The Running Girls(3)
Randall nodded. “Close by it,” he said, opening the back seat of the cab.
“Holiday?” said the driver, the car making a barely perceptible humming sound as it glided away.
“I have a place there.”
“How long you lived out there?”
Randall glanced out of the window, unsure how to answer the question. “All my life,” he said eventually.
Twenty minutes later the driver dropped him at the foot of a dirt track that led to his old house. “Sorry, can’t risk taking her any further.”
Randall thanked the driver and watched him ease the car away before beginning the short hike. The vines and bushes surrounding the track were denser than he recalled but he supposed lots could change in sixteen years. Chattering cicadas accompanied him as he made his way across the baked earth, the noise from the insects incessant as if they were welcoming him home. Randall’s boots slipped beneath him for no good reason, and every few steps he had to adjust his stride as a dull ache hit his knee.
As Randall rounded the corner to the house, he half expected Herbie to come bounding toward him. He pictured the dog, a golden retriever/Labrador cross, straining on his leash as Randall was pushed into the back seat of the patrol car, the dog’s eyes wide and pleading as the second of his owners was taken away from him.
The windows of the house were boarded up, and as Randall placed his hands on the soft wood he shivered involuntarily, his blood running cold. The lock on the door had been changed, the old set of keys he’d been handed back on discharge worthless. Randall dropped his bag and slid to the ground. The late afternoon sun was still high, and although his body was coated in sweat, he couldn’t rid himself of the coldness.
He sat that way for some time, even though Annie wouldn’t have wanted him to mope. She’d have told him to get to his feet, to start fixing his situation before dark crawled up on him.
“Best do as she says,” he muttered, hauling himself up. Heat returned to his body as he searched the back of the house, his effort rewarded when he uncovered a set of rusted tools in his old shed.
As he pried loose the first of the boards from the front window, the musty smell of the trapped air leaking toward him, he heard the distant noise of an approaching vehicle. He stopped, the sound of his heart thumping in his ears. The cicadas stopped chattering as the engine roared, then faded into nothing.
Randall continued working on the boards but he was aware of something heading his way. It was the same feeling he used to get when Annie and Herbie returned from their walks. A change in the air, in the quality of the few sounds that reached them out here, before he could hear the dog trampling everything in his path to see him again.
He’d managed to free the final board, glimpsing inside of his former home, by the time he heard the footsteps behind him. He eased around, expecting the worst, as he’d done on a daily basis for the last sixteen years.
Three men stood maybe ten yards away. They all appeared older than him, but that didn’t make them any less of a threat. Randall recognized one of them. The man was twenty years his senior, but still had that iron-backed rigidity Randall had always respected and feared.
“Frank,” said the man, nodding his head half an inch.
Randall blew out a deep sigh and lowered his eyes. “Warren.”
“I heard they’d let you out. Didn’t think we’d see you down here again.”
“No, sir,” said Frank.
Warren Campbell was Annie’s father. He’d been the chief of police at the time of Randall’s arrest. Randall appreciated why Warren was here; knew firsthand that his sense of justice went beyond that of the courts. Randall opened, then shut, his mouth. He could plead and explain, tell Warren what he’d told him all those years ago, but he would have had better luck talking to the cicadas. Warren, like everyone else, needed someone to blame. Otherwise, Annie’s life and death made no sense.
Randall understood that and, although he wanted to run, he held his ground as the three men moved toward him.
Chapter Two
Sometimes Laurie felt as if she had only two body shapes: plump and muscular athlete. David had hinted on more than one occasion over the last year that she was overdoing it, and glancing down now at her short, stocky legs, bulging as she pumped the pedals of her road bike, she was inclined to agree with him. There wasn’t an inch of fat on them, but they still looked bulkier than before. Whirling beneath her saddle as if independent from the rest of her body, Laurie let them guide her along the seawall, her speed creating its own breeze, which drifted through her shoulder-length auburn hair and cooled the hot jets of sweat coating her skin.
The exercise bug had started as a means to shed the baby weight and had soon developed into an obsession. She’d signed up for a triathlon in Houston, but that goal wasn’t what motivated her. Exercising made her forget, if only for a time.
She almost declined the call. She had her earphones in, the tempo of the music driving her onward, helping her to not remember, and the interruption of the call was an annoyance. But curiosity got the better of her and she answered.
Little in this town escaped Laurie’s attention. When the informant who’d called her told her that Frank Randall had been seen at the bus terminal, all thoughts about continuing her ride disappeared. Fortunately, she was only half a mile away from her apartment.