Kitabı oku: «Dark Moon», sayfa 3
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“Yeah, right.” Everything he said to her came out sounding as if he didn’t believe her. It had been that way from the first.
Conveying the impression that he had all the time in the world, he fanned himself with a sheaf of papers as he waited for her to begin. She’d discovered it was one of his techniques. Most people found it hard to sit in silence. She wasn’t one, but she had business and she wanted to get on with it, not play head games.
“Detective Stoner, something strange happened yesterday.”
He leaned forward and slipped into a cracker drawl. “Miz Conrad, if you only knew, sumpin’ strange happens in this town every day.” He tapped his fingers on his desk. “We haven’t found that boy. Eric.” He looked away from her.
“Yes. I know.”
“I’m sorry. I know you hope we’ll find him alive. We sure as hell want to.” Continuing to avoid her gaze, he sighed.
“Detective—” she paused, not quite sure how to say what she wanted to “—Ryder Hayes is a sort of neighbor of mine.”
“What kind of neighbor is that? A ‘sort of’ one?” The chair creaked and squeaked. “Do you know him?”
“No. I met him yesterday for the first time.” She lifted the flap of her purse and her fingers brushed the edge of the capsaicin cylinder. “Look, I think I heard a child in his house. Crying.” She stared at the floor, at the black pattern of scuff marks against the linoleum, the coffee stains on the side of Stoner’s desk. “I know it sounds unbelievable, but…”
There was a long pause.
“And when would that have been, Miz Conrad?” he asked gently. He picked up a pen, put it down carefully. “Yesterday?”
“Yes,” she said slowly, puzzled.
“You were pis—ticked off with him, weren’t you? About the dogs you thought were his?”
“What?” Josie spoke very carefully, not ready to uncork her temper but well and truly pis—ticked off now. “What are you talking about?”
“Um,” he said, stretching out his short legs and watching her from half-closed eyes. He was a man who sat tall and stood short, a disproportionately long torso giving the illusion that he was taller than his five foot nine. As he pivoted under his desk, his feet brushed against the sides of her shoes. Josie tucked her toes under the rung of the metal folding chair as he pa-dum-dumped in a negligent rhythm on the arms of his chair. “Well, it’s like this, Miz Conrad. Hayes came in earlier today.”
“What?” Josie’s fingers tightened on her purse.
That was why Stoner had been watching for her, to “handle” her with official soothing.
“He said we might expect a call from you. He wanted to touch base with us first.”
“He’s been a busy man, Detective.” The red-pepper spray at her house. The visit to the police. Oh, yes, Hayes had been very busy. She wished she knew what else he’d been doing during the long hours of the night after she left his house. She shut her eyes for a moment, collecting herself. “What did he have to say?”
Stoner’s voice was pleasant. “He thought you might be…upset, is how I think he put it.”
Josie leaned forward and gripped the edge of the scarred desk. Ryder Hayes had been one jump ahead of her. He’d been busily creating a picture of her for the police. A picture she didn’t care one damned bit for. “Listen, ‘upset’ doesn’t begin to describe how I felt about his dogs—”
“They’re not his dogs, Miz Conrad.”
“So he says.” She stood up, angry with Stoner, with Ryder Hayes, with herself. “But the dogs were on my property. For all I know, they might be responsible for what’s happened to the children. They’re dangerous. They went toward his house, and I believe they’re his. And when I went to his house to—” she paused, wondering what word was best to use “—to talk with him about the situation, I think I saw a child crying in the hallway of his house.”
“A child?” Stoner brushed his hand against the edge of an envelope.
Leaning toward him, both hands flat on the desk on either side of her purse, Josie added, “You should consider adding him to your list of people to investigate.” She whirled away, whirled back in anger. “Why did he come here, anyway? What did he give as his reason for making a Sunday-morning visit to the police station? Don’t you think it’s a little peculiar? Just a tiny bit suspicious, Detective?” Josie was so angry she thought her eardrums would burst with the force of her blood pounding in her head.
She wanted to scream at the stolid-looking detective, shake him, make him get up and go immediately to the Hayes house, and yet Stoner sat there rocking and watching her with that bland expression that told her nothing.
“Calm down, Miz Conrad,” he said, rocking forward and leaning his elbows on the desk.
“Calm down?” She wanted to screech at him, pull her hair out by the roots. Instead, she controlled her voice.
He motioned toward the chair. “Yeah. Take it easy and set a spell longer, hear?” Light blond hair grew thickly along the length of his fair, sun-spotted arms.
Like fur, Josie thought irritably. “Why should I? You’re wasting my time, Detective. And telling me nothing. Nothing.”
“Sit down, Miz Conrad.” The casual tone disappeared. Command deepened his easy, light voice into something else. “Please.”
Josie recognized an order. She sat.
Stoner templed his fingers, pad to pad. He avoided her eyes. “I know you think we haven’t done enough to find your daughter.”
Not answering, Josie sat there, tension pounding in her head. He was right. She didn’t believe they’d done everything they could have. If they’d looked harder, spent more hours, searched—She wound her fingers into the braided strap of her purse.
“However,” Stoner said, letting his hands fall to the desk, “we’ve done everything we can. We’ve sent out APBs, we’ve distributed pictures to the restaurants along the highway, we’ve followed up every lead we’ve been given.” His voice was weary. “You know that. You’ve been in here twice a week, checking.”
Josie nodded, her throat spasming against the words threatening to spill forth. She couldn’t afford to alienate Stoner. He was her only link to the search for Mellie. Stoner was willing at least to talk with her. Over the months, the other detectives had passed her along to him, tired of her calls and visits. “Yes,” she managed to say at last. Clearing her throat, she continued, her voice rising with frustration, “But why won’t you follow up on Ryder Hayes? How can you know he’s in the clear unless you’ve searched his house?”
“We searched his house earlier today.”
“What?” Josie sank bonelessly against the chair.
Now Stoner looked at her. She thought it was sympathy that darkened his eyes, but astonished by what he’d said, she couldn’t tell. “This morning. After he came in and volunteered that you might call or swear out a complaint. He invited us out to search his house.”
“But—”
“If he’d had anything to hide, he would have taken care of it before he showed up here, but, Miz Conrad, I swear on my mother’s grave, there’s been no kid at this house. And there aren’t any dogs anywhere around. No sign of dogs on his property. We checked. Nothing that would signal that a pack of dogs had been there at all. No sign of a kid. There’s nothing in that whole blamed house except dust and his magic stuff, a slick kitchen, and one room he sleeps in. We looked. Top to bottom. Everywhere.”
“Everywhere?” she whispered, stunned. “What if you’d looked last night?” She should have insisted that they initiate a search earlier. Why hadn’t she?
Because she’d been disoriented by the strange experience in those last moments with him. So bewildered that she’d felt as if her whole world had flipped crazily upside down.
“If we’d looked last night, we might have found indications that animals had been there, that a kid had been on the premises. We might have found something. But we didn’t go out there last night.” He turned his head from side to side and Josie heard a pop of vertebrae. “Wished to God we had. We didn’t, though. One more dead end.” The thick hair on his wrist sparkled in the sunlight as he reached toward her and she jerked away.
The heavy glass ashtray was too near her elbow. Spraying ashes and matches, it fell to the linoleum floor. “Sorry,” she muttered and made no move to clean up the mess.
Neither did Stoner. “Look, I know you’re distraught—”
“No, Detective, I’m not distraught. I’m angry. You can’t even begin to believe how angry,” Josie said, clipping her words out. She wasn’t about to allow him to label her and dismiss her. She knew how the bureaucratic mind worked. If Stoner could stick a label on her, he would be able to get rid of her more easily. She wanted him to take the memory of her face home with him every night. She wanted him to think about Mellie’s small face in the dark of the night. “I want my daughter found. I don’t know anything about Ryder Hayes. But I saw the dogs. They were going to attack me. Maybe he had nothing to do with them, as he says. I don’t know. But I’m not so distraught—” she made the word into a blasphemy “—that I’m losing my grip on reality. I’m the last person in the world who would do that, believe me.” She spoke fiercely, willing him to understand. “I’m not going off the deep end. I want my daughter back. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. So I want to know what happened to her, that’s all!”
“We’re doing the best we can.” Stoner’s face was obdurate.
“Right,” she said and stood up so abruptly that the chair skidded away. “Fine. Ryder Hayes is as innocent as a newborn babe. He doesn’t have a pack of killer dogs hanging out at his house. Splendid. I’ll sleep much better tonight, Detective. Thanks.” When he grimaced, she knew her irony had been too heavy-handed, but she didn’t give a damn. She only wanted out of the stifling atmosphere created by Stoner and his bureaucratic mentality.
She was glad Stoner didn’t follow her to the door. She might have said something she would have regretted. She was ready to pick a fight, ready to vent the rage and frustration and grief that pooled in her and grew deeper and stronger by the day.
Outside the station, she blinked in the brilliant sunlight. Everything was glazed with white-hot light and Sunday-morning still. In half an hour, the churches would empty and the streets would be filled.
Head down, she walked to the parking lot. She’d lied to Stoner. She was losing her grip. Exhaustion and the constant drain of not knowing about Mellie were taking a bigger toll than she wanted to admit. That, and her refusal to go anywhere, see anyone except the detectives on the case.
She had to organize her life. If she didn’t, she’d never make it through whatever was going to happen. She had to keep strong for Mellie’s sake.
The car was idling next to hers, a low purring that she didn’t even register until she reached into her purse for her car keys, and then she looked over.
The silvery car was backed in so that its driver’s side faced forward. Her car faced the chain links at the edge of the parking lot.
Breaking the glittery silver expanse, a darkened window slid down.
Blinded by the blaze of sunlight in front of her, Josie couldn’t see the face inside the shadowed interior. But she recognized the voice and the lazy grace of his movements as he leaned forward, dipping his head.
“May I have a word with you, Josie Conrad? A moment of your time?” Ryder Hayes said politely, the cool smoothness of his words spreading over her suddenly flushed skin like melting ice cream.
CHAPTER THREE
The sidewalks down both sides of the street in front of the parking lot were empty. Heat shimmered over the surfaces.
The concrete seared the soles of Josie’s flats.
Washing into the noon heat, the chill from Ryder Hayes’s expensive car eddied around her ankles. His house had been cold, too.
She was fenced in between the wire chain in front of the hood of her car and the partially open door on the driver’s side of the ghostly silver sports car.
It glittered in the heat.
Josie didn’t back away, but her pulse swung wildly for those few seconds as she looked into the car and couldn’t see his face.
“A moment of your time, Mrs. Conrad?” he repeated, shifting toward her. “No more than that. A small request it seems to me. Between neighbors, at any rate.” His head angled in her direction. His hair absorbed the light, turned the glare into shades of darkness.
Josie could see the square of his chin, the harsh bones of his cheeks.
But not his eyes.
“I don’t think so, Mr. Hayes,” she answered in the same vein, her voice as exquisitely polite as his, denying the frantic pumping of her heart. She turned her head, looking back toward the police station. Where was Stoner? He’d been Johnny-on-the-spot when she’d arrived. Where was he now?
“You and I need to discuss some things.”
She extended her key. “Unfortunately, I’m on my way home.” She wanted to inhale the words, take them back, as he shifted again. “I mean,” she added, spacing the words, “that I have errands to do.” She hoped the words didn’t sound as contrived to him as they did to her. She stuck the key into her car door and opened it. “People are expecting me.”
“Yes, I thought so.” He shoved his door farther open, completely blocking her. “That people were expecting you, that is,” he added, irony shivering along his dark voice.
His exquisite politeness exposed her lie as the pathetic thing she’d feared it was, but doggedly Josie stuck to it. “Friends who are stopping in for dinner.”
“I’m sure your friends won’t mind waiting a few moments. Since I’m sure they’re such close friends.” The smile that curved long furrows into his lean cheeks mocked her. He glanced at the police station. “You decided to swear out a complaint, after all.”
She edged closer to her car. “Of course I did,” she said. “What did you expect?”
There was a long pause, and then he smiled. “I expect you’re lying, you see.”
She must have blanched because he nodded.
“But you intended to swear out a complaint. If I hadn’t already entertained the gentlemen in blue. And in suits. I wasn’t sure, but I thought you would, in spite of my call. It seemed the most logical action for you to take. That’s why I approached the police first. It seemed…easier. A preemptive strike, if you will. I like to avoid trouble when I can. You should have taken my advice. You would have avoided complications for yourself.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Her knuckles hurt with the strength of her grip on the car. The edges of her consciousness were darkening, thickening, closing in. She had to get away from him. Josie inhaled slowly, pushing back that terrifying darkness.
She should never have pulled her car in right to the edge of the chain-link fence. “Would you mind shutting your door, Mr. Hayes? I’d hate to scratch the finish. I’m sure it’s expensive.”
“Yes, in fact, it is.” His teeth flashed in the dim interior. “Very.”
No matter how she tried, Josie couldn’t see inside his car. Her eyes couldn’t adjust quickly enough between the blinding light bouncing up from the concrete and the cool shadows of his car. She examined the side of the police station. In this new building all the windows were shut and sealed against the heat and humidity, thanks to the central air. The old police station had made do with tall windows, taller ceilings and lots of fans.
This was supposed to be an improvement.
Unless you were in the parking lot wondering if anyone would hear you if you screamed.
Josie studied the ground, trying to decide what to do. A chameleon on the raised concrete next to the fence lifted one translucent green leg. She could always hop into her car and back out, ripping his door off in the process.
If she had the chance, she thought as one sneaker-clad foot came into view. She looked up and saw only the edge of dark slacks that tightened across a muscular thigh.
“A penny for your thoughts.” A copper coin spun into the air and she looked skyward. The coin gleamed as it tumbled to the ground, clinking as it landed.
“You can’t afford them. They’re worth more than a penny.”
“Of course they are. I should have known.” Still in the car and facing her, but with one foot on the concrete not far from her own, he dipped slightly forward in a seated half bow and his long fingers flashed in front of her eyes. A shower of copper pennies whirled and fell around her. One coin bounced off her shoe and rolled on its edge across the concrete. “So, lady green eyes, many pennies for your thoughts.”
“You wouldn’t be interested,” Josie said, staring at the bright copper as it vanished under her car. The coin looked newly minted.
“I assure you I am.” A second leg joined the first. His feet were slightly apart, his arm resting casually across the top of his open door, masking his eyes still. “I’m exceedingly interested in your thoughts, you know.” And he came out of the car, his lean body moving in one flowing motion.
And this time, she did step back, as far as she could, slam bang into the side of her car. She was better off not seeing his eyes, she realized. She wanted to look away and couldn’t. Caught by the dark blaze of their intensity, she stared and tried to swallow, the air growing thin and cold as she fought for breath while the rumble of his car’s idling engine became the thrumming pulse in her veins.
As if from a distance, she felt the stir of air as he stepped to the side, heard from afar the soft snick as he closed his car door, his gaze never leaving hers.
She was free.
And still she couldn’t look away from the tormented dark eyes of Ryder Hayes. More disturbing, much worse, was her realization that she didn’t want to look away. Wanted, instead, to step into that darkness and linger there, offer solace where none was asked for or wanted.
Ryder Hayes wanted something, all right, but it wasn’t consolation. Shaking free of the spell, she gasped as air flooded her lungs and she pressed back against the blistering metal of her car.
“What’s the matter, Josie Birdsong?” he said, still several feet away from her, although she felt as if he were enveloping her in darkness and cold.
Or heat. Held by the intensity of his dark eyes, she could no longer distinguish between heat and cold. In his presence, ice burned hot.
He took a step forward, stopped, slid his narrow hands carefully into his pockets as he scowled. “Am I frightening you?”
His question released her. “Yes, Mr. Hayes, you are. And I don’t like men who try to push me around, so step back. I want to go home, and you’re in my way.”
“Is that how it seems? That I’m bullying you?” he asked with only the slightest interest. But he stepped back.
“Yes.” Josie slid onto the hot seat of her car and grasped the door handle, ready to slam it at the first opportunity. “Maybe you’re even trying to terrorize me. I don’t know for sure. I can’t quite decide, but, yes, you’re definitely bullying me.”
He frowned. “Possibly I am. I’m not really sure myself what my intent is.” He leaned forward, touching the roof of her car. His arm blocked her exit as surely as had his car door. More so, she realized, since she didn’t think she was capable of running her car over his lean body. “What I do know is that I need to talk with you.”
“What you need is your business, Mr. Hayes. Not mine. And I don’t need or want to talk to you. Especially not right now,” Josie said through dry lips. She wasn’t frightened anymore. Disturbed, oh yes. But not afraid. At least not when he wasn’t holding her captive with his dark gaze. She half turned in her seat. The angle of her view hid his neck and face from her, but her eyes were on a level with the narrow silver buckle of his snakeskin belt. Remembering, she shuddered.
“What’s the matter?”
Above the gleam of his leather belt, the dazzling white of his cotton shirt moved back, away from her, and she grabbed the door. His narrow fingers closed around the rim, stopping her. “Let go,” she said. “Now.”
His fingernails were clean, square cut. “One minute. Sixty seconds. Here. At your house. Or in the police station if it makes you more comfortable. Your choice, but it’s important, Josie Birdsong. To both of us.” Soft, implacable, his voice made it impossible for her to leave. It held a knowledge that he had no right to. In its way, it was as much of a threat as his hand holding her door, preventing her departure. “Your choice,” he repeated. “Not mine, not what I want at all.”
Josie didn’t understand. He was asking her to meet with him.
“But we have to talk. As soon as possible.”
Not responding to his demand, Josie lifted her head. “How do you know my mother’s name?” He’d used it earlier, at his house. Even Bart hadn’t known.
He shrugged, one powerful shoulder scarcely moving. “Magic.”
Her heart stopped. Literally. And then it lurched forward. “Magic?” she whispered. Mellie’s word.
Not touching her, he waved his fingers in front of her and a pale pink tea rose appeared. “Illusions, that’s all. Nothing more. It’s only magic until you know the trick. The gimmick. And everything has a gimmick, Josie Bird-song,” he said, his voice taunting her. “Everything has an explanation.”
“Nobody knows my mother’s maiden name,” she said, more jolted by his knowledge than she wanted him to know.
“No?”
“No,” she insisted, tearing her gaze away from his and switching on the temperamental ignition of her car. It sputtered and died. “No one in Angel Bay knows. It’s never come up. I’ve never told anyone here, not even the bank. How could you know?”
“Magic, then, I reckon,” he drawled, a flavor of grits and redeye gravy turning his smooth voice rough. Before she could stop him, he stuck one long arm in through the open window and turned the key.
The engine purred like a tiger under his touch.
“Magic, Mr. Hayes?” Josie said, not hiding her derision.
“Luck.” He shrugged. “Or skill. But everything has an explanation. If you look for it.” He ran his flat palm along the frame of the car window. “And that brings us full circle, Mrs. Conrad. When can we meet to talk?”
“I’m not going to meet you. Not here. Not anywhere,” she insisted.
“Yes, you will.” He bent his knees and his face came into view. There was absolute certainty in his eyes. “You’ll see me. And we’ll talk. Tonight, probably.” He shut her car door very gently and she barely glimpsed the rapid flick of his fingers through the window.
The rose and a handful of copper coins dropped into her lap, a waterfall of pink petals and golden red pennies, and that fast, he was inside his car, his sneaker lifting from the concrete, disappearing into the chilled interior as he pivoted and shut his door.
Josie turned to watch his car. Its silver vanished into the white dazzle of noon heat. She picked up one of the pennies and turned it over. Like the one lying on the parking lot and the one that had rolled under the car, this, too, shone as if newly minted. She examined a second, and a third. A fourth. Curious, she opened her door and peered underneath the car, retrieving the penny there and looking at its date. All were 1962 mints. The year of her birth.
As he’d said, everything had a gimmick.
Tucking the pennies into the space in the armrest, she lifted the rose. Merely touching it released its wild, sweet scent into the car. Its pink petals were warm and supple against her palm, like fingers brushing over her skin, growing warmer as she held them against her.
All the way home, Josie smelled the rose. With no air-conditioning in her car, the heat intensified the fragrance until she couldn’t smell anything else.
When she arrived, she took the rose and put it into a clear glass bottle and placed it in her bedroom. Instantly the room filled with its subtle sweetness and she changed her clothes with the scent filling her lungs. The copper coins glowed next to the bottle.
Josie had no intention of talking with Ryder Hayes about anything. She didn’t know anything about him. She didn’t want to know anything more about him than she already did. What she already knew was disturbing enough.
She touched the rose and one petal curled, drifted to the dresser top.
Could he be involved in the children’s murders?
He’d known her mother’s name. Somehow he knew about Josie’s Seminole background, that she was a remote descendant of Josie Billie, one of the old medicine men, a heritage so distant that Josie rarely thought of it herself. Didn’t want to, if she were honest with herself. But that door opening on the past was one of the reasons she’d been so startled when he’d used her maiden name.
“Magic,” Ryder Hayes had said.
“The wind,” her mother had said when Josie was little. “The wind whispers everything.”
Josie pulled on faded shorts and headed outdoors, away from the tender fragrance of Ryder’s magic rose.
It might be real, but its hope was an illusion.
Later in the afternoon, the phone rang.
Rushing in from the garden, her hands grimy with dirt, she picked up the phone in time to hear the soft click as someone hung up.
A nuisance, but she couldn’t change her number.
Not while there was a hope that Mellie would phone her. No real hope, an illusion she couldn’t shatter. Not yet. Sometimes hope was a necessary illusion that kept the heart beating.
In a lingering flare of orange and neon pink, the sun paused at dusk before finally surrendering to a velvet black night.
Ryder had said he would see her at night.
He was wrong. She had no intention of wending her way to his decaying house. Not in the daylight. Certainly not at nighttime.
By candlelight Josie sat at her kitchen table and lifted a spoonful of mango and yogurt, put it down. The yogurt gleamed faintly in the candle glow.
She wasn’t hungry. She didn’t want to turn on the television. Didn’t want to hear about the missing boy. Eric. “Eric Ames,” she whispered fiercely. The child had a name. Eric. She didn’t want to sit on her porch.
She wanted—
Something.
Restless, the weight of her loneliness and grief pushing her into aimless motion, Josie prowled like a jungle cat through the four rooms of her house, from rose-scented bedroom to the living room where the lock she’d snapped in the morning was still in its slot. She took a quick shower and turned on a fan to circulate the muggy air as she pulled on thin cotton underpants and a loose cotton blouse over her damp skin, skin that hummed with electricity, as if there were a storm on the horizon. She peered out her window, hoping for a storm. For rain. For an end to her waiting.
The trees in the woods were motionless.
There were no yellow-eyed dogs hiding in the darkness watching her.
No storm in that clear, dark sky.
Only the occasional warble of a mockingbird, the dry croak of a frog carrying from the edge of the river where it curved away from her house.
She found herself in her bedroom, lifting the flower, stroking it across her neck, down to her breasts, over the skin of her wrists.
He’d said he would see her tonight.
Finally, sighing, she went to her porch. As she lit the candles there, she wondered if Ryder had planted a suggestion in her brain that was making her so fidgety.
Maybe he had.
She swept her hair off her face, the heavy weight too much in the heat.
And still her skin hummed, as if answering something that whispered to her on a windless night.
When she unlatched the screen door of the porch so that she could take the evening garbage out, she turned on the floodlights all around the house. She went outside toward the garage. She wanted to put the bucket with the snake in the metal garbage can that clamped shut, safe from marauding dogs and raccoons. All day she’d avoided that final cleanup, but she didn’t want to wake up in the morning and find pieces of the reptile scattered about her yard.
As she approached the garage, she saw the empty, overturned bucket.
There was no trace of the snake she’d killed, no bits of paper, no trampled bits of earth where a ransacking animal had feasted. Alarmed, Josie paused and looked around, the light hairs on her arm rising with her uneasiness. Nothing. It was as if the snake had ever been.
The empty, shiny interior of the bucket gleamed mockingly at her.
She couldn’t look away from that empty bucket.
Holding her bag of garbage out, a shield against the sight of that shiny metal, Josie backed away. Halfway to her porch she froze as she caught the minute change in the shades of darkness at the edge of the woods.
Bugs swarmed around the bright porch light, banged against the wide bulbs, clustered there until the swarm grew too thick, and heavy bodies fell to the ground.
And then he came out of the woods toward her.
She gasped and the handle of the garbage bag slipped through her fingers. Keeping his lean form in view, Josie took slow steps away from him, her breath rattling in her ears.
She’d misunderstood. She’d thought he meant she would come to his house. Stupid of her. But she’d had that sensation of being drawn, of being almost hypnotized, and so she’d misunderstood.
On one side of the screen door, her mouth going dry with something beyond fear, she faced him, the hook-andeye lock nothing more than the illusion of a barrier.
In a glance, Josie took in his appearance. Ruffled, his hair looked as if he’d dragged his hands through it repeatedly. He hadn’t shaved since she’d seen him that afternoon, and a faint beard shadowed his pale skin. His jeans rode low on his hips, and his black T-shirt was tucked into the waistband. A silver snap caught the light from the floods and sparkled momentarily as he stopped, one foot on the lowest porch step.
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