His eyes darkened, and he nodded. “No, not today.”
He had the grace to let her get out of there first. She picked up her pace, moving in a half run by the time she reached her car. She drove out to the entrance to the Park Loop Road and paid for a pass, joining a car from Colorado and an SUV from West Virginia on the quiet, scenic drive.
“Chris…don’t go. We can run errands another time.”
He touched her cheek. “I won’t be long.”
She smiled, falling back onto the couch in the front room. “Good. I’ll read for a little while and take a nap.”
“Yes.” He laughed, kissing her softly. “Rest up for later.”
After he left, she read a few pages and fell asleep, wishing he’d stayed with her.
The breathtaking, classic Maine coast beauty steadied her even as it conjured up memories, the whisper of long-ago kisses, the shudder of long-ago orgasms. She could see Chris’s eyes, as dark a green as the fir trees around her, as he’d watched her in the night.
To ease the pain, she would tell herself she was a different person now, but she wasn’t. Sure she’d changed—she didn’t know if Chris would recognize her anymore. She wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old law student who’d never endured serious loss, who’d never been called to a scene of a triple homicide or looked into the eyes of someone who’d killed in a fit of rage and now couldn’t go back and undo what he’d done. Yet with all she’d done in the past seven years, she wasn’t a different person. Deep down she was the same woman who’d fallen in love with her guy from Maine, her FBI agent.
He’d been her first proper lover, and he’d relished that role in their eighteen months together.
That their life together was over didn’t mean it had never happened.
Or that she needed to pretend that she didn’t want to fall in love again. It wouldn’t be the same—it couldn’t be the same. And it didn’t have to be.
She wanted it, she realized. She wanted to love a man, to be in love with a man—not out of desperation, not just to have someone in her life, but to let it happen if it was meant to, to be open to the possibility of it.
She made no stops on the winding drive.
When she arrived back at her house, the air was still, only the distant cries of seagulls to disturb the silence. Inside, she smelled plaster dust and the faint odor of fresh paint.
She dialed Lou Beeler’s pager. When he returned her call, she was in the back room, shaking open a black trash bag, standing up to her mid-calves in debris from her gutted walls. Any more frustrations, and she’d have all the walls in the house ripped out.
“I don’t have anything for you,” Lou said.
“Did you talk to Mattie Young?”
“I did. He wants to get a restraining order against you.”
Abigail snorted. “Let him try.”
“Doyle doesn’t have anything, either. Abigail—you know these calls could be B.S. You must have made your share of enemies over the past few years. One of them could have dug around on the Internet and figured out just enough to push your buttons.”
“Is that what you believe happened?”
“I don’t believe anything. I just follow the facts.” He paused. “So should you.”
She sat on a chair covered in white plaster dust. She’d meant to throw sheets over the furniture, but hadn’t gotten around to it. Now, she had a bigger mess to clean up—and Lou Beeler doubting her objectivity.
She didn’t blame him. In his place, she’d do no different.
She smiled to herself as she continued over the phone, “Does that mean I still have a green light to look into the calls myself?”
“As if you need a green light from me. You know what I’m saying, Abigail.”
“You’d like for me to go back to Boston.”
“Your caller could be there.”
“Or not,” she said.
Lou sighed. “Or not.”
“What about the FBI guys doing the background check on Grace Cooper?”
“What about them?”
“Come on, Lou. You know what I’m asking. Did you talk to them about the calls?”
“Yes.”
She waited, but he didn’t go on. “All right. I can take a hint.”
The Maine CID detective broke into laughter. “No, you can’t,” he said, still chuckling as he hung up.
Abigail scowled at the dead phone and debated driving out to the local police station and finding Doyle Alden, but what good would that do?
Instead, using an ancient dustpan and brush—and her hands—she swept up the chunks of plaster, bent nails, mice skeletons and yellowed drywall tape, shoving the debris into her heavy-duty trash bag.
She needed answers. But how could she get them with such an elusive caller? Without the law enforcement resources she usually had at her disposal?
“You’re the only person the killer fears.”
Was it true? If so, what leverage did it give her?