The Other Lady Vanishes (Burning Cove #2)(19)

“It was an excellent idea.” Jake turned serious again. “More women should exercise the same caution.”

She thought about Conrad Massey. “You are so right.”

Jake took the Crescent Beach turnoff. A short time later he brought the speedster to a halt in front of her cottage. He shut down the engine and climbed out from behind the wheel.

When he reached down to assist her out of the seat, she got another little electric thrill. It took willpower but she managed to suppress the urge to ask him in for a nightcap.

He went up the front steps with her and waited while she got out her key, opened the front door, and turned on a light. She moved into the small hall and turned to face him.

“Good night,” she said, determined to hang on to her breezy, devil-may-care attitude at all costs. “It’s been an interesting evening.”

He gripped the doorjamb and leaned in a little, his eyes very intent. “I just want to make it clear one more time that I did not ask for that second ticket because I found it convenient to accompany you to the performance this evening. I asked for it because I wanted to be with you tonight.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yes. Madam Zolanda is the reason I came to Burning Cove but she is not the reason I went to the theater with you.”

“All right.”

“That’s it? You’re accepting my explanation?”

“You don’t owe me any explanations. Good night, Jake.”

His eyes tightened at the corners. He looked as if he wanted to argue about something, but evidently he couldn’t come up with a reasonable excuse.

With obvious reluctance he released his grip on the doorjamb and stepped back.

“Good night,” he said.

He waited while she closed and locked the door. She twitched the curtains aside and watched him go down the steps to his car. He drove the short distance to his own cottage. When the lights of the speedster disappeared into the small garage, she turned off the living room lamp and made her way upstairs to the bedroom at the end of the hall.

The drapes were open. She went to the window and stood looking out at Jake’s cottage for a time. When she saw the lights come on upstairs in his bedroom, she closed her own drapes, sat down on the little dressing table chair, and unfastened the straps of her sandals.

Shoes in hand, she got up and opened the large wooden wardrobe. She started to put the sandals in their proper place on the shoe rack.

For a few seconds she could only gaze, bewildered, at her brown and beige Oxfords, the shoes she wore for work. They were in the space reserved for the evening sandals.

She spent a full minute trying to remember if, in her excitement about getting dressed for the date, she had forgotten exactly where she had positioned the Oxfords.

She took a closer look at the bottom of the wardrobe. It wasn’t just that the Oxfords were in the wrong place. The wooden shoe rack had been moved.

In her head she heard Dr. Gill speaking to her. Paranoia is a sign of mental instability, Adelaide. This drug will help you recover.

In a desperate effort to put her mind at ease, she hoisted the shoe rack out of the wardrobe and set it on the floor. Carefully, as if she were opening a box that might contain spiders, she opened the lid of the built-in storage compartment in the base of the wardrobe.

For a moment she stared at the neatly folded spare blankets. The faded patchwork quilt was on top. That was wrong. She was certain that she had left the plaid wool blanket on top.

She was paranoid. So what? She had a right. A woman who had spent two months locked up in a psychiatric asylum had every reason to be paranoid.

She crossed the room and went down on her knees beside the bed. The elderly lady who had rented the cottage to her had told her about the small compartment in the floor. She had explained that it was where she and her husband had hidden what little money and valuables they still possessed after the crash. One certainly couldn’t trust the banks.

Adelaide pressed the concealed spring. The trapdoor popped open. She took out the wooden box she had hidden inside and placed it on the bed. She straightened and raised the lid of the box. The gold wedding band caught the lamplight. She ignored it and the handful of newspaper clippings about a mysterious, year-old explosion in a laboratory that had claimed two lives.

She took out the little pistol and made sure it was loaded.

Gun in hand, she left the bedroom, turning on every light along the way. She checked the bathroom and the spare bedroom and then she started downstairs.

It took every ounce of nerve she possessed to conduct the search, but she forced herself to open every closet and every cupboard that was large enough to conceal a person.

No killer garbed in a surgeon’s mask leaped out at her.

By the time she reached the kitchen, every light in the house was blazing.

The back door was locked.

The window in the small laundry room was not.

A wave of bone-chilling cold swept through her. She was very certain now that there had been an intruder inside the house. The question was, what had he hoped to find? A transient searching for food or valuables was the most likely explanation, but she could not bring herself to believe it.

Paranoia is a sign of mental instability, Adelaide.

She was concentrating so intently that she nearly screamed aloud when she heard the knock on the front door.





Chapter 11