by Rachel Lee
“Don’t be sorry.” He put his mug aside and came to kneel in front of her. “Trish, I hope to God I just had some kind of nervous breakdown, that these images that have been driving me like a whip are just fantasy. But I don’t dare take the chance.”
She looked into his eyes and felt again the forbidden ache. Loneliness welled up in her. All the friends she had couldn’t help now. The only person who was with her in this scary time was a near stranger, and that didn’t ease her need not to be alone. She needed to be grounded by people she knew and trusted, people who could give her emotional support. But the thing was, she didn’t want to risk pulling anyone else into this.
“I should go back to the motel,” he said slowly.
“No. Please. I don’t want to be alone with this.”
“But if that guy is already in town and watching…”
“Then he already knows you’re here.” Shaking her head, trying to batter down a welter of emotions, she sought doorways, exits, escape. But until whatever this was played out, she was trapped.
Truly trapped.
Chapter 8
Trish dozed on the couch, Grant on the recliner. Neither slept well, and often Trish would open her eyes to see Grant looking at her. As if she was a puzzle. As if he was trying to figure out something.
Maybe he was as confused by all of this as she was.
Morning dawned hazy, hinting at the summery day to come in the waning weeks of autumn. Grant joined Trish in the kitchen and proved he was adept at slicing grapefruit and cooking eggs. They didn’t have much to say. Trish was dreading the meeting with Gage. She suspected Grant felt the same, but at least he looked determined.
At eight o’clock, the sun still far in the east, Trish called the sheriff. Gage took her call promptly.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but I may have a serious problem.”
“What’s going on?”
“Grant Wolfe and I need to talk to you. Privately.”
There was no hesitation. “Are you at your place? Both of you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be there in ten.”
She hung up and looked at Grant. “You’re sure about this?”
He closed his eyes a moment. “It doesn’t feel wrong. And that’s all I’ve got to go on, really.”
Gage arrived in his personal vehicle, dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket. He often eschewed the uniform, but with his scarred face, everyone in the county recognized him on sight, so what did it matter? Gage was a totally unforgettable man.
He joined them in the living room, crossed his legs loosely, ankle on thigh. “So what’s going on?”
Trish hesitated. “This is one of those things you’re going to have a whole lot of trouble believing. And the two of us need some…”
“Objective thinking,” Grant said when Trish trailed off. “We’ve been discussing this for a couple of days, and I don’t want us to get into a folie à deux. If we’re not already there.”
“I’m listening.” He gave Trish an encouraging smile. “And trust me, I’ve probably heard weirder things than you can dish up.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Trish said. “Maybe I should start at my beginning and let Grant take over with his part.”
Grant nodded agreement. “Sounds like the best approach.”
“Okay,” Trish said. “I told you I was edgy because some numbers hadn’t matched at work, and that was probably why I was overreacting to Grant being on the park bench every night.”
“I remember,” Gage said. “Seems you got past that, since you’re both here.”
“Well, not exactly. But let me tell you some details. I was uneasy because I’d discovered an inventory discrepancy. Microchips unaccounted for. I don’t know how much you know about what we do at the plant, but a lot of it is on government contracts.”
“I’ve heard,” Gage said. “Security clearances and all that. I’ve been part of more than one background check when the FBI has come to ask questions for someone’s security clearance. So missing microchips could be a big deal, not just a monetary matter.”
Trish felt a wave of gratitude toward this man for understanding so quickly. “That’s part of the reason I was uneasy. Not just because I might have made a mistake, but because it could cause the company a real hassle regardless of whether I was right or wrong. That’s why I mentioned I might get fired. Not likely, if we sort it out ourselves, and it turns out to just be a miscount on someone’s part, including my own. But even if it’s a miscount and the feds hear about it, we could have problems.”
“I get it. So you had cause for anxiety. Then Grant shows up. Yeah, I’d be watching him, too, if I were you, and getting paranoid.”
“The thing is, I didn’t know if those chips were classified. We make unclassified ones, too, and everything is coded. So I might have discovered that some run-of-the-mill chips were missing. I mean, it was really all up in the air, and the main thing—I thought, anyway—was that I was worried about my job. I wasn’t looking past that. Until Grant.”
Gage trained his gaze on Grant. “So how do you fit?”
“This is the part where you’re going to want to toss me out of town,” Grant said, obviously trying to make the words sound light. He didn’t quite achieve the effect.
Leaning forward, he told Gage his whole story, start to finish, his voice breaking a bit when he spoke of the plane crash, the death of his family and the visions that had preceded it. The sympathy on Gage’s face was unmistakable.
“But it doesn’t end there,” Grant continued after a moment of silence. “I started having new visions a few weeks ago. And they brought me here. The compulsion has been overwhelming to be outside this house every night at the same time.”
“Why?” Gage asked quietly.
“Because someone is going to try to kill Trish. I see it. Over and over I see someone standing in her bedroom in the dark with a silenced pistol.”
“Damn,” Gage said expressively.
Hurrying, in case Gage might dismiss it all, Trish jumped in. “What’s more, even though at first I thought Grant was just, well, a nut, I began to realize that I’d been having feelings that something bad was going to happen. That something was lurking right around the corner. Think about it, Gage. How many times do people say ‘I knew that was going to happen.’”
“You don’t have to convince me,” Gage said flatly. “I’ve had experiences that make me think we don’t begin to understand these so-called paranormal things. Okay, so you both have an idea that someone might try to kill Trish. Give me something solid.”
Grant hesitated. Trish finally spoke. “We managed to find out that the missing chips are classified. They’re for weapons systems, and they can’t be sold to anyone but the Department of Defense.”
“I won’t ask how you figured that out, considering Trish just said everything is coded.”
“Thanks,” Grant said. “Thanks for that.”
“Well, if those chips are really missing, and someone knows you found out, that’s ample cause for murder. Either to protect the thief or to protect the company.”
“My thinking exactly,” Grant said.
“But the thing is,” Trish interjected, “it struck me the only way we can find out is to let this guy come after me just the way Grant sees it. Otherwise, if this is really happening, I could be targeted somewhere else.”
Silence greeted her words. Even Gage looked as if he had swallowed something awful.
“Bait,” he finally said.
“Exactly.” Her voice was subdued. “It scares me, Gage. Grant can tell you I was actually shaking last night. I want to run, I want to hide. But how can I ever have a life again if this doesn’t get resolved somehow?”
“So what you’re saying is to let Grant’s vision play out. But what if it doesn’t?”
“I can’t even think about that now.” A small shudder passed through her. “Since we found out what the missing chips are, I’m m
ore terrified than ever. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.”
One corner of Gage’s mouth tightened as he thought. “I could call the feds, let the chips fall—no pun intended—and go into witness protection. Except I know the costs of that. You not only lose your whole life, but you still can’t be sure no one will find you. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.” He paused. “And frankly, I don’t know why you should pay such a heavy price when you’ve done nothing wrong.”
“There’s a heavier price,” Grant said.
“True.”
But Trish shook her head. “Would I like to run? Hell, yes. I think I’ve already said that. But…give up everything and still have to look over my shoulder for years at least? I don’t want to do that. Something in me says I should take this risk, terrified or not. But to do that, we have another problem—we can’t do anything that will materially change what Grant has foreseen. That’s why I didn’t want to come to you. If you put a guard on me and this killer finds out, the whole game changes.”
“I already figured that out,” Gage said.
Tad chose that moment to wander in and hop up beside Trish on the couch, laying his head in her lap. She stroked his silky ears and waited. Her chest felt tight, her heart heavy, as if this moment was freighted with an entire future of terrible possibilities. And maybe it was, given Grant’s vision.
“Okay,” Gage said after a few minutes of thought. “We have to make sure we don’t shift anything out of alignment, for lack of a better word.” He looked at Grant. “Do you think we might have already?”
“I don’t get that feeling. But I’m running on feelings here, and we all know how easily I could be wrong.”
“For the sake of being able to do anything at all,” Gage replied, “we’re going with your feelings. I need to figure out how to set up some kind of protection for Trish that won’t scare this guy off. And I need you, both of you, to keep me clued in to anything you see or feel that might indicate something is changing. I’ll be honest with you—I don’t know how much stock I put in these visions, but I know I’m not willing to just dismiss them. Trish is right. Every one of us has said or felt that we knew something was going to happen before it did. In law enforcement we get used to that and call it a hunch. And I’ve never been a man to dismiss hunches out of hand.”
Trish felt something inside her begin to uncoil. “Thanks, Gage.”
“I’ll let you know what I come up with. I won’t let it drag on, though. It seems to me we need to act fast.”
At the door, though, he paused and faced Grant. “I’ve been through the same hell you have,” he said. “Let me tell you one thing I finally learned.”
“Which is?”
“That guilt doesn’t fix a thing or change a thing. All it does is rip you apart and make you useless. You’re not God. Let Her do Her job and you do yours.”
Trish dropped off Grant back at the motel, and he went in to shower and change. Both of them figured the killer in his vision wouldn’t know that Grant was any kind of threat, let alone that anyone was aware of him, so it wouldn’t hurt for the two of them to be seen together, as long as Grant stayed away during the hours that he deemed dangerous.
After his shower, still a little damp despite toweling himself, Grant flopped naked on the bed, determined to catch up on some sleep.
But sleep proved elusive. Gage’s words had stuck in his head, and where before that kind of advice had struck him intellectually, somehow this time it had hit emotionally.
You’re not God.
Sage words, and something in his reaction told him they were words he needed to hear. Laura wouldn’t have wanted this for him, he knew. He’d known that all along, but grief was an unreasoning taskmaster, one that yielded not one wit to sense or logic.
Yet grief wasn’t the same as guilt. Guilt. It was the guilt he needed to let go of, the guilt that whipped him endlessly, especially because, sadly enough, he was beginning to let go of grief.
If he gave himself half a chance, he’d probably turn that natural healing into guilt, too. It wasn’t that he didn’t miss Laura and his daughter each and every day. But the ache for their loss, the emptiness in their wake…that was becoming a familiar, quiet companion. A hole that would always be there. Maybe you never stopped grieving, maybe you just got used to it. Maybe time eased the ache a bit simply because it had to. Life went on, even when it seemed like a mortal insult.
But guilt…that was a whole different thing. That remained fresh, vivid and clawing. Like grief, it didn’t yield to logic, but it also didn’t yield to time.
You’re not God.
He sighed and rubbed his eyes, wishing sleep would carry him away from this constant, nagging, endless misery for just a little while. But sleep remained stubbornly elusive, leaving him mired in his own company.
Because that’s what it was beginning to feel like in his head: a mire. Quicksand that wouldn’t let go.
But maybe it was a quagmire of his own making. Lately he wondered if he clung to guilt and grief for fear that he might discover there was nothing else left inside him. That the tragedy of his loss had transformed him into a mere husk, capable of feeling nothing but pain.
It wasn’t your fault.
Almost as if she stood by the bed, he heard Laura speak. The mere memory of her voice was enough to make his throat tighten.
It wasn’t your fault.
That’s exactly what she would say. She’d give him hell for beating himself up about something he hadn’t properly understood. She’d stand there wagging her finger and tell him that he had another responsibility now, and lying around feeling guilty would only keep him from taking advantage of the lesson he had learned, the lesson that had caused a series of visions to bring him to this out-of-the-way little town and hunt down a total stranger.
She’d tell him: The only failures in life are the ones you don’t learn from.
He could even hear her saying it, as she had so many times before to him, to herself, to others she knew.
Laura had believed life was a school, that everyone was bound to screw up at times, and the only proper response was to dust yourself off and not repeat your mistakes.
She was right about that. And by this point in time, a year later, she’d be getting pretty annoyed with him for beating himself up. And she’d be cheering him on for having learned his lesson and trying to help Trish.
Trish. Feelings for her were beginning to edge their way into his heart. He didn’t know if he was ready for that. But there they were, stealthy invaders he had tried not to notice. She was a lovely woman, and like any normal man he had noticed how attractive she was.
And like any man who’d been without a mate for so long, he felt the sexual pull like a huge undertow. All that held him back was the fear that he might hurt her, because he hadn’t resolved his own issues yet.
But damn, he wanted to make love to her. He wanted to feel her silky skin against his, feel her body rise to meet him, hear her moans and whimpers. He wanted to take a journey with her to that one place in life where you touched the stars. Just the thought made his body ache with need.
But that wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t be fair to her.
And he was scared to death of the things that would make it fair to her.
He didn’t know if he could ever allow himself to be that vulnerable again. The price might be enormous.
He ought to know; he’d paid it once already.
“Howdy!”
Startled, Trish looked up from the mail she was pulling from her porch mailbox and saw a woman walking her way from the house next door. A stranger, not one of the house’s residents. Yet the woman, about her age with cinnamon-colored hair, wearing jeans and a denim jacket, carried a leaf rake as if she’d just been working in the yard.
Trish’s heart skipped a beat. Who said an assassin had to be a man? But it was still late afternoon, there were other people driving by, kids were starting to fill the
park. Wrong time, wrong place.
“Hi,” Trish answered uncertainly.
The still-smiling woman, rake in hand, climbed the steps of Trish’s porch. “I hate this raking,” she said cheerfully.
“Not my favorite thing, either.” Trish had to battle an urge to dash into the house and lock the door. But it was already too late. The woman reached her, staying a step back, and with her free hand lifted her jacket.
Trish gasped with relief when she saw the badge on the woman’s belt.
“Lori Morgan,” the woman said, keeping her voice low. “Try to act like you know me.”
“I wish I did.”
Lori laughed as if Trish had said something funny, then lowered her voice again. “Invite me in for coffee so we can talk.”
Wrong time of day, Trish reminded herself. Besides, that badge looked all too real. “Hey, take a break,” she said in a normal conversational voice. “Come on in for some coffee.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Lori propped the rake against the house and followed Trish inside.
Once the door closed behind them, Trish faced the woman uncertainly. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Am I a cop?”
At that Trish smiled. “That joke is worn to death.”
“In all its ten thousand variations,” Lori agreed as she followed Trish to the kitchen. “Oh, I like this,” she commented as she took a seat. “You’ve made this room so homey.”
“Thanks. I feel the heart of any home is the kitchen.”
“You’re right about that.” At that moment Lori was distracted by the arrival of Tad. He bounced into the kitchen, carrying his tennis ball, only to drop it when he saw Lori. The serious sniffing began around Lori’s ankles and shins. “Cute dog,” she said.
“If he bothers you…”
Lori interrupted her with a wave of her hand. “He doesn’t bother me. My house is run by a Saint Bernard and a malamute, and two cats fill in as kings.”