Lover in the Shadows Read online

  Holding the shutter carefully so that she could look out onto the gallery, Molly saw only darkness.

  Again the sound came, lower, from the floor.

  Staring through the window, Molly saw a shimmer of motion, a flick of dark against dark. Something was out there.

  Eyes were gleaming up at her.

  Real eyes, not metallic reflections of her own fear-glazed self. A stray cat. Real. Nothing to make her hide behind locked doors jiggling with imagined fears.

  Drawn to the reality of the cat, she carefully released the bolts. Damp air rushed in as she held on to the screen door and looked down at the cat staring back at her with unblinking gold eyes.

  Large, with powerful muscles along his flanks and shoulders and a broad head with a bumpy, hooked nose, he was the most beautiful animal she’d ever seen. Rain-wet, his black coat was shiny and sleek.

  “Hey, puss,” she whispered, looking down the length of the gallery. Off to her left she thought she saw movement, but it was only a mourning dove winging off into the rain, disturbed by the rattle of the opening door.

  Imperiously unmoving, the cat sat with his long tail curled around his front paws and watched her with unwinking golden eyes.

  “Looking for any port in a storm, fella?” Molly stooped and touched her nose to the screen door close to the cat, comforted by the presence of another creature. This big cat with his unwavering gaze was solid and tangible in the quicksand of her thoughts. “You’re a beauty, you are.” Molly looked at his neck. “No collar? That’s a shame. I’ll bet there’s someone out there looking for you, cat.”

  The cat tilted his head and lifted his paw to the door. He tapped it, an arrogant demand for service. Molly pressed her finger to the door and the pad of the cat’s big paw flexed. His claws pierced the screen around her finger, encircling the tip. Trapping it in the cage of his claws.

  “Careful, buster. What do you want, anyway?”

  The cat’s eyes never blinked.

  “Oh? As if I should read your mind, huh? Food and a cozy spot next to the fire?”

  Unmoving, utterly still, he watched her.

  “Listen, buster, this is Florida. You’re not going to freeze.” Molly surveyed his body. Long, muscle-padded haunches. “You’re obviously not hungry. Couldn’t be. Vamoose, fella.” She tried to pull her finger away, but the cat tightened his grip, his eyes never leaving hers.

  “Hey, this isn’t funny. Shoo, go away. I can’t help you. Sorry, but the last thing I need is a cat around here right now.” She wiggled her finger, but the cat held it firm. “If you were a dog, maybe I’d let you stay. I could use a real big, real mean dog. A brute. With a nasty disposition. A dog I’d keep for sure.” She pulled harder, futilely.

  Uneasy, Molly raised her voice and looked around, sensing something ruffling her nerve endings. “Hey, listen, puss, let go. I want to shut the door, okay?” Molly thunked the screen with the fingers of her free hand.

  So fast she never saw his movement, like dark lightning streaking, the cat fastened a paw around her hand, capturing a second finger and holding it with his claws through the screen.

  “Well, buster, now we’re in a fine mess. Let go,” she ordered, glaring at the animal.

  His gold gaze held hers. There was something in his somber stare that kept her looking, looking past the darker gold flecks, as if she were moving down a golden corridor faster and faster and faster, wind and air rushing past her, golden eyes locked on hers, drawing her deeper into that spinning gold….

  Molly shook her head. Light lifted the edges of gray from the gallery and she could see out into her yard, down to the bayou veiled in rain. She sighed, exhausted and wrung out.

  Looking back at the sleek animal in front of her, she frowned. “So, I’m a sucker for helpless critters, cat, but you’re the most unhelpless beast I’ve ever seen. And, like I said, you’re not a dog. Besides, cats are always looking down hallways as if they see something, and, puss, I don’t need you seeing things that go bump in the night, you know? I’m having enough problems figuring out which bumps are real and which ones aren’t. I don’t need you spooking the heck out of me.” Her voice dropped to a shaky whisper.

  Not breaking her skin, the cat curled his claws tighter. That arrogance she’d noted earlier gleamed back at her from his gold eyes.

  “You have some nerve, cat. Anybody ever tell you that? Yes, I know I like cats. Ordinarily.”

  The cat arched his back, his claws still hooked in the screen around her fingers. Damp heat from his large body came to her in the chilly, rain-dark dawn.

  Molly hesitated. “Listen, if I let you in, you can’t stay, hear? I mean, this isn’t your home away from home. You can come in for a while. Just until…” She stopped. She knew what she was doing. She knew she didn’t want to deal with the knife still in her kitchen. Twisting her fingers caught in his grasp, Molly continued, “Just until, okay?”

  The cat blinked and sat back on his haunches, releasing her.

  “Stinker. Bully.” She unlocked the screen door. “I guess you wouldn’t turn down a meal, huh?”

  Padding in, his tail lifted, the cat moved across her gray floor like a dark cloud over shadowy water. Passing her refrigerator, he circled the kitchen until he came to the spot on the floor where she’d woken up.

  For a long moment he stayed there.

  He stopped next to the knife and looked back at her. His ears angled to the hall off the kitchen, listening. Listening to something beyond her hearing.

  Molly watched the ripples move across his skin and felt an answering shiver move across her own. “Hey, c’mon, cat. Don’t do this to me. Really.” She rubbed her arms.

  Smelling the handle of the knife, the beast parted his mouth in a feral baring of teeth. A low growl curled around the kitchen. His canines were long, white and very sharp.

  “Stop it. This isn’t funny. I mean it,” Molly added, nerves twanging as he looked back at her with those wild gold eyes. He blinked again and moved closer to her, loose-jointed and muscular, stopping at her feet.

  “All right. That’s fair,” she said, bending to pick him up. His fur was warm against her cold skin. “Unlike some guys, at least you listen. But you’d better mind your p’s and q’s, okay?” she babbled into the silky fur at his ear. “Or you’re out of here. And don’t count on gourmet food, either. Got it?”

  Silently, he rested his front paws on her forearm, claiming her.

  Molly held the heavy cat tightly to her as she walked through the rooms of her house, checking every window from top to bottom, every latch. All closed. Bolted. As they always were. She’d changed the locks, too, after the second incident. Even her brother Reid didn’t have a key to the new locks.

  Molly didn’t realize how tightly her fingers were wound into the cat’s fur until he reached up and batted her face with the pad of his wide paw, drawing her attention. “Sorry about that,” she 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. Harris.” He nodded, but Molly didn’t answer. The sigh of an early morning wind filled the silence between them.

  She couldn’t have spoken. Didn’t know what to say. She only knew she had to hold on to the center of her being with every ounce of energy she had or she’d go spinning apart.

  He nodded again. His pen slid along the edge of his notebook. “Ms. Harris, do you remember seeing or hearing anything unusual last night?”

  She wished she could. “Nothing,” she said, worrying the cuticle of her thumb with her finger. “I was asleep.” The lie trembled off her lips.

  His pen moved steadily across the page. “Were you.” It wasn’t a question.

  Reflexively glancing at the slash in her palm, she stopped abruptly. “Why? What’s happened?”

  He reached out for her hand, turning it in his. His hand was strong, his fingertips rough. “Painful cut.”

  “I was peeling vegetables, carrots. For soup.” Her throat gone dry, she swallowed and coughed.

  “Sore throat?” he asked, still holding her hand palm up.

  His fingers closed around her hand, capturing it.

  “No.” She was afraid to tug her hand free.

  He tilted her hand toward the light and studied it. “There’s a nasty virus going around.” He looked at her. The glasses concealed his expression as he said, “You want to be careful, Ms. Harris. You could be coming down with something.”

  “No. I’m not catching a cold.” Molly knew he wasn’t asking out of concern for her health. “Why are you here?” She withdrew her hand, managing not to jerk it out of his light, careful grasp.

  “There’s been a problem. Down at your part of the bayou. Near the boat pier.”

  Feeling as if she were moving through shifting sand, Molly went to the living room window facing the bayou and looked out. Off in the distance she saw a van and several figures milling around the edge of the water. “What happened?” She turned back to face him, but the light was at her back and she couldn’t see him clearly even though he removed his sunglasses and hooked them into his pocket, but she had an impression of grim eyes, golden brown, watching her.

  “Someone was murdered last night on your bayou.”

  Murdered. “Are you sure? Murdered?” The word tolled through her, over and over, like the deep-toned bells of the First Presbyterian Church in town. Murder.
Irrevocable.

  “Oh, yes, we’re sure.” His thin mouth lifted. “No question. Two fishermen passing by early this morning saw the body and called us. Yes, we’re sure.” His long fingers curled around his notebook. “You know anything that could help us?”

  “I told you. I was asleep.”

  “Yes. So you did.” Threat, implicit. Explicit in the dark velvet of his voice, in the hidden gaze.

  At some level, ever since she’d woken up on the kitchen floor, she’d been envisioning news like this. But it still short-circuited her brain and left her struggling for an answer while John Harlan’s golden brown eyes followed her every twitch and movement.

  “Who?” Her heart pounding like a captured bird, she couldn’t hold his relentless gaze.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Why don’t you put on your shoes, and we’ll go down to the bayou together? We believe you could save us some time if you can identify the body.” The detective’s mild voice coaxed her, his tone soothing. She didn’t trust him for a minute. He’d reached for her hand again and his thumb rested lightly, so lightly against the wound in her palm that she felt as if he’d manacled her to him. “Can you do that, Ms. Harris?” He released her wrist with an unreadable expression.

  She shivered as his fingers brushed the edges of hers.

  “Will you come down to the bayou, please, and take a look at her?” Relentless, his mild voice, deceptive in its honeyed assault that hid the sting.

  “Her?” Needing breath, Molly tugged at the neck of her sweatshirt. Nightmare visions, bloodred, danced in her brain.

  John Harlan’s gaze watched the nervous pulling of her fingers against the often-washed cotton. “Ah, I’ve distressed you.” His words were oddly old-fashioned. No sympathy in his deep voice, though, despite his polite words. He shifted, one hip slanting forward, the expensive fabric of his slacks flowing and tightening with the casual movement. “Something bothering you, Ms. Harris?”

  “You said someone has been murdered. Murder bothers me,” she breathed through chalk-dry lips.

  “I’m sure it does,” he said, stepping so close that the power in his looming form and wide shoulders made her claustrophobic. “Well, that makes at least two of us then. I don’t like murder, either.” His courteous expression, at odds with his tough face, never altered as his voice dropped so deep that Molly felt its vibration down to her toes. “Or murderers.”