Chapter Nine
I stumbled into the bedroom and grabbed my phone off the nightstand, trying to get my fingers to cooperate to dial Mason’s number. But I was having trouble breathing and my vision was blackening around the edges. I will not pass out. After two more deep breaths, my vision returned to normal, but a new thought hit me.
What if Daniel Crocker was still in the house?
My clumsy hand dropped the phone and I fumbled to pick it up as I ran down the hall and out the kitchen door. Standing in the driveway in my spaghetti strap nightgown and barefeet, I struggled to see the numbers on my phone through my tears.
Get it together, Rose.
I blinked and the screen cleared enough for me to find Mason’s speed dial.
“Rose?” He sounded alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
Do not freak him out. I was freaked out enough for both of us. “How did you know something’s wrong?”
“Because you’re calling me at six-thirty in the morning and you’re crying.”
“Someone’s been in my house.”
“Get out of there. Now!”
“I did. I am.” I shook my head. “I’m standing in my driveway.”
“Go to Heidi Joy’s. Or even better, Mildred’s.”
That cleared my head. “I’m not going to Mildred’s house.”
“Did you call 9-1-1?”
“No, I called you. And he’s not here anymore.” I was starting to feel more in control. “He got his point across.”
“Who? What happened?” He sounded breathless. “Never mind. Tell me when I get there. Just go to Heidi Joy’s. Now.”
“Do you want me to call 9-1-1?”
“No. We’re already on our way.”
“We? You’re with the police? At this time of morning? Why?”
“I’m with the sheriff and he’s already got someone on the way. Are you at Heidi Joy’s yet?”
“No, I’m on the phone with you.”
“Go over there!”
“He’s already gone, Mason. I’m safe.” For now.
“Rose, just humor me. Please.”
“Okay. I’m going,” I said, climbing her front porch.
“Stay put. I’ll be right there,” Mason said before hanging up.
But I couldn’t bring myself to wake Heidi Joy up. She had looked so exhausted the last few times I’d seen her that I didn’t want to steal her precious sleep and scare her half to death by telling her that someone had broken into my house. Again.
I sat on a chair on her front porch and wrapped my arms across my chest. Now that my shock had worn off, I was getting cold. I considered going back inside my house to get a robe, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I hadn’t lied to Mason when I said that I was sure Daniel Crocker was gone. But the horror of what happened was hitting me.
Psychopath Daniel Crocker had been in my house—while I’d slept—and I hadn’t known it. He could have easily killed me; he’d chosen to taunt me instead.
But how? The last I heard, Daniel Crocker was cornered in a warehouse in Shreveport.
Two police cars turned the corner and pulled up in front of my house, lights flashing and sirens blaring. This had happened so often over the last six months that I was surprised my neighbors hadn’t signed a petition to get me kicked out of the neighborhood. I couldn’t say I would blame them.
A car from the sheriff’s office pulled up next, and Mason’s car was right behind it. His door flew open and Mason bounded across the yard, shrugging off his jacket. “Rose, I told you to go into Heidi Joy’s house.” He pulled me out of the chair and put his coat around my bare shoulders.
“No. You told me to go to Heidi Joy’s. I just couldn’t wake her and scare the living daylights out of her. Although I’m sure the sirens did it for me.”
He glanced down at my feet. “You don’t even have any shoes on.”
“I saw…it and just grabbed my phone and ran out the door.”
“What is it?”
“Go see for yourself.”
Heidi Joy’s front door opened and Andy, Sr. came out wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a stained T-shirt, running his hand through his bed-head hair. “What’s going on?”
Mason put his arm around my shoulders. “Can Rose wait inside for a bit? Someone’s broken into her house.”
“Again?”
I cringed.
“Rose, there’s something I have to tell you first,” Mason said. Taking a deep breath, he turned me to face him, keeping a strong arm around my back. “Daniel Crocker wasn’t in the warehouse in Shreveport.”
“I know.”
His face paled. “How do you know?”
“He left me a note.”
He pushed me inside the front door and turned to Andy, his face hardening. “Do not let her out of your sight.” Then he hurried across the yard, intercepting the policemen who were about to go through my open kitchen door.
I stared out the front window, wondering why these things kept happening to me. I had lived a simple, boring life until Daniel Crocker showed up at the DMV that Friday in May, just five months ago.
Mason came back about ten minutes later, carrying a pair of shoes and clothing wadded up in a ball. He handed them to me, looking embarrassed. “I figured you’d want some clothes. Why don’t you get dressed and I’ll take you for breakfast. We can talk about what we found.”
“Okay.” I grabbed the clothes and started down the hall. As I unwrapped the wad, I quickly found the source of Mason’s embarrassment. He’d gotten me a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, but he’d also picked out a pair of panties and a bra. It had to be pretty apparent that I was braless in my nightgown. I closed my eyes, taking a moment to wallow in my humiliation.
When I finished changing, I put on my shoes and Mason slipped his hand into mine and led me outside to his car.
“Don’t you have to stick around?”
“No, Sheriff Foster and Jeff are in there and I trust them to do a thorough investigation.” He opened the passenger door and climbed behind the steering wheel. “Are you okay, Rose?”
“Yeah,” I said, watching several sheriff’s deputies walk into my house. This was a new twist to the law enforcement invasion of my house. I’d never entertained the sheriff before. “I’m fine.”
We were silent as Mason drove through town, heading away from most of the restaurants that were open this early. He kept his gaze focused on the road, but I could tell he was upset.
I turned toward him. “I thought we were getting breakfast.”
“We are. At my house. I don’t think you should be in public right now.”
“You mean out in the open.”
He didn’t say anything and my stomach revolted. I looked in the side mirror and realized the car behind us had been following us through several turns. Inhaling sharply, I turned to Mason in a panic. “Somebody’s following us.”
He reached over and grabbed my hand. “It’s okay. It’s a sheriff’s deputy in an unmarked car. He’s protecting us.”
Nodding, I pressed my knuckles to my lips. How was this happening? Panic bubbled up in my chest and I took deep breaths to calm down.
Mason squeezed my hand. “It’s okay, Rose. It’s going to be okay.”
I closed my eyes, telling myself I had nothing to worry about. Half the law enforcement officers in southern Arkansas were looking for Crocker. But it was the reassurance of the man next to me that made me believe everything could be okay.
He turned into a section of condos in the newer part of town, one that bordered Violet’s cookie-cutter neighborhood. The condos were all upscale, with stone and brick and stucco exteriors. But as we drove past the well-manicured lawns, I couldn’t help noticing how boring the landscaping looked.
When he pulled into a driveway, I looked through the windshield at the two-story four-plex that loomed ahead. “So this is where you live?”
“This is it.” As he led me through the front door I noticed the car that had been following us was parked at the curb across the street. Mason locked the door.
“Do you think he’d come here looking for me?”
Mason stopped and hesitated as he searched my eyes. “Yes. Crocker is bat-shit crazy and obsessed with making you pay for what he thinks you’ve done to him. I have no doubt he’d come here or anywhere looking for you.”
“Oh.” That wasn’t the answer I expected.
“Stay away from the windows.” He disappeared upstairs and came back out carrying a handgun.
“Is that really necessary, Mason?”
“Yes.” He set it on the kitchen counter.
He was being so matter-of-fact, so different from how he’d been last night, that I suddenly worried he’d decided I was too much trouble. “Mason, are you mad at me?”
His head swung around, his eyes wide as he placed a box of pancake mix on the counter. “Why on earth would I be angry with you?” He came around the counter and pulled me into his arms. “No, I’m freaked out. He was in your house with you and he could have…” His voice trailed off. “I should have stayed with you. I should never have left but I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to resist you if I stayed and Jeff was so sure—”
“Mason, stop.”
He squeezed me tighter. “Jeff said they had Crocker cornered in Shreveport, but it just didn’t make sense to me that he would have run that far.”
“Why?
“Because he’s obsessed with you.” He released me. “Do you like pancakes?”
I blinked, stunned by his bombshell followed by a complete change in topic. “Yeah.”
He grabbed a bottle of syrup out of the cabinet.
“I’m beginning to think everyone eats better than I do.”
He glanced over his shoulder as he spooned pancake mix into a measuring cup. “What do you usually eat?”
“Canned soup.”
He grimaced. “Then just about everyone does eat better than you.”
“Thanks.” I laughed, but it was forced. I was eager to find out what Mason knew. “I know that I shouldn’t have touched the note he left, but I wasn’t thinking straight.” I shrugged. “I saw the sofa and I just—”
Mason turned around to face me. “It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Do we have to eat now? I keep thinking about him being in my house and it makes me feel like I’m going to throw up.”
He was around the counter in seconds, pulling me off the stool and into his arms.
I rested my cheek on his chest and wrapped my arms around his back. “You found the note?”
“Yes.”
“Was that blood on the sofa?”
“No, it was catsup.”
“Thank God. I was worried someone or some animal had gotten hurt.”
“No one got hurt. That I know of.”
I leaned my head back to look up at him. “How do you know he’s obsessed with me?”
“I did some digging after what that boy from your neighborhood said about Crocker’s guys threatening you.”
“Oh.”
“The sheriff’s department has been investigating, but they didn’t do much legwork because they seemed like idle threats. Crocker’s known associates had been lying low and Crocker was behind bars. Until the guards at the county jail realized he wasn’t in his cell around three a.m. two days ago.”
I shuddered.
“I get the rose petals and the rolling pin.” His voice softened. “But why the geode?”
I stiffened, remembering the day of Crocker’s arrest. “I guess it wasn’t in the report.” I forced a smile. “And I know you’ve read the report. Sometimes I think you know more about me from reports than I do.”
He grimaced.
“I’m teasing—or trying to. If you were investigating Crocker’s threats, of course you would have looked at the report.”
“There was nothing about a geode in there.”
“When I went to the warehouse to save Joe, I got Crocker to take me upstairs to keep him distracted so he wouldn’t shoot Joe. I may have…questioned his masculinity.”
“That wasn’t in the report, Rose. All it says is that he took you up to the office, then the bust unfolded and Joe came upstairs to save you.”
I shook my head. “That’s not how it happened.”
He guided me to one of the chairs at the kitchen table and then disappeared for a moment, returning with a legal pad and pen. “Start from the beginning. The first time you saw Daniel Crocker was at the DMV, correct?”
“Yeah, when I saw the vision of me dead on Momma’s sofa with my head bashed in. I passed out before I could blurt out that he was going to murder me. He left his paperwork and disappeared.”
He nodded. “Okay, I have that part down.”
“The next time I saw him was at the bar in Jasper’s. My blind date had left while I was in the bathroom, so I decided to head to the bar and scratch an item off my wish list—drink wine.”
Mason looked up from writing. “Wait. Some guy left you at Jasper’s?”
“To be fair, he didn’t want to go out with me at all. Violet coerced him into it. And he was terrified that I had killed Momma.”
Mason shook his head and lowered his gaze to the paper. “What an idiot. What happened next?”
“Sloan was the bartender.”
He looked up again, his eyes wide. “Sloan Chapman?”
“Yeah, just one more coincidence that dug me even deeper into the whole mess. I’d never had wine before, so I had no idea what to order. He was really sweet and helped me figure it out. Then Daniel Crocker came in. He’d seen me in the restaurant with my date, but he didn’t recognize me because I had a different hairstyle and was wearing makeup. I looked different. Still, he said he knew he’d seen me somewhere, and it was driving him crazy that he couldn’t place me.” I paused, taking a breath. “Sloan saw Crocker hitting on me and came over to intervene. He told Crocker that I was his sister and to back off. Crocker did, but he wasn’t happy about it.”
Mason looked up. “Do you realize the risk Sloan took defending you?”
I nodded, tears in my eyes. “He was shot a few days later, after Crocker came back to the DMV and figured out who I was. He had been looking for me every day while I was off for Momma’s funeral. He figured out that Sloan wasn’t my brother, and then he asked me if he was an undercover cop. I was horrified and told him no. But I didn’t know anything then. I had no idea that Sloan was working with the state police. I got him killed.” My voice broke. “I’ve lived with the guilt of that ever since.”
“Rose. It wasn’t your fault. You had no way of knowing.”
I shook my head. “The next time I saw Crocker was at Sloan’s visitation. That was the night that I had another vision of myself dead. It was also when I finally figured out why he was interested in me: He thought I was the DMV informant with a flash drive of information. He told me to meet him the next night at The Trading Post at 10:00 p.m. and bring him the flash drive. But I was clueless about what was supposed to be on it.”
Mason kept his eyes on the legal pad. “The report says you went and gave him a flash drive with false information, and then Joe showed up and helped you escape out the back window. That’s pretty skimpy.” He looked up again. “What else happened that night?”
“Why do you think something else happened?”
His face hardened. “Crocker has a…reputation.”
I hesitated. “When Joe realized I really wasn’t part of the whole mess, he drove me to my car, which was still at the funeral home, and gave me the fake flash drive. The reason I agreed to meet with Crocker was that I was trying to save Violet—Crocker had put a photo of her under my door to remind me what was at stake.” I swallowed and looked toward Mason’s shiny stainless steel refrigerator. “He’d expressed an interest in how I was dressed at the funeral home the night before, so I wore a low-cut shirt and tried to dress sexy, hoping to distract him from the fact that I didn’t have what he wanted. When Joe gave me the flash drive, he told me I had the right idea but warned me not to let Crocker get me into bed. He was known to be…rough.”
Mason continued writing, his knuckles turning white from his strong grip on the pen.
“When I showed up, Crocker seemed eager to show me how interested he was in me. After his men did a quick check of the flash drive and it passed, Crocker insisted on celebrating with tequila shots.”
I heard Mason’s pen scribbling.
“After the first three shots and some sloppy kissing, I excused myself to the bathroom to throw up. Joe was in there waiting for me. He told me to go back out and said that he’d help me escape the next time. So I did three more shots with Crocker, with some kissing in between, and then I went to the bathroom to throw up again. And I escaped with Joe.”
Mason scribbled down several more lines and then looked up, expressionless. “And when did you see Crocker again?”
“The next day. After we left The Trading Post, Joe took me to his house and hid me in his attic. Crocker’s men showed up, but Joe swore he hadn’t helped me, that he’d been home alone all night. They said they’d kill him if he was lying. When Joe went off the morning of the big bust, I had a vision of him getting shot, but he insisted he’d be fine and that I needed to stay in his house until it was done.
“Instead, I chased Muffy behind Joe’s house. While I was out there, Crocker’s men showed up and busted Joe’s door down and found my shoes in his house. The ones I’d been wearing the night before. I knew my vision was going to come true, so Muffy and I stole Miss Mildred’s car and drove out there with a gun that Joe had planted in my shed. We broke in the back of Crocker’s warehouse. Muffy and I hid in a storage room until Crocker came storming out of his office, demanding that Joe tell him where I was. So I rushed out and told Crocker that Joe had nothing to do with it. I said I’d left on my own because I was looking for a real man.”
Mason stopped writing and looked up at me wide-eyed.
“What?” I shrugged. “I had to come up with something.”
He still didn’t say anything.
“Crocker was going to shoot me, but I told him he should prove he was a real man before killing me, so he dragged me up the stairs to the office.”
Mason kept watching me, expressionless.
“When a commotion broke out downstairs, I bit his lip and he stumbled backward, then I pulled out my gun and shot him in the leg. But Joe heard the gunshot and ran upstairs with Muffy. She attacked Crocker and he started hitting her. I had to make him stop, so I picked up a geode off his desk and threw it at his head, knocking him out. Joe tied him up with a light cord, and then the state police took him away.”
Mason was silent for several seconds. “Do you know what his unfinished business is?”
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. “I have a good idea.”