Along Came Trouble(21)
Ellen smiled. “I promise not to shoot at you.”
“Good. That’ll be a help.”
They were silent for a while. Crickets chirped. Ellen tried to think about Caleb in combat, but her brain shied away from the desert.
“Do me a favor,” he said.
“Do I owe you a favor?”
“No. That’s why it would be a favor. Tell me why you don’t want me here.”
Oh, but I do.
“This house is mine. I don’t want . . .” She didn’t want anybody to take it from her—didn’t want it to be altered in any way that made it less hers. But she could hardly explain that to him in a way that made any sense, and certainly not without spilling a whole bunch of painful truths about her life with Richard that she’d rather keep to herself.
She started over. “Look, I don’t need security. There’s no real risk. These vultures”—she waved her hand around as if they were everywhere, which was sort of silly, since surely they were all in their hotel beds now, or sleeping in dead trees or whatever—“have been circling Jamie for the last twelve or thirteen years. I’m not afraid of them. I’m not going to give them more power than they deserve.”
He didn’t move, but she could feel him lean in closer. Not with his body, so much, but with his attention. “I can understand that.”
“You can?”
“Sure. But is it possible, hypothetically, that this is a different situation than you’ve been in before? Because it’s happening here, in Camelot, and it involves your next-door neighbor as well as you and Hank?”
“Henry.” Hank was a nickname for a grown-up, tobacco-spitting baseball player, not her baby. “I don’t see why that changes anything. It doesn’t make them dangerous. It just means they’re a bigger hassle.”
“Want to hear what the situation looks like to me?”
“Not especially.”
He shook his head, the smirk back on his lips.
“What?”
“You’re kind of a pain in the ass.”
“Only when large, obnoxious men get all up in my face.”
He grinned. Those white teeth and crinkly-cornered, laughing eyes had probably felled dozens of women. She wondered what kind of man he was, what kind of lover. Whether he’d earned that cocksure smile, or if it was an affectation that would only disappoint.
“Fair enough. You don’t want me to crowd you. You like doing things your own way, and the last thing you need is some strange man following you around, messing up your systems, protecting you from danger you don’t even believe is real.”
Perceptive, too.
“I get all that,” he said. “And I think, within reason, it’s healthy and perfectly fine. But here’s the part that’s not fine. You have hardware on all your doors that’s not worth a damn. A photographer could drive out toward Cedarburg, take the gravel road into the cemetery, and end up just behind those woods out back, and then he could walk up to your back windows and take a picture of you and your son playing in the living room. Or he could wait until dark and break in and pull a knife on you, or a gun.”
An ugly thought. She didn’t want his ugly thoughts taking up residence in her head. “Why would anybody want to do that? I’m a lawyer, not a celebrity. I’m not interesting to them. I live in Camelot for a reason. I like not having to lock the car doors when I run into the market for some milk. I don’t want to worry about men with knives in my living room.”
“You don’t have to worry about it. You just have to let me worry about it.”
She crossed her arms, already fatigued. He was more difficult to spar with than she wanted him to be. That brick wall of a body came accompanied by an agile mind, which made Caleb Clark a thoroughly inconvenient man to butt heads with. “What do you want from me?”
“I want a car at the end of your driveway, regular patrols of the perimeter, deadbolts, motion-sensitive floodlights, blinds, an alarm system, and a fence.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“That’s good, because it sounds awful, and you haven’t even been inside the house yet.”
“None of it’s going to bother you, day-to-day. You’d put up with a couple hours of installation, and then you could go back to ignoring it all, and I could sleep at night.”
“As if I’m keeping you up.”