Chapter Seven
“BILL, calm down,” Jared said into his cell phone. “Stop yelling so loud. She’ll hear you. Yes, I did give her something to make her sleep. Poor thing, this has hit her hard. No, I’m not going soft on you.” He listened for a moment. “If you’ll calm down, I’ll tell you why I told her who I was and what I want. Are you ready to listen?”
Jared took a deep breath. “Something is going on around here, but I can’t figure out what it is. Some lawyer is acting like Ms. Palmer is the love of his life, but she only met him a couple of days ago. I don’t trust him. Something isn’t right. I think he wants something and he’s planning to get it. But she’s falling for him hook, line, and sinker. She seems to believe every word out of his mouth. He even told her some cock-and-bull story about being unfaithful to his ex-wife while the woman was dying of cancer, and she swallowed it. It was all I could do to not step in and tell her a few home truths.”
Pausing, he listened. “Yeah, I guess he could be on the up-and-up, but I doubt it. The point is that I saw that I didn’t have a chance with her. She isn’t what I thought she was going to be. She’s isn’t some desperate, lonely woman who swoons every time a man makes a move toward her.” He hesitated. “She’s more of a no-nonsense type of woman, so I took the chance of telling her the truth. Besides, she’d already figured out that nearly everything I’d said or done was a lie. She should have worked for us.”
Jared rolled his eyes and listened. “No, I’m not falling for her. It’s just that I made a judgment call and decided that the best thing to do was to tell her who I am, what I want, and see if she can help figure out why Applegate swallowed her name and Social Security number. By the way, I want you to see if Applegate was writing a book, maybe a tell-all about his life undercover. Maybe he just wanted her as his editor.” Jared smiled at the phone. “Yeah, she came up with that idea. She’s not dumb. Look, I didn’t call you to get yelled at. I need you to send someone here to do something for me. Ms. Palmer is a bit upset with me, so she’s told me to get out of her house, to get out of town, actually. What I need is for you to send a man down here and maybe fire a few shots so she’ll realize this is serious. No,” Jared said patiently, “not at anyone, just fire a few shots around. I need to have a reason to stay near her. If she thinks she’s in danger, she’ll be more receptive to my hanging around her as a bodyguard, so to speak.”
Jared listened, grimacing. “Yes, I know this is supposed to be an undercover assignment, and I know you think I shouldn’t have told her anything, but I did. Now I want you to send a man out here right away. Put him in a car tonight. She’s to meet Granville tomorrow at ten A.M., but I want her to miss that meeting. He’s getting too close too fast, and I don’t like it at all. Look, I gotta go. I put this red concoction on the cuts on my feet and it’s burning. I have to take a shower, and I need to get a couple of hours sleep so I’ll be ready for this man. Send somebody good, understand? I don’t want any cock-ups. I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know how everything went. Oh, and, Bill, thanks for doing this.”
Smiling, Jared hung up the phone, turned it off so it wouldn’t ring, then hid it under the bedsprings. Throwing back the covers, he got out of bed and pulled the sling off his arm. In the hospital they’d asked him if he thought he needed a sling, and he’d moaned that he did. Now he flexed his arm, made a fist of his hand, then dropped to the floor and did half a dozen one-arm push-ups. The arm was okay, but he was disgusted that so few push-ups could make him feel so sore.
He pulled off his clothes, dropped them on the floor, then picked them up and put them on the chair by the bed. In the shower, he let the hot water run over him and wash away all the “wounds” that he’d colored his body with. He’d wanted Eden to think that he was bleeding and in pain. He hoped she didn’t miss the red nail polish he’d taken from her bedroom. That, mixed with a little of her cocoa butter cream and some nail polish remover, had made a reddish mess that was burning his scabbed cuts.
He soaped himself and thought about how angry Bill had been when Jared told him that he’d told Eden the truth. But she’d made Jared feel like he had in the third grade when his teacher wouldn’t believe a word he’d said. Other teachers had believed him. He’d made up elaborate stories about why he was late or where he’d been, and they’d all believed him. But not Mrs. Lancaster. She’d looked him in the eye and told him he had to write lines as punishment for lying.
Eden was like Mrs. Lancaster. She didn’t believe him either. Clever girl! he thought. She’d seen that his clothes were too new, that there was no table saw in his garage, and she’d called the electric company about the houses being on the same circuit. If she knew he was a liar, how was he supposed to make her like him so much that she revealed secrets to him? And with Granville around, how could Jared get close to the woman as quickly as possible?
While he’d stood outside the dining room listening to her and Granville talk, Jared had thought about telling Eden the truth. No lying, just the facts of the case. He’d present it to her as a problem and let her help solve it.
As he’d hobbled up the stairs, he told himself that wouldn’t work. If she was told about a spy, she’d throw him out, and he’d never find out anything. No, he thought, he’d better not do that. But then, he’d stood at the window and watched her and Granville in the moonlit garden, and he’d felt something that was rare for him: jealousy. Granville was older than Jared, not in as good shape, and had a boring office job, but it looked as though “the girl” was falling for him.
Jared had turned away from the window in disgust at himself for having such juvenile thoughts. This was a job, he told himself. It was the same as other jobs. But somehow it was already different. For one thing, he’d never before worked in a middle-class home situation. Gangsters, thugs, drug lords, the underworld had all been in his working life, but not this. This was a nice house, a nice woman, and a nice town—and they made thoughts of retirement and having a normal life come into his mind.
By the time Eden came up the stairs after Granville left, Jared was prepared for her. He had no doubt that she was going to tell him to get out, so he’d made his wounds look as though they were bleeding. She couldn’t throw out someone dripping blood, could she?
She hadn’t surprised him when she’d told him that she knew that everything he’d told her was a lie. But he was surprised when, even knowing that, she’d gone downstairs and made him a tray of food. It was while she was downstairs that he made the final decision to tell her the truth. He was aware that part of him was hoping she’d be so interested in what he told her that she’d spend more time with him. But she told him to leave. He was going to have to resort to other methods to get close enough to her to find out what she knew. By the time he got back into bed, he was smiling again. When he’d first surveyed the place, before Eden had arrived, he’d seen a cellar beneath the house. It looked old enough to have petroglyphs on the walls, and he didn’t relish spending any time down there, but it would do as a hideout for a few hours. Still smiling, he went to sleep.