The camera panned over to Amy, reminding Laura that she’d taken the video on one of their many playdates. Not ten seconds later Chris walked into frame, giving her an unexpected pang. She was missing him, too, not just Lacey. Before the last case she’d been distancing herself from him on purpose, trying to put him off so he would never come into contact with Zach. With that, their disastrous last meeting, and then going off on a case again, she felt like she hadn’t seen him properly in a long time.
She didn’t let herself think about it. The girls might have been asleep, but Chris wasn’t. She found his number in her contacts list and pressed dial, waiting for it to connect.
It rang five times before she lost her nerve and put the phone down.
Maybe he was busy, or even asleep after a long shift. There could have been many reasons why he didn’t answer. The fact that he didn’t want to talk to her was only one of them.
Right?
Laura scrubbed her hands over her face, remembering the last message he’d sent her. That he would be there when she was ready to talk. And she wasn’t, was she? If Nate’s advice was to be taken, she never would be. She could never tell him the truth. But was that fair?
Or was she doing him an injustice if she didn’t just end things now, before he got in too deep?
The terrible truth of it was that she already was in too deep.
So deep that thinking about all of this gave her a heartache, and she actually found it preferable to think about their horrible case—with no leads, no idea of motive, and not a single viable suspect despite all this legwork.
But at least tomorrow, she had a chance of changing that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Alana took one last look around the museum, reassuring herself that everything was in its place. She liked to leave everything where it was supposed to be. Get it ready late at night, rather than first thing in the morning.
She gave herself a satisfied nod and reached for the keys hooked onto her belt, pulling them out so she could head home.
She looked out from the doors as she always liked to at this time of night, out over the town below. In the distance, the swell of the sea was promised by the moonlight glinting on the waves, but from here, she could barely hear it anymore. Instead, what she saw was the twinkling lights burning in homes and businesses open late, like so many tiny lighthouses guiding her on her own way home. She took a deep breath of the fresh air.
Alana turned to lock the doors, shoving her hands back into the pockets of her heavy felt coat as soon as she could to stay warm. She was glad that it wasn’t a long walk home. The nights were so cold at this time of the year, and it looked like there would be a storm tonight, too, but so long as the wind didn’t whip up any faster and drive the clouds her way, she thought she would be able to get home and warm before it hit.
She turned the familiar route, as always going on the defensive. It wasn’t that she was paranoid, but she thought that wariness was a good trait for a woman to have when she was walking home alone in the dark. In the summer, this route was just beautiful. But in the winter, it was a horror show every single night. Every shadow looked like someone waiting to lunge at her. Every car that passed seemed to, quite obviously and reasonably, belong to a mass murderer.
Although, with the way things were going down there in town, right now she had less reason to poke fun at herself than usual.
Alana increased her pace to a brisk walk, thinking it would serve the double purpose of helping her to warm up and also getting her home faster.
When she heard a heavy step somewhere behind her, someone stumbling over something in the dark, her heartbeat increased to double time as well.
Alana fingered her keys in her pocket, selecting one of them and pushing it between her middle and forefinger—the longest one, the one that locked the big, heavy wooden doors of the nautical museum. It wasn’t sharp, but it would go into an eyeball or up a nose pretty well if she got a chance. She tried to think fast. She’d prepared for this on hundreds of dark night walks, but it had never actually happened before.
It might not be happening now. Maybe it was just someone out walking a dog, or taking in the night air, or going to meet a lover with no interest in her at all. Maybe it was onlybecauseshe’d thought of this happening that it seemed like it was going to.
But if it really was…
Alana had thought about it enough times. She had enough strategies in her head. Now the problem was figuring out how to choose one.
But she thought she had an idea—and it was one that required her to act immediately, before the other person could get too close.
It was lucky that this was her home route. She knew it like the back of her hand. She had walked over these hills above the town to and from home, to and from the views of the sea, to and from meetings with friends. All different directions were hers. She could go as far away from the light as she needed to and still know her way.
Alana darted to the left and down a hidden gully, knowing that she could follow it to the end and then come out not too far from home at a right-angle. It would add maybe five minutes to her walk. But it was much safer than staying on the path.
She held her breath for a few steps and then stopped, listening, trying to be as quiet as possible. It wouldn’t help to go down this steep and uncertain path if she was going to be followed anyway. She strained to hear a footstep or the breathing of someone else, watching the air above the place where she now stood—back at the elevation of the path—for telltale white steam. But there was nothing. The whole place was still and quiet. She could only hear gulls, far off in the distance the crashing of the waves, and somewhere down below the dim movement of a few cars that hadn’t yet returned to their homes for the night.
Nothing else.
Maybe she’d been caught up in thought and imagined it.
No, she was sure about the noise she’d heard. It was either a person or a very large animal, and if it was an animal, hopefully they weren’t interested in her anyway.