Lover In The Shadows

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.