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On a hunch he asked, “What are you running from?”
That stopped her cold in the act of pushing her car door open for herself. “I beg your pardon?”
He took advantage of her distraction to go around and open it for her. He took only a single step back, which forced her to slide past him at a distance of about two inches. When they were chest to chest, he repeated, “Who are you running from, Sammie Jo?”
She hesitated for an instant and then moved past him to the bungalow. As he turned on the lights, she slid a pair of sunglasses over her eyes. He stared at her featureless gaze expectantly.
“Dang, you’re good,” she commented neutrally.
“Well?”
“I just broke up with a ginormous jerk, and I happen to find a change of scenery refreshing at the moment.”
“Is he violent?”
“Possibly.”
“Psychotic?”
“Definitely.”
His heart was pounding far too hard. She needed protection, and he couldn’t possibly do it. She mustn’t depend on him. “Anything else I should know about you?” he asked tautly.
“Hey, you’re the one with all the secrets, not me,” she declared.
And that was how he planned to keep it. There were some things he would never speak of. Ever.
“Now what?” she asked, startling him.
“I don’t understand.”
“Our only lead on what this Proctor guy’s up to is dead. How do you want to proceed with investigating his cult or whatever it is?”
“After I put you on a plane in the morning, I plan to drive up into the mountains and find that road again. Then I’ll follow it and see where it leads.”
“Why wait till morning? I see great at night. I’ll be your eyes.”
And apparently, she was bright-eyed and bushytailed at nearly 3:00 a.m. Far be it from him to admit that he was beat and would rather sleep. He picked up the car keys resolutely. “Let’s go, then.”
Finding the dirt road wasn’t hard. His sense of direction was unerring and he went right to it. But it got weird when Sammie Jo announced from the passenger seat that she’d spotted the tire tracks leaving the drop-off point. All he saw was gravel stretching away into the dark in the headlights.
“Slow down,” she ordered, leaning forward in her seat. “Okay. Go straight ahead through the intersection.”
They followed the tracks for maybe a mile. Then they ran into a paved road and the tracks turned right. But the dust had worn off the tires in a few hundred yards, and Sammie Jo shook her head in disgust. “Lost the tracks. Drat. That vehicle could have gone anywhere from here.”
“Let’s head back to the motel and get some rest. We can talk to the sheriff tomorrow and see what he’s come up with.”
“You think he’ll work with you?” she asked doubtfully. “He seemed the type to resent outsiders, and he wasn’t exactly friendly to us. Now, Deputy Barney seemed all kinds of eager to work with me. I could probably pump him for some—”
“No.” She looked far too pleased at his knee-jerk response. He scowled. “Have you got any better ideas?”
“Well, yeah,” she answered. “We have to stop being outsiders.”
“Come again?”
“Let’s move into the area. Settle down.”
“What are you talking about?” He was lost, and he considered himself to be a reasonably bright fellow.
“Think about it. We’ve already established ourselves as a couple. I mentioned to the sheriff that we’re thinking about moving off the grid and into this area. So let’s rent a little place. Meet the neighbors. They’ll be a lot more likely to talk to us than if we’re tourists passing through.”
The idea of setting up house sent figurative butcher knives slashing through his body. It was a cover, dammit. Just a cover. An act. Lord knew he’d become a hell of an actor over the past few years. He could put on this fake skin and live in it for a while if he had to.
“Where do you suggest we move to?” he asked.
“Spruce Hollow, of course.”
“It’s a bold gambit.”
She grinned over at him. “Are you in?”
“Your middle name is trouble, isn’t it?” he grumbled.
“With a capital T. Just leave it to me. I’ll set up the rest of our cover tomorrow. All I need you to do is get some of the kind of clothes you normally wear.”
“That I normally … What are you talking about?”
“You look like a pig dressed up as a showgirl.”
“Excuse me?” he exclaimed.
“Well, you don’t look like an actual pig. You’re quite a hottie, in point of fact. But you look totally uncomfortable in those jeans and that ridiculous flannel shirt. If you’re going to blend in, you have to look like yourself.”
He frowned. “I’d have to make a trip to a real city to shop.”
“You do that and I’ll take care of the rest. By the time you get back, I’ll have all the arrangements made.”
He stared at her in shock. Steamroller, thy name is Sammie Jo.
He got back to the motel room after his road trip to Charleston at about noon and found a note on the kitchen table.
G.—I took the liberty of packing your stuff—nice silk boxer shorts, BTW. Check out of the motel and meet me at this address. And for God’s sake, wear some uptight rich-guy clothes.
—S.
She’d checked out his underwear? Vixen. He’d have to return the favor sometime. He noticed belatedly that the sticky note was pasted to a hand-drawn map. What had she gone and done?
Bemused, he followed her instructions to Spruce Hollow’s one and only side street and pulled up in front of a one-story brick ranch house that looked straight out of the 1950s. Oh, God. He couldn’t do this.
The house was low and rectangular, nothing like the neat, craftsman-style home that flashed into his head with blinding clarity. A home with blood everywhere. Death. And that horrible, primal scream that wouldn’t stop.
Chapter 4
He’d done some hard things in his life, seen and survived horrors that would have broken a lesser man—at least that was what the shrinks told him. But turning the Bronco into that little ranch house’s driveway, parking it and climbing out like he wasn’t screaming in terror inside his head was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.
Two women emerged from the house as he stood by the SUV fighting every warning his body could shout at him to turn and run until he couldn’t take another step. The yard was overgrown and full of weeds, but a neat carpet of green swam in his mind’s eye. Paint peeled from these shutters, and a rusty rain gutter dangled from the front porch. That other house had been fully restored to pristine perfection.
He