Play Dead (15 page)

“So, you felt you needed to convince me to
help you. And the way you went about it was to break into my house and go
through my private things and scare me half to death. I got to tell you, Bill,
this has not been the best of strategies.”

“Sorry I frightened you.” He grimaced, in
an expression that he, perhaps, thought made him look contrite. If so, he
should look in a mirror, because the effect was more that of a smart aleck
sneer. “I didn’t expect you to come back so soon.”

I tensed. Had he been following me? Was he
the driver of the white sedan? If he was, I didn’t want to give away the fact
that I was on the lookout for that particular vehicle. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I was hoping to talk to you
privately, later tonight. I was going to put everything back the way I found it
and then call you.”

He was a regular prince of decorum. I
glanced down at my dog. Doppler had stopped his barking and was now lying on
the floor before my feet. I’d like to think his intention was still to protect
me, but he seemed to be nodding off.

“You got part of that right,” I said. “You
need to leave my house. Now. Kaitlyn’s out, but she and her
date
will be
here any moment.”

Bill chuckled. “I wouldn’t count on that,
if I were you.”

“What do you mean?”

The sneer on his face spread wider. “Let’s
just say I know all about her ‘date’ tonight.”

Surprised and disgusted, I asked, “Her
date was staged? She’s going out with some friend of yours?”

“More like hired help. He’s keeping her
occupied
till I call her date’s cell phone and tell him the coast’s clear.” He ran
his eyes the length of my body and raised an eyebrow. “Listen, you seem like a
nice, sensible person. Get out while the getting’s good. Kaitlyn is nuts.”

She
must
have been to marry this
oily creep. If he proved to be dangerous as well, now that he’d masterminded
Kaitlyn’s “date,” there was little possibility of someone coming to my rescue.
I clenched my jaw and stared at him. If I refused to talk to him, he might
leave. Not that that meant much to me in the way of protection, since he had
the key to the dead bolt.

He spread his hands in a flawed attempt to
don a sincere posture. “I’m not exaggerating. Just before I left Colorado, but
after we’d separated, she used to injure herself, then turn around and claim
that I was beating her. She’s a desperate woman. If I were you, I’d do what I did.
Pack up right now and move out.” Doppler rose and took a couple of steps toward
Bill Wayne, who started to bend down to greet him.

“Doppler, come!” I called in immediate
panic. He stopped instantly and circled back toward me. “Don’t touch my dog!”

“Whoa.” Bill straightened and held up his
palms. “You sure are protective of your little mutt.” He turned as if to leave,
then paused and said over his shoulder, “I wouldn’t trust leaving him, or any
dog, alone with Kaitlyn, if I were you.”

I swept Doppler up into my arms.

Grinning, Bill Wayne watched me. I met his
dark, sunken eyes. He’d just found my Achilles’ heel, and we both knew it. I
decided he was the ugliest man I’d ever seen.

“Ask her about our puppy sometime, if you
don’t believe me.” He gestured with his large chin at the doggie door built
into the back door beside me. “I installed that for our puppy. She sure didn’t
get much chance to use it, though.”

Much as I didn’t want to ask, I couldn’t
stop myself. “What happened to her?”

Bill grimaced and shook his head, his eyes
focused on Doppler. “Like I said, you’ll have to ask Kaitlyn. I still can’t
believe she would do something like that to a puppy.”

A shudder of fear and revulsion ran up my
spine. Kaitlyn had told me the former owners of the house had installed the
doggie door, that she and Bill never bothered to put in a new door. His words
had the disturbing ring of truth to them, but how could I tell? What if he was
just trying to manipulate me and get back at his ex-ish wife? This was a man
who’d just broken into my bedroom. I hugged Doppler closer to me and said as
calmly as I could, “Please go.”

He opened the front door and looked back
at me. “Don’t tell her I was here, okay? You won’t be accomplishing anything.
You’ll only hurt her feelings when she realizes this so-called date of hers was
hired help.”

He shut the door behind him. Doppler
wriggled in my arms, and I set him down, my stomach churning. I couldn’t trust
either of these people; not Kaitlyn, whom I’d already concluded was more than a
little unstable; not her husband who seemed not only odd, but dangerous.

I marched into my room. How dare that
bastard paw through my things! The thought of him violating my privacy like this
both frightened and infuriated me.

One thing was certain. I was uncomfortable
here and I was not staying.

The handset of my phone had been placed
off its hook on the nightstand. I replaced it, then began a thorough survey to
see if anything was missing or out of place. I first scanned my bed; its
blue-and-white quilt cover seemed to be in the same reasonably neat condition
as when I’d left. I turned my attention to the top dresser drawer, which Bill
had been rifling through when I surprised him.

Nothing seemed to be missing. Partway
through my mental inventory, the phone rang. I answered, and a sexy male voice
said, “Hi. Is this Allida?”

“Yes.” I didn’t recognize the voice and
was trying to do so.

“It’s Keith. You sound a little
out-of-sorts. I’ll bet you didn’t expect to hear from me quite so soon.”

My heart was racing with my pent-up anger
at Bill Wayne. “It’s not that. I just had a very unpleasant and unexpected
encounter with my roommate’s ex. Or rather, her separatee.”

“Is everything all right?”

I took a deep breath in an attempt to calm
myself so that I could enjoy talking to Keith, but it didn’t work. “Not really.
I doubt I’ll be at this number much longer, but you can always reach me through
my office phone or, for that matter, my mother’s.”

“You’re moving out?”

“Yes. And I don’t want to be here when my
roommate gets back from her date...if you want to call it that. That jerk of a
husband of hers set her up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, the sleazeball hired somebody to
pretend to be interested in her and take her out just so he could get her out
of the house.”

There was a pause, and all I could think
was how bizarre all of this must sound from Keith’s perspective. He’d known me
for all of three hours or so now. He must think he wound up with the all-time,
loony-tune date. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t be dumping all of this on
you. I barely even know you.”

“That’s all right.” He chuckled. “Here I
was, afraid we wouldn’t have much to talk about.”

I smiled and held the phone tight. “That’s
seldom a problem with me. It’s one of the occupational hazards of working with
patients with a vocabulary of less than a hundred words. You talk your fellow
humans’ ears off.”

He chuckled again, then said, “I’ll call
you soon at your office. Good night.”

“Good night,” I repeated. I hung up, then
stared at the phone for a moment, realizing I hadn’t learned why he’d called.

I had to pack my essentials first, which
meant Doppler and everything that belonged to him. His carrier/dog bed took up
most of the space behind the backseat. Then I emptied the bathroom of my stuff,
followed by dumping the contents of my top dresser drawer into my suitcase. I
grabbed what I could out of the remaining drawers until the suitcases were so
full I had to sit on them to shut them.

I grabbed an armload of clothes on
hangers, took them out to the car and dumped them on the backseat, and put
Doppler and paraphernalia in the front passenger side. I hugged myself to
battie the rapidly chilling night air and made a visual appraisal of my packing.
My suitcases and a couple of blankets would still fit in the back. There wouldn’t
be room for my full laundry basket, though. Maybe I could flip the basket
upside down and tie it to the car roof. No, now that I was running my own business,
I had to keep up at least the pretense of dignity.

Still making mental calculations, I went
back inside. It was much too late for me to barge in on my mother. I’d spend
the night on the couch in Russell’s office and drive out to Berthoud in the
morning. Wouldn’t Mom be surprised? Her non-pilot daughter was about to throw
up her hands and move back home. Life just didn’t seem to want to get with my
program, blast it all.

The phone rang again while I was lugging
my two suitcases toward the front door. I hesitated. This could be my last
chance to make a clean getaway before Kaitlyn returned from her phony date.
Then again, it wasn’t her fault that her “ex” had done this. I owed it to
Kaitlyn to explain my departure face-to-face. Plus, considering the
circumstances of her “date,” I needed to stay and make sure she got home all
right. I answered the phone.

“Allida Babcock?” said a male voice. “This
is Dennis Corning. I believe you spoke to my wife yesterday about the collie,
Sage, that used to belong to Hannah Jones. We were watching him after Hannah’s
death.”

A little discombobulated at getting a
business call at home this late, I muttered, “Oh, yes. Hello, Mr. Corning.”
Could
he have gotten my home number from directory assistance?
I wondered. He
must have.

“I hope this isn’t too late to call. We
just saw a story on Beth Gleason’s murder on the ten o’clock news. She was Sage’s
new owner, wasn’t she?”

There was no sense in denying what he
already knew. “Yes.”

“We’ve changed our minds. We want Sage
back. We’ll give him a good home, and that poor dog has been through too much
already.”

“What about your other dog...what was his
name?” I remembered Shakespeare’s name, but wanted to make sure this really was
the husband of the woman before I continued this conversation.

“Shakespeare. We’ll work with him.”

“What about your son?” The boy’s name I
truly
had
forgotten.

“We’ll work through that, too.”

“I’ll have to give this some thought. I’ve
placed the dog in a really good home, which could become permanent. I think for
the short term he’s better off where he is.”

“And where is that?”

Surely I was being paranoid to find this
whole phone call disquieting. I could see myself doing the same thing in his
shoes. Even so, I decided, I would not have asked this last question. At the
very least, it was presumptuous, and at the worst, it was suspicious. “With an
experienced dog owner. Why do you ask?”

He said nothing for a moment. “Could you
meet with us to discuss this?” he asked.

This would give me the chance to learn
more about Sage’s background. “I’d be happy to.”

We made arrangements to meet tomorrow
afternoon. I braced myself at the sound of Kaitlyn’s footsteps on the porch.
The door flew open and Kaitlyn dashed inside. She twirled as she shut the door,
a move that made me dizzy just to watch. She leaned back against the door and
gave an exaggerated sigh of contentment.

“Guess what, Allida?” I didn’t hazard a
guess, but she went on, “I’m in love, and I owe it all to you.”

“No, you don’t owe me anything. We’re
entirely debt free.”

“If you hadn’t told me to start dating
again, I would have refused to go out with Jim, and I’d have never discovered
how wonderful he is.”

“So you had a nice time?”

“The best!”

There was always the possibility that this
Jim truly cared about Kaitlyn. Not a very large possibility, however. Just so
long as he didn’t cut things short the moment he got a call from Bill, I’d find
it a little easier to believe. “I’m surprised you’re back so early.”

“Oh, somebody from Jim’s office contacted
him on his cell phone and told him he was going to be making some big
presentation in the morning.”

“On a Sunday?”

“Lots of people work Sundays.
You
do.”

I’d grown used to Kaitlyn’s
self-absorption, but I was finding it a little surprising that she had managed
to miss not only my packed-to-the-gills car out front, but the pair of
suitcases in the center of the floor not ten feet away from her. “Yes, I do.
And speaking of which, did you used to have a puppy?”

“No. I’ve never had a dog. I thought I
told you that already. Why?”

“The dog door was already here when you
and your husband bought this place...what? Five years ago?”

“Six. That’s right. Exterior doors cost
hundreds of dollars.” She studied my face and said, “What’s wrong, Allida? Why
are you suddenly asking me about dog doors?”

“I’m...going to stay at my mother’s house
tonight. I can’t stay here until you change the locks, at the very least.”

Finally, she noticed the suitcases, and
her face paled as she stared at them. “What are you—”

“Bill was here when I returned from my
date. He was going through my dresser drawers.”