a moment he reminded her vaguely of that young guy Diane Lane had had an affair with in that Unfaithful DVD Celia had made her rent a while back.
Narrowing her eyes, Emma rattled the house keys she held in one hand. Just because he looked like a hedonistic foreign guy with a thing for older women stuck in ruts didn’t make him any less of a potential threat, but she was determined to get to the bottom of his behavior.
“Sir,” she said, “I am speaking to you. What are you doing here?”
He unfolded his tall, lean frame from the front seat of the sports car. She stepped back instinctively. “I don’t think I have an answer for you,” he said slowly, his gaze remaining on her mango-and-burnt-orange Victorian home.
Emma’s keys jangled as she looped the key ring around her forefinger. “Then perhaps you’d best concentrate until you come up with one.” She raised her hand until a small canister attached to the key chain dangled before his whiskey-colored eyes. “This is pepper spray—the kind with UV dye in it, which will brand you as a marauding psychotic while the police track you down,” she continued. “And if you don’t answer my question soon, I will spray the whole canister on your head, and then I will beat you with its empty metal shell.”
He blinked, then finally turned to look at her. For the second time that afternoon, his shuttered, cool facade snapped back into place, leaching the warmth and vulnerability out of his light eyes. “Look, lady,” he said. “There is no marauding. Do you see any marauding going on?”
Emma’s teeth clenched tightly with an audible click. She was just dying for an excuse to spray him.
“And furthermore—” He cut himself off, narrowing his eyes at the can of pepper spray she held. “You know, that’s not a good brand.”
She felt her anger slip a bit. “What?”
“That pepper spray. Sure, they say it doesn’t wash off for three days, but in field tests, they found that a little peroxide will do the trick in about five minutes.”
“But—”
“You want the good stuff, you really ought to order through the Spies-R-Us catalog.” He closed the car door behind him and leaned back against it. “That stuff lasts for a week. At least. Can’t even sandpaper it off.”
Feeling out of sorts, Emma double-checked the safety lock on the pepper spray to keep from shooting herself in the eye and stuffed it in the cargo pocket of her beige silk pants. What kind of stalker gave you self-defense tips? Maybe she should have been more patient. Maybe she should stop behaving like a paranoid jerk and figure out whether the man needed help. After all, if he’d wanted to harm her, he certainly could have done so last night, after he’d gone all Bruce Lee on her would-be attacker.
“Well,” she said with a sigh, “I apologize for threatening you with this inferior brand of pepper spray. Despite your penchant for skulking in my yard, you saved my life in that alley last night, for which I never got a chance to properly thank you. So. Thank you.”
“I don’t skulk,” he muttered under his breath.
“What are you looking for, Joe?” she asked quietly. He looked up then, and something vulnerable and hurting flashed across his face. Maybe her asking was a reckless move, but he looked like he so desperately needed…something.
“You!” a deep voice boomed behind them.
Both of them turned their heads simultaneously toward the sound. A few feet away stood her neighbor, Louis Bernard, known to the neighborhood kids as Crazy Louie.
“Louis.” Emma padded across the lush grass toward where Louis was half-hidden behind a spray of night-blooming jasmine. “Is everything okay?”
But he wouldn’t even look at her. His entire being was focused on Joe. Jeez, no one paid any attention to her anymore.
Louis drew his silver caterpillar eyebrows together and rocked back and forth on bare, eggshell-white feet, which poked out from the hems of his brown knit pants. He’d missed a button on his shirt, so the right side of his collar stuck upward a little higher than the left, giving him a slightly hunchbacked look. His fingers were curled into the pages of the latest L.A. Times, which he crumpled against his chest.
“You go home!” he yelled at Joe with a childlike emphasis on each word.
“Louis, it’s all right.” Emma put a hand on one of Louis’s bony arms, rubbing his thin bicep in a manner she hoped was soothing. “This is just Joe. He’s my friend.”
Louis swayed back and forth in time to music only he could hear, tufted locks of his silver and brown hair bobbing up and down with the movement. “Joe needs to go home,” he said, a little more softly.
“He’ll go home soon,” Emma replied. Louis was the only son of her elderly neighbor, Jasmine Bernard, and although he was fifty-something, Jasmine had told her he had the emotional maturity of a child. He was also usually a gentle soul, not prone at all to screaming at her guests. Not that Joe was a guest or anything.
“I know Joe. I know Joe. I know Joe,” Louis chanted.
Louis rocked and crumpled his newspaper, breathing as if he’d just sprinted to the ocean and back. At a loss, Emma continued rubbing his arm, until he finally started to calm beneath her touch. She glanced up briefly to find Joe staring intently at the two of them, as if trying to recall whether Louis really did know him. Obviously, Joe wasn’t going home any time soon—he’d barely even blinked in response to Louis’s rant.
Perhaps sending Louis away was her best option, to keep the poor man from getting too upset. “Louis, do you think your mother might want her newspaper?” she asked gently.
“I know Joe. I know Joe. Joe’s newspaper,” he chanted in response.
“Maybe you can go give it to her, and then come back after dinner and have some juice with me.”
Louis grew quiet, though he continued to rock on his heels, then nodded.
“Come have some juice later, all right, Louis? After Joe goes home? You know I’m always happy to see you.” Jasmine was always diligent about not letting Louis stay at her house for more than half an hour, but Emma would have gladly welcomed him for longer visits. Through some miracle and despite his disability, he played the piano with a virtuoso’s touch, and she loved to hear him practice Mozart on the small antique upright in her sitting room. He’d been in a car accident as a child that had left him in his current mental state, but somehow the talent that was to be his had been left intact.
“Okay,” Louis said, staring at something on the ground only he could see.
“Great, I’ll see you later tonight.” She gave him an encouraging pat toward his house.
Louis dropped his newspaper and clutched at the buttons on his shirt. “Come to Joe’s house tonight,” he muttered as he shuffled home. “Play in the tower with Joe and Daniel.” And then he hopped up the steps to his house and disappeared inside with a slam of the screen door.
“Joe’s house?” Emma scooped the newspaper Louis had left behind off the ground and folded it carefully until it was the size of a small notebook. She turned to face the man leaning against the car behind her. The “tower” Louis had referred to was most likely the turret on the
