LITMIR.BIZ

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healed enough to allow her comfortable travel to Bloom’s office.

      Sam Larson wasn’t looking to her for approval or even a reaction. He was all business as he headed up decaying steps toward a door. Bloom stepped gingerly forward—not sure she trusted the steps, in spite of the fact that a man twice her size had just bounded up them—until she noticed the new boards giving support underneath the porch.

      For some reason that small sign of repair, of attention and care, gave her the impetus to focus on Ken behind bars, and not on the fact that this place was supposed to be her new home. Albeit temporarily. Stepping with as much authority as she could muster, she made it to the front door without shaking.

      Or even feeling like shaking.

      The door was as ancient-looking as the rest of the house, but it was solid. And bore new dead bolt locks. Two of them. He unlocked them and handed her the keys.

      To say the inside wasn’t what she’d been expecting would be a huge understatement. Nor did it resemble anything like any of the places she’d lived over the last two decades. But it was...doable. Reminded her of the little place her folks had lived in on the farm when they’d first married. Before they’d built their current, more modern, fancier home. Also on the farm. The old place was a guest house now, of sorts. Nothing fancy. Isolated. But clean if you didn’t look too closely.

      Sam’s choice of safe house was certainly off the beaten path. So far off Ken would never believe she’d inhabit such a place. Or probably ever visit himself. But those trees, the snarls of weedy undergrowth, the dirt road, the...dirt...in general, wouldn’t be an impediment to the types of people Ken had supposedly befriended.

      “There are two bedrooms,” the detective was saying, heading from the entry, past a galley kitchen, through the great room toward a hallway at the back. “One has its own bathroom, the other uses the bath here off the hall.” He was opening doors as he went, showing her an iron tub that reminded her, again, of that old house on the farm. It had been a place she’d gravitated to when she’d been home for summer vacations. More home to her than the house she’d lived in with her parents before her uncle and father had decided to ship her away for being too smart.

      Before her mother had chosen to side with them.

      Plush white towels in varying sizes hung on the rods. She caught sight of a price tag on the back of one of them. The toilet was new. Linoleum, like that in the other parts she’d seen of the cottage, was yellowed and curled around the base of the new white porcelain.

      Three types of shampoo, a full bar of soap and a container of body wash lined the back wall of the tub. The shower curtain still had creases in it from being packaged.

      Had the house just been made habitable for her purposes? And if so, who’d paid for it?

      Could they somehow stick Prosecutor Trevor Banyon with the tab?

      The bedroom immediately across the hall was small, but as clean as the rest of the house. An old double bed sat on scarred linoleum. The comforter and pillow cases resembled the shower curtain in their even creases. A window faced the front yard. It was a little low for her liking.

      “It’s bolted shut,” Larson said, observant as always, apparently. She’d been eying the old latch and wondering...

      “It’s completely reinforced with rebar.”

      “Rebar?”

      “It’s steel bar used in construction to reinforce concrete.”

      She nodded. Feeling a bit cramped standing there alone with him in the small room. She noted a dresser. A door that she assumed opened to a closet. And she moved toward the hall, grateful when he stepped aside to give her clear passage.

      Her wedge sandals had a two-inch sole, but her eyes only came to his nose as she passed. She didn’t look closely.

      Instead, she concentrated on what had to be new paint in the hallway. The same off-color, not bright enough to be white and not golden enough to be beige—that she’d noted on walls in the front room.

      He led her to the second bedroom. Stood back while she looked around. A charging station sat on a nightstand on one side of the king-size bed. The comforter, a nondescript beige, had no crease marks. If anything, it was slightly wrinkled, as though it had been crammed into a dryer that was too small for it. A couple of paintings hung on the walls. They were washed-out prints of boats that looked as though they’d come from a dollar store.

      They made Bloom want to paint. The entire place cried for her brushes. For color.

      I choose joy, her inner voice piped up unexpectedly. Yes. She consciously always chose color—in her clothes, her adornments, her walls, because color brought her joy.

      In the bathroom she noticed a used bar of soap in the shower. Along with identical bottles of everything she’d seen in the other, smaller bathroom off the hall. Even the new towels were there. Minus any visible tags.

      And the toilet paper roll, as in the other room, was full, as though it hadn’t had a single sheet torn off from it.

      But that soap...

      “Is this someone’s room?” she asked.

      “Not currently, why?”

      “The soap in the shower.”

      He blinked, looked a tad put out and retrieved the bar. “That shouldn’t have been left there,” he said, sounding apologetic.

      Or annoyed. She couldn’t tell which. Unlike Ken, Sam Larson kept his emotions well in check.

      He’d said she could have either bedroom.

      “You’re sure I’m not putting somebody out of a home?”

      “Positive.”

      There’d been new towels in both bathrooms. As though both were expected to be used.

      “I’m not staying here alone am I?” For a brief second her heart rate sped up.

      She didn’t want Detective Larson to stay with her. He hadn’t offered, either. But for a second there...

      “No, you’re not,” he said, as though brooking no argument.

      The place was remote. And while she prided herself on being self-sufficient, the place was...remote. And yet...she didn’t want to stay alone with him.

      Transference was a powerful tool the mind used to emulate the sense of safety and security that was on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Right behind physiological. She was noticing him. Noting odd sensations. She couldn’t afford a personal setback. Most particularly not with Ken soon to be back in her picture, however briefly.

      “Who’s going to be staying here with me?”

      “Detective Chantel Harris,” he said. “She’s giving us some time to get you settled and then she’ll be along. I’ll introduce you before I go.”

      She could pretend she wasn’t disappointed. Though she’d like to think that for her own good she’d have refused to stay there alone with him. But her inner voice wouldn’t let her get away with lying to herself, so she went ahead and dealt with the feeling of dismay right then and there. He was her safety net. What she was feeling was normal. She nodded.

      She thought about Ken being free and needed him back behind bars. Those bars that held him had given her her life back. Had taught her about freedom. Given her the first real taste of it she’d ever known.

      “So what is this, someone’s summer home?” she asked, following Sam back out into the great room. She could see dishes stacked on shelves that a cupboard door had once covered. “If it is, they’ll be needing it soon.”

      It was July. Summer visitors were already there in full force. Ever since Memorial Day the beaches—and bed-and-breakfasts that lined the streets around them—had been filled.

      “This house is yours for as long as you need it,”

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