it wouldn’t hurt a girl’s ego to…
A subtle, external awareness seeped into Brooke’s thoughts, short-circuiting the endless debate. The sun was already bright in the cloudless sky, yet a chill slunk down her spine and she halted beside her car.
She slowly turned, seeking the source.
It was that same odd sensation she got watching a DVD by herself late at night, when she was reminded of how Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful timing combined with her ever-churning imagination could totally spook her. Only this wasn’t something she could turn off with the remote.
She zeroed in on a dented tan pickup truck parked a block down the street. Brooke adjusted her glasses at the temple and squinted.
Who was that? She didn’t recognize the vehicle or its occupant behind the steering wheel, though she could make out little more than the man’s snow-white hair. But he wasn’t old, not if the ripples of muscle beneath his T-shirt were any indication. He was almost faceless with his head hunched down into his shoulders and his purple K-State ball cap pulled low over his eyes. Was he lost? Sleeping?
Watching her ?
He shifted in his seat and Brooke quickly turned away, avoiding any possibility of eye contact by staring down at her fingers on the door handle. “Paranoid much?”
Her nerves about starting the new job had gotten the better of her common sense, that was all. This was a regular old Monday morning in the middle of July, not a Hitchcock movie. And the Wildcat fan was nothing more than a man in a truck.
Brooke lifted her chin, determined to dispel her suspicion. She saw her aunts through the tall, narrow church windows, moving inside the house. There was a trio of boys two houses down, marking the bases for an early-morning whiffle ball game. Farther down the street, she spotted another neighbor, Mrs. Boyer, hanging on to the leash of her Labradoodle puppy as they practiced their daily walk.
All normal. All familiar.
Except…
Him.
“Stop it.” Brooke yanked open the car door and tossed her bag across the seat before she was tempted to look his way again. The man was probably one of Truman McCarthy’s construction workers, who’d shown up early for his shift and was waiting for his foreman to arrive. She was the only one who spent so much time with the thoughts inside her head that she could turn a harmless observation into a threat. No one else in the neighborhood seemed to think anything was out of place. Why should she?
Dismissing the man, the truck and the creepy sixth sense her imagination had concocted, Brooke hiked her skirt a notch and climbed inside to start the car and drive away.
But only a few minutes later, she began to wonder if her imagination had been playing tricks on her, after all. Stopped at a light before turning onto the highway which would take her into downtown Kansas City, Brooke checked her rearview mirror. Her breath hitched and she looked again.
Three vehicles behind her. Waiting to turn onto the same highway.
The stranger in the dented tan pickup truck.
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