24
Kellen gasped and slammed her back against the wall.
“What?” Nils swiveled around.
Gregory had vanished.
She cleared her throat, swallowed, said, “Nothing.” Because the cottage was elevated above ground level. No one could stand on the ground and look in unless they were ten feet tall.
“A light?” Nils walked over and looked out into the winter darkness. “Are the smugglers out there tonight?”
“No. Just…an overactive imagination. Mine.” She pressed her hand to her forehead over the scar and worked to bring her heart rate down to acceptable levels. Ever since the Army had discharged her, she’d been afraid something like this would happen: optical illusions, madness, another year lost and no idea where it went, what happened, what she had done.
“We don’t need to imagine anything bad.” The big, strong man was chiding her.
But right now, she was glad of the company of this patronizing, mansplaining jerk. She was glad she wasn’t alone.
In a businesslike tone, he said, “It’s all happening here. I don’t exult in the disappearance of a law officer, but you and I both know the loss of Lloyd Magnuson and Priscilla’s body means the Librarian is here and taking steps to conceal his crimes. We are so close.” His eyes gleamed with radical fervor.
When he looked like that, he made her uneasy. “Nils, you’re rocking the boat, and rocking this particular boat will result in someone going overboard. That someone could be you.”
He half turned his head, and his profile was sharply etched against the shiny dark of the window. “I’m remarkably well-balanced.”
She got to her feet. “Let me be clear. You should be careful, because I won’t go over the side with you. I didn’t survive Afghanistan to recover a penis statue.” She donned her oversize coat, walked to the door, opened it, looked behind her and saw him watching her, his beautiful brown eyes avid, his face speculative.
She stepped out onto the porch and firmly shut the door behind her. Alone and aloud, she said, “I didn’t survive Gregory Lykke to take a second lover I don’t trust.”
She looked around, saw no smuggling lights and no disembodied heads.
She found that comforting. But she’d run to Nils’s cottage to avoid being seen as a target. Now…now she was more spooked by the phantom she’d imagined than the killer she knew was out there. So she sprinted to the resort, keeping to the lighted paths, taking her chances with smugglers and knowing in the corner of her mind that she was trying to outrun the ghost of her long-dead and viciously brutal husband.
* * *
“Mara. Mara! Did you see?” Destiny Longacre peered out the blinds in Mara’s cottage. “That’s Kellen Adams, and she’s sneaking out of that guest cottage!”
“Really?” Ellen leaped up from the coffee table, where Mara was filing her nails, and ran to the window.
“Wait. Wait! I want to see, too!” Daisy hobbled over, her newly painted toes separated by cotton balls. “Whose cottage is that?”
Xander lifted his hands from Mara’s shoulders—he had been massaging her and urging a regime of stress-relieving yoga breathing—and wandered over to look. “That’s Nils Brooks’s cottage. The author. Nice-looking man and I spoke to him today. Intelligent, insightful and curious about how the resort works.”
Mara was hosting a spa worker evening to get their minds off the past two days, and they had been fixing hair, massaging tense knots of muscle and snacking on caramel corn while waiting for the pizza to bake.
Now Mara went over and slapped the blinds out of Destiny’s hands. The blinds fell with a clatter and everyone turned to find Mara with her hands on her hips. “It’s nobody’s business.”
“You’re right,” Ellen agreed. “But he’s got good hair.”
“How does she have time for this while Annie is away?” Destiny shook her hands as if she had hurt them. “She’s been working all day.”
Daisy chortled. “But not all night!”
A short burst of laughter. Groans.
When the merriment died down, Xander said, “She has superpowers.”
He was so calm, so Zen, everyone stared at him trying to decide if he was serious.
“Frances is dating Mitch, and Mitch said while overseas she saved them more than once from impossible situations. They found out—”
“They who?” Mara asked.
“Her team, the people in maintenance, found out that her parents were spies, bred by the government to have superhero powers.”
“Wow,” Destiny said in an awed voice.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Daisy said.
Mara sighed and used the corkscrew to noisily crank the cork out of another bottle of wine.
The oven timer dinged. Xander swooped in and removed the margherita pizza, sliced it and put it in the middle of the coffee table.
Everyone settled down to food, drink and speculation about Kellen Adams, who she really was and where she had come from.