he followed the loop past quiet grand houses and out the gate. He figured Milagro would be happy if they made the drive in silence, but silence wasn’t usually one of his strong suits. “How long have you lived in Cedar Creek?”
Quick glance, hesitation. Yep, she’d rather not chitchat. “Fifteen years.”
“Hmm. I see the same people so often, sometimes I start thinking I know everyone in town. You go to school here?”
“I was homeschooled.”
“Church?”
“No.” After a moment’s pause, he guessed curiosity made her ask, “Do you?”
“Regularly enough that God doesn’t forget my face. Every Sam Douglas in town is expected to be there at least twice a month on Sundays.”
That caught her attention, as he expected it would. “How many are there?”
“There’s me. My father. My grandfather, who’s gone now. My cousin Samson. His boy, Sammy. A cousin Samantha. And her son, Samwell. Samantha hyphenates Douglas with her husband’s last name for both her and Samwell.”
“Maybe your family should look at one of the other twenty-five letters in the alphabet.” She folded her arms across her chest, tucking her fingers into the folds of fabric at her elbows.
Wow. A long sentence with a little bit of humor in it. Feeling a sense of accomplishment, he turned the AC lower. “We’re a big family. We require a lot of names.”
She didn’t ask how big. If she had, he would have turned the question back on her. Since she didn’t, he turned it back anyway. “Do you have family?”
Her expression turned both pensive and wary, and though the truck cab left her little room to move, she managed to put some distance between them.
“Look, Milagro, I don’t know if you’re a citizen, an immigrant or an undocumented worker, and I don’t care. You had a shock today. You probably need someone to stay with tonight, just in case. Do you have someone you can call?”
Her face had gone pale once more, but reluctant acceptance replaced the wariness. “Gramma. My grandmother.”
“Do you want me to take you to her house?”
“No. She’ll come.”
He caught a glimpse of that tiny sort-of smile, softened with deep affection.
“She always comes.”
Whatever she’d been through, she’d held on to her faith in her grandmother with both hands. That was good. With a family the size of his, it could have been easy for some of the kids to get lost in the crowd, to not have anyone special they could trust no matter what, but with parents and grandparents like his, that hadn’t happened to them. He appreciated that it hadn’t happened to Milagro, either.
By that time, they’d reached her street. Sam’s own house was only six or eight blocks away, across Main Street and in a very similar neighborhood: old houses, some neatly maintained and others looking as if the next strong wind would blow them away. Some of the yards were lush with flowers and vegetable gardens; some looked as if a flock of ravenous chickens had pecked out the last piece of grass and it had never grown back.
Milagro’s house was, like his, on the better side of things. It occupied the corner, a decent-size lot with a white-sided house, a deep front porch and a picket fence containing the closest thing he’d ever seen to an English cottage garden. He hadn’t expected her to have a pretty yard or a lot of flowers. She did that sort of thing all day. Didn’t she want a break from it at night?
The driveway went only as far as the sidewalk, the rest of it having been claimed for plantings. He shifted the truck into Park, then turned to face her. “Are you going to be all right?”
She nodded.
“You’ll call your grandmother?”
Another nod.
“Here’s my number. If you need anything, even just to talk, call me.”
She hesitated before accepting the business card he offered. Then, with a polite nod, she opened the door, got out and walked through the gate and into her garden. She followed the stone path to the porch, never glancing back. There she unlocked the door, opened it to the bare minimum of space she needed to slip through and did just that.
The cop in him wondered about that. Was someone inside she didn’t want him to see? Did she have an inside garden that he might have to haul her to jail for? Was she such a bad housekeeper she didn’t want anyone to catch a glimpse of the mess? But in those seconds the door was open, he’d heard excited barking and gotten the impression of a yellow-furred mass of energy greeting her. She had a dog, a big one judging from what he’d seen, who’d been locked up all day and probably regarded an open door as an invitation to romp down the streets.
Would she call her grandmother? Would she do it now or wait until tonight, when it was dark and she was vulnerable and the image of Evan Carlyle’s face haunted her even with her eyes squeezed shut?
Her decision to make, he reminded himself. He’d done his duty, both as police chief and as Samuel Douglas’s son. The rest was up to her.
January 1.
Halloween had come and gone, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I saw TV sometimes. I knew what those days were like for most people, but I had never had a Halloween costume or anything to feel thankful for. My parents hadn’t killed me yet. That should have been something, shouldn’t it? The idea of Christmas, of people all over the world celebrating someone’s birth... My mother said my being born was the worst thing that ever happened to her. She hated me. He hated me, too.
I didn’t hate them. I just wished they were dead.
He took me to the Rose Parade today. I had never seen so many people in one place, tens of thousands of them. We walked down the crowded sidewalks, him grasping my hand so tightly it hurt, his narrow dark eyes sliding from one woman to the next. Did they have any idea, even just a slight disturbance in their souls, that they were in the presence of evil? I knew it. I smelled it, that mix of excitement and lust and sick, sick pleasure. For him, half the fun was the choosing. He never drank before a hunt. The anticipation was his high, his need, his reward.
We walked. He looked. I let my mind wander someplace safer. Sometimes I just stopped being. I was nothing and nowhere. A blink, and I no longer existed. Sometimes I became someone else, a normal girl whose father loved her so much that he’d fought traffic and huge crowds just so she could see the parade. He held my hand so tightly because his heart would be broken if we got separated. Fear, ignited by pure, sweet love.
I didn’t pretend very often. It was too nice, and when he poked me to point out his target—our target—the fantasy crashed so hard I was afraid it would squash the hope out of me.
Today I looked at those crowds, those hundreds of thousands of people, and wondered what would happen if I ran right into the middle of them. He was stronger, but I was fast and wiry, and I was more afraid. If I twisted my hand from his, quick and hard, and
