Targeted

by Lori L. Harris

  Alec glanced at her. “Your place. To pack up photo albums and anything else that you want out of there. Maybe some of your art things, too.”

  He turned into Hibiscus Park, the SUV moving slowly past homes where the vibrant green of well-tended lawns was heightened by flower borders of bright pinks and reds and whites, where the late-model cars of retirees were kept showroom clean and the minivans of harried young mothers weren’t.

  The knot in her stomach expanded up into her chest. Her breathing quickened.

  She turned in the leather seat until she faced Alec. “I don’t think I can go in there.” She heard the slight hitch in her voice. It wasn’t just the room that terrified her; it was the image of the faceless man standing next to the bed.

  “Listen, Katie,” Alec said and there was a calm quality to his voice. “Not many women would have done what you did this morning. Especially not after seeing the photos. You’re a strong lady. Maybe what’s happening now is just the first time you’ve been tested, so you aren’t aware of how strong.”

  He covered her clasped hands with his own. “Take it easy. If you don’t want to go in, I’ll go in and get the things for you. You can wait in the car.”

  “Thanks.” She’d expected to feel relieved, but didn’t. It had been only several hours since she’d assured him she could handle whatever catching this monster would entail, but here she was already refusing a simple request to walk into an unoccupied house.

  As Alec pulled to the curb and turned off the engine, Katie glanced at the bungalow she’d called home for just over two months. It appeared to be pretty much like the others in the neighborhood, only a bit more down in the heel. The lawn obviously hadn’t been cut since she’d last done it, and almost as if in victory, weeds waved above the thinning turf. It might look a little sad, but it certainly didn’t look like a house of horrors.

  It would take only a matter of minutes to grab the albums and her journal. The art supplies would take only a few more, and she needed something to distract her. Less than five minutes. Three hundred seconds. She could handle anything for that long, couldn’t she?

  When he reached for his door handle, she did the same.

  “Are you sure?” Alec asked.

  “Yeah.” She was sure she wanted to do it. She just wasn’t sure how she was going to act once she got in there.

  As Alec retrieved the flattened boxes and the roll of packing tape he’d brought from the back of the SUV, she waited next to the truck. Her neighbor two doors away, a widower of many years, lifted a hand in a wave. Some of the tightness in her chest eased as she was forced to return the smile and wave.

  Alec led the way up the walk. When the front door was pushed open, the house exhaled a dank breath of air.

  “A cleaning crew came through yesterday, so most of the dusting powder has been taken care of, and they straightened up what they could, but there will be lots of things out of place.”

  After flipping on the foyer light, he scanned the interior before turning back to her. As he did, his jacket fell open enough to reveal his weapon. She’d never been fond of guns. Until now.

  Having waited outside until the last minute, she now stepped in. He shut the door behind them and locked it, even going so far as to put the chain on. “Wait here while I have a quick look around and turn on some lights for us.”

  The house carried a sharp chill that seemed to penetrate bone deep. She rubbed her upper arms. Obviously, her landlord had shut off the heat.

  Turning, she saw the damaged plaster just outside the opening to the dining room. Inside her head, she could hear the explosion of those shots. She’d been fighting to get her feet back on the ground as he dragged her backward, her fingers clawing at the forearm crushing her windpipe, then at the arm with the gun.

  She forced herself to look away. She’d be much better off if she didn’t think about that night. Though Alec had done a cursory inspection of the living room before moving on to the others, he returned to open the drapes and turn on the two lamps.

  Katie hadn’t moved from where he’d left her. “You could have picked up the albums and even some of my art supplies any time over the past few days. You didn’t need me.”

  “You’re right,” he said.

  “So that’s not really the reason you brought me here, is it?”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “Then what is?”

  Alec grabbed her hand. “There are two places in this town where he will expect you to turn up first. Where you work and where you used to sleep.”

  The panic she’d been keeping corralled threatened to break loose again. She took a deep breath, almost wishing she hadn’t asked.

  “And,” Alec added, “the main reason I brought you here was that to get beyond what happened to you is going to require work from you, and that work has to start here where it happened. With your seeing this house for what it is. Just a house.”

  Katie unconsciously lifted her right hand to cover the fading bruises on her throat. All she wanted to do was get back to Alec’s house, one of the few places she felt safe. As long as he was at her side.

  “Do you think we could get this over with, then?” she asked.

  He gave her a smile that she suspected was meant to encourage. “Sure.”

  Walking slowly toward the kitchen, she trailed her fingers along the foyer wall and allowed Alec’s words to roll repeatedly through her mind. It’s just a house. Just a house. A house.

  Houses didn’t have souls that could be tainted with the deeds that happened within them. Whatever she was feeling right now—the heavy ugliness of violence—was a manifestation of her own emotions and imagination.

  The door at the end—her bedroom door—had drifted partially closed, as it always did. Where had he been that night? In the darkened dining room? In her bedroom? Maybe he’d expected her to head there to change—her usual path when she came home at night—and when she hadn’t, he’d grown impatient. She realized he must have been watching her before that night, in order to know where she lived, her schedule.

  She stopped at the kitchen opening. The mess on the floor was gone. Chairs had been neatly pushed in around the breakfast table. One sat at an odd angle, the bottom portion of a leg missing. She could kiss her security deposit goodbye.

  She could feel Alec right behind her, not intruding, letting her set the pace, but close enough should she need him. She was determined not to.

  She stopped outside the bedroom door, but couldn’t make herself nudge it open. Just as she hadn’t been able to walk those twenty feet down the empty aisle between the funeral home chairs to her sister’s casket.

  “Its okay, Katie. Everything from that night has been removed.”

  Her fingers remained curled until they reached the glass knob. She had regretted not making that trip, regretted not touching her twin one last time. And, just as that regret haunted her, the memory of this room would if she didn’t face it.

  The door swung inward when she pushed it, stirring the stale air. An unfamiliar scent lingered, perhaps that of the fingerprinting powder, but just beneath that was the smell of her perfume. And maybe of the candles, too. But the soft glow of the bedside lamp revealed a benign room. Lavender sheets, a set that had been in the top of her closet, covered the bed.

  The wall area above the bed was still blank, the picture that had hung there missing. The police probably had it. She recalled the photo she’d seen this morning, the word scrawled in blood above another bed.

  God. She’d been so lucky. Just as she had the night her sister Karen died. Death had been so close, and she had escaped.

  Only she hadn’t felt lucky then, and she wasn’t now.

  She allowed her glance to take in the rest of the room. The cheap pickled-oak furniture, the small bookcase behind the door. The painting just above the bookcase—a young boy paddling out on his surfboard, his father on a second board paddling alongside. She’d titled the piece A Long Boarder’s Right of Passage. She’
d hung it there so that it was the first thing she saw every morning. It had reminded her of the water she missed, and of the summer she and Karen had learned to surf.

  Alec had moved to the center of the room. The faint shadow of a late-afternoon beard and the dark intensity of his gaze as he watched her now, made her aware of just how much her impression of him had changed in the past four days. Before that night, she’d seen him only as a very attractive man, one capable of making her pulse quicken with a simple look. More recently, she’d seen him as the only one capable of righting her world. She now realized he could easily be both.

  “Would it be better if I got out of the way while you packed?”

  “No…umm…no.” Her facial muscles refused to cooperate when she tried to smile. “Please stay. It’s not going to take long.”

  Katie knelt in front of the small bookshelf. Where her arrangement of the books had been haphazard, they were now placed in ascending height from right to left. Art volumes filled the top shelf, novels the second and family photo albums the third.

  After putting together and placing one of the boxes near the bookcase, Alec moved to the window.

  She pulled the half a dozen photo albums from the bottom shelf and placed them on the floor. Dusting powder clung to the outside covers.

  She flipped open the top album and saw that the same dust had sifted between the photos and their plastic sleeves.

  If the police had gone to the trouble of checking the inside pages, did that mean they thought he’d sat here in her bedroom going through the albums? Had his fingers brushed across the faces of her sister and her parents, of her close friends? Her fingers shook as she slammed closed the cover. God, she hated this!

  She looked up, hoping Alec hadn’t noticed. But he had. Something in his eyes gave him away. He knew exactly what was going on in her head. What she was thinking.

  “You really are very talented,” he commented. He’d wandered from the window to stand in front of the painting of the two surfers.

  “Don’t look so surprised.” She managed a weak smile.

  “I’m not.” He glanced down at her. “I just hadn’t realized you did anything but landscapes.”

  She knew he’d been in the house several times over the past four days, so there was little chance that he hadn’t seen the painting. He was just trying to help her cope by distracting her. There were many layers to Alec. The rough professional who gave orders and expected them to be followed, the polite stranger, and then this man, observant and even kind.

  She placed the album in the box beside her. “I hear that your brother’s a surfer. What about you?”

  Alec retreated to the window again. The action didn’t surprise her. She’d already caught on to the fact that he didn’t like to talk about himself.

  He parted the blinds to look out. “I taught him.”

  “You?” He didn’t seem the surfer type.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t look so surprised.”

  She smiled at that. “I’m not.” She tried wiping some of the black powder off her hands using a piece of paper she found on the shelf, and then noticed that some of it clung to her jacket sleeve. “Well, maybe I am a little bit. I can’t picture you as a beach bum.”

  “But you can picture Jack as one?”

  “Yeah.” She narrowed her eyes as she looked up at him again. “I think it’s his blond hair and the tan. And I sense this irreverent streak in him.”

  “That’s Jack.”

  She climbed to her feet, one of the albums still in her hand. “Were you close growing up?”

  “No. There are six years between us, which isn’t much when you’re adults, but it was when we were kids. Most of the time I just considered him a nuisance.” He moved away from the window. “My folks took a place at the beach for two months one summer. He’d just turned twelve, and I hadn’t quite made it to eighteen.”

  “Was that when you taught him to surf?”

  “Yeah. My mother was against it. Too many sharks and rip currents.”

  He chuckled, his whole face seeming to relax at the memory. In that brief moment, she saw what he must have been like that summer. Deep tan, hair longer than it was now and a quick smile. And the eyes… There would have been hope there.

  She dropped the album in the box with the other one.

  “We’d leave early, saying we were meeting some friends for a game of volleyball, and be gone all day. I think Dad knew what was happening, but he was happy that Jack and I were connecting. He probably figured if we hadn’t by the time I went off to college, we never would.”

  Katie moved to the dresser as Alec talked. Ignoring the clothes, she grabbed her journal from the bottom drawer. It, too, showed signs of having been dusted. The possibility that it had been read—by the killer, by Alec or some other officer of the law—left her feeling as if she’d been laid open on a coroner’s slab.

  She glanced over her shoulder, taking in the room, thinking just how close she had come to the morgue. It was the kind of image that really drove home her own mortality. Made her wonder if she had made the wrong decision after all.

  Her fingers trembled. She took a deep breath. No. She wasn’t going to cave in now. She’d made it this far, she could keep it together for another few minutes.

  “Katie?” Alec stopped his wandering around the room. “Are you okay?”

  She took another deep breath and let it out slowly. She just needed to keep her mind elsewhere. “What beach was it…that you went to that summer?”

  Moving in behind her, he caught her gaze in the dresser mirror. She saw in his dark eyes that he understood what she wanted from him.

  “New Smyrna,” he said. “One morning we took off early and drove almost to Miami to get some good waves. A hurricane had passed just off shore and kicked up some bigger surf.

  “Everything was fine. I’m sitting there waiting to catch a wave and I look over and see Jack’s board being carried in, but no Jack. Two hundred miles from my parents, my brother has disappeared, and I don’t know what to do. And then I feel something latch on to my leg. For half a second I think it’s a shark and that it’s already gotten Jack, and has come back for me.”

  He stepped back. “But it was just Jack. He’d been messing with the board’s leash, actually had it off his ankle, when a wave took him broadside. The undertow caught him and dragged him out.”

  As she listened, she tried to picture the two men as boys, but found it difficult. “And you hadn’t noticed any of that happening?” She dumped the contents of the jewelry box onto the dresser. Several loose shell beads from a broken anklet dribbled onto the floor. Ignoring them, she picked out the good pieces of jewelry.

  “Notice? No. I was thinking about the blond coed who had moved in next door. I was trying to figure out how I was going to separate her from her jock boyfriend.”

  “And did you?” Katie asked. She had no difficulty picturing him with some cute blond cheerleader. Was that his type?

  “Yeah. Unfortunately, I did.”

  Katie looked up at the serious note in Alec’s voice. “She was trouble?”

  “No. It’s just that once she came on the scene, Jack and I stopped catching waves together. I didn’t realize a kid brother was more important than a long-legged blonde.”

  She sensed that he was uncomfortable with how much he’d revealed to her in that one story. Alec didn’t let people get too close. She had assumed that he’d built the wall around himself after Jill’s murder. But perhaps he’d been erecting the barrier long before that. Perhaps her death had only been the last brick sliding into place, finally cutting him off from those around him.

  He turned back to her, all emotion once more locked away. “Are you done in here? If you are, maybe we can make a quick pass through your studio and grab some things.”

  She glanced around the room. Alec had been right in his assessment of both her and the house. It was just a house. In the morning, she’d call her landlord and tell him to
give everything else to charity.

  Her gaze landed on the painting of the two surfers. “Nearly done.”

  She lifted the painting down from the wall, studied it for several seconds. She’d never be able to look at it and not remember recent events.

  She turned to Alec. “I want you to have this. To remind you of that summer.”

  Chapter Eight

  It was still early, just after five in the afternoon when Katie piled the cardboard box she’d just emptied with the other two beneath the table in the small room that linked Alec’s kitchen to the large solarium. With east-facing windows, the space had probably been used as a breakfast room at one time.

  She’d chosen it for her studio because of its proximity to the kitchen and den, the two rooms that Alec obviously used, and because it was adjacent to the solarium.

  She had even briefly considered setting her things up in the glassed-in space, but she hoped to do some painting at night and knew that all that glass would make her feel like a pork chop in a butcher’s case.

  As it was, she could cart her easel out there during the day and keep busy by painting one of the many palms or orchids that filled the space.

  She stuck a handful of brushes, shafts first, into a mason jar. Alec’s cat jumped up on the table and immediately hopped into the box she was unloading.

  She smiled at the animal. “Comfortable?”

  She looked up when Alec walked in with another box.

  “This is the last of the art supplies.” He placed it on the end of the table next to the one with the cat, and the cat immediately tried it on for size. As he peeked over the top, Katie ran a hand down his back. “What do you call him?”

  “Since he’s always underfoot, I’ve never had any reason to name him.” He reached in, scooped the cat out of the box and placed it on the floor. “Did you want me to bring the boxes with the albums in here or put them upstairs?”

  “Upstairs is fine.”

  He started to leave, then turned back. “If you need anything, just ask. I’ll make us some dinner later, but for right now, I should make some preparations for tomorrow.”