by Linda Howard
I took a deep breath. “I finally placed her. She’s a floor nurse at the hospital. She came into my room, was really friendly, chatted for a while, but she kept ripping my bandages off, and she was really rough doing it.”
He looked angry, his jaw working a little. “Did anyone else see her?”
“Siana was there.”
“Describe her.”
“About my age, maybe a little older. It was hard to tell. Very pretty, with greenish hazel eyes. Brown hair, but it was a bad dye job. She must have bleached the dye out afterward, which is really hard to do, and that threw me off when she turned up at the fire scene as a blonde.”
“How tall?”
I swallowed to ease my throat. “I don’t know. I was lying down, so I don’t have a frame of reference. But she was slim, built really well. And she…” I started to say she had really long eyelashes but an elusive picture was trying to form in my mind, another face swimming into focus. I gasped. “I saw her in the fabric shop, too, after I got out of the hospital. I thought she looked familiar then. But her hair was different that time, too. It was red, I think, a dark red.” She had been following me around, and not just in a Chevrolet. Glancing at Wyatt, I knew from his grim expression that the same thought had occurred to him.
“Wigs,” said Forester.
Wyatt nodded. “That’s what it sounds like.”
“The blond hair could have been a wig,” I said. “It was covered with a hood so I couldn’t tell. But the brown hair in the hospital wasn’t a wig, it was her hair, and it was dyed. Trust me.” My whisper was going; I started coughing at the end of that speech. The laryngitis was something else I could lay at her door, and though it was minor in comparison to burning my condo, not being able to talk was a pain in the ass. If I needed to scream or something, I’d be S.O.L. When you think of the situations in which you might need to scream, having a voice suddenly becomes more important.
“I’ll contact the hospital,” said Forester, “see if we can get photos of everyone who was working—when?”
“First shift, last Friday,” supplied Wyatt. “Fourth floor, neurological wing.”
“We might not need a warrant,” said Forester, but without much hope. “But this hospital tends to get pissy on privacy issues.”
“I get pissy on attempted murder issues,” said Wyatt, his tone icy.
I wondered what he could do if the hospital administration balked at providing photos without first being served with a warrant, then remembered that, courtesy of his previous celebrity status, he could pick up the phone and talk to the governor anytime he wanted. Wyatt could affect fund-raising, appointments, any number of aspects that were pertinent to a hospital. Way cool.
Forester left to get on the phone with the hospital and Wyatt turned his attention back to me. “Was the first time you saw her while you were in the hospital?”
“So far as I know.”
“Can you think of anything you said that might have set her off, anything she said that can give us any idea what’s going on here?”
I thought back over the conversation and shook my head. “I mentioned I was getting married in less than a month and didn’t have time for a concussion. She said something about when she was planning her own wedding, how crazy the last month was. She asked if I liked your mother, said it must be nice to have a mother-in-law you liked, from which I gathered she doesn’t like hers. She thought I’d been in a motorcycle accident, because of the road rash. Just…conversation. I said I was hungry and she said she’d have a tray sent up, but she never did. That’s it. She was very friendly.” I did some more coughing, and looked around for a pad to write on. I’d strained my throat enough. If I kept this up, I’d be right back where I’d started.
“That’s all the questions,” he said, getting up and coming around the desk to haul me to my feet, his arms closing around me. “Rest your throat. We’ll get her now; that’s the lead we’ve been needing.”
“It just makes no sense,” I whispered. “I don’t know her.”
“Stalkers don’t make sense, period. They form illogical obsessions in an instant, and a lot of times the victim has done nothing more than be polite. It isn’t your fault, and there’s nothing you could have done to prevent it. It’s a personality disorder. If she changes her appearance that often, then she’s looking for something, and you’re probably everything she wants to be and isn’t.”
That was a pretty neat psychological assessment. I was impressed. “Hey, you’re not just another pretty face,” I said, looking up at him. “And everyone says football players are dumb.”
He laughed and patted my butt, though his hand probably lingered too long for it to qualify as an actual pat. At the quick knock on his door, though, he dropped his hand and stepped away.
Forester popped his head in, a frown knitting his forehead. “I talked to the floor supervisor,” he reported. “She said there’s no one answering that description on her floor at all.”
Wyatt frowned, rubbing his bottom lip as he thought. “Could have been someone from the ER who saw Blair when she was brought in, took a little side trip up to see her. There should be security film of the hallways, almost every hospital has that now.”
“I’ll get in touch with hospital security and see what I can do.”
“How much trouble will that be?” I asked Wyatt when Forester had gone back to his phone.
His smile was thin. “Depends on what kind of day the chief of security is having. Depends on whether hospital rules say he has to clear this with the administrator before letting us see the film. Depends on whether the administrator is having a dick-head day. If he is, then it depends on whether or not we can find a judge to sign a warrant, which can be a little iffy on a Friday afternoon, and especially iffy if the hospital administrator plays golf with a few of the judges.”
Good God. And he’d wanted to be a cop.
“Do I need to stay?”
“No, you can go do your thing. I know how to get in touch with you. Just be careful.”
I nodded my understanding. As I rode down in the elevator I sighed. I was tired of looking for white Chevrolets, and anyway, if she were smart, which she appeared to be, why wouldn’t she swap up her vehicles? Renting a car wasn’t difficult. For all I knew she could be in a blue Chevrolet by now.
A chill went down my back.
Or a beige Buick.
Or even a white Taurus.
I’d let myself be blinded by the idea that I’d recognize her by what she was driving. She could be driving anything. She could have been following me all morning, and I wouldn’t have known it because I’d been looking for the wrong color car.
She could be anywhere.
Chapter
Twenty-six
I had a choice. I could bolt for Wyatt’s house, using the technique he’d taught me the night before to evade any followers, and hole up there like a scared rabbit, or I could use that same technique to break free and then go about my business. I chose to go about my business.
Why not? I had a wedding to pull off. What else could go wrong? What other complication could be added to my list of things to do? Not only did I have to be ready for a wedding in three weeks—a wedding for which I didn’t even have a gown yet!—someone was trying to kill me, my home had been burned to the ground, I couldn’t talk, I had to decide whether the man I loved truly loved me in return or if I should call off the wedding I was in the middle of planning, and I somehow had to repair the marriage of two people whose own children couldn’t get them to talk to each other. I felt like a crazed bee, unable to stop going from flower to flower despite the hurricane blowing the stems flat and sometimes ripping them entirely from the ground.
To top things off, the stores had put out their Christmas decorations. I needed to start my Christmas shopping in the middle of all this, because the decorations are a signal to all those lunatic early shoppers who descend on stores like locusts and strip them of all the prime gifts, leaving only left
overs behind for the sane people who like to do their Christmas shopping after Thanksgiving—you know, when the Christmas season actually starts. Even if I didn’t start my Christmas shopping now, the pressure was on, evidenced by the colored balls and little fiber-optic trees popping up in stores.
I couldn’t play it safe and hide out. I had too many things to do. I could even rationalize it and say any on-the-ball nutcase out there would expect me to play it safe, therefore I was actually safer by not playing it safe, or something like that.
So I went to see Sally.
She had started working outside the home, at an antiques auction house, when her youngest finished high school. Basically Sally drove around to estate sales, yard sales, junk sales, searching for antiques she could get at low prices, which the auction house then spruced up and sold for profit. The auctions were every Friday night, which meant that on Fridays she could be found at the auction house helping with the stickering, cataloging, and arranging. The other four days of the week, and sometimes on Saturday, too, she was out doing her thing.
There was a mix of cars and pickup trucks, plus a midsize delivery truck backed up to a loading dock, parked outside the auction house, but the door was locked since they weren’t open for business yet. I walked around to the loading dock and found a set of steps leading up, and I went in through the open bay door.
A skinny middle-aged guy with bug eyes and Coke-bottle glasses, pushing an empty hand truck, said, “Y’need help, ma’am?”
He was probably twenty-years older than I was, but this was the South, so he “ma’amed” me. It’s just good manners.
I held up my hand, signaling he should stop, because no way could he hear me from where he was, and hurried over. “I’m looking for Sally Arledge,” I whispered hoarsely.
“Right through there,” he said, pointing toward a door at one end of the small dock area. “That’s a bad case of laryngitis, if you don’t mind me saying so. You need to take some honey and lemon in hot tea for that, and if that don’t work, then put some Vicks salve on your throat and wrap it with a hot towel, and take a spoonful of sugar with kerosene dripped on it. Sounds crazy, but that’s what my mama always gave us when we were little and had the sore throat, and it worked. Didn’t kill us, either,” he said, his bug eyes crinkling merrily.
“You actually took kerosene?” I asked. Huh. That sounded like something I needed to ask Grammy. The salve and hot towel remedy actually made sense, but I wasn’t about to take kerosene dripped on anything.
“Sure did. Not very much, mind. A bunch would likely kill you doornail dead, or at least make you puke your guts up, but a little tad didn’t hurt us.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I promised. “Thanks!” I hurried toward the door he’d indicated, trying to envision how that remedy had gotten started. Somewhere, someone had thought, “Boy, my throat hurts! I think I’ll get some kerosene and drink it. Bound to help. I’ll put it on sugar, though; make it go down better.”
The world amazes me.
The first person I saw when I went through the door was Sally, perched on a ladder, wiping down the top of a huge carved headboard that was leaning against the wall. It was a gorgeous piece, the wood blackened with age, and if it fell on anyone it would likely kill them. No way would I have sex with that thing looming over me, though I guess going out with a bang isn’t a bad way to go.
She didn’t look around, so I had to go over and knock on the headboard to get her attention. “Blair!” Her mobile face expressing both pleasure and concern, which isn’t an easy thing to do when you think about it, Sally left her rag draped over the top of the headboard and climbed down the ladder. “Tina told me about your condo, and your throat, and everything. Poor baby, you’ve had a rough week.” Once on the floor, she hugged me tightly in sympathy.
Sally was about five-two and weighed maybe a hundred pounds, a tiny dynamo who was never still. Her dark red hair was stylishly shaggy and spiky without being over the top, and she’d had interesting blond streaks put in it to frame her face. The broken nose that she sustained when she drove into the side of the house while trying to hit Jazz had left a tiny bump on the bridge of her nose that somehow looked good. She had worn glasses before, but the glasses were actually what had broken her nose when the air bag deployed; since then she’d switched to contacts.
I hugged her in return. “Is there somewhere we can talk? I have something to show you.”
She looked interested. “Sure. Let’s go over here and sit down.”
She indicated some folding chairs that were haphazardly grouped in the middle of the auction floor. Later they would be arranged in neat rows for the bidders. We took two of them, then I reached in my tote bag and pulled out the invoices from Sticks and Stones and handed them to her.
Puzzled, she looked at them for a couple of seconds before it registered what they were, then her eyes widened in shock and fury. “Twenty thousand dollars!” she yelped. “He paid…he paid twenty thousand dollars for that dreck?”
“No,” I said, “he didn’t pay that for the dreck. He paid that for you, because he loves you.”
“Did he send you over here?” she demanded furiously.
I shook my head. “I’m interfering all on my own.” Well, also because Wyatt had forced me to, but that was between us.
She stared down at the invoice, trying to get her mind around the amount. To her, the furniture and artwork Monica Stevens had used to replace Sally’s prized antiques were worth maybe a couple of thousand, tops. To say the two looked at style from the opposite ends of the spectrum was to understate the case.
“He knew how much I loved my antique pieces,” she said, her voice breaking a little. “And if he didn’t, he should have! Why else would I have put so much work into repairing them and refinishing them? It wasn’t as if we couldn’t have afforded different furniture if I’d wanted it!”
“But he didn’t know,” I pointed out. “For one thing, you didn’t work on the pieces when he was at home. And for another, I have never in my life seen a man more clueless about style and decorating than Jazz Arledge. That orange couch in his office—” I broke off, shuddering.
She blinked, distracted. “You’ve seen his office? Isn’t that place horrible?” Then she shook off the disturbing image. “That doesn’t matter. If he’d listened to me at all during the thirty-five years we’ve been married, if he paid any attention to the house he lived in, he couldn’t possibly have thought—”
“That’s just it, he literally has no clue about different decorating styles. He didn’t know different styles existed. To him, furniture is furniture is furniture, period. I think he sort of gets the concept now, but only in the vaguest way, like he knows there are different styles but he has no idea what they are or how any of them look. It’s a language he doesn’t speak, so he doesn’t understand what you’re saying when you talk about antiques.”
“Surely to God he knows that ‘antique’ means old.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “Look, can he tell the difference between navy blue and black?”
She shook her head.
“Most men can’t. They don’t have the necessary number of color rods in their eyes to tell the difference, so even if you put a navy blue sock beside a black sock they look the same to a man. It’s the same principle. It isn’t that Jazz isn’t interested, that he’s ignored what you like, it’s that his brain isn’t wired to see style. You don’t ask a wingless bird to fly, do you?”
Tears glittered brightly in her eyes and she looked down at the invoices in her hand. “You’re saying I’m wrong.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong to be upset about the furniture. I would have been, too.” Understatement, there. “But you were definitely wrong to try to hit him with the car.”
“That’s what Tina said.”
“She did?” Mom was in my corner! When had that happened?
“When you were in the hospital,” Sally said, as if she’d heard my thought. �
�She said that seeing how much pain you were in even though you hadn’t actually been hit by that car changed her mind. She said that hurt feelings were one thing, but physical injuries were way more serious.”
I sighed. I’m not one to downplay hurt feelings, but considering everything that had happened the past couple of months I had to agree. “She’s right. You didn’t catch him in adultery, you know. He bought furniture you don’t like.”
“So get over it.”
I nodded.
“And apologize.”
I nodded again.
“Damn, I hate apologizing! It isn’t just this. We’ve said things since this happened that we shouldn’t have said…”
“So get over it.” I could barely even whisper by then. It’s amazing how whispering can strain your throat.
“The heck of it is, I didn’t intend to hit him at all. We’d been arguing and we were both mad, but I had an appointment and had to leave. He followed me out, still arguing. You know Jazz, know how stubborn he is. He had a point he wanted to make, and intended to drive it into the ground. I started backing up and he was still standing there, waving his arms and yelling, and I was so mad I shoved the gear shift into Park so I could get out and yell in his face, except I didn’t shove it all the way up, and my foot was on the gas, and, well, right then I wouldn’t have minded if I had hit him, but it wasn’t deliberate. The next thing I knew the air bag was in my lap, my glasses were broken, and my nose was bleeding.” Ruefully she rubbed the tiny bump on her nose. “A broken nose at my age. And now I’ll have to live with that dreck.”
Smiling, I shook my head. “I talked to Monica. She’ll take the furniture back and work with you to redo your bedroom the way you like. She does other styles, too, you know. I think you’ll even like her. Plus I told her Mom would spread the word to her real estate clients that Monica isn’t a one-note Joanie, that she can do things other than steel and glass.”