“I went to see Dad today,” Logan said, changing the subject.
“How was he?” she asked. “The last time I was over there, he seemed a little sluggish. He was getting around okay, but you could tell it was a lot of work for him.”
“He was better,” Logan said. “That cane the doctor gave him helps. He came to the door to let me in, then walked with me to the garage to help me find some tools to work on the house.”
“I’m worried he won’t get the use of his left hand back,” Pepper said with a shake of her head. “He can barely hold a spoon without dropping it. I just don’t see him working on cars and handling heavy tools anytime soon.”
“It’s only been a couple of months. He’s going to therapy and he said that’s helping. You never know. We’ve got to take this one day at a time. He could be in there tinkering under the hood with Sean by summer.”
“You’re right,” Pepper said, trying to stay positive. She was usually an upbeat person, but it was hard to do when she was watching her family struggle. “On the bright side, now that Dad can stay home alone during the day, Mom’s able to go back to run the shop. It’s taken a lot of pressure off Sean. Now he can focus on fixing the cars and Mom can handle the customers and the phones.”
“I’m sure she’s happy to get out of the house. Of course, now I have to worry about her sneaking across the street to check on me all the time.”
“Ah, the downside to renting a house so close to the garage,” Pepper replied with a smile. “I’m sure she’d be glad to help you decorate.”
Logan groaned and rolled his eyes. “She’d want to cover everything with those doilies she crochets.” Pepper chuckled, knowing he was right. She had a box with about fifteen doilies her mother gave her for her new house. It was currently collecting dust in the corner of the dining room, but so were most things.
“All right,” Logan said, pushing back from the table, “enough eating. It’s time to get some work done.”
“Fine.” Pepper sipped the last of her drink and followed Logan into the kitchen to throw out their trash. “I’ll start on the kitchen. Then you can spend all day tomorrow trying to figure out where I put things.”
Logan laughed. “Okay. Just don’t hide the K-Cups or you’ll get a desperate call from me at dawn.”
Chapter 2
Pepper finally got ready to leave around nine thirty. It took more time than she expected to wipe out the cabinets, line them, and put away all of Logan’s things. The kitchen was small and the layout was a little awkward, so it took some time to figure out what should go where. She was pretty pleased with herself when she was finished. It actually looked better than her own kitchen, which stung just a little.
As she stepped down off his porch and onto the sidewalk, the patio light flickered for a moment, then went out. A streetlamp up the block made it bright enough to walk without tripping, but the sudden darkness was disconcerting.
The street was quiet. Too quiet. She looked around and didn’t see a single person out and about. No cars, no people walking dogs or coming in and out of the grocery store. On any other day, she wouldn’t have given a second thought to it, but after that conversation today about the peeper, she found herself a little on edge. All of the victims had been single women who lived alone. There had been no rhyme or reason to the nights, no patterns to anticipate when he might strike again. Whoever he was, he could be out there watching her right now.
The rustle of leaves sounded on her left, and she snapped her head around to look. There was no breeze tonight, but a bush at the corner of Logan’s foundation was moving. She told herself it could be a cat or rabbit and forced her feet down the sidewalk to her car.
Logan’s house was only about five blocks away from Pepper’s, but she’d opted to drive tonight not knowing how late she’d finish. She rounded her car quickly and checked the backseat for crazies before she climbed in. She shut the door and locked it as soon as she could. From there, it was a short, uneventful drive. The whole town was quiet tonight, including her street, Daisy Drive.
When she parked and turned off her car, she eyed the area around her house and prepared to make a run for it. Nothing was out of the ordinary, but she was spooked nonetheless. It was a short walk from her driveway to her front door, and she made certain she had her house key ready in one hand and her pepper spray ready in the other. Miss Francine had told her to get a big gun or a big dog, but that wasn’t really her style. When she moved out of her parents’ home, her daddy insisted she have some way to protect herself, so she special ordered the police-grade pepper spray from the Internet. If it could drop a violent three-hundred-pound drunk, it could handle whoever might be looking in the windows of Rosewood homes.
Pepper’s house was two blocks off the main square, just across from Whittaker’s restaurant. The restaurant could get a little loud on the weekends and during the summer when they stayed open later, but on the average weeknight, they closed up at nine. Not even the dishwashers were still there tonight.
Both of her neighbors were older. Miss Phyllis owned the antiques store and was almost completely deaf. Instead of wearing a hearing aid, she opted to crank the volume up on her television so loud that Pepper knew exactly what she was watching at all times. The silence indicated she was in bed already. On the other side were the Jacksons—Art and Connie.
They owned the gas station, and Art usually got home late from closing up.
Not the most dangerous place, but that didn’t keep her from climbing her stairs two at a time and lunging for her front door.
She unlocked it quickly, stepped inside, then shut and bolted the door. Only then did she let out a sigh of relief mingled with nervous laughter. “You’re being silly,” she chided herself, then immediately turned and pulled the curtains closed on her front windows. Why would the peeper come to watch her? Really, there wasn’t anything exciting to look at.
Pepper switched on the lamp by the front door, illuminating what she liked to refer to as her livbedoset—a combination living room, bedroom, and closet. Her couch, bed, television, dresser, and a makeshift clothing rack occupied most of the free space in the room, making her feel sometimes like she had a studio apartment instead of a thousand-square-foot house.
She dropped her purse and pepper spray on the table by the door and made her way through the house, closing curtains and securing windows as she went.
Her house was a two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow. In theory. Unfortunately, she didn’t have enough time or money to make all of the rooms usable. The home had previously been owned by an elderly widower. He’d fallen and broken his hip, spending the next few years in a long-term-care facility in Ashville. When he passed on, his kids had fought over his estate for several years, and by the time the house went on the market, it had been vacant for almost a decade.
One bedroom had a weak floor that needed to be reinforced and a window in such a poor state that the curtains moved even when it was shut. The other had an electrical problem, so none of the outlets or fixtures worked, and the wallpaper was peeling down in a mildewy mess. She was pretty certain that the drywall needed to be replaced in there, too.
She would use the rooms for storage if
she could, but neither was in any shape to put anything in them. With her luck, a heavy box would fall through the floor and she’d find a family of rabid raccoons in her crawl space. That meant that all the boxes of unpacked belongings and homeless furniture were stacked up in what should be the dining room.