Paranoid(122)

In many respects it was the same as the others. She was twenty years younger and in the vacuous cannery with the others. She’d looked down, seen the gun in her hand, and seen Luke fall, but this time as he glanced up at her, he morphed, his image altering from one man in her life to another, from Luke to Lucas to Dylan, then her father, and finally Xander Vale. Still, she’d squeezed the trigger and the pistol had gone off in her hand and Luke was staring up at her again.

Now she was awake. Something waking her. A noise that was out of place.

A gunshot?

For a second, she listened, lying still on the bed, ears straining over the rapid-fire beat of her heart, then heard the sound of a car’s engine. So probably she’d just heard the vehicle backfire, which had crept into her nightmare and jarred her awake. But that was odd, wasn’t it? How many times did you hear a car backfiring these days?

And the sound had been different, muted.

And coming from inside the house.

At the foot of the bed, Reno stretched, then hopped down and padded to the door. He looked over his shoulder as if to say, “What’re you waiting for?” His cue that he wanted to go outside. “It’s the middle of the night,” she admonished, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

He wasn’t budging. Started to whine.

She was about to call him back to the bed when she heard something. A scrape against hardwood? Footsteps? Someone was up? Her heart kicked into double time even though she told herself it was probably Dylan, getting something out of the fridge. Sometimes he did that, staying up late on the computer and then being suddenly “starved” and raiding the refrigerator.

But the thump?

What was that?

Reno started to paw at the door.

“Okay, okay,” she whispered. She stepped into her jeans and threw a sweater over her nightshirt.

Scraaape.

The screech of metal on metal was audible.

What was that?

Rachel didn’t move a muscle. She strained to listen, hear anything out of the ordinary. And there it was, the soft scrape of metal on metal . . . like the sound of the back slider opening and closing . . . or . . . a window?

No!

Was Harper sneaking out again?

She wouldn’t!

Or would she?

With the dog bounding in front, Rachel hurried down the stairs, nearly stumbling in the dark, slapped at a light switch at the foot of the staircase. She threw open the door to Harper’s room, hit the switch, and stared at the empty bed with its crumpled bedding. A glance at the window indicated it was cracked. What the hell? What about the damned security system?

She flew out of Harper’s room and into Dylan’s. Again she hit the lights. He was asleep in the bed, one arm flung over his head, mouth agape. In a second his eyes flew open and he was blinking. “Mom? What’re you doing?”

“Where’s your sister?”

“What? In bed . . .” And then he came to completely. “Oh.”

“Right. ‘Oh.’ She’s not. She just snuck out, probably to meet with Xander again. Where are they?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

“God, no!”

“But the security system?”

He groaned.

“Dylan?” Rachel said, closing the littered gap between the door and the bed.

“Okay! Okay,” he said, as if she’d beat it out of him when all she’d done was drill him with her gaze. “Yeah. She asked me to fix it and I did.”

“You mean fix it so it wouldn’t go off when she snuck out again. Like break the circuit to her window like before.”

He nodded mutely.

Fury grew deep inside her. “You are so grounded,” she said, trying and failing to calm down and telling herself that as long as Harper was with Xander, she was safe.

But that wasn’t true.

People were being murdered, people Rachel knew, people connected to her, a classmate having disappeared. Bruce Hollander, a known felon, was on the loose, probably had been stalking her, chasing her, probably had lurked in the shadows and watched the house only to spray that horrid message on her door. Didn’t Harper understand how dangerous it was?

Nowhere was truly safe.

“Stay here!” she commanded her son, who looked like he wasn’t about to go anywhere but back to sleep. “Hook up the system again, and make sure it’s working and stay here!”

Back up the stairs she sprang, grabbed her phone from its charger. She tapped out a message to her daughter: Call me! Come home! Now!

After sending the text, she stopped at Dylan’s room again. He was falling back to sleep. “Fix it!” she ordered before speeding to the kitchen, where she snagged her purse and keys. With Reno barking in protest in the kitchen, she locked the door behind her, pulled on the running shoes she’d left on the porch, and was inside her Explorer in less than a minute.

This was crazy, she knew, trying to find her daughter, but Rachel was desperate, her heart racing, panic threatening.

At the stop sign, she checked her phone; although she hadn’t heard the ping of an incoming text she prayed her daughter had gotten back to her.

Nope.

She called Cade on the fly, hitting the gas and searching the deserted city streets of Edgewater. The call went to voice mail and she left a quick message: “It’s Rachel. Harper’s snuck out again, with Xander. I’m trying to track them down. Call me.”