She tried to make him out and narrowed her eyes, squinting. He was standing where the ground rose above her. He had a bulky coat with a fur hood pulled up over his head. His face was invisible. His arms hung down at his side, long, like ape limbs. She realized that he held things in both hands that made his arms look as if they dropped all the way to his knees. His left hand held a heavy flashlight. His right hand held a gun.
"Seen enough?" he asked.
Meaning: had she seen the gun?
He switched on the flashlight and directed the intense beam at her face. She felt a sharp pain as the light hit her pupils, and she covered her face and backed away.
"Turn that off, you son of a bitch," she snapped.
He laughed in a low, deep rumble and switched the light off.
"Let's get this over with," Serena said. "Neither one of us wants to be out here long."
"You mean you want to get back into bed with your cop lover?"
Serena let a few seconds of cold silence pass. "So you know who I am. Am I supposed to be scared?"
"I think you are."
"Big words from a blackmailer. Blackmailers are cowards. You can't let me see your face. You steal someone's secrets and pretend it makes you a big man. Stealing secrets is what little girls do."
He didn't answer right away, and then he said, "I could tell you what I do to little girls."
"What, do you dress up like them?"
"Watch your mouth," he said.
"I'm not afraid of a pissant blackmailer. Do you want the money or not?"
"Did you count it?"
"Yes."
"Ten thousand?"
"Yes."
"I hope you didn't do something stupid like mark the bills or write down the serial numbers. Or tell your cop lover about this."
"I guess you'll have to take your chances," Serena said.
"So will you. Don't forget that."
"You're taking a big risk, blackmailing someone like Dan," she told him.
"Yeah? People like Dan pay me because they keep one face for the world and one face for all the fucking games they play when no one's watching. You don't know the shit that goes down in this town. You and your cop lover, you're blind."
"So it's not just Dan," Serena concluded. "Who else are you doing this to?"
"Like I said, some people around here have dirty secrets."
Serena reached inside her jacket pocket.
"Stop," he snapped, instantly raising his gun, pointing it at her head.
"I'm getting your money."
He blinded her with the flashlight again. "Slowly. Use two fingers. Don't be stupid."
She extracted the envelope and held it up. "See?"
"Put it on the headstone and back away."
She saw a stone encrusted with dead moss near her feet. It slanted backward toward the ground. The name, partly eroded by time, read BURNS. She lay the envelope on the arched summit of the marker and backed up slowly.
"That's far enough," he called when she was another fifteen feet away. "Turn around. Get on your knees."
"No way."
"Get on your knees."
"I'm not turning my back on you."
"Just do it."
She sank to her knees in the snow. The wetness soaked through her jeans. "Make it fast."
He kept the flashlight in her face. She couldn't see a thing and had to close her eyes. She heard him slide down the low slope. The snow crunched under his boots as he came closer. Her bare hands stiffened in the cold, and she fluttered her fingers to limber them up, in case she needed to dive into her coat for her gun. He was at the headstone. She heard him ruffling through the cash in the envelope.
She waited for what he would do next. She listened carefully for any footstep that meant he was walking toward her.
"See you soon," he said.
The white light disappeared behind her eyelids. She opened her eyes, blinking, seeing nothing but aftershocks of light. She heard footsteps heading away from her. He was jogging as he retreated up the hillside. When she could finally see again, she caught only a fleeting glimpse of a moving silhouette, and then it blended into darkness with the rest of the trees.
She was alone.
Serena pushed herself to her feet and brushed the snow away. She climbed back up to the fence by the road and stepped over it again. Her breathing was loud and fast. Her pulse was galloping like a Thoroughbred. Stride's Bronco had never looked so good.
Closer by, the dog howled again. It was loose. Or maybe it was a prowling wolf, not a dog at all. She didn't want to stick around and find out.
16
Serena's body was ice-cold when she slid under the fleece blanket into bed an hour later. Frosty air breathed on her face and bare shoulders through a crack in the window. The bedroom was small, like the other matchbox rooms in the old house, which had no foundation underneath it, just wooden pilings that made the floors slant like a carnival fun house. The room had a comforting, musty smell about it, a smell of age and the sea that had long ago taken up residence deep in its timbers. She often woke up to that smell and heard odd noises in the night, as if ghosts were passing from room to room.
She had spent much of the past year haunting antique shops along the North Shore to pick up cherry wood dressers, throw rugs, and old nautical equipment. She was surprised at how much she enjoyed the contrast to her condominium in Las Vegas, which was stark and modern, done in blacks and whites, with her photographs of bitterroot and landscapes of the jagged Mojave hills on the walls. It was an emotionless place, and that was how she wanted it then. Since meeting Jonny, though, she had been flooded by emotions, and she was getting better now at managing the demons from her past, letting them out without feeling that they could control her. That was one of the reasons she enjoyed the antique quality of this house. She wanted a sense of the past again, which she had blocked out for years. When she held a clock from the early 1900s in her hands, she could feel all the people who had owned it and touched it.
She molded herself against Jonny in bed. She knew from his breathing that he was awake. He hadn't said a word as she came into the bedroom, bringing the chill of the night with her, and quickly stripped. When she slid her fingers between his legs, she felt him stir.
"Do you know how cold that hand is?" he murmured.
"Sorry."
"I'm not complaining."
Serena kissed him. "I thought you'd be asleep."
"Not when you're out on a job at midnight."
"I'm okay."
"You took your gun," he said.
"It was just a precaution."
"Do you want to tell me about it?"
"I can't say anything," Serena said.
"Even in the box?"
"Not yet."
Stride turned his head toward her and opened his eyes. Serena could see he was troubled.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
He pushed himself up in bed until he was sitting. "I found out that Eric was involved with Tanjy Powell. I had to tell Abel Teitscher about it."
"So you're off the case again."
Stride nodded.
"Did Abel tell you anything about the investigation?"
"I pried a couple of things out of him," Stride said.
"Like what?"
"The most intriguing thing was that Eric went to see Tony Wells the night he died," Stride said.
Serena propped herself on one elbow and brushed her hair back out of her face. "Tony? Why?"
"Tony can't say. Privilege."
"Was Eric getting therapy?"
"Abel doesn't think so."
"But Maggie was."
"Yeah."
"Do you think Tony knows something about Eric's murder?" Serena asked.
"I do, and I think he wants to help, but he can't talk unless Maggie says it's okay."
"That's a no-brainer if it clears her of murder."
"You'd think so, but the question is, what's Maggie hiding?" Stride said. "Something's going on that she wants to keep secret."
"I have an appointment with Tony tomorrow morning. Maybe I can get something out of him."
"Not likely. Not if it involves a patient."