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She sat at her kitchen table and bit into her sandwich, thinking about the tangled mess of her mind. A mind that she always preferred to believe was relatively neat and orderly…yet as of this moment seemed anything but.
What was the psychological term? Transference? No, more like projection? Whatever, it disturbed her to think that she might be reacting to Grant in a way dictated by her experience with Jackson. After all, what had Grant done except sit on a park bench in the middle of the night? So maybe her suspicions resided less with his actions and the timing of them than they did with the horrendous betrayal she had suffered at Jackson’s hands. Maybe she felt uneasy and threatened for no other reason.
Probably a good time to have a heart-to-heart with one of her girlfriends, but a glance at the clock told her that they were all still involved in the middle of their workdays. Not the time for a conversation like this.
She took another bite of her sandwich just as her cell rang. With a muffled groan as she tried to chew and swallow fast, she pulled the phone from her pocket as the ring tone played the same bars of “Carmina Burana” for the second time.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Trish, it’s Gage.”
“Oh, hi, Gage. Thanks for calling. I’m sitting here concluding yet again that I’m overreacting to that guy.”
“Conclude away. I did the ‘stop and identify’ I promised you I would last night.”
“I saw you. You’re going to think I’m nuts.”
A quiet laugh escaped him. “Not a chance. Why?”
“Because after you left I went out and talked to him. And then I met him at the truck stop and we talked longer.”
“Well, I’ll give you credit for guts and curiosity, but I’m not going to tell you that was a wise thing to do with a total stranger.”
“Well, since I’m getting concerned about the state of my own mind right now, I have to agree. I bounced from he’s not really a threat to feeling stalked, and now I’m on my way back again.”
At that Gage really laughed. “It’s hard to reach a conclusion in the absence of facts. But I have some facts for you. Interested?”
“In anything that might help me get my balance back. When I have to stand back and look at my own mental workings, something’s not right.”
She could hear the smile in his response. “Smart people do that all the time. It’s the idiots who never selfexamine. Anyway, I do have some info for you.”
“I’m listening.”
“I couldn’t find anything on him yesterday because he used a fake name on the motel register.”
“Not good.”
“Not a crime. When I stopped last night and talked to him, I got his driver’s license. No wants, no warrants, great credit rating and he owns property in California.”
“That’s a long way away. Anything else?”
“Actually, yeah. But nothing that raises a red flag.” Gage fell silent a moment. “Did he give you his full name?”
“No, just Grant.”
“Well, until the guy does something wrong, I don’t feel I have the right to share any more. Sorry, but there are limits. Just ask him his full name. Then you can find out what’s in the public record just as I did. But I don’t have the right, legally or ethically, to go beyond what I just told you.”
She almost sighed, but knew he was right. How much would she want Gage to invade her own privacy just because she made someone feel uneasy?
“Thanks, Gage. I appreciate your help.”
“You’re more than welcome. If he does anything else to concern you, let me know immediately, okay?”
“Sure thing.”
She closed her phone, slipped it back into her pocket and felt an urge to laugh at herself. Oh, it was so shocking! Yep, really shocking. Some guy sits on a public park bench, legal even at one in the morning, and nobody could do anything about it.
For some reason, her grandmother’s voice floated into her mind, the woman’s plainspoken way of telling someone to think about what they were doing: Are you tetched in the head? Always delivered in a kind voice, but always in its own way like a jerk back to a calmer state of mind.
“Are you tetched in the head, girl?” she asked out loud.
Yeah, maybe she was. And maybe tonight she’d go out and ask Grant for his full name. Or maybe not. Just because Jackson was a lying scoundrel didn’t mean every other man on the planet was.
She finished her sandwich in a calmer frame of mind. Then she grabbed a heavy flannel shirt and her book and went out back. Ten minutes later she had a small fire burning, and she curled up on a chaise with her coffee to read.
Clouds might be moving in, but that didn’t mean winter had arrived.
Yet.
The deepening night chill, which had begun its arrival with rain in the late afternoon, bit at Grant’s exposed skin as he limped his designated path from the motel to Mahoney’s, where he spent fifteen minutes sipping an excellent rye, and then again as he limped his way toward the park to sit in front of Trish Devlin’s house. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, but the night managed to bite even through his jeans, and his hood couldn’t cover his cheeks. If he was here much longer he might have to upgrade his clothing.
But he had no choice yet. His path was ordained, by what he couldn’t really say. All he knew was that he’d ignored something like this before and had lived to regret it. He wished he hadn’t lived.
So he followed the plan, according to what he knew, even though it was entirely possible he couldn’t make any difference at all to the outcome. How would he know? Science didn’t like these questions and had never tried to answer them. Theology even tried to steer away from this place.
But here he was in the midst of it. After nearly a year of thumbing rides around the country, trying to deal with his demons, he’d become aware of a different demon. And somehow he’d known he’d arrive in the right place at the right time.
The minute that last rig had pulled into the truck stop here, somewhere deep inside, he’d known: this is it. Certainty as strong as a compulsion had led him to check into the motel, then hunt for the bar he was sure he’d seen before. The clock he recognized over the bar. The time that had been nagging at him. The subsequent walk to a park and a bench that were somehow familiar.
Sometimes he wondered if his experience was something like that of serial killers who talked about a compulsion, an inner pressure to hunt a victim whom they somehow recognized even if they had never met.
Sometimes he wondered if he’d gone off the deep end. Sometimes he wondered if he himself was the demon he was hunting.
But he was here, guided by God knew what to this out-of-the-way place, and fear of failing yet again made him follow this set path night after night. The only reassurance he had that he wasn’t the demon was his own distaste for making Trish Devlin nervous.
He wished there was another way.
But there wasn’t. He just knew he had to be on that bench at that time. Period. And he couldn’t explain it to another soul without getting himself committed.
Smothering a sigh, ignoring the grinding pain in his hip and the stabbing pain in his thigh and the incessant ache in his back, which probably came from limping around so much, he plowed through the night, feeling as if he were walking through an iceberg rather than air. At times it was almost as if something pushed back at him, told him to turn around. But the compulsion overrode everything else, and because he hadn’t trusted that compulsion before, to his great grief and horror, he had to trust it now.
Time, he reminded himself, was an artifact of the large-number world he existed in. At the quantum level, past and future became one in a timeless present. So his experience was possible.
Possible.
Just possible.
A lot of rational people would tell him he was nuts. There’d been a time he would have agreed. But not since the…accident.
Except now he lived in a world where he knew there were no “accidents,” only probabilities, and there was one probability he had come here to prevent.
It was possible he had already prevented it just by coming here and making this walk every night. But the compulsion remained, so he remained, too.
He lowered himself to the bench again with a gasp of both pain and relief. Maybe when this compulsion let go, maybe when he dealt with whatever he’d come to deal with here, he’d be able to allow himself the gift of the hip replacement the docs had wanted to give him. A hip replacement he’d denied himself out of guilt.
He almost smiled then, realizing that he might actually be doing penance for something that had arisen from the morass of quantum probabilities, probabilities over which he could exercise only minimal control by making decisions. He had made a rational decision that time.
This time he was making an irrational one in order to atone.
And he was evidently scaring the woman who lived in that house. He felt bad about that, but maybe his whole purpose in doing this was to scare her. Because if he was right, she needed to be scared.
The last thing he expected to see was Trish Devlin come out of her house and march toward him. After their meeting at the truck stop, he expected her to avoid him like the plague. Instead, here she was, striding purposefully toward him, her snorkel hood up on her parka, her hands in her pockets.
When she reached him, she stood over him. The snorkel hood, even though it wasn’t fully zipped, managed to shadow her face completely.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“A very cold guy who is sorry he keeps disturbing you.”
“I’m finding that hard to believe. The sheriff says you appear to be okay.”
“Then you shouldn’t worry about me.”
“Well, I can’t stop wondering about you. I go from being annoyed to being frightened to being just plain curious. Either way, I can’t sleep until you leave. So why don’t you just come into my house and tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Why should anything be going on?” He genuinely wanted to hear her answer to that.
“Because after what I told you about feeling stalked, a gentleman would have chosen a different bench tonight.”
“Reasonable,” he said. “But not possible.”
“Why the hell not?”
His answer was simple, and as true as he could give her. “Because I can’t.”
“That’s not true. You can walk any direction you want, sit on any one of another dozen benches.”
“Theoretically.”
She made a disgusted sound. “Why do I feel as if I’m caught up in a conversation with an evasive Zen monk?”
“I should be so lucky.”
“Then just give me your full name.”
“Why?”
“So I can do a Google search on you. So maybe then I’ll be able to sleep.”
“I don’t want you to sleep at this time of night.”
She swore then, a phrase he suspected was totally uncharacteristic. It didn’t seem to pass her lips easily. “Do you always talk in riddles?”
“Enigmas, actually. I can’t explain.” He hesitated, but sensed there was no danger in the revelation. And feelings were about all he had left to guide him in this unknown territory. “But I will give you my full name. The search engines should take you on an interesting journey.”
“I hope so.”
“My full name is Grant Frederick Wolfe.” He spelled the last name for her. “You’ll probably find me most often as Grant F. Wolfe, or even G. F. Wolfe, which is the name I used on most of my papers.”
“Thank you,” she said stiffly, then turned to walk back to her house.
This should be interesting, he thought as he watched her disappear inside. Because he had a pretty good idea what the search engines would bring up.
He glanced at his watch. Ten more minutes, then he could go back to the motel’s warmth.
Maybe, at some point, the universe would reveal to him why he’d been chosen for this particular hell.
Because he sure didn’t have any idea why.
Chapter Four (#u303cff3d-f574-5333-a9e2-f12a78619496)
The morning was chilly enough to cause Trish’s breath to fog. The rain yesterday had cleared the air so well that the trees seemed even more colorful, the sky even bluer and the sun even brighter. They were in the height of autumn, with a brief burst of Indian summer in the forecast for tomorrow. She looked forward to those few warmer days.
But this morning she had a mission. By nine-thirty, she was hammering on the door of Grant’s room at the motel. A few minutes passed, then the door opened and he looked out at her with sleep-puffed eyes.
“Come in,” he said. “Except you’ll have to excuse my state of dress. I haven’t even brushed my teeth yet.”
She stepped into the warmth and glanced around the room. It showed its age, of course, but Grant was evidently a neat person. His few possessions appeared to be stowed away.
On the other hand, Grant himself was something else. Maybe he slept in the buff, but he’d pulled on nothing but a pair of jeans to answer the door, and he hadn’t even bothered to snap them.
Trish’s thoughts raced down an alley she didn’t want to enter, but it proved impossible for her to ignore the fact that he had a broad, smoothly muscled chest, arms that said he could lift more than a laptop. And then there was that faint sprinkling of dark hair below his navel that acted like an arrow, pointing directly to the open snap of his jeans.
The man was beefcake, for crying out loud. He could have posed for one of those calendars.
But then he turned swiftly away, grabbing a sweatshirt on the foot of the bed, and she saw his back. Her awareness of his musculature vanished as she saw the patchwork of scars. They looked like surgical scars, but she could only imagine the injuries they represented.
Almost as if the strength had been sucked from her, she sank into the one chair beside the window.
Sweatshirt on, he dropped onto the end of the bed, facing her. “So,” he said. “Can I buy you a coffee or breakfast? I could use a cinnamon roll myself.”
“I want to talk.”
He nodded. “I figured that out. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. But wouldn’t it be better to talk somewhere public?”
“For you or for me?”
“For both of us, maybe.”
