by Beverly Bird
The woman drove a little farther up the street and parked there to think the problem out.
It was only by sheer luck that she happened to glance into her rearview mirror at the exact time a pale-yellow behemoth of an automobile lumbered out of the drive. An ancient woman with hair in tight white curls was driving. As she inched the car past at a cautious crawl, she hunched forward to grip the steering wheel in both gnarly white hands.
“Good enough,” the watcher said aloud. Now she was willing to take her chances. She got out of the car and forced herself not to hurry as she went back to the driveway.
An equally old male geezer might still be in residence in the big white house, she thought, but judging by the looks of his wife, his sight and hearing could be counted on to be imperfect. She headed up the drive as though she belonged there. The garage door was up now. The old woman hadn’t bothered to lower it. Was there a way to the upstairs apartment from inside?
The woman stepped into the garage and peered around, noticing stairs in the back. She climbed them, then tried the knob on the door at the top.
Locked up tight. Picturing Cait Matthews, she wasn’t surprised.
But the lock was one of those silly, old-fashioned types right in the handle, she discovered, the kind that a five-year-old could get through. The woman ran one long, painted fingernail back and forth in the narrow space between the door and the jam, trying to catch the bolt.
Close, but not quite. She went back downstairs again and sorted through a pile of odds and ends on an old workbench.
Everything was coated with dust. If the old lady had a husband who had once used this stuff, then he was either incapacitated now or dead. No one had touched any of these tools in a very long time. She found an awl, better for her purposes than anything she might have hoped for. She went back upstairs and used it to remove the doorknob entirely.
She stepped into a kitchen so tidy it offended her. She stopped and sniffed at pristine air. Maybe, she thought, there was a hint of garlic in it, but if so, the prissy nurse had all but banished its source with air freshener and a good dose of detergent. The stove and counters gleamed in the sunlight that slanted through the single kitchen window.
The woman drove her fingers into her hair while she looked around, frowning. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she knew she’d recognize it when she saw it.
She finally moved into the living room, cramped and small and dark now because the sun was hitting the back of the garage and this room looked out on the street. There were antiques everywhere—wash-basins and lamps and doodads, even a red leather chair that looked interesting. The woman picked up a brass candle snuffer and inspected it, then the hairs at her nape lifted.
“Yeowl!”
She cried out and jumped at the sound. The snuffer went flying from her hand to land against one wooden arm of the leather chair with a crack. The bell snapped cleanly off.
“Jeez!” Her heart was bucking. She looked around as she clapped a hand to her chest. A large orange cat sat in the threshold to what was probably a bedroom. “You scared the hell out of me!”
The beast opened his mouth and hissed.
“Oh, shut up. Look what you did.” The woman crossed the room to retrieve the candle snuffer. She fussed with it for a moment, but there was no putting it back together. She replaced it on the crowded sideboard where she’d found it, balancing the handle on top of the bell just so. The twit would never even know it was broken unless she picked it up, and why would she? There wasn’t a single candle in the room. Although, knowing Nurse Matthews, she probably dusted everything in this jumbled place before she slept each night.
The woman headed for the bedroom. That was where secrets were usually kept. The cat didn’t move.
“Shoo.” She waved a hand at him. He wouldn’t leave the doorway. She tried to step over him and he gave a rumbling, growling sound of warning. “Okay, we’ll do this the hard way.” She reached down and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. She’d known a cat or two in her time. They always went docile in such a grip. It was the way their mothers held them when they were kittens.
This one went insane.
He curled his whole fat body into a ball, legs flailing, claws slashing as he tried to reach her with one of them. He twisted, angling his head even in spite of her grip, flashing teeth at her, trying to bite her. The woman swore, holding him as far away from herself as possible. He was heavy. She was going to lose her hold on him. If he got loose, then what would he do to her?
She ran back to the kitchen with him and made it to the door there, the one that led downstairs into the garage. The cat’s back claws raked her forearm. She bit back another curse and tossed him out on the steps, then quickly closed the door.
After a few moments of silence, she dared to open the door a crack to peer through. She didn’t see any sign of the cat in the gloom on the other side. She closed the door again and began to move back across the kitchen when she noticed that she was dripping blood on the floor.
“Damn, damn, damn.” She thought of DNA and then snorted. Nobody tested for DNA over for a simple breaking-and-entering—and that was assuming Cait even called the cops in the first place. She probably would never even realize that anyone had been in her home. Still, there was the broken candle snuffer.
The woman ripped a paper towel off the roll and wiped up the blood, then wrapped it around her wrist to staunch the flow once the floor was clean. Then she took another towel and went to wipe the candle snuffer free of her fingerprints, as well. She pocketed both paper towels and finally made it into the bedroom.
A single bed? What kind of woman slept in a single bed? Dumb question, she answered herself, then she began to poke through Cait’s dresser drawers. She found not a single thing worth mentioning until she happened to look down as she stepped into the bathroom. Her gaze landed on the trash can there and her eyes bugged.
What was that? A pregnancy test?
The woman stared at it, then threw back her head and laughed, delighted. She had to hold her stomach when the spasms kept coming and started to hurt. Finally she hunkered down beside the can and reached in for the little stick.
She’d taken a number of these tests herself, praying through the whole course of her marriage that she’d conceive. She knew what she was looking at. It was exactly what she had longed to see on little sticks like this too many times to count.
The bitch was pregnant.
Suddenly, rage exploded in her head and tears stung at her eyes. She dropped the stick back into the trash and shot to her feet. She looked around the pretty blue-and-white room, wanting to smash it, to destroy everything she saw. No, no, no. She mustn’t do that. She pressed her hands to the sides of her head, instead, against the pain rocking through her skull.
At least now she knew what had gone on in that basement room between Sam Walters and Cait Matthews. No wonder they had been so chummy in that storage room.
She forced herself to breathe evenly, deeply, getting her control back. She told herself that this was actually a boon. It was definitely something she could use. She just wasn’t sure how yet.
She left the bedroom, shaken to her core. On the way out, she inspected everything, trying to remember what all she had touched. The scratch on her arm was starting to sting now. Finally she was satisfied that everything looked the way it had when she had come in.
It took her five more minutes to put the doorknob back in place. Then she waited at the foot of the stairs for a moment, listening to make sure the old lady wasn’t coming back.
There was no car coming. She walked calmly out of the garage. Once she got halfway down the drive, she knew she was home free. If the old woman came back now, she could simply say she’d been looking for Cait, but no one had answered her knock on the apartment door. Of course, the old woman would know what she looked like then, would be able to identify her, but that would only matter if Cait ever realized someone had been in her apartment and called the pol
ice. That, the woman thought again, really wasn’t likely.
She went back to her car and drove home, her mind racing, wondering what to do now.
Seven
Cait dragged herself up the outside stairs to her apartment at half-past four, feeling as though her shoes were made of lead. It was part of being pregnant, she thought, actually cherishing it. She was already starting to experience that overriding tiredness as her body got the hint that another human being was growing inside her.
There was a feeling of satisfaction in her chest, too, and she smiled as she started fitting her keys into the locks on her door. Things were starting to come together. She’d made an appointment with an obstetrician in Laredo—a name picked out of the medical directory behind the nurses’ station—but she could always change later if she decided she didn’t like the man. She’d withstood Sam’s charm all day without budging an inch. In fact, she’d managed to antagonize him.
It would be so much easier to leave him behind if she’d never learned to cherish his grins, his charm, his humor. But in just two more days she’d be safely tucked away in the neonatal unit, well away from him. She only had to remain strong against him for another shift.
She wasn’t sure she had it in her.
Cait stepped into her apartment and dropped her purse on the chair near the door. “See, right on schedule this time,” she said to Billy. “You don’t have a thing to worry about.”
She headed for the window to gather him up and pet him, then she frowned and paused. The cat wasn’t on the window ledge.
“Billy?” She pivoted in place, looking around the room. “Here, kitty, kitty.” Her heart lurched. He must be sick. It was the only reason she could think of that he wouldn’t be in the window watching for her.
She hurried into the bedroom but he wasn’t there, either. She got to her knees and peered under the bed. Nothing. Her pulse accelerated as she stuck her head into the bathroom. She came up empty there, too.
“Billy,” she said. “What’s wrong? Where are you?”
She went back to the living room. Until that moment she had never realized how much she had come to depend on his company since she’d rescued him from the pound. How much she needed him. Where could he have gone?
She should never have let herself love anything again, she thought helplessly, never. She pressed her fingers to her temples as though it would help her think, then began ripping the pillows from the sofa, feeling terrified and foolish both at once. She dropped to the floor to look under the sofa, too. The last sensible thing in her head told her to be absolutely sure that the cat was gone before she became unglued.
She looked under the chair and in the coat closet. She yanked open the drawers of the sideboard, as though a fat, old orange tabby could somehow manage to squeeze his way inside one. She laughed shrilly at herself and slammed them shut again. The stem of the candle snuffer on top fell off its little bell.
Cait went utterly still and stared at it.
Finally, with a shaking hand, she reached and picked it up. She used her other hand to scrub at the back of her neck. Someone was watching her again.
“No, no, no,” she whispered. She was at home. She was alone. No one was here. She’d just been through the entire apartment. No one’s eyes were on her.
She went to the window and looked out, anyway. No one was there.
But someone had been here. Her candle snuffer was broken and Billy was gone.
She finally realized that the keening sound filling the air was coming from her own throat. She dropped the snuffer stem to the carpet and pressed her hand to her mouth. It wasn’t the PTSD and it wasn’t pregnancy hormones making her nuts, she realized. Someone was after her. Someone really had been watching her, following her.
A twelve-pound tabby didn’t let himself out of a locked apartment by himself, and candle snuffers didn’t fall apart on their own.
Terror speared through her, robbing her of breath. This was every bit as mind-numbing as when Hines had finally shoved her forward into the laundry chute that day when she’d started making her way toward it too slowly. Cait sank to the floor and curled herself into a little ball, finally crying.
There was always more than one way to skin a cat, Sam thought, letting himself into his condo at a quarter past five. He just had to figure out what they were.
Houdini barked in greeting and Sam scratched him absently between the ears, shedding his tie on his way to the answering machine. A big red goose egg stared back at him from the number-of-calls window. No calls. That was bad. Really bad.
He had to get a handle on this situation before it spiraled totally out of control. He had to convince Cait to see him again.
Again? He laughed hoarsely and scrubbed a hand over his mouth. Their first encounter had hardly been a matter of seeing each other. A madman had grabbed them and stuck them in a cement room. They’d…reacted. They’d reached out for each other.
Sam knew honestly that he would never have asked Cait out had that not happened. Of course, if that hadn’t happened, he’d never have known about the spitfire lurking underneath those starched scrubs of hers.
Now she had his attention, and he wanted to see her. Socially, intimately, whatever. Just to get her off his mind, he reminded himself. Except, for the first time in his memory, a woman wanted nothing to do with him.
It occurred to Sam that he’d barely thought of anything but her all day, puzzling at the situation, worrying over it, becoming more and more irritated by it. Between patients, he’d watched her. He’d never once caught her watching him back.
Three weeks ago he would have said she was ice to the bone. But he knew better now. So the only explanation was that she was trying to drive him crazy.
Maybe she was playing hard to get. Sam snapped his fingers. That was it. Except…he’d asked her out and she had refused him. Women played hard to get in order to snag a man’s interest. He’d given her his—and she’d tossed it right back in his face again.
Houdini barked one more time.
“Will you be quiet?” Sam snapped. “I’m trying to think here.” He went to the kitchen for a beer. The retriever followed him.
“You’re not going out running,” he told him, grabbing a bottle out of the refrigerator. “You’ve already used up your allowance for the week. I’m not dropping another twenty-five bucks on you before Friday.”
Houdini made a rumbling sound in his throat. Suddenly Sam stopped in midmotion as he began to unscrew the cap from the bottle. He stared at the dog as something occurred to him. “Good thinking.”
The dog’s tongue hung out. He seemed to be grinning.
Sam put the unopened bottle back in the refrigerator. It took three minutes for him to put on gym shorts and hunt down his running shoes. But then he took off the shorts, deciding he needed a quick shower. After that he stepped into jeans and pulled on a polo shirt, hitting the bathroom one more time to brush his teeth. Then he stopped back in the bedroom to slap on some cologne.
Finally he went to find the dog’s leash. Cait wanted him. Of course, she wanted him. She’d made love with him, no matter what the circumstances. That said something loud and clear. She was probably just worried about his less-than-conventional tendencies, he decided. She knew better than to get involved with a man who defied order in nearly every aspect of his life except professionally.
Of course, he wasn’t talking about getting involved with her. Not really. He just wanted to spend a little more time with her so they could both come to the conclusion that they were all wrong for each other. But first, to do that, he had to get past her barriers so she’d go out with him. He had to be a little more…well, conventional.
So he would walk his dog, instead of turning him loose in the pet area. And if he happened to end up on Euclid Street, well, all the better.
He snapped on Houdini’s leash and they went downstairs. Then, in the parking lot, Sam hesitated. Euclid Street was a good mile away. He was too impatient to take the time
to walk.
“Come on, pal. We’re going sightseeing.” He led the dog to his car, unlocked it and let the big beast jump up into the passenger seat. “Scratch that leather with your monster toenails and you die.”
The dog shot him a look as if to say that clippers were his master’s responsibility. Sam ignored him and went around to the other side of the car, getting behind the wheel.
He drove to within four blocks of Cait’s apartment. Then he parked, leashed the dog, and they proceeded the rest of the way on foot. “This,” he told Houdini when they were a block away, “is how conventional guys do this.”
In response, the dog gave a blood-throbbing howl and lunged forward.
Sam actually took several running steps with the absurd idea of either keeping up with him or controlling him again. Then Houdini gave another ferocious yank on the leash, and Sam thought his arm might come out of the socket. He let go of the leather in self-defense, swearing, rubbing his shoulder.
Houdini was off and running. But he didn’t go far. As Sam watched, he cut into a driveway a block ahead. And unless Sam badly missed his guess, it was Cait’s driveway.
“Damned dog can’t be that smart,” he muttered. “Can he?” Then he broke into a jog to go after him.
By the time he got to the driveway, the din was incredible. It was most definitely Cait’s address. The retriever was howling and pacing around a tree in the small yard between the white house and the garage where Cait lived. Houdini stopped periodically to jump up and brace his paws on the trunk, barking for all he was worth.
In response, the tree yowled.
Not the tree, Sam realized, running that way. The cat. Cait had a cat. A big, orange thing that had had a pretty tough life these past few weeks. Tabitha Monroe had taken it into her head to use him to meet Hines’s ransom demands when he and Cait had been held hostage in his underground room.
This, he thought, was good. He could rescue the cat. Cait would be grateful and with any luck, her good manners would necessitate she repay him by having dinner with him. Sam reached the tree and sidestepped Houdini, looking for a handhold on a branch so he could climb up.