Lover In The Shadows

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A whimper, faint but audible, escaped her. Her mouth moved as if she were trying to say something, but no words came out. Harlan had the strangest feeling she was screaming, but he frowned, troubled by the idea of Molly Harris silently screaming somewhere in the darkness.

He considered the idea. If she’d done what he thought she had, she should be screaming. And if she hadn’t…

Reaching a decision, he rose. “I’ll be damned if I like this case one little bit. It stinks to high heaven. I mean, I love messy cases, but not where I get the real strong sense that somebody’s doing my work for me. Let’s give the crime-lab boys a chance to do their thing, pin down time of death, do the blood typing, and then we’ll visit Ms. Harris again. We don’t have to arrest her today. She’s not going anywhere.” Harlan watched the rapid lift and fall of the quilt over Molly’s breasts, the shuddering movement touching him in spite of the Luminol glowing in the kitchen, the evidence proclaiming the innocence in her eyes a sham.

Blood had been spilled here. Spilled and washed down. Old blood. Fresh blood.

More blood than a bad cut would produce.

He glanced at her small hand, where the line of the wound was obscene against the smoothness of her skin. It was a nasty cut. Lifting her palm, he studied the cut again.

There was something odd about the way the wound came around the base of her thumb, but he couldn’t figure out what.

He wanted to take her into the station for questioning, photograph the wound and see if the samples of the blood from the wooden handle matched hers or Camina Milar’s.

She whimpered again, her mouth opening in that silent scream. Smoothing his rumpled hair, Harlan dismissed the feeling that somewhere, locked in the darkness of her unconscious, Molly Harris was screaming for help. Too fanciful. He wanted to leave her soft mouth with its maybe screams behind him. Wanted to get back to work. Knowing he was stupid for doing so, he touched her mouth briefly, his finger pressing lightly into the defenseless contours.

“So, what’s the plan, boss?”

Harlan looked away from Molly Harris and the spread of her shiny hair against her couch and reached his decision. “I’m going back to the station. You catch a ride with Tanner, but I want one of you to stay with Ms. Harris until she comes to. You, preferably. If you can?”

“Sure. I’ll work something out. No problem.” Ross grinned. “Hell, this is the closest I’ve come to having a date in a month of Sundays. I reckon I can hang around here awhile.”

“Good.” Harlan heard the tiny whimper again, and it disturbed him. Molly Harris was getting under his skin, when all he wanted was to see her in jail, where he figured she belonged. “Call the medic and have him hang around, too, Ross, okay?”

Ross nodded and reached for his walkie-talkie.

As he studied Molly Harris’s unconscious form, the pain moving over her face like shadows slipping across the moon, Harlan’s uneasiness deepened. He couldn’t escape the impression that he was missing something important about her. And he damn sure didn’t like the feeling that he wanted to stay with her.

He wanted to banish Molly Harris from his thoughts, wanted to roar down her driveway and leave her behind, never giving her another thought. And yet he wanted to keep touching her cool, satiny skin until it warmed, wanted to see her face soft and gazing up at him—

The latter instinct was so strong that he had to restrain himself from heading for the door in two long strides. He rubbed the last of the clinging grains of sand from his hands. Ms. Harris had been walking barefoot in sand and brush, that much was for sure. He sighed.

“The medic’s on his way up from the bayou.”

Harlan shrugged, his still-damp jacket sticking to his slacks. “From the looks of her, Ross, I figure she’s suffering from stress and exhaustion, but have him check her out. Then you stay out of the way until she’s awake. If the medic thinks she’s having any problems, get her to the hospital ASAP, got it? I don’t want any complaints about this case. Understand?” He frowned, that odd reluctance to leave keeping him where he stood despite his better judgment.

“Got it in one, boss.” Waggling a skinny arm, Ross waved him on his way. “Go on along, lil’ dogie.”

Harlan laughed. “You been hanging around the cowboy crew again, Ross?” From the corner of his eye, he caught the shiver of Molly Harris’s hair, tea against the cream of the couch.

“Yup.” Ross tipped back an imaginary hat. “You’d be surprised what you can learn from that bunch of ramblers, boss.”

“Yeah? Watch it. Those dudes can get you in trouble.” Harlan glanced around Molly’s living room once more. It had a surprising familiarity. The pictures in the file had frozen the room’s dimensions in his mind, but even the white on white of its furniture resonated inside him, like a faraway chime on a still afternoon. “Well.” He shrugged. “I’m gone, Ross. Check in with me after you finish here.”

Once more the kitchen was dark. Walking through the room’s eerie Luminol glow, Harlan stared at the dirty cat-food plate. It was the only messy thing in Molly Harris’s kitchen. He reached down and picked up the plate, carrying it to the sink, where he rinsed it. He opened the dishwasher and slid the plate between two rubber-coated prongs.

A glass. Two cups. One plate. In a rinsed-out pan, a fragment of milk scum clung like cobwebs to the edge.

Ms. Harris had made herself hot milk sometime last night.

He glanced around at the well-equipped kitchen. New appliances. Refrigerator. Stove. Pausing, he frowned. Why hadn’t she heated her milk in the microwave?

Harlan took the pan out of the dishwasher and carried it to the stove. Placing it on the grate above the gas burner, he thought for a moment.

She would have been in the kitchen, heating her milk. Sleepless, wanting hot milk so she could fall asleep at some point during the long night.

As if he could see her, a small, solitary form in the night moving slowly about her kitchen, he knew that.

At the stove, he looked up and straight out toward the dock.

In the gray half-light of the rainy winter evening, he could see the dark band of the bayou, the wooden finger of the rickety pier jutting into the water.

At night, what would she have seen?

The glow of Camina’s cigarette. Molly would have seen that bit of light. If she’d been up, wandering through her house, she would have seen the red glow of Camina’s cigarettes.

Turning away from the window overlooking the sink and the bayou, Harlan faced the microwave. His back was to the bayou and the long, empty expanse of lawn.

In the glass door of the microwave, shadows moved behind him, reflections like ghosts shimmering in back of him, watching him.

No, she wouldn’t have used the microwave at night. She wouldn’t have wanted to turn her back on all that darkness.

He knew that about her. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did.

That ability to leap from A to Z was part of his luck. One of the things that made him a good cop. One of the things that made the chief crazy, because Harlan couldn’t explain it.

He didn’t know where the knowledge came from. He’d always had it. Not being given to flights of fancy, he tried not to examine the source of his knowing. He didn’t believe in psychic mumbo jumbo, but even so, some things were better left unexplained, even for a cop whose intuition had always given him an edge.

He didn’t like mysteries, though—especially when they were his own. So intuition was as good an explanation as any.

Glancing around the kitchen one last time, he knew Molly Harris had roamed through her kitchen last night, had her cup of milk and had gone outside. The knowledge was just there, inside him.

Stepping out onto the gallery, he looked down the rain-swept lawn toward the driveway and saw Tanner waiting beside the car. Walking toward him, Harlan turned once and stared back at the house encircled by moss-heavy oak trees, the moss hanging wet and gray in long loops.

The first-floor gallery, unscreened, wrapped the lower portion of the house. Off the rooms upstairs, a second gallery ran from the sides of the house all around to the back. With no outside staircases, that gallery was accessible only from the inside rooms opening onto it. On the tall, floor-to-ceiling windows at the front of the house, the drapes and shades were drawn back. He saw the light shining on the table next to the sofa, saw Molly Harris’s red-and-pink quilt, imagined the thin line of her arm hanging down to the wooden floor. Imagined her soft mouth open in silent pleading.

The house had been closed off from outside eyes when he and Ross had first driven up. He’d thought it secretive as they drove up the winding driveway hedged by enormous double yellow hibiscus bushes. Climbing into his car and nodding to Tanner, who wandered back down toward the bayou, where bright searchlights sliced the dark, Harlan decided that Molly must have opened the shutters and pulled back the drapes when she’d fled back to the house after his earlier questioning.

He’d fought the urge to pursue her to the house.

Just as he now disregarded the sense that he should turn around and go back to her house.

Stay with her.

She’d been defenseless in his arms as he’d carried her past the open gallery into the huge, empty house.

Trying to ease the tightness between his shoulder blades, Harlan rolled his shoulders.

Firing up the engine, he let it idle for a long time as he continued to stare at the house, at the image of Molly in the long window facing him, the light shining down on her, while outside, night crept silently closer. Finally, he shifted into first and drove away, the rain blurring the windshield.

Stay with her.

The shoulder harness pulling against his chest, he turned and saw the house disappear behind him into the sheeting rain. Just before he looked back at the driveway, he frowned.

He thought he’d seen a shape move at the corner of the house.

Molly woke up abruptly, her heart pounding sickeningly.

The gleam of the lamp on the table turned the man’s hair carroty.

Her pulse slowed as she recognized him. He’d been here with Detective Harlan. She turned her head.

No one else was in the room.

Her mouth was dry—sleepy dry, not the cotton dry of fear. She wet her lips. They were cracked.

She yawned. She’d slept the afternoon through. Unbelievable. Perhaps she ought to see if the man wanted to Molly-sit in the evenings.

“Hey there, Ms. Harris.”

Struggling to rise, Molly found she was cocooned in her quilt, the wild hues splashing the somber, clean whiteness of her living room with streaks of reddish color.

Pushing the quilt away, she gagged, remembering the dark stains against Camina’s blouse, remembering other stains. “Where is everyone?”

“All gone. Harlan told me to stay until you woke up. The doc checked you out. You keeled over like a chopped tree and went right to sleep. Doc said to let you sleep, that you’d wake up in your own good time.”

“I was asleep?” She wanted verification. “Did I…” How could she ask him if she’d gotten up, draped in her comforter, and roamed her house, eyes open wide but her mind asleep, off guard?

“Relax. You never said a word.” His grin was wide and uncomplicated.

She’d been right. Nothing hidden in this man, unlike John Harlan with his enigmatic flashes of irony, his comments that implied more than they said. She shivered and pulled the comforter over her shoulders. She was glad the redhead had stayed with her. She didn’t like the idea of waking up and knowing that the detective had watched her in her sleep, watched her while she was vulnerable. She shivered again.

“I just…slept?” Molly huddled into the quilt, relieved.

“Oh, you squeaked a few times, like you were trying to say something. That’s all.” He stood up and stretched his long arms toward the ceiling. “John said to check in with him when you came to. I’m supposed to tell you not to take any out-of-town trips.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I’m supposed to tell you also that John will be back tomorrow. You’ll need to have your lawyer with you. If you want, you can come into the station instead, though.” He wrinkled his face, too young and embarrassed to be comfortable confronting her with their suspicions.

“Yes. Of course.” Molly cleared her throat. “Why didn’t Detective Harlan arrest me today?”

“Well, you’ll have to ask him, ma’am. Tomorrow,” the redhead said reassuringly. “I don’t think he was afraid you’d run off, though. You aren’t going to, are you?” Worry creased his freckle-splotched face. “Because Harlan would kill me if he thought I hadn’t made it clear that you were only being questioned, ma’am, not arrested. No cause to do anything foolish, ma’am.”

“Not yet, anyway?” Molly managed a laugh. It wouldn’t have fooled John Harlan, its high pitch patently false even to her own ears, but the young technician smiled back in relief.

“Well, good night then, ma’am. You want to lock up behind me?”

Wrapped in her quilt, Molly still felt shivers edging bump by bump up her spinal column. “Oh, yes. I’ll see you out through the kitchen.” Rising too quickly to her feet, she was momentarily dizzy, but she steadied herself on the arm of the couch. “Do you mind waiting with me here while I close the drapes and lock up?” She shot him an easygoing smile, not letting on how desperately she wanted him to stay in her house all night while she slept. This young man. But not John Harlan. She wouldn’t have slept had he remained behind.

“Nope, I don’t mind. You want some help?” He walked toward the front door.

“No. Thanks, anyway. It will only take me a second more down here.” She had to check the locks herself. She didn’t trust anyone else, not even this blue-eyed young cop.

While Ross Whittaker—he’d told her his name—waited, Molly went through her nightly routine. With him by her side, she felt safe from the fear that she was whirling off into some world she’d never escape from.

Ross Whittaker was so normal that he made her believe during these moments that she’d imagined everything that had happened to her in the last months.