You should never drink alone.
Isn’t that what they say? Whoever they are.
Too bad. Jenna had just had one helluva day and she decided a cup of decaf coffee laced with a bit of Kahlua and Bailey’s Irish Cream wouldn’t kill her. She spied the aerosol whipped cream in the refrigerator and couldn’t resist. “In for a penny,” she told herself as she added a dollop of cream to her cup, then topped it all off with a dash of chocolate sprinkles. If her trainer Ron ever found out, he’d punish her with extra minutes on the treadmill, but so what? He was, after all, only twenty-six and certainly didn’t know about the soothing effects of chocolate and alcohol when it came to times of stress. Which this definitely was.
“Right?” she said to the dog, who had settled into his favorite spot under the table. Critter, if nothing else, was optimistic when it came to the thought of scraps being surreptitiously slipped in his direction. His tail thumped loudly on the floor as Jenna sat on a chair and pawed through her bag for the mail she’d picked up earlier. With everything else that had happened in her life today, she’d forgotten about the mail until just this moment. The girls had devoured pizza, salad, and ice cream and were upstairs in their rooms while Jenna contemplated a long, hot bath in the Jacuzzi.
As she sipped her drink, she sorted through the magazines, bills, and advertisements that had collected in her post office box during the last week. Until she came to the hand-addressed envelope. Her name was written in precise block letters and there was no return address. Using a letter opener, she slit the envelope open and noted that the postmark was Portland.
Inside was a single sheet of paper.
A unique, single sheet of paper upon which was a short love poem, the words superimposed over a pale image of Jenna wearing a black sheath with a beaded neckline, a picture taken of her on the set of Resurrection. It had been a publicity shot taken of her in the role of the coolly seductive and psychotic killer, Anne Parks.
You are every woman.
Sensual. Strong. Erotic.
You are one woman.
Searching. Wanting. Waiting.
You are my woman.
Today. Tomorrow. Endlessly.
I will come for you.
Jenna’s heart nearly stopped. Ice congealed in her veins. “Oh, God,” she whispered and dropped the letter as if it burned her. Coffee from her cup sloshed onto the table, splashing over the sheet and envelope. Who had sent this to her? Why? Heart hammering, she glanced around the room, as if whoever had mailed the poem might appear.
Critter climbed to his feet and whined.
“It’s—it’s all right,” she said, though she could barely breathe. Someone knew her mailing address, realized she lived here. When she’d moved from L.A., she’d tried to start over, had asked that all of her fan mail be sent to her agent’s address…Her post office box here was supposed to be private.
It’s a small town.
The general public does know you live here.
You know this comes with the territory.
Relax.
But she couldn’t stop her pulse from racing. She’d received mail from obsessed fans before, but those incidents had been years ago. It was while she was married, when she’d lived in Southern California and was still making movies, still part of the industry, still a name that would come up time and again in the gossip columns. In the past year and a half, most of her mail had been screened and filtered by Monty Fenderson of the Fenderson Agency. She fought the absurd impulse to call him, to rant and rave, to scream that her privacy had been invaded.
Which was ludicrous.
The public knew that she lived in a small Oregon town. That was to be expected.
So a piece of mail from a sicko slipped through. So what?
Her nerves were just shot from the storm, all the talk of the murdered woman, her fights with her daughters…what she needed to do was calm down. Finish her drink. Take that bath…. Nonetheless, she walked around the house and though it was far from town, flanked by towering trees and the river, fenced off from the world, she walked from room to room and shut the blinds. A shiver slid down her spine as she read the last line again.
I will come for you.
Without a second thought, she walked to the wall where the alarm system was housed and pressed the code. A second later a tiny green light switched to red. It was a basic system, one that had been installed, the realtor had told her, long after the house was built, and was only wired to the doors. A buzzer went off when the system was engaged and a door opened; two minutes later, if the alarm hadn’t been deactivated, a siren began to shriek. But she wasn’t contracted with a security firm that notified the sheriff’s department if the alarm went off. Yet. She’d take care of that tomorrow morning.
Meanwhile she sat near the fire and warmed her hands. She had a crippled old dog and a shotgun with no ammunition for protection.
Don’t freak out. It’s just an anonymous letter…no big deal.