The Man from Nowhere

by Rachel Lee

  This was something she’d been reluctant to share even with her girlfriends, a subject she had tried to leave behind her in Boston. But maybe the only way to exorcise a demon was to face it head-on. “It was practically a country-Western song.”

  At that he smiled. “Most of life is a country-Western song.”

  “I’m beginning to think so.” She bit her lower lip, then said, “I had an affair with a married man. I didn’t know he was married, in fact, he told me he was divorced. It’s not something I would have done knowingly.”

  He nodded encouragingly.

  “What killed me was discovering that he’d lied to me. If he could lie to me about that, how many other things had he lied about? I felt betrayed and dirty. Used and humiliated.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said gently.

  Remembering, she closed her eyes. Anger tried to surface again, but she didn’t allow it. “I guess I still feel those things,” she said quietly. “All of them. And sometimes they’re still strong.”

  She opened her eyes and peeked at him, daring to see his reaction. All she found was kind understanding, no judgment.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “Sometimes people can do unforgivable things.”

  “Yeah. And I keep telling myself that his wife must feel a million times worse.”

  “That doesn’t negate what he did to you,” Grant said.

  “No, but of the two of us, I think she got the worse deal. Getting out was easy for me.”

  “Did she leave him?”

  Trish shrugged one shoulder. “I think she did for a while. I heard something about them going to counseling after a bit. And that’s when I decided I needed a new job. People may be well-intentioned, but I didn’t want to keep hearing the gossip.”

  “Are you sure it was well-intentioned?”

  “What difference does it make? Oh, I imagine some folks thought I must have known he was still married, but my friends defended me. They, at least, knew better. Still, it’s awful to know you’re the subject of conversations at the water cooler.”

  “How did it get out, anyway?”

  “His wife. She wanted me fired.”

  “Ouch.” He winced. “I think I’d have fired him, not you.”

  “Nobody got fired, but I sure had an uncomfortable interview with the partners.” She could still squirm, remembering. “I guess that’s the reason a lot of businesses have a rule about not dating coworkers.”

  “That rule isn’t worth the paper it might be written on. People meet at work, they feel attraction, some even get married. Yeah, a bad relationship can cause disruption, but only if the people involved aren’t mature enough to keep it out of the workplace. That’s all I ever asked of my employees—don’t bring it to work.”

  He shook his head. “In a case like yours, I probably would have fired the guy. For using you the way he did, and for his wife bringing it into the workplace by trying to have you fired. I would have considered him more trouble than I wanted, both then and down the road.” He gave her a slight smile. “I don’t need unscrupulous guys like that working for me.”

  She felt herself smiling back almost shyly. “The partners seemed more intent on finding out if I was inclined to be a home-wrecker.”

  “Then they were idiots. The home-wrecker was him, not you. He was the one who was supposed to be off the market.”

  “You really mean that.”

  “Of course I do.” He waved a hand. “I just don’t subscribe to this notion that men shouldn’t have to exercise self-control, and that women are always at fault when some guy can’t keep his pants zipped.”

  A small giggle escaped her, whether from his irritation or his description, she wasn’t sure.

  He cocked a brow at her. “You think I’m funny?”

  “Not exactly. It’s just the way you said it.”

  “I’m only saying what’s true. There’s a tendency in society to accept that men are ruled by rampaging sex hormones and it’s up to the woman to keep her head. Nuh-uh. I don’t buy it. We may tend to think sexually more often, but that doesn’t mean we’re slaves to our drives. And if we are slaves to our drives, maybe we ought to pack it up and go home and let women rule the world, because after all, women are supposed to have enough self-control for all of us.”

  Now she was giggling more loudly, and the twinkle in his dark eyes said that was exactly what he had wanted.

  “So you’d have fired him,” she said, still chuckling.

  “I’d have booted him so fast his head would have been spinning.”

  “I would have liked to have seen that.”

  “I bet you would.”

  Her chuckle faded, and she sighed. “He had kids. I’m glad he didn’t lose his job for their sakes.”

  “He should be the one worrying about his kids, not you. But I guess you have a generous heart.”

  “I hope so.” She smiled. “I like you, Dr. Grant Wolfe.”

  He shook his head. “I prefer just ‘Grant.’ ‘Doctor’ sounds like I should have a rubber glove and a stethoscope. And I’m glad you like me.”

  Just like that, the air became pregnant. Their eyes locked, and Trish stopped breathing. Every cell in her body seemed to be reaching for him. Madness. Sheer madness. Wonderful madness. Everything else vanished in a longing so intense it took her totally by surprise.

  Then the oven timer dinged. Saved by the bell.

  “Oh!” she said, startled. “I haven’t even started the broccoli. And the potatoes…”

  She jumped up to get to work, feeling as if she had just peered over a steep cliff and had almost fallen.

  No, she told herself as she started the broccoli and began to make mashed potatoes. No. She didn’t know him, really, and anyway, he was the worst possible kind of married man.

  Married to a ghost.

  Chapter 7

  They talked randomly through dinner, and afterward he insisted on doing the dishes. She sat at the table, chatting with him while he loaded the dishwasher and scrubbed the roasting pan. They carefully avoided discussing any matter of seriousness, avoided allusions to the events that had brought them together.

  In short, they took a break.

  But then he said he had to go back to the motel.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why can’t you just stay here until it’s time to go sit on the bench?”

  “Because I feel a compulsion to follow the path. It’s like I have to do it.” He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry, Trish, but I really have to do this. Maybe I’m nuts, or maybe there’s a reason. I don’t know. I just know what I have to do.”

  She nodded, and realized she was trying to hang on to something that was only going to go away eventually regardless. She had to let him go because she couldn’t afford to let him stay.

  He took a few moments to check his messages on her computer, but all he heard from Dex was, “Still looking. Will take a bit longer.”

  “Maybe by tomorrow,” Grant said after he showed her the message.

  “It might not be related,” she reminded him…or maybe she was reminding herself. Everything had gone off-kilter, first with Grant’s arrival and now with her own doubts about the anxiety that had been plaguing her.

  She wasn’t being herself at all. Not at all. Best to take Grant back to the motel and try to find her footing again.

  So she did exactly that. But for some reason it didn’t help at all.

  At midnight Grant was on the bench again, watching her house, exactly as he had every previous night. The compulsion hadn’t weakened at all, which he interpreted to mean that the threat still remained, despite warning her.

  He kept hoping for another vision or a dream. Something, anything that would tell him Trish was out of danger.

  But somehow he felt the web drawing tighter around him, as if he were being sucked into the vortex of whatever he had foreseen.

  The night was cooling rapidly, and he zipped his coat as quietly as possible. Haunted by memor
ies of the premonitions that might have saved his family, he could no more have budged from that bench than he could have stepped out in front of a racing train. For some reason he had to be here. Somehow he had to atone, if only by giving witness to his belief that such premonitions could happen, could be real. And if there was a damn thing he could do to save Trish from that shadowy figure with the silenced gun, he would do it. At any cost.

  Abruptly the compulsion let go. He glanced at his watch and saw that twenty minutes had passed. It always let go at the same time, which to him indicated that whatever he had been brought here for, it would be over in about twenty minutes.

  And then what? A woman saved? Or would he be too late, helpless in the face of a predestined future?

  He could absolutely not bear that possibility.

  He closed his eyes for a few moments, remaining on the bench. Quantum probabilities argued against a fixed future. Instead, they argued for something even more complicated: a future that contained all probabilities. In which case, you had to steer your course, make your decisions, do everything you knew how to bring about a particular outcome.

  Somehow, some way, a murderer had become a high probability in Trish’s life. Somehow he had been dragged into the whirlpool of that probability. But he had to believe it was just a probability, not a certainty. He had to.

  Sighing, he opened his eyes and levered himself up from the bench. The instant he did so, Trish’s porch light came on and she stepped out. He waited, but felt nothing wrong, so he started to cross the street.

  “At least come in for a hot drink,” she called as he neared.

  He couldn’t for the life of him find anything wrong with that idea. The compulsion was gone, the nightmare darkness that hovered around the edges of his mind had withdrawn. Somehow he knew tonight was not the night.

  “Thanks,” he said as he reached her steps. A painful climb with his hip stiffening, but he made it. Just four steps.

  And then they were back in her kitchen and she was offering him hot chocolate.

  “It’s the instant kind,” she said almost apologetically.

  “That would be great. It’s the only kind I’ve ever had.”

  “Remind me someday to make it for you from scratch. But it’s too late at night now. I don’t want to fuss with much except heating water.”

  “That’s plenty of fuss. Am I turning you into a night owl?”

  She shook her head as she put the kettle on. “Anxiety is doing that. Otherwise I would never have seen you on that bench.”

  All of a sudden he asked, “Did you reply to that e-mail from your CFO?”

  “Hank? No, not yet.”

  “Good. Don’t. Use vacation as your cover. Leave him wondering.”

  She sat facing him, waiting for the kettle. “What brought that on?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it must have been niggling at me somehow.” He spread his hands. “I can’t really explain any of this, Trish. I wish I could.”

  “I know.” She took a paper napkin from the wicker basket she always kept on the table and began folding it with origami skills nearly forgotten, but learned with great enthusiasm as a child. She doubted she would make anything other than a mess, but it kept her hands busy.

  And she needed to keep her hands busy, because her fingers kept wanting, as if they had their own mind, to touch Grant. To stroke his hair. To feel his skin. To trace the muscles and scars until they had discovered every inch of him.

  She forced her wandering mind back to matters at hand. The kettle began to whistle, so she rose and quickly poured water into the mugs that already held the mix, then topped them with a little bit of cream to make the cocoa richer.

  With habit so old she didn’t even think about it, she stuck a teaspoon in each mug and carried them back to the table.

  Grant sat stirring his cocoa with his head slightly down. “This stinks.”

  “Any part in particular, or all of it?”

  He looked up, weariness etched all over his face. “Any part of it. All of it. Take your pick. My visions are vague. The compulsion to be out in front of your house every night is overwhelming. But none of it tells me enough.”

  “So now you want high-definition precognition?”

  He appeared startled, and then a short laugh escaped him. “Yeah. In full living color, with a beginning, a middle and end.”

  “The end,” she said quietly, “has not been written.”

  The words seemed to hang on the air, thickening it and chilling it until she felt something icy snake along her spine.

  Their eyes met, and for an instant, just an instant, electricity seemed to zap between them, like static on dry air. Then it was gone, giving way to darker things.

  He pressed his lips together, appearing to try to gather himself in some way. Trish needed a moment, as well. The change in mood had been so sudden, up then down in an eye blink.

  “Do you think,” he asked finally, “that your sheriff would listen to me?”

  “I’m sure he’d listen. I don’t know whether he’d believe you. Or me. I mean, this is weird. I’m not sure I’d talk to my best friend about this.”

  “I hear you.”

  “But Gage…well, Gage might not believe it, but he wouldn’t ignore it. He’d probably park someone right outside my house.”

  “Then we should call him.”

  She started to agree, but then something else struck her, maybe the most chilling thought of all. “No,” she said.

  “No? Look, Trish, I’m not sure I’ll be able to do enough to help you. If you think your sheriff will listen to me, then we have to tell him. Even one sleepy deputy might be enough to tip the scales.”

  “No,” she said again.

  It was his turn to grow impatient. “Are you out of your mind? You need all the protection you can get.”

  “I’m not out of my mind,” she said quietly. “But think about this, Grant. If somebody really wants to kill me, if I’m not just some kind of random target, putting a deputy out there will only change the place and time. Right now you’re pretty sure about where, when and how. What happens if we change things in a way that makes your vision invalid? Can you be sure I won’t just be attacked in the parking lot at work? Or when I go out in the morning to walk the dog?”

  “God, I don’t like this. Don’t be crazy, Trish. If you need a round-the-clock guard, then we’ll get you one.”

  “But how will I know? How will you know? Don’t you see? Unless we let this play out, we’ll never know when it’s over. We’ll never know that I’m safe. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.”

  He drew a long breath. “Okay. I understand. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up trying to find a way to better protect you.”

  “I have a dog and I have a shotgun,” she reminded him. “And be honest, Grant, why are you so determined to be out there on that bench every night instead of in here or in your motel room? I asked you to stay after dinner, but you wouldn’t even consider it. Because you know. You absolutely know that if you don’t follow the exact pattern, you’ll change what happens, and you’re worried that we wouldn’t be prepared then. Admit it.”

  He clearly didn’t want to admit it, but she also saw that he couldn’t argue about it.

  “Nothing is fixed,” he said slowly.

  “No. It’s not. I can’t believe it is. But what you’ve seen…well, that’s what we need to prepare for. If we do something that makes it impossible for that guy to do what you’ve seen the way you’ve seen it, how can we even guess where he might come from, instead?”

  “I really, really don’t like this.”

  “Neither do I,” she admitted as a little shiver of apprehension ran through her. “But how else can I handle this? If I leave town for a week or a month or forever, how can I be sure this guy isn’t hunting for me? At this point I’m convinced enough that something is wrong that I’m willing to take the chance on you, rather than maybe becoming a t
arget when I’m not ready for it.”

  He stood up, paced her small kitchen with mug in hand. He took a couple of sips before setting it on the table. “I don’t know,” he said. “But honest to God, I don’t feel like I know anything anymore.”

  “How so?” she asked, following him with her eyes, hating the way he winced a little bit with nearly every step.

  “I used to be high on knowledge,” he admitted. “I chased it like the gold at the end of the rainbow. I worked in a world of uncertainties that fascinated me as if I was playing with magic. Theories, equations, thought experiments. I was your ultimate geek, more plugged into a computer than the day-to-day world.”

  “But you ran a successful business,” she reminded him.

  “It was a means to an end. But yeah, I learned how to do that because I had to, in order to chase my pot of gold. But for heaven’s sake, Trish, my dog had to teach me how to be a decent person. My dog taught me how to be a passably good husband and father.”

  “I’m sure that you had some of the basics already.”

  At that he paused a moment, then resumed his pacing. “Yeah, maybe,” he said finally. “I had good friends. The kind of people who still give a damn, even though I walked out on them ten months ago and never did a thing to reassure them I was still alive. People who kept searching for me when they could have just bought me out of my business and gotten wealthier without me.”

  “So you had some contact with the real world.”

  “I always had contact with the real world. The problem was that I was focused on the reality we don’t see, the world too small for most of us to even notice. The world nobody really understands and probably never will.”

  He drew a long shaky breath.

  “Grant—” she started, aching for him.

  He cut her off. “I loved my wife and daughter. I loved them. But I didn’t love them enough. I should have given them more time, should have put my work aside more often. But I’d get hot on the track of some idea and I might not come home for days. I’d lock myself in my lab, catching catnaps when I had to, living on coffee and junk food. Laura always said she understood, but in retrospect…maybe she was just being nice. I couldn’t have been easy to live with.”