It took a moment to sink in.
“So the police sergeant is the gym owner’s brother,” Paige said. “OK. That could make him more hostile to me, and maybe less likely to follow up, I guess, or worst case, he’d be in it with her, but he wouldn’t have the whole department sucked into that, surely. He didn’t take Jace that seriously either, though.”
“He didn’t like me,” Jace said, “but cops tend not to. Except you, of course, and look how hard I had to work on you. I can look resistant to authority, I hear.”
“But wait,” Lily said. “My animals are OK now, right? Are you sure?”
“They were this morning,” Jace said.
“Oh,” Paige said. “Duh. Of course. If I didn’t have this stupid head knock, I would’ve seen that. See, there again. If people were trying to kick me out, to make me sell, if they cared enough to bash me, surely they’d have gone after my animals too by now. The goats. I was at the hospital for a long time last night. Everybody saw me leave, and that Jace took me. If Sergeant Whatever is Jennifer’s brother, if they were talking, even if she didn’t do the chickens, even if it was Jace’s stalker, Jennifer would have heard about the chickens and the shop and seized her opportunity. Or told the others.”
“They wouldn’t necessarily go after the goats,” Lily said. “Some people are animal lovers.”
“They hit me in the head.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Paige recognized that stubborn streak. Lily was sweet and accommodating until she wasn’t. “An animal is different.”
“They let the chickens out to get killed,” Jace said.
“A chicken isn’t a dog or a cat or a goat,” Lily insisted. “I can kill a chicken if I have to. What do you think I do if one of them gets attacked or too sick? Take them to the vet and have them put to sleep while I stroke their feathers? No. I kill them. I couldn’t kill one of my sweet goats.”
“But could you kill me?” Paige asked. “That’s the question.”
“I’m saying they’re two different things,” Lily said. “If the goal’s to intimidate a person so she sells her property, and if the person they’re targeting is an animal lover, they’d go after the goats. The babies are cute. They’re sweet. They’re babies. So either the person’s an animal lover, too, and that’s why they didn’t, or you’re right, it’s Jace’s person, because they hit you and they didn’t hit a goat.”
“Maybe it’s two people. Or three.” Paige’s head was hurting again. Too much thinking. It wanted to shut down. “One could hit me, and one could hit the goat.”
“Except they didn’t,” Lily said. “So see?”
Paige sighed. “OK. I need to call the cops again and see what they know. I need to call…” She blanked on the names.
Jace looked at her sharply. “Time for you to get off the phone and rest,” he said. “I’ll call Worthington and update him. I’ll call Hailey, too.”
Paige wanted to protest, but she’d lost her focus, somehow. “OK, baby,” she said to Lily. “I’m going to…”
Lily said, “I’m coming back. I’ll be there at midnight. I already bought my ticket. Twelve-oh-two in Kalispell. I can get a taxi.”
Paige wanted to think about that, but it was hard right now. Jace said, “No taxi. We could have some ammunition here if we can switch the two of you off. Surprise is your best asset. We’ll have to think about that. I’ll come collect you, Lily.”
“She shouldn’t…” Paige said. “It’s not a… good idea.”
“It’s not your choice,” Lily said. “It’s mine. See you at midnight, Jace. Thank you for taking care of my sister.”
The screen changed, because the call was over. Jace took the plate off Paige’s lap and said, “Right. Rethinking all my impressions of Lily here. But you need to rest some more, and UPS delivered my shipment. I’m going over to your place and getting those alarms and cameras installed. We’ll leave Tobias here to guard the cabin until I can wire things up here, and we’ll put you in your own bed.”
“I have a weapon,” she said. “I have two. Uh… one. In my purse. I definitely have one.”
“I know you do. I believe you’re a good shot, too. But right now? You’d miss. I don’t want you where I’m not.”
Everybody was taking care of her. That wasn’t how it worked. That was never how it worked.
She’d go home, she decided. She’d take another little nap. And then she’d think about it some more.
She did. In her bed, with the distant sound of an electric drill providing comforting background noise as she drifted off. Which was Jace installing a camera on the barn. Keeping the goats safe. Being next to the bees so she could stay away from them.
Two hours later, though, there was no choice but to get going on this thing. She called Hailey and endured a whole lot of concern. And then she called Lieutenant Iverson.
“I told you,” he said before she’d had a chance to say anything. “I haven’t heard anything yet. When I do, I’ll call you. You’re on leave.”
“It’s not that. It’s that I got injured. I’m reporting it.”
“Say again?”
“Somebody attacked me last night. At my sister’s, where I’ve been staying. I have a little concussion. And my arm’s in a sling, but it’s just bruising. Couple days on that.”
“A… little… concussion. Hollander, you’re off duty. Stay off duty. Stay out of trouble. And watch yourself better. There’s something called self-defense. You learned it, remember that?”
“I know. It was in the dark. Never mind. Minor. I’m thinking a week, and I’ll be fine. Or light duty. I can do light duty.”
He sighed. “Get me a doctor’s report. Consider continuing your leave somewhere more peaceful. I’d like to get you back without further damage.”
Good luck with that. Sinful wasn’t going to get more peaceful unless she made it that way. She hung up, got out of bed, managed to get herself, with only a little bit of swearing, into a dress, since that was the easiest, put the sling on again, and followed the sound of the electric drill, closer now.
Jace was attaching something to the sill of the kitchen window. A motion sensor. She leaned against the doorway, waited for the drilling to stop, and asked, “How’s it going?”
He turned and set the drill down on the counter. “All good. No worries.” He frowned at her, every bit of his dark intensity showing. “The cops are coming out later. Are you sure you should be out of bed?”
She sat down at the kitchen counter. “I’m sure.”
Today, Paige found, she rated higher than Patrolman Wilson of the red hair and freckles. When the black-and-white pulled up to the cabin, Sergeant Worthington was at the wheel.
Jace let him in, since Paige was on the couch. She’d swung around to sit up straight, though, and she’d put down the ice pack she’d had pressed to her face. She wanted to look professional. Serious. As serious as a woman in a blue lace dress and a fat lip could look, anyway. She’d thought about changing again. Way too hard, though.
“How’re you doing?” Worthington asked, taking a seat on the recliner while Jace sat beside Paige.
“Oh, you know,” she said. “Could be worse. What did you find out?” She and Jace had discussed telling him about the Lily-switch, and had dismissed the idea. It was what Jace had said. The power of surprise. Not to mention drawing enemy fire. Whatever Lily said, Paige was trained to handle that, and Lily wasn’t.
Worthington scratched the back of his head. “I’m guessing the power was shut off to the gym using the master breaker, since it wasn’t just the lights. Equipment, climate control, everything. It wouldn’t have been hard to find the right switch. The master’s red. When the power got turned back on, that switch had been tripped. Of course, it doesn’t mean it was switched off at the box, but it’s likely.”
“If it had been a short,” Jace said, “they wouldn’t have been able to turn it back on and have it stay on.”
Worthington gazed at him in a not entirely friendly fashion. “Can I ask, sir, how you’re involved in this?”
“Oh, I think you know. Call it male protective impulse. Goes pretty far in some of us.” Jace’s blue eyes shone hard as blue stone, and the testosterone was running so high, you could practically take hold of it.
“I understand you have some military background,” Worthington said.
“Some.”
“This would be a good time to point out that you’re not a police officer, and this is a police investigation. We don’t take kindly to vigilantism around here.”
Jace hadn’t raised his voice, and he didn’t now. Instead, he sat back, folded his arms, and said, “I’ll leave the investigating to you, then, and handle the protective part of the deal.”
Worthington apparently decided not to pursue that, which was probably wise. “So,” Paige said, trying to make her expression Lily-like and admiring, which wasn’t easy with a swollen lip, “you said the power was probably turned off at the box?”
“Yes,” Worthington said. “Which is between the locker rooms, in a recess. Again, not hidden, and not impossible to know about.”
“Who turned it back on, do you know?” Paige asked, still going for “innocent.”
Worthington shifted. Just a little. And Paige thought, The butt can’t lie. Deceptive people shifted position. They couldn’t help it. They controlled their faces, mostly, and their hands. Their lower bodies picked up the tension. “That was the owner,” he said.
“Oh. Your sister Jennifer,” Paige said, keeping it neutral.
“Neither she nor anybody else we asked told us they saw who flipped the switch off,” Worthington said, “but all it would take was a clear couple seconds and some nerve.”
“And premeditation,” Jace said, and Paige looked at him and tried to convey, Shut up. He seemed to get it, because he did.
“And then what did they do?” she asked Worthington.
“We found an item that could have struck you,” Worthington said. “A hand weight, the kind women use. Five pounds. It was under a bench, fairly near your cubicle. Could have rolled there. Could’ve been left by anybody, of course. Or not.”
An item that could have struck you. Not the item we think the perpetrator struck you with, which would have been how Paige would have put it. Distancing. Lessening. The missing money, not the embezzled funds. Or the bad thing that happened, not the rape. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “That sure makes sense.” She wondered if she’d taken the Lily-act too far. Apparently not, because she saw Worthington relax. “Were you able to find any fingerprints or anything?”
No shifting now. This part, he could be straightforward about. “Rubberized surface. Doesn’t hold a print. And nothing on the breaker panel, either. Jennifer’s fingerprints on top, which they would have been, since she turned it back on. Everything else smudged. We’ve been able to get a list of everybody people remember being in the locker room when the lights went out. Ladies from the yoga class, a few women changing to leave. We’ll check them out.”
“But I guess,” Paige said, “that doesn’t help too much. Not if the person switched the lights off and then came in. It was probably twenty seconds later that I saw the light, which was right before the person hit me.”
Worthington cleared his throat. “The memory can be unreliable, ma’am. Very difficult to estimate accurately in that situation.”
“Ninety seconds,” Jace said. “From the time the lights went off to when… Lily came out of the locker room. And in the first few seconds, there was a flash of light. Could have been somebody moving in the distance. Circuit breaker box to the women’s locker room? How many meters?”
Worthington stared at Jace for a long few seconds, then said, “How do you know it was ninety seconds, sir?”
“Because,” Jace said, “I counted them off. I’d say that flash I saw was the person who’d flipped the breaker finding the locker room entrance, or why wouldn’t they have used that light to help out in some way? Instead, the light went off. Or it went into a room with the person, and the door shut behind it. Which would mean somebody who wasn’t in the women’s locker room at the beginning.”
“Maybe you have an opinion, sir,” Worthington said, “on what they did next.”
“Well, no,” Jace said. “I don’t. Or I should say that I have two. If they were somebody who had a reason to be in the locker room, I think they dropped that weight after they hit Lily, moved away from it, banged around some in the dark like everybody else, and took off their clothes.”
“Took off their clothes,” Worthington repeated.
“Easiest thing in the world,” Jace said. “The lights come on, and she’s half-naked, just like everybody else, stumbling around looking for her phone and her bra.”
“And what would your second idea be, sir?” Worthington asked.
“Well, the other one, obviously. That they left the locker room again and were standing around outside it. Or even turning the lights back on. Oh, wait. That was Ms. Turner.”
“Yes,” Worthington said. “It was.”
“Do you know who was in the locker room just before the lights went out?” Jace asked Paige.
“No,” she admitted. “I had the curtain closed. I was getting undressed for at least thirty seconds. Anybody could have come in or gone out.”
“Was that usual for you?” Worthington asked. “Being in that cubicle?”
“No.” She knew why he was asking. Because he knew it wasn’t usual. He wondered if she were making this up. If she’d hit herself in the head, maybe, to gain sympathy? Or… what? “I have heavy periods. I prefer to be modest at that time of the month. I can’t wear tampons, you see, and sometimes, I have to change my pad unexpectedly. I get clotting,” she decided to throw in. “They can be large. It gets pretty messy. Drippy.”
Worthington cleared his throat again, consulted his notebook, and Paige could feel Jace trying not to laugh beside her. “Thank you,” the sergeant said. “That’s about what we’ve got, but we’ll keep working it.”
“One minute,” Jace said when Worthington appeared to be about to stand up. “I’m concerned about the possible link between Paige’s attacker and the person who’s been targeting me. Somebody watching me would know that I’d spent the night here. The last letter referenced my not ‘waiting for them,’ if you remember. The person threatened a knife at her throat.”
“We’ve considered that,” Worthington said stiffly. “Of course. We’re following that up, in fact. We put a trace on the initial call to you.”
“This morning,” Jace said. “That’s when you did that.”
“Do you have a problem with that, sir?”
“No,” Jace said. “I’m just glad you finally did it. Where did it come from?”
“A public phone. Local. Unfortunately, there’s no security footage available in that location, and nobody remembers seeing somebody using the phone a week ago. If you do get any more messages, though, or any other contact, please let us know right away.”
When he left, Jace shut the door behind him, looked thoughtfully at Paige, and said, “He’d rather believe that, anyway. Which means I hope you’re right. I hope this is one person, and it’s my person. Because that’s the one he’s looking for.”
“Yes. And everything he said about what happened to me was just that. What happened to me. Like… disembodied. The switch ‘was tripped.’ I ‘got hit’ by a weight. If it’s his sister, if it’s anybody invested in my selling, anybody who might be involved with his sister or that she might know about, he doesn’t want to know.”
“I agree,” Jace said. His grin started slowly, then grew.
“What?” Paige asked. “It’s funny now? How?” She hadn’t imagined that tension in him. He’d been holding himself back. He’d wanted to explode.
“Changing your pad,” he said. “Clots. Drippy clots. Maybe you should’ve described them better. ‘Quarter-sized.’”
He was laughing, and she was trying not to. “Liver-like,” she suggested. “Dark red. Hemorrhage. Men are such babies. I thought he was going to throw up. And by the way, it’s not true. In case you were worried.” She picked up her ice pack again, but it had melted.
Jace grabbed it, still smiling, and said, “Switching it out. Hang on. And no worries. You can’t put me off that easily.”
When he came back with the cold pack, she said, “We should go to the meeting tonight. You and me.”
He switched gears just like that. “Shock them, maybe? Get the town behind you?”
“Maybe. And maybe more. We should make a plan.”