdo could be. In a case like this, you’re much better off being safe.”