“Hello, Pumpkin.” Darcy scratched behind the cat’s ears, and Pumpkin pressed his head into her palm.
Mroww! This more insistent cry came from a sleek, cream-colored feline, seal-point ears attesting to a Siamese heritage.
“Hello, Spice.” Darcy knelt, one hand extended. Spice deigned to let her pet her.
Darcy stood and looked around at the evidence that someone else—Ryder, she guessed—had been here. Mail was spread out in a messy array on the hall table, and powdery residue—fingerprint powder?—covered the door frame and other surfaces. Darcy moved farther into the house, noting the afghan crumpled at the bottom of the sofa, a paperback romance novel splayed, spine up, on the table beside it. A rectangle outlined by dust on the desk in the corner of the room indicated where Kelly’s laptop had sat. Ryder had probably taken it. From television crime dramas she had watched, she guessed he would look at her emails and other correspondence, searching for threats or any indication that someone had wanted to harm Kelly.
But Kelly would have said something to Darcy if anyone had threatened her. Unlike Darcy, Kelly never held back her feelings. Darcy blinked back stinging tears and hurried to the kitchen, to the cat carriers stacked in the corner. Both cats watched from the doorway, tails twitching, suspicious.
She set the open carriers in the middle of the kitchen floor, then filled two dishes with the gourmet salmon Pumpkin and Spice favored, and slid the dishes into the carrier. Pumpkin took the bait immediately, scarcely looking up from devouring the food when Darcy fastened the door of the carrier. Spice was more wary, tail twitching furiously as she prowled around the open carrier. But hunger won over caution and soon she, too, darted inside, and Darcy fastened the door.
She was loading the second crate into the back of her Subaru when the door to the other half of the duplex opened. A man’s figure filled the doorway. “Darcy, is that you?”
“Hello, Ken.” She tried to relax some of the stiffness from her face as she turned to greet Kelly’s neighbor. Ken Rutledge was a trim, athletic man who taught math and coached boys’ track and Junior Varsity basketball at Eagle Mountain High School.
He came toward her and she forced herself not to pull away when he took her arm. “What’s going on?” he asked. “When I got home from practice two cop cars were pulling away from Kelly’s half of the house.” He looked past her to the back of her Forester. “And you’re taking Kelly’s cats? Has something happened to her?”
“Kelly’s dead. Someone killed her.” Her voice broke, and she let him pull her into his arms.
“Kelly’s dead?” he asked, smoothing his hand down her back as she sobbed. “How? Who?”
She hated that she had to fight so hard to pull herself together. She tried to shove out of his arms, but he held her tight. She reminded herself that this was just Ken—Kelly’s neighbor, and a man Darcy herself had dated a few times. He thought he was being helpful, holding her this way. She forced herself to relax and wait for her tears to subside. When his hold on her loosened, she eased back. “I don’t know any details,” she said. “A state patrolman told me they found her up on Dixon Pass—murdered.”
“That’s horrible.” Ken’s eyes were bright with the shock of the news—and fascination. “Who would want to hurt Kelly?”
“The cops didn’t stop to talk to you?” she asked.
“When I saw the sheriff’s department vehicles I didn’t pull in,” he said. “I drove past and waited until they were gone before I came back.”
“Why would you do that?” She stared at him.
He shrugged. “I have a couple of traffic tickets I haven’t paid. I didn’t want any hassle if they looked me up and saw them.”
She took a step back. “Ken, they’re going to want to talk to you,” she said. “You may know something. You might have seen someone hanging around here, watching Kelly.”
“I haven’t seen anything like that.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “And I’ll talk to them. I just didn’t feel like dealing with them tonight. I mean, I didn’t know Kelly was dead.”
She closed the hatch of the car. “I have to go,” she said.
He put a hand on her shoulder. “You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this,” he said. “You’re welcome to stay with me.”
“No. Thank you.” She took out her keys and clutched them, automatically lacing them through her fingers to use as a weapon, the way the self-defense instructor in Fort Collins had shown her.
His expression clouded. “If it was someone else, you’d accept help, wouldn’t you?” he said. “Because it’s me, you’re refusing. Just because we have a romantic history, doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”
She closed her eyes, then opened them to find him glaring at her. Were they ever going to stop having this conversation? They had only gone out together three times. To her, that didn’t constitute a romantic history, though he insisted on seeing things differently. “Ken, I don’t want to talk about this now,” she said. “I’m tired and I’m upset and I just want to go home.”
“I’m here for you, Darcy,” he said.
“I know.” She got into the driver’s seat, forcing herself not to hurry, and drove away. When she glanced in the rearview mirror, Ken was still standing in the drive, frowning after her, hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Dating him had been a bad idea—Darcy had known it from the first date—but Kelly had pressured her to give him a chance. “He’s a nice man,” she had said. “And the two of you have a lot in common.”
They did have a lot in common—a shared love of books and animals and hiking. But Ken pushed too hard. He wanted too much. After only two dates, he had asked her to move in with him. He had talked about them taking a vacation together next summer, and had wanted her to come home to Wisconsin to meet his parents for Christmas. She had broken off with him then, telling him she wasn’t ready to get serious with anyone. He had pretended not to understand, telling her coming home to meet his family was just friendly, not serious. But she couldn’t see things that way.
He had been upset at first—angry even. He called her some horrible names and told her she would regret losing a guy like him. But after he had returned from visiting his folks last week, he had been more cordial. They had exchanged greetings when she stopped by to see Kelly, and the three of them spent a couple of hours one afternoon shoveling the driveway together. Darcy had been willing to be friends with him, as long as he didn’t want more.
She turned onto the gravel county road that led to the horse ranch that belonged to one of their first clients. Robbie Lusk had built the tiny house on wheels parked by the creek as an experiment, he said, and was happy to rent it out to Darcy. His hope was to add more tiny homes and form a little community, and he had a second home under construction.
Darcy slowed to pull into her drive, her cozy home visible beneath the golden glow of the security light one hundred yards ahead. But she was startled to see a dark SUV moving down the drive toward her. Heart in her throat, she braked hard, eliciting complaints from the cats in their carriers behind her. The SUV barreled out past her, a rooster tail of wet snow in its wake. It turned sharply, scarcely inches from her front bumper, and she tried to see the
