said, stroking the fur down his back and over his tail. He stretched up onto her shoulder. “Listen, cat,” she said, looking at him eye-to-eye and still feeling tremors way down in the cold spot inside her, “I’m at my wit’s end, and I can’t figure out what to do next. I’m too scared to fall asleep, and I’m so tired I don’t know what’s real anymore. I’m talking to a cat, and you don’t even purr.”
She sank into a chair in the living room and propped her feet on the matching footstool. Clutching the cat’s warm, sinewy body to her, she remembered the feel of the cold floor, the gleam of the knife. The look in her own reflected eye. Molly shuddered. “Hey, fella, I’m in over my head in really bad stuff,” she whispered, “and I’m sinking fast.” She buried her cold face in his fur.
Arranging himself in her lap to his satisfaction, the cat fixed her with that unwavering gaze as she muttered to him. He was so still and calm that some of her own tension seeped from her as she stroked him endlessly from ear to tail tip, the smooth, sleek fur and firm muscles solid and real against her fingers.
And all the while she stroked him, the cat was silent.
Moving closer, he watched her lean back in the chair, pale brown hair clinging to the chair fabric, her hands tangled in the black silk of the cat’s fur. Saw, too, the lines around her drawn, silvery gray eyes, the smudges of exhaustion underneath. He sensed the immense effort she was making as her small hands moved in an endless, hypnotic rhythm.
She might drowse now. Possibly. Or not.
He could wait.
But he knew she wouldn’t sleep.
Not tonight.
The piercing shrill of the doorbell jerked Molly to her feet. While she’d drifted off somewhere in her mind, the cat had disappeared, leaving long strands of black fur clinging to her fingers. Anxiously she brushed her hands down her pajamas, wincing at the ache in her hand.
She had no idea what time it was.
Peering through the privacy hole on the door, she saw that rain still dripped down the eaves and spattered the gallery. Her stomach curled in nauseating twists as she looked at the detective’s shield held eye level by the man standing in an easy, legs-apart stance at her front door.
Unlocking the door but keeping the chain on, Molly leaned her head against the doorjamb.
Choice had been taken from her.
“Yes?” Her voice was thready. To herself as she heard the edgy notes, she sounded guilty of unnamed horrors.
“Police.” Anonymous behind the silver-rimmed, round dark lenses of his sunglasses, he could have been anyone.
“Yes. I see.” Dread was moving through her in long rollers, gaining force, growing large and overpowering like enormous waves far out at sea.
She saw, too, the second man sitting in the passenger side of the black car parked in her driveway. She’d never heard it drive up. She must have dozed off.
Trying to sort out this new set of events, Molly rubbed her forehead fretfully against the edge of the door.
“We need to talk with you, ma’am.” Florida sand in his voice, a native, like her. She didn’t recognize his tough, sharp-planed face, though.
Molly cleared her throat. “What about?”
“I’ll explain. May I come in?” Against the stark black of his shirt and jacket and the sleek black of his hair, the man’s face was pale.
Yielding to the authority in his voice, in the bracing of his hand against one lean hip, Molly almost removed the chain. But caution and the ever-present fear stopped her. Sunglasses on a rain-dark morning? “Look, can you give me a name? A badge number?” She was having trouble swallowing.
There was a long silence. She saw him look toward the man in the low-slung car, shrug and turn back to her.
“Sure. John Harlan.” He held the shield closer to the door, his gesture somehow mocking. “Badge number 8973. You can call—”
“I’ll look it up,” she said through the crack, and she shut the door very carefully with shaking hands.
Racing upstairs, knees turning to syrup with fear, Molly looked up the phone number for the local police, rolling the edge of her pajama top between her fingers as she waited for an answer, trembling at each suddenly loud sound of her house, each creak and sigh of a branch against a window.
According to the desk sergeant, Harlan, badge number 8973, was supposed to be at her house.
The wave that had been building crashed around her and pulled her out to sea. There in the dark depths where monsters dwelt, it built again in slow, sickening swoops of power.
Smoothing the rolled edge of her pajama top flat, Molly unbuttoned the garment slowly, making herself go through the simple, grounding motions. She couldn’t afford to think.
Skimming off her bottoms, she slid into jeans and a sweat shirt and ripped a brush through her hair. Red scrawled across her cheek as she tried to put on lipstick, and she flung the lipstick case back onto her dresser with a violence that surprised her.
Wiping the slash of crimson off her cheek, she shuddered.
She didn’t need any more red today.
She hurried down the stairs. “I called the police station,” she muttered as she opened the door.
“Good.” His voice was like hot chocolate on cold ice cream, just that edge of hardness under the smooth.
Bigger and more powerful than she’d realized, he filled the doorway and stepped into her house, wiping his feet carefully.
The bottoms of his expensive black slacks were mud spattered. Bayou mud and dried sand.
Backing up, Molly wanted to slam the door and run.
He must have seen something in her face, because he stopped. “Do we have a problem here?” He was all waiting stillness, power held in abeyance.
“No. No problem,” she said, hearing the lie, knowing he did, too, as he inclined his head toward her, listening carefully. She cleared her throat. “How can I help you? What’s happened?” She twisted her fingers together and sensed, rather than saw, his gaze behind the mask of dark glasses follow their movements. She stopped, let her hands lie easily along the side seams of her jeans.
And tried to breathe past the constriction in her chest. “What do you want?”
He slid a notebook from his shirt pocket. Underneath his jacket, she glimpsed his thin, black leather belt, the shine of its narrow buckle. Glimpsed, too, the edge of a shoulder holster.
As he flipped open the notebook with his long, thin fingers, Molly braced herself.
“You’re off the beaten path here, Ms.—” He checked his notebook, but she didn’t believe for a minute that he didn’t remember her name. Something about his careful stance, his slow turning of pages told her he knew.
She let him play out his game.
“Ms.
