Chasing Venus (2 page)

The route was her usual
one and required no concentration.
 
Her mind was free to wander, and it did, to her favorite daydream.

New Yorkers shouldered past her as she stared into the windows of the
glitzy bookstore.
 
Snow drifted from
the sky, dusting her brunette hair and melting on the long lashes rimming her
green eyes, shiny with tears of joy.
 
A businessman, walking fast, bumped into her, muttered under his breath.

She remained motionless.
 
Mesmerized.
 
Nothing could
tear her from this sight, one she'd dreamed of for years.
 
Her novel—hers!—stacked in a
giant pyramid in the window.
 
In the
middle where the bestsellers go.

A
 
shopper inside lifted a
book from the pyramid and headed for the registers.
 
More like that and Annie would rise even
higher on the bestsellers list.
 
She
could just imagine Philip and that new wife of his frowning at each other over
their
New York Times
, unable to
fathom that Annette Rowell's name was printed there, and in such an illustrious
position.

Maybe I shouldn't have
divorced her,
Philip would think, eyeing
wife number two with the disappointment he'd previously reserved for Annie
.
 
But who would have thought she'd ever
amount to anything?

The fantasy generated
the usual smile but this time it didn’t last long.
 
Annie was abruptly jarred back to
reality.

She picked up her
pace—just a bit, not enough to be obvious, then raised her chin a notch
and resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder.

How long had that car
been behind her?

Why wasn’t it driving
past?

It was late April and
the longer days allowed her to get sloppy about when she set off on her
run.
 
In January she had to get
going by 3:30 or it’d be dark by the time the circuit led her back home.
 
Darkness and jogging solo were a bad
combo for any woman.
 
Let alone one
who might have a target on her back.

But she’d gotten caught
up revising chapter seventeen, and five o’clock slipped by, then six, six
thirty … And there was no way she’d skip the run.
 
She was all discipline these
days—in her writing, her workouts, her meals, everything.
 
But it meant that here she was, still
out, with the shadows too long for comfort.

The slow-moving car
sped up.
 
She could tell from the
rev of its engine.
 
Then it appeared
alongside her and slowed again to roll at exactly her rate of speed.
 
From inside the vehicle, through the
open passenger window, she could feel the driver’s eyes on her.
 
Just … watching.

She kept her gaze
straight ahead, her heart thumping an anxious rhythm that had little to do with
exertion.

What should she
do?
 
Be bold
, she decided.
 
Look at the driver
.

She swung her head to
the left and got an eyeful of a beat-up maroon sedan.
 
Behind the wheel … a man.
 
Not an elderly man, either, which might
have explained the molasses-in-January pace.
 
Of indeterminate age, and dark-haired.
 
Wearing sunglasses even though the sun
had nearly set.

But that was all she
could make out, because a second later the car accelerated and shot ahead.
 
At first Annie couldn’t understand why,
until she realized that another vehicle was coming up from behind.
 
She caught a snippet of animated
conversation through open windows as an SUV sped past.

The roar of both
engines died away and silence again descended, broken only by the repetitive
beat of Annie’s footfalls on the gravel.

The SUV scared him off.
 
That’s good, right?

Sure, but who was he?
 
And
why did he have to get scared off in the first place?

Don’t think.
 
Just run.
 
Get home.

For several minutes she
made good progress.
 
But the peace
was short-lived.
 
Soon she heard a
vehicle behind her.

She glanced over her
shoulder.

Despite the gloaming, a
car was approaching without its headlights on.
 
Was it the maroon sedan?
 
She couldn’t tell.
 
Had the guy turned around and doubled
back?

Her breath caught in
her throat.
 
Should she confront
him?
 
No, that would only egg him
on.
 
Turn around?
 
But it made no sense to close the
distance between them.
 
Speed
up?
 
At the bend just ahead she
could cross the road and sprint over the smallish hill to the left.
 
It would make for more difficult running
but it would also be impossible for him to follow her.

Unless he abandoned his
vehicle.

She didn’t care to
consider that possibility.
 
Nor did
she have time to think.
 
She was
nearly at the bend now, the softly mounded hill tempting her as an escape
route.

Do it.
 
Another few
paces.
 
Now.

She made a sharp left
turn and knifed across the road, then scrambled up the grassy incline as fast
as her aching muscles and pounding heart would allow.
 
It was no easy trick, winded as she
was.
 
Don’t let him follow me don’t let him follow me
 
…

Behind her she heard
tires on gravel.
 
Had he pulled off
the road?
 
She was only a little
ways up the hill, which was steeper than it had appeared.
 
Her breath was coming hard and fast into
a dry open mouth that was sucking in as much oxygen as possible.
 
Her lungs were on fire; her brain
repeated the silent mantra.
 
Don’t let him follow me …

She wished for the fearlessness
she’d enjoyed as a girl.
 
In those
days she was scared of nothing and no one.
 
Since then, two decades of life had intervened.
 
Philip had intervened, wreaking havoc
with the confidence that used to fill her.

Behind her a car door
opened.
 
She heard the
beep-beep-beep
of the ignition when the
key is left in, then voices, and static, like radio on a bad frequency.
 
A flashlight beam lit up the grass ahead
of her.

“Miss!” a man’s voice
shouted.
 
“Stop!”

She paused—she
was almost on all fours, she’d been scrambling so hard—and glanced behind
her.
 

It was a cop, late
forties or so, with a thick build, a wide lined face, and a flashlight in his
hand.
 
He was standing in front of a
black-and-white with both doors open.
 
“Are you all right?”

Now she understood the
static sound: it was the police radio.
 
She let herself drop onto the grassy bank, cool against her skin, and
watched the cop make his laborious way up the incline.
 
When he got closer, she could see that
his badge read HELMS.
 
“Are you all
right?” he repeated.

She nodded, for a
second couldn’t find her voice.
 
Then, “I’m fine.”

He motioned at the
hill.
 
“Why’d you come up here?”

“I thought I was being
followed.”
 
She relayed the
story.
 
Behind Helms, down the hill,
his fellow deputy exited the cruiser.
 
He was white, too, roughly the same age, height, and build as his
partner but with a gut that sagged over his belt.

Helms offered her a
hand and hoisted her to her feet.
 
He motioned toward the road.
 
“Let’s talk down there.”

She followed without
protest.
 
Once at the base of the
hill she could read Helms’s partner’s badge: PINCUS.

Helms slid a notebook
from his back pocket.
 
“Did you see
the license plate?”

“No.”
 
How embarrassing she hadn’t even thought
to look.
 
But the car had sped off
so fast she might not have been able to read it even if she had.

He eyed her.
 
“You realize that was us behind you just
now.”

“Yes, but there was
that guy alongside me.
 
Did you see
him?”

“In a maroon sedan, you
told me.”

“Yes.
 
At least the first guy was.
 
I’m not sure about the second.
 
I couldn’t see that well because it got
so dark.”
 
Helms didn’t say anything
and she got the idea he didn’t believe her.
 
“I’m not making this up,” she added.

Helms regarded her a
second longer then flipped his notebook open and jotted a few lines.
 
Then he returned it to his pocket.
 
“I have a piece of advice for you, Ms.
Rowell.”

“I know.
 
I shouldn’t be out running at this …
”
 
She paused.
 
“You know my name?”

“You’re that mystery writer
from out of town who rents the old Marsden place.”

Pincus
spoke for the first time.
 
“You live
there alone.”

He didn’t need to
remind her.
 
Nor did she care to
remember how that came to be—how Philip left her once he finished the
medical training she’d helped pay for, how he’d traded her in for a woman
doctor “soul mate,” how she’d moved to this remote town to get the lower rent
she could afford on her tiny advances.

She looked at Helms and
a frightening idea took root in her mind.
 
“Is there a reason you’re keeping an eye on me?”

His gaze skittered
away.
 
Then, “We’ve been asked to be
on the alert where you’re concerned.”

“Because of the murders
of those writers,”
Pincus
added.

Helms shot
Pincus
a look that said
Zip
it
.
 
Then he turned his eyes
again toward Annie.
 
“It’s a routine
alert given to law-enforcement agencies that have known mystery writers in
their jurisdiction.”

It might be routine to
him.
 
It wasn’t to her.

“We’ll drive you home,”
Helms went on.
 
He opened the
cruiser’s rear door and stood beside it.
 
“And my advice is you shouldn’t be out alone at this hour.
 
You need to be more careful.”

Truer words were never
spoken.
 
She got inside the cruiser
and settled on its cracked black
Naugahyde
.

On a rational level she
knew she wasn’t a likely target.
 
True, three big-name mystery writers had been murdered.
 
One after the next, in the space of a
few months.
 
First Seamus O’Neill,
then Elizabeth Wimble, and a week ago Maggie Boswell.
 
All of them literary superstars.

That didn’t describe
her.
 
She was a little-known name
with a small to middling readership.
 
But it was growing.
 
Each of
her four mysteries had done better than the one before.
 
And with the latest release, the series
was really building.

What if it does really well?
 
What if I do become a bestseller?
 
For the first time it seemed
possible.
 
Her publisher was really
pushing her.
 
And she knew that
Devil’s Cradle
, which had just come out,
was her best work.
 
After Philip
told her he wanted a divorce, she’d poured her heart and soul into her writing
and the effort showed.
 
How ironic
it would be if the success she’d struggled so hard for was a double-edged
sword.

She gazed out the
cruiser’s window as hills and trees flew past, hulking shadows in the
dark.
 
Mystery writers getting
killed was terrifying.
 
It wasn’t
theoretical, like writing mysteries.
 
There she had no problem spreading bodies around like peat moss.

These people she
knew.
 
They were flesh and
blood.
 
She’d met them, talked to
them.
 
Just days ago she’d gone down
the coast to Santa Barbara to attend the book party where Maggie Boswell was
killed.

Meaning, she knew, that
the murderer had been there as well.
 
He’d probably had a few drinks, told a few jokes.
 
He might have been within inches of her.
 
Maybe he’d brushed up against her.
 
Maybe he was standing outside when she
left the party, watching her go.
 
The same man who shot Seamus O’Neill and plunged the crochet hook into
Elizabeth Wimble’s throat.

She slid on the seat as
Helms made the left turn that led past the churchyard cemetery, its
weatherbeaten
headstones decades old.
 
She’d been renting in Bodega Bay for
almost a year and she completely understood why Alfred Hitchcock picked it as
the site for
The Birds
.
 
It was perfect.
 
The windswept terrain and unforgiving
rocky cliffs, the fog rolling in from the cold surging Pacific …