Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(6)

But still, there are moments, moments when the heroes in the Nora Roberts novels she reads before bed start to look like Dylan in her mind, or when her hands start to wander under the sheet as she wonders what things would be like if she wasn’t quite her and he wasn’t quite him and her past was someone else’s.

When she reminds herself that she’s just a hard-luck case, then Dylan’s good looks don’t inspire childish romantic fantasies in her. Instead his twinkling blue eyes, determined jaw, and short, jet-black hair, which he always keeps combed to one side like some TV dad from the 1950s, are just additional reminders that he’s passing through, while she plans to hide out here for as long as she can.

And it was all going so well, she thinks. Until the Blake decided to have a Halloween film festival.

“OK then. Well, is it safe to say you assumed that by moving to a town as small as Scarlet, you’d never have to look at that poster again?”

“Something like that, yeah. And technically, I don’t live here.”

“Your grocery store is here,” he answers. “And your PO box.”

“And you.”

“Exactly. So it’s got to feel as if they’re getting ready to play that movie just down the street from where you live, even though it’s a forty-five-minute drive.”

“Movies. Plural.”

“Exactly. Go deeper, Charley.”

It gives her a warm feeling the way he says even the shortened version of her new name. Charlotte is what her grandmother wanted to name her when she was born, and Rowe is the last name of a Canadian author who wrote a vampire novel her grandmother had loved.

“What does that mean, Dr. Thorpe?”

“It means you call me Dr. Thorpe when I ask you to do something you don’t want to do.”

“What are you asking me to do, Dylan?”

“Spell out how you feel, without judgment. So that we can walk you back to a healthier perspective together, one step at a time. “

“OK . . . I feel like the movies are a sign someone knows I’m here.”

“Even though you changed your name. Even though you live behind the kind of security system that’s usually used to protect bars of gold.”

“And the guns. Don’t forget about the guns.”

“The point, Charlotte, is that when I asked you to describe what you were seeing out the window, you used the word invasion.”

“Did I?”

“You did, yes. Is that an accurate description of what you feel when you look at that marquee?”

“Yes,” she answers.

“So it’s safe to say that what you’re feeling now is akin to what you felt when Jason Briffel made threats against you in the past?”

Like ice water in her face, hearing the guy’s name again.

“Do we have to use his real name?” she asks.

“What would you like us to call him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we can come up with some term for him, some nickname.”

“How about we just call him your stalker?”

“Maybe something more . . . I don’t know . . . benign.”

“I’d caution you against downplaying it. Dismissing the seriousness of the letters he sent to you and Abigail Banning won’t make you stronger.”

“I’m not dismissing it. I just don’t want to say his name, OK?”

There’s a flash of something in his eyes, an emotion she can’t quite read. Is he offended? Did she bruise his Harvard-educated ego?

She doesn’t have the energy to apologize just yet, because she’s seeing Jason Briffel all over again. His ruddy-cheeked baby face and his mess of dirty-blond curls. The way he used to linger too long next to the signing table after the events she did with her dad; his hungry, probing looks as he fingered the latest copy of her dad’s book, which he’d just purchased yet again so he could secure a place in line and have an excuse to get close to her.

How many times had she told her dad she thought the guy was stranger than the rest? When he’d reach the table, he’d fall to a crouch so they could be at eye level with each other, and he’d start asking her all kinds of concerned questions about how she was holding up, as if her rescue had been only months before and not years. And then there was the time he’d tried to reach for her hand. She’d withdrawn it quickly, and something dark had flashed in his eyes.

Her father had dismissed her concerns, of course. He hadn’t taken them half as seriously as he did the computer hacks they were subjected to by crime scene junkies searching for proof she was lying about what she’d had to do on that farm. When it came to Jason Briffel, her father had just given her some lecture about how they couldn’t control who their work touched. To this day, she isn’t sure if her dad really believed, or still believes, his old pabulum—that those leering horror movie fans were truly concerned with the psychology of serial killers. That they came to their events so they could learn how to protect themselves and their loved ones from psychopaths, not just to savor the gory details of the Bannings’ crimes, to worship the dark mystique in which those awful movies had shrouded her.

Then Briffel had found their address.

That’s when the letters started.

It was her dad’s fault, something with how he’d registered to vote in his district that had made his address available to the public. And as she’d read the first letter, she’d realized where all Briffel’s concerned questions came from. He wasn’t worried she’d been traumatized by her time with the Bannings. In his twisted mind, the trauma was that she had been “removed from the Bannings’ care,” as he put it, her destiny thwarted.