Cloud Dust: RD-1 (R-D #1)
Connie Suttle
Chapter 1
I got out five years ago.
Untalented, they said.
In other words, they didn't know what to do with me, and murder usually leaves a mess.
I understood messes. Saw too many of them in my dreams. That's why I live where I do, still in their shadow but outside their walls. The conditions, of course, are that I have to move every five years, check in now and then, and never, ever, talk about them to anyone.
It was time to move.
"I don't want you to go." Eric, my next-door neighbor looked like a sad puppy as the movers loaded my caramel-colored sofa onto their truck and wrapped it in heavy plastic.
"Honey, I'll send postcards, I promise." He peered over our shared side fence, watching as five years of my life were loaded into a moving van.
I didn't want to go, either. Eric and his partner, Max, were the only friends I had, and even they knew little about me. I knew all about them, though, and fed their cat when they went on vacation or out of town for weekends with Eric's family.
"You'll send me the next book?"
"Yes. It's such a burden and all, but I'll send it," I teased.
That's what I do—I write books. Mysteries. Under a pen name. There wasn't any way I wanted to give up an entire catalog of work again, just because I used my current name.
To Eric, Max and the rest of the world, I'm twenty-seven. It says so, right on my driver's license—Corinne Watson, born May 29, twenty-seven years ago. I look younger than my listed age—by at least four years. People would be shocked to learn that I'm actually seventy-three, but that would be giving away secrets. Unless I wanted them on my doorstep the next day, that secret would remain a secret.
"Will you call us?"
"Absolutely." Lie.
"How long will you live in France?"
"Until I finish the book. I'll be back after that." Another lie.
Eric and Max thought I was renting a house in a small village in France, so I could soak up local culture and write a mystery. They thought my furniture was going into storage until my return, and that I was renting my house out in the interim. Big lie.
The house was never mine—they'd purchased it for me. They couldn't help themselves—control was their thing. Who knows what would happen to the house—perhaps someone else they were content to watch from a distance might have it for five years.
"What if the cookie recipe doesn't turn out right?" Eric frowned. He'd been eating my oatmeal cookies for five years. I'd sent him the recipe the night before in an e-mail.
"It will, if you follow the directions. Stop worrying, all right?"
"That's the last of it, ma'am," one of the movers came to me with a clipboard in his hand. "Sign here." He tapped the bottom of a paper filled with legal garbage that nobody in their right mind would ever want to read.
I signed and handed the clipboard back, my hand shaking. That's another thing that Eric and Max don't know.
I have PTSD. And GAD. I take medication for it, and hide it quite well on most days. Why do I have those things?
That's the stuff nightmares are made of.
*
"Corinne, you're welcome to redecorate. Major changes have to be approved."
"So a sunroom to grow marijuana is out of the question?" I blinked at Colonel August Hunter as he led me through my new home. He was my contact. Handler. Whatever.
Can a seventy-three-year-old say whatever and get away with it?
If you look twenty-three, with long, black hair, fair skin and gray eyes, you can get away with a lot. August grimaced at my joke. Of all the people belonging to the hive-mind-collective of them, he was one of the least offensive.
August was tall, straight-spined, black, late-forties and a former Marine. Handsome, too, but I didn't want to point that out. He'd officially given up his job with the armed forces to join the collective of them. Shortly after that, he'd been assigned to me.
I was a problem for him, but he accepted the job with long-suffering patience if not good humor. The best course of action for me, therefore, is to fly under the radar and make his job as easy as possible. My warped sense of humor gets the best of me at times, but that's all.
Everything else ends up in my books.
"You can stay at a hotel tonight; your belongings won't arrive until tomorrow," August pointed out.
I didn't make any observations on how I was only moving from Arlington, Virginia to Silver Spring, Maryland, roughly a distance of fifteen miles. It took me barely half an hour to drive to my new address.
I also didn't add that taking that long to replace the bugs they'd installed on my furniture and appliances was amateurish.
August probably knew that I knew about the bugs. I knew that he knew that I knew. We never discussed it; that would place implication and blame. Paperwork would ensue. Probably another move.
I—and the bugs—would stay in Silver Spring. "Do you know the neighbors?" I asked.
"A file will be delivered tomorrow, with your things."
"Those poor people." I lifted a slat in wood blinds to stare at the house next door. It, like mine, was a narrow townhouse with three floors. I hate stairs. Yes, I look and feel young, but carrying laundry from the top to the bottom floor and then back again is still a chore, and getting from the top floor to the bottom floor to answer the door and explain to the salesperson there what No Soliciting actually means is downright annoying.