Death Night - Todd Ritter

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would be great. Thank you.” Kat allowed herself a brief sigh of relief. This was one less thing she’d need to worry about. “I’ll have the bones transferred to the morgue and meet you and Nick there.”

      Lucy chuckled. “Who said anything about Nick? I’m leaving him at home.”

      Kat ended the call, letting out a lengthy yawn as she shoved the phone back into her pocket. There was a lot to be done in the coming hours. Question the other members of the historical society. Look into the pasts of Perry Hollow’s volunteer firefighters. Search Constance’s office. Lieutenant Tony Vasquez would be handling most of it, but Kat wanted to help out as much as she could. Still, she wouldn’t be of much use exhausted. And until she had to meet Lucy, she decided the best course of action would be to go home and get some sleep. It would only be for an hour, but that was better than nothing.

      Rounding the building to the front lawn, she saw that things had finally quieted down on the street. The fire trucks were long gone. So was the crowd, which had been shooed away by Carl soon after Constance’s body was found.

      Now, only one person remained, an absurdly tall man watching Kat from the sidewalk. She recognized him instantly, just as she had during the fire. Only now she realized he hadn’t been a figment of her imagination or a remnant from a slowly fading dream. Henry Goll really was back in town.

      “So it is you.”

      “In the flesh,” Henry said.

      Kat quickened her pace across the lawn, urged on by his sudden appearance. Getting to know Henry had been the only good thing to come out of the Grim Reaper killings. At first, she hadn’t known what to think of the tall, handsome man with the noticeable scars. He had been aloof. Quiet. Suspicious. Yet he eventually softened, opened up, began to trust her. By the time they had saved each other’s lives, they were friends.

      When he vanished soon after, Kat understood his reasons. But it didn’t make her miss him any less.

      “How did you know I was here?” she asked.

      “I saw you during the fire,” he admitted. “You were a bit preoccupied at the time, so I didn’t say hello.”

      “Understood.”

      “But when I stepped outside and noticed that there was still police activity going on at the museum, I thought you’d be here.”

      “You thought correctly.”

      Kat had finally reached the sidewalk. She started to shake Henry’s hand, changed her mind, and went in for a hug. She felt a little foolish as she wrapped her arms around his waist. Still, the hug was as long as it was tight.

      “You shouldn’t have left like that,” she said. “You didn’t even say good-bye.”

      Henry, stiffened to the point of paralysis by her embrace, cleared his throat. “I sent you a postcard.”

      “That’s not a good-bye. That’s an ‘Oh, by the way, I skipped town.’ I never thought I’d see you again.”

      “I’m sorry,” Henry said. “It was wrong of me to vanish like that. And it’s good to see you, too.”

      Kat took it to mean she should stop hugging him. But when she finally pulled away, she noticed that Henry Goll, the most stoic man she had ever known, was now smiling.

       5 A.M.

      He wasn’t remotely tired, although he should have been exhausted. Sleeping on a plane isn’t the same as sleeping in a bed, and his rest during the flight had been fitful at best. But it was 11 A.M. in Rome, and Henry was as wide awake in Perry Hollow as he would have been there. Jet lag was a bitch.

      Kat Campbell, however, looked ready to sleep for days. When they climbed into their booth at the Perry Hollow Diner, the first thing she ordered was a pot of coffee. She then looked across the table at Henry and asked, in all seriousness, “What will you be drinking?”

      Henry also ordered coffee, although a single cup and not the whole pot.

      They were the sole customers at the diner, the only place in town that was open all night, so their java came quickly. Kat gulped hers down like a man stumbling parched from a desert. Henry sipped his, finding it disappointingly weak. Ten months in Italy had turned him into a coffee snob. If it wasn’t espresso of the highest quality, his taste buds wanted nothing to do with it.

      “How have you been?” Kat asked rapidly, fueled by the caffeine. “Where have you been? Tell me everything.”

      “But I want to know how you’re doing,” Henry said. “And James. And Nick.”

      “You first,” Kat demanded.

      He quickly brought her up to speed on all that had happened since they last saw each other. First was the recovery period, slow and painful. Then his decision to escape his past (again) and start a new life (again) in a place far away—this time Italy. Since he was already fluent in Italian, it didn’t take him long to get a job at the country’s largest daily newspaper. It was based in Rome, but he wrote almost exclusively about American issues.

      “I’m like a foreign correspondent,” he told Kat, “except I never leave.”

      He talked at length about life in Italy. The charming apartment where he could glimpse the top of the Colosseum from his bathroom window. The great food that forced him to double the length of his daily workouts. The amazing opera productions, including a performance of La Traviata at La Scala in Milan, which was the best thing he had ever seen and heard. The excellent wines, which got him through the frequent nights when what happened in Perry Hollow haunted his dreams.

      As he spoke, he felt the heat of Kat’s gaze on his face. She hadn’t seen him since that horrible night in the Perry Mill. Henry had made sure of that. Now she was making up for lost time, studying him in an attempt to survey the damage. The attention to his scars would have annoyed him if it was coming from someone else. He let Kat look because he knew she cared.

      “You can talk about it,” Henry told her. “I don’t pretend they’re not there.”

      “It’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be,” Kat said. “You suffered a lot. And I assumed the damage would be worse.”

      “The doctors did what they could.” Henry took a sip of his coffee. It was piping hot and came close to scalding his tongue. His lips, however, felt none of it. The scar tissue there desensitized everything. “The rest I have to live with.”

      Kat stared into her coffee cup, suddenly unable to look him in the eyes. “Henry, I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner. I’m sorry you had to go through all that.”

      Henry reached across the table and took her hands. They were soft and surprisingly delicate. He had expected someone as tough as Kat to have equally hardened hands.

      “I refuse to listen to an apology from you,” he said. “You helped save my life, and I will always be grateful for that. Besides, I had scars before all that happened.” He pointed to the mark at his temple before moving down to the long line that sliced through his lips. “Or don’t you remember these?”

      “I just wish that I could have done something to spare you from getting more of them.”

      “I prefer scars to death,” Henry said. “Besides, you have no idea how intriguing it makes me to the Italians.”

      That was probably the thing that surprised him most about living in Rome. Many women, and a good number of men, came on to him in bars, at work functions, on the street. It helped that he kept himself in peak physical condition. But he had a feeling that the scars, which made him feel like a freak and an outsider in the United States, gave him an air of mystery to the Italians. In a country full of beautiful people, he stood out by being the opposite. During

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