She tore open the door and checked the interior…The phone wasn’t in its usual spot, which was the cup holder near the gearshift. Nor was it on the dash or front seat…She checked the glove box. Not there. Using a flashlight she kept in a pocket on the driver’s side door, she searched again, sweeping the flashlight’s beam under the seat and there, hidden beneath the seat-adjustment bar, was her phone, the battery nearly dead.
How had it gotten there?
She hadn’t used it since the fire, had dropped it during the attack.
She’d been nowhere near her truck.
Someone had put it there.
Her heart nearly stopped. She had the eerie sensation that she was being watched. She looked around the grounds and saw nothing out of the ordinary. The horses were grazing in the pasture, Khan was nosing around the water trough, the dogs in their runs were sleeping undisturbed in the afternoon sun and Nate was still missing.
Nerves strung tight, she flipped open her phone and tried to check her messages as the battery beeped a warning. Before she could connect, the phone went dead and there was no reviving it. “Damn,” she muttered, slapping it against her palm before giving up. Who had found her phone and placed it—no, hidden it—in her pickup without telling her? Someone who had found it that night? Travis? No. Nate? She made a mental note to ask him about it. But when? Surely not the night the shed burned down.
And then she knew.
As surely as if he’d whispered the truth to her, she realized that whoever had started the fire had placed the phone in her truck. The same twisted individual who had left her the burned birth certificate, who had kidnapped Dani, who had killed Mary Beth.
And she’d just erased any chance of collecting his fingerprints, she berated herself. Then she decided that whoever had taken it would have been careful about that, too.
Goose bumps broke out on her skin and she slowly turned, staring at her house, the kennels, the stable, the destroyed shed, searching the familiar nooks and crannies for a stranger, someone dangerous and dark, someone who enjoyed tormenting her.
Who was he?
Why had he killed Mary Beth but spared her?
Because he’s not finished. And he wants you to know. He gets off on scaring you.
“Bastard,” she hissed. She thought of Dani Settler. Her child. Travis’s child. Hang in there, honey…We’ll find you. We will!
She strode into the house, hooked the cell phone into its charger, then dialed Nate’s cell phone. To hell with giving him his space. She needed him here. Now.
But he didn’t answer and his voice mail box was full. “Damn it all to hell,” she muttered. Her thoughts next flew to Travis. She wanted to talk to him, to see him. He’d been gone for only a few hours and it seemed like an eternity.
“Oh, get over yourself,” she muttered. What was she thinking? She, who was so hell-bent to get away from her overprotective brothers. She, who had sworn off marriage after the horror she’d endured as Mrs. Ryan Carlyle. She, the girl who had suffered the ultimate rejection when she’d told Brendan Giles she was pregnant. She had no business—no damned business at all—thinking of Travis Settler as anything more than Dani’s father, a worried man looking for his child.
“He’s nothing more to me,” she told the puppy who had finally, in exhaustion, curled into a little ball and was sleeping on the fluffy pillow in the pen. “You’re going to be fine,” Shannon whispered and wondered if she was talking to the dog or herself.
What she needed, she decided, was some time to think, away from the rubble, away from the phone, away from the ridiculous notion that there were sinister eyes watching her every move.
“I’ll be back soon,” she promised the little dog, who didn’t so much as move upon the pillow. “Sweet dreams.”
She found the keys to her truck. She had to get out. She’d been cooped up with her thoughts too long.
She wondered about Nate again. Ever since she’d told him she was buying a new place she’d felt a wall build between them, one emotional brick stacked upon another.
And it was weird that he hadn’t been hovering over her since the fire, but maybe that was a blessing, to borrow from Oliver’s take on life.
Deciding to do something constructive, she began hauling a load of supplies to her truck that she’d bought earlier, intending to move them to her new place. It was tricky, carrying the boxes of cleaning products, painting supplies, paper towels, toilet paper and such, but she managed eventually to fill the bed of the pickup. Shannon worked steadily, grimly satisfied at her efforts. With hours still before sunset the last case of Lysol was finally tucked behind a wheel well. Despite her tender shoulder and ribs, it felt good to actually do something again, to turn her thoughts away from the fires and Mary Beth’s murder, at least for a little while.
Whistling to Khan, she opened the door of the cab and he flew across her seat to his position on the passenger side. “Aren’t you the pampered one,” she said with a smile as she twisted on the ignition. She threw the rig into drive and took off, gravel spraying from her tires as she tromped on the accelerator a little harder than she’d intended.
They drove fifteen miles under a canopy of madrona and oak trees where sunlight pierced through the leaves to spackle the ground. Though she turned on the radio and tried to concentrate on a ballad by some country artist she didn’t recognize, her mind spun wildly with images of charred documents, baby pictures, Brendan Giles, Mary Beth’s horrid death, Travis Settler—who was too damned sexy for his own good—and odd-shaped symbols burned into wood. What kind of nightmare had she fallen into? What did it all mean? Was Brendan really back in Santa Lucia?
Don’t trust what Oliver told you, her mind warned. He’s been wrong before. Hallucinated. Been hospitalized for psychiatric problems…It could be happening again…
She was so deep in thought that she nearly missed the turnoff to her new place. The lane was overgrown, brambles and berry vines covering a rusted, permanently opened gate that lopped on uneven hinges. She braked quickly, causing Khan to nearly lose his footing.
“Sorry,” she said, then maneuvered her pickup into the private road. Little more than two ruts separated by a stripe of dry weeds that scraped the truck’s undercarriage, the lane wound through the trees upward into the foothills. The old pickup bounced and lurched as it made the gentle climb. Shannon, shifting down, made a mental note to order several loads of gravel.