She hurried into the building.
Gall rounded the wing and glanced into the empty cabin. “Where are her folks?”
“They stayed in Houston.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. The old man looked like he was on his last leg. Otherwise, how’d it go?”
“Don’t make nice with me, Gall. I’m mad as hell at you.”
“You’re richer tonight than—”
“I want a straight answer. Did you know about her book?”
“Book?”
“A book. You know, like people read.”
“Does it have pictures?”
“No.”
“Then I didn’t know about it.”
Dent searched Gall’s eyes, which were rheumy but free of deceit. “I’ll kill you later. Right now, I’m ready to put up my airplane and call it a day.”
While he was going about it, Bellamy and Gall conducted their business in the hangar office. But he kept an eye on them, and, as she came out of the hangar, he placed himself directly in her path.
Stiffly, she said, “Thank you.”
He wasn’t about to let her getaway be that easy. “I may not use words like ‘expunge,’ but I know how to fly. I’m a good pilot. You had no reason to be scared.”
Not quite meeting his gaze, she said, “I wasn’t afraid of the flying.”
Chapter 3
Together Dent and Gall got the airplane into the hangar. Dent climbed back in to retrieve his sunglasses and iPad, and spotted the copy of
Gall turned away from the noisily humming refrigerator, a six-pack of Bud in his hand. “I thought we’d crack a couple of—Where are you going?”
“After her.”
“What do you mean, after her?”
Dent got into the driver’s seat and started the engine, but when he would have pulled the door closed, Gall was there, the six-pack in one hand, his other braced against the open car door. “Don’t go borrowing trouble, Ace.”
“Oh that’s funny. You’re the one who set me up with them.”
“I was wrong.”
“You think?” He gave the door a tug. “Let go.”
“Why’re you going after her?”
“She left her book behind. I’m going to return it.”
He yanked hard on the door and Gall released it. “You should leave it alone.”
Dent didn’t acknowledge the warning. He shoved the Vette into first gear and peeled out of the hangar. He knew the road well, which was fortunate, because while he drove with one hand, he used his other to wrestle his wallet from his back pocket, fish the check from it, and, after reading the address, accessed a GPS app on his iPad. In a matter of minutes he had a map to her place.
Georgetown, not quite thirty miles north of Austin, was known for its Victorian-era architecture. Its town square and tree-lined residential streets boasted structures with gingerbread trim.
Bellamy lived in one such house. It sat in a grove of pecan trees and had a deep veranda that ran the width of the house. Dent parked at the curb and, taking the book with him, followed a flower-bordered path to the steps leading up to the porch. He took them two at a time and reached past a potted Boston fern to ring the doorbell.
Then he saw that the front door stood ajar. He knocked. “Hello?” He heard a noise, but it wasn’t an acknowledgment. “Hello? Bellamy?” As fast as he’d been driving, she couldn’t have been that far ahead of him. “Hello?”
She appeared in the wedge between the door frame and the door, and it looked to him like she was depending on it for support. Her eyes were wide and watery, and her face was pale, bringing into stark contrast a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks that he hadn’t noticed before.
She licked her lips. “What are you doing here?”
“Are you okay?”
She gave an affirmative nod, but he didn’t believe her.
“You look all…” He gestured toward her face. “Was it the flight? Did it mess you up that bad?”
“No.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
He hesitated, wondering why he didn’t just hand her the book and tell her to shove it where the sun don’t shine, as he’d come here to do, then turn and walk away. For good. Forever and ever, amen.
He had a strong premonition that if he stayed for one second longer, he would live to regret it. But despite the impulse to get the hell out of there and away from her and all things Lyston, he gave the door a gentle push, which she resisted. He pushed harder until she let go and the door swung wide.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed.
The central hallway behind her looked like it had been the site of a ticker-tape parade. The glossy hardwood floor was littered with scraps of paper. Brushing past her, he went in, bent down, and picked up one of the larger pieces. It was the corner of a page; T. J. David was printed on it, along with a page number.
“You found it like this when you got home?”
“I was just a few minutes ahead of you,” she replied. “This is as far as I got.”
Dent’s first thought was that the intruder might still be inside the house. “Alarm system?”
“The house doesn’t have one. I only moved in a couple of weeks ago.” She gestured toward sealed boxes stacked against the wall. “I haven’t even finished unpacking.”
“Your husband isn’t here?”
The question seemed to confuse her at first, then she stammered, “No. I mean… I don’t… I’m divorced.”
“Dent—”
“I’ll be okay.”
He set the copy of her novel on the console table, then continued down the central hallway past a dining room and a living room, which opened off of it on opposite sides. The hall led him to the back of the house, where he found the kitchen and utility room. The door to the yard was standing open. The locking mechanism dangled from a neat round hole in the door.
A striped cat curiously peered around the jamb. Upon seeing Dent, it skedaddled. Being careful not to touch anything, he stepped out onto a concrete stoop, where a bag of potting soil and a stack of terra-cotta flowerpots stood against the exterior wall of the house. One of the pots had been broken. Pieces of it lay on the steps leading down to the ground. The fenced yard was empty.
He figured the house-breaker was no longer a threat, but he wanted to check the upstairs anyway. He retraced his steps through the kitchen and back into the wide hallway. Bellamy was standing where he’d left her, cell phone in hand.
“I think he came and went through the utility room door. I’m gonna check upstairs.”
