Capitol K-9 Unit Christmas: Protecting Virginia

The words were stated without emotion, but he read a boatload of feelings in her face. Fear, sadness, anxiety. Shame. That was the big one, and he’d seen it one too many times—a woman who’d done nothing wrong, feeling shame for what she’d been through.

“Your husband?” he asked, and she nodded, lifting another photo from the mantel. She was in it, white flowers in her hair, wearing a simple white dress that fell to her feet.

“This is my wedding photo. I guess Laurel cut Kevin out of it. We were married in Maui. A beautiful beach wedding with five hundred guests.”

“Wow.”

“I know. It was excessive. We footed the bill. I would have preferred to use the money to finish my doctorate, but Kevin...” She shook her head. “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to you,” he responded.

“It shouldn’t.” She replaced the picture she was still holding. “I should check the other rooms, see if anything has been disturbed.”

She walked into the hall, and he didn’t stop her.

He wanted to take a closer look at the photos on the mantel. The one of Virginia didn’t look as if it had been cut. He opened the back of the frame and carefully lifted the photo out.

It had been folded.

He smoothed it out, eyeing the smiling dark-haired man who stood to Virginia’s right. Not touching her. Which seemed odd. It was a wedding photo, after all. The guy had a shot glass in one hand, a bottle of bourbon in the other. He looked drunk, his eyes heavy-lidded, his grin sloppy.

He replaced the photo and looked at the others. Nothing stood out to him. They were all of the 1950s couple—marriage, new house, baby dressed in blue.

Kevin’s father? If so, there were no other pictures of him. No toddler pictures. No school photos. No wedding picture. That made John curious. There was a story there, and he had a feeling that it was somehow related to the man who’d been in the house.

It wasn’t his case, and it wasn’t any of his business, but he planned to mention it to Morris. See if he knew more about the Johnson family than Virginia did.

Or more than she was willing to reveal.

That was going to have to change. There was no way she could be allowed to keep her secrets. She’d have to open up, say everything she knew, everything she suspected, because John had a bad feeling that the guy who’d been in her house had been after a lot more than a few bucks. He’d been after Virginia, and if she wasn’t careful, he just might get what he wanted.

FOUR (#ulink_4e469cf0-20fe-523a-8039-a33ce38a2298)

The police thought the intruder had entered through the kitchen. The lock hadn’t been tampered with, but there were a couple of muddy footprints on the back deck and a pair of old size ten boots sitting under the swing.

They weren’t Kevin’s. He’d always worn Italian leather. Dress shoes shined to a high sheen paired with suits he spent a small fortune on. Even if he’d worn boots, Virginia didn’t think they’d have been sitting out on the back deck years after his death.

They belonged to someone. So did the clothes she’d found in the closet in the bedroom she hadn’t wanted to enter. The bedroom she and Kevin had shared. She’d gone in anyway, found faded jeans and threadbare T-shirts hanging in a closet that had once been filled with Kevin’s clothes. Kevin had never worn jeans, had rarely worn T-shirts. No, the clothes had belonged to someone else. Officer Morris had taken them as evidence. Virginia wasn’t sure what kind of evidence he could get from them. Hair? DNA? She hadn’t asked. She’d been too busy trying not to panic.

Now she was alone, the officers gone, the house silent. She paced the living room, cold to the bone. She’d turned the heat on high, turned every light in the house on. She’d made tea and drunk two cups, but she couldn’t get warm.

Someone had been in the house.

Someone who’d looked like Kevin, who’d called her Ginny, who’d mocked her with words that had made her blood run like ice through her veins.

A friend of Kevin’s?

If so, he wasn’t someone she’d ever met.

Whoever he was, he’d been in the house for a while. The clothes, the boots. The police had agreed that the guy had spent some time there.

That meant he’d had plenty of time to take whatever he might have wanted, but the house seemed untouched, hundreds of valuable things left behind.

She rubbed her arms, trying to chase away the chill. It didn’t work. It was the house, the memories. She’d thought about going to a hotel, but she had to do this, and she had to do it alone. Cassie had offered to stay the night, babysit her like she babysat the children at All Our Kids. Virginia had refused her offer.

At the time, the sun had still been up.

Now it had set, the last rays tingeing the sky with gold and pink. If she just looked at that, stared out the window and watched the sky go black, she might be okay.

She would be okay.

Because there was nothing to be afraid of. Gavin had changed the lock on the back and front doors; he’d checked the locks on all the windows. The house was secure. That should have made her feel better. It didn’t.

She grabbed her overnight bag and walked up the stairs, the wood creaking beneath her feet. She knew the sounds the treads made. She knew the groan of the landing, the soft hiss of the furnace. She knew the house with all its quirks, but she still felt exposed and afraid, nervous in a way she hadn’t been in years.

She thought about calling Cassie, just to hear someone else’s voice, but if she did that, Cassie would come running to the rescue.

That wasn’t what Virginia wanted.

What she wanted was peace. The hard-won kind that came from conquering the beasts that had been controlling her for too long.

Outside, the neighborhood quieted as people settled in for an evening at home. That was the kind of place this was—weekend parties and weeknight quiet. Older, well-established families doing what they’d done for generations—living well and nicely.

Only things weren’t always nice there.

She’d learned that the hard way.

She grabbed a blanket from the linen closet. There was no way she was sleeping in any of the bedrooms. She’d sleep on the couch with her cell phone clutched in her hand. Just in case.

She would sleep, though.

She’d promised herself that.

She wouldn’t spend the night pacing and jumping at shadows.

Only it had been years since she’d lived alone, years since she’d not had noise to fill the silences. The sounds of children whispering and giggling, the soft pad of feet on the floor, those were part of her life. Without them all she could hear were her own thoughts.

She settled onto the couch, pulling the blanket around her shoulders. It smelled of dust and loneliness. She tried not to think about Laurel, spending the last years of her life alone. No kids to visit her. No husband. No grandchildren. Just Laurel living in this mausoleum of a house, shuffling from room to room, dusting and cleaning compulsively the way she had when Virginia lived there.

She couldn’t sleep with that thought or with the musty blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She shoved it off, lay on her side, staring out the front window, wishing the night away.

She must have drifted off.

She woke to the sound of rain tapping against the roof and the subtle scent of cigarette smoke drifting in the air.

Cigarette smoke?

Her pulse jumped, and she inhaled deeply, catching the scent again. Just a tinge of something acrid and a little sharp lingering.