Unforeseen Danger (22 page)

“I told you to stay inside,” he said.

“I was worried about you.
 
We need to call the police.”

“Whoever did this is gone.
 
I didn’t see anything.”
 
Jake took the phone from her and sat on the front steps to call Matt.

Five minutes later, a white blazer with Whitwell Police emblazoned on the side pulled up beside the BMW, and Matt bailed out.

He and a deputy roped off the scene and took their statements.
 
Nearly two hours later, he drove them home.

Another hit and run.
 
They still had nothing to go on.
 
Nikki stared at the grim line of Jake’s mouth and was terrified of what would happen next.

Nikki drifted into a fitful sleep that night, tossing and turning, moving from one hazy nightmare to the next.
 
As far as she knew, Jake didn’t sleep at all.

***

November 8

Nikki greeted Darcy at the door the next morning with a scrub brush in one hand, a bottle of lemon-scented disinfectant in the other.
 
She led her friend to kitchen and collapsed in a chair.

“Wow!” Darcy said.
 
She sipped coffee from the Styrofoam cup she’d carried in with her and surveyed the sparkling kitchen.
 
“Have you been possessed by Mr. Clean?”
 

 
“Did I never clean before the accident?”
 
Nikki asked with a shaky laugh.
 

She didn’t tell Darcy that she’d been up cleaning since five.
 
Jake had left earlier than usual this morning, having arranged for his foreman to pick him up in a work truck.
 
Although he kissed her when he left and cautioned her three times not to open the door for anyone but Darcy or his mother, he seemed distant, distracted.
 
Nikki tried not to take it personally.

“No
offense
,
Nik
,” Darcy said, before taking another gulp of coffee, “—but you were a bigger slob than me.
 
You have some woman from town come every Friday to clean.”

“Really?”
 
Nikki looked at the brush in her hand.
 
“But I like this.
 
It’s very stress relieving.”

“Stop it,
Nik
.
 
You’re scaring me,” Darcy admonished.
 
She glanced at Nikki with thoughtful
gray
eyes.
 
“You said stress relieving.
 
Are you and Blue Eyes having problems?”

With a sigh, Nikki told her about the latest attack.
 
Darcy asked her a flurry of questions and Nikki nearly forgot to ask her the most important one.
 
“Hey, do I know anybody named Parker?”
 

“Um, there’s Parker Sloan, the tennis instructor at the club.
 
That’s the only Parker I know.”

Nikki started to tell her that she meant Parker as a last name, when the thought struck her:

S Parker

Parker S

Could it really be that simple?

“Tell me about him!
 
Could he be the one that I had an affair with?”
 

To her consternation, Darcy nearly choked on her coffee.
 
She laughed and gasped for breath.

“Oh,
Nik
!
 
I don’t think so,” she chortled.
 
“We always made fun of this guy, because he swaggered around like he thought he was God’s gift.
 
He always wears his shirt a little too unbuttoned, to better show off his hairy chest, and he flirts with all the ladies.”
 
She gave Nikki a mirthful wink, and said, “Let me put it this way: Parker Sloan makes Tommy Miller look good.
 
Why did you think he might be the one?”

Nikki filled her in on yesterday’s excursion to
Grundy
County
and what they learned at the motel.

“I have no idea.
 
That name means nothing to me.”

“I’m sure it does to me,” Nikki said.
 
“But what?”

“Well, come on.
 
I’ll help you clean your room, and maybe we’ll find something.”

“Nope, already did.
 
There was nothing there.
 
But I am going to clean house today, so you can watch TV or read or whatever.”

“Nah, use me as free
labor
.
 
Maybe you’ll inspire me to clean up my own place.
 
 

I can work upstairs while you work down here.”

***

Nikki found the stack of letters in the pull-out drawer by the computer.
 
Nestled between the stapler and a tape dispenser, she might not have paid them any attention if they hadn’t been tied with a baby pink ribbon.
 
They were all addressed to her from Derek
LeBain
.
 
Nikki plopped down in the leather swivel chair and untied the ribbon, curious about this link to her past.

Angel eyes.

He called her angel eyes.
 

The first of the letters was nearly four years old, written before she had ever met Jake, and the last was dated a little over two months ago.
 

Tears burned her eyes as she read the words of a lover she couldn’t remember.
 
Derek sounded so lost and lonely, and so in love with her.
 
His heartbreak was something palpable.
 
It jumped off the page as she read letter after letter begging her to come back, to love him again.
 
The only letter that even mentioned Jake by name was dated on their wedding day.

It sounded so fatalistic, almost like a suicide note, but it hadn’t been.
 
The letters continued long after her marriage.
 
How had she felt about him?
 
Nikki wished she knew.

The next letter contained a photograph of the two of them, and Nikki stared at his face for a long time, hoping for some spark of recollection.
 
Derek was a gorgeous man, his face as perfectly formed as any leading man’s.
 
He had a strong chin, full lips and pale eyes that were either
gray
or blue.
 
Blonde and tan, he looked like he had everything going for him, but, after reading his
letters,
Nikki knew his handsome exterior masked a haunted soul.
 
After studying his face, she looked at her own in the picture.
 
Although she flashed a smile at the camera, it looked
forced
.

“Nikki.”

Darcy’s voice startled her.
 
Nikki jumped, sending the letters in her lap sailing across the floor.

“I didn’t mean to startle you.
 
I—” Darcy fell silent as she reached to pick up the picture on the floor.

“He was beautiful,” Nikki said softly.

“You have no idea,” Darcy snapped, then squeezed her eyes shut.
 
“I’m sorry.
 
I just can’t talk about him.
 
Not yet.”

She turned away, but not before Nikki saw the glimmer of tears in her eyes.

The phone rang and Darcy snatched it up.
 
Her eyes widened and she said, “What did you say?
 
Who is this?
 
Hello—
”
 
She
stared at the phone, then slowly replaced it in the cradle.

“Darcy, who was it?” Nikki demanded.

“It was your lover.
 
He thought I was you.”
 
Darcy gave her a hard look.
 
“He said for you not to give up on him, that he would take care of Jake soon.”

***

Whistling, Jake caught the freight elevator and went back up to where Hank was waiting – impatiently, Jake guessed.
 
He was in a remarkably good mood for having spent his lunch hour with Evan Stephens.
 
Stephens was still here, getting in the way as he walked around the construction site.

Hank munched on a sandwich, and barely looked up as Jake walked the beam toward him.
 
Jake hummed to himself as he sat beside Hank, knowing that he was wearing on his foreman’s nerves.
 
Maybe he was a little punchy from lack of sleep, but it was hard to keep from grinning.

“Well?”
 
Hank demanded.

“Stephens agreed to plan B.
 
We don’t have to do all the changes on the west wing.
 
I persuaded him that it would create a structural weakness.”

“I would like to persuade him about a few things,” Hank grumbled, but Jake could tell that his foreman was relieved.
 
The sooner they were finished with Stephens, the better.
 

After Hank finished his sandwich, they went back down to the ground level.
 
Jake’s cell phone rang.
 
He handed a material checklist to Hank and sat on a wooden slat to answer it.
 

“Jake,
it’s
Matt.”

Jake’s pulse quickened.
 
“What do you have for me, Matt?
 
Any leads?”

“I got the results from the lab test.
 
Someone sprinkled a little
Augmentin
in your mom’s casserole.”

“
Augmentin
.
 
What’s that?”

“A drug very similar to penicillin.
 
Definitely not naturally occurring, even in Cat’s casserole.
 
Someone was trying to do you in, Jake.”

Jake wiped a hand down his face.
 
“Yeah, I figured—”

The phone crackled as he lost the signal, then the connection.
 
Jake was punching in Matt’s number when he heard Hank Timmons
scream
his name.

Moving instinctively, Jake threw himself off the slat just seconds before it exploded in a shower of wood fragments.
 
He lay on the ground in stunned silence as Hank scrambled over the mess to get to him.

Hank’s face was as white as greasepaint and his mouth opened and closed like a fish’s as he stood over Jake.
 
Jake stared at his mouth in fascination for a moment before he realized that Hank was talking.
 
It was another moment before he was able to comprehend what Hank was saying.

“Jake, say something!
 
Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Jake managed, when air finally rushed back into his lungs.
 
“What happened?”

“The cable snapped.
 
The beam was coming right at you – Oh, Lord, Jake, look at that, will
ya
?”
 

The beam had landed vertically.
 
If it had landed horizontally, it would’ve driven Jake into the ground like a nail.
 
Jake stood, but when he realized just how narrowly he had escaped death, he sank back on his knees.
 
Hank was babbling now and Jake thought the big man was going to cry.

“
Geez
, Jake!
 
How did you know when to move?
 
I saw it coming, but I didn’t have time to do anything.”

Jake reached down to pick up a little piece of the black cell phone he had dropped and grinned crazily at his general foreman.

“When I heard Hank Timmons scream like a little girl, I knew to run for cover.”

***

The headache made her nauseous.
 
When Tylenol wouldn’t knock it, Nikki asked Darcy to run to the pharmacy to fill the prescription Dr. Carver had given her.
 
Rubbing her forehead, Nikki watched Darcy back out of the drive and then lay on the couch.
 
The house sparkled; she and Darcy had even washed the walls and stopped only to have a sandwich with her father when he dropped by.
 

Since the accident, Nikki had an almost compulsive desire for neatness.
 
While the house hadn’t really been dirty, she felt more relaxed now that she knew it was spotless.
 
Nikki wondered if that was inspired by her desire to ‘clean up’ her marriage, erasing the ugly stain that her unfaithfulness had left behind.
 
She enjoyed the fresh lemon scent that permeated the air, although the scent of the roast that she and Darcy had prepared for Jake’s dinner muted it somewhat.

Nikki stood up, and nearly fell as a blinding pain stabbed through her head and the mother of all headaches took control.
 
Multi-
colored
spots danced before her eyes as she headed up the stairs to her bedroom.
 
Jake wouldn’t be home for a while, and she just wanted to lie down.

Minutes later, Nikki was in agony.
 
She blindly staggered around her bedroom, trying to find her purse as the pain ripped through her head.