Vicious

stood a better chance of getting the hell out of there if she needed to leave in a hurry.

Susan remembered the flare gun in her purse.

The place was surrounded by trees and bushes. Staying close to the side of the house, she crept past a gas meter and some plastic trash cans behind the carport. As she approached the backyard, she saw the dock and a canoe tied to it. There was also a wooden picnic table in the backyard, and beside that a tall flagpole with a large American flag loudly flapping in the breeze.

She crept around the edge of the house. A sudden hissing noise made her turn her head, and she saw him. Susan froze. It was the man she’d met in Arby’s yesterday, only his black hair looked wet and messy, his five o’clock shadow was even scruffier, and he didn’t have a shirt on. She noticed his lean physique and hairy chest as he moved away from a stack of lumber piled against the house. The hissing noise came from the nozzle of a hose he carried. He twisted it to cut off the water flow, dropped the hose, and then reached for the front of his jeans. At that moment, he glanced up and saw her. “Whoa!” he said, quickly buttoning his jeans back up.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered.

He scowled at her. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s you. What do you want?”

“Nothing!” she replied, taken aback by his blatant hostility. He’d been so friendly yesterday— overly friendly. In fact, that had been the problem. “Are you staying here?” she asked.

He looked at her as if she were crazy. “Um, yeah, I’m staying here. This is my place.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t know you lived around here. When I saw you at the grocery store yesterday, I thought you might have followed me from Mount Vernon.”

“I wasn’t following you at all.” He grabbed a dirty grey sweatshirt from the stack of lumber and put it on. “In fact, after the Arby’s incident, when I saw you again in the parking lot at Rosie’s, I stayed in my car just to avoid you. What are you doing here?”

“Nothing, my mistake,” she said. “God….” She shookher head at him, then turned and started back toward the car.

He started after her. “Hey, excuse me if I seem rude, but y’know, I was just trying to be nice to you and your little boy at the restaurant yesterday, and you treated me like Jack the Ripper.”

She passed the carport and glanced over her shoulder at him. “There’s being nice, and there’s being overly familiar. You have some major boundary issues, pal.”

“I’m getting a lecture on boundary issues from a woman who just trespassed onto private property and snuck into my backyard? Listen—listen to me for just a second….”

Susan stopped a few feet in front of her car. She could see Mattie in the backseat. She managed a reassuring smile for him and waved. He returned the wave. She didn’t turn to look at the man.

“If I came across as overly friendly and pushy yesterday, I’m sorry,” he said. His apologetic tone seemed genuine. “There was table full of guys in that Arby’s, young, obnoxious, good old boys. I don’t know if you noticed them, but they sure noticed you….”

Susan remembered them staring at her. They hadn’t seemed overtly obnoxious to her.

“I heard those guys talking,” the man went on. “They were making bets on who could nail you in the parking lot at the back of the restaurant. I don’t know how serious they were, but two of them started egging one guy on. It was pretty revolting. So I figured maybe they’d leave you alone if I joined you and it looked like we knew each other. If I came across as overly familiar, that’s why….”

Susan remembered how those three twenty-something guys had lumbered out of the restaurant shortly after he’d sat down with her and Mattie.

“So the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right?” he said. “Anyway, you’re here now, and I’m sorry I was rude. What can I do for you?”

Standing in his driveway in front of his house, dwarfed by all the tall trees, Susan felt so stupid and lost. She turned to face him. She let out a little laugh, but tears came to her eyes. “I’m staying here with my fiance,” she explained, a tremor in her voice. “We were supposed to go sailing at noon, and he went to pick up something at Rosie’s. And he never came back. This is totally unlike him. I’ve talked to Rosie, the police, and some neighbors….”

She held back her tears, took a few deep breaths, and dug out a Kleenex from her purse.

“Would you like some lemonade or something?” he asked.

Nodding, Susan wiped her nose and eyes. “That would be nice.”

“Good,” he said. He tapped on Mattie’s window. “Hello, Matthew Blanchette from Seattle. Do you like lemonade?”

“Yeah!” Mattie replied, nodding enthusiastically.

Susan opened the back door and took him out of his car seat.

“My name is Tom Collins, like the drink,” the man said.

“Susan Blanchette,” she said, “like your crazy neighbor down the bay for the weekend.” She set Mattie on his feet and then closed the car door after him.

His smile vanished. “Are you staying in the house on Birch?”

She nodded. “Yes, why?”

He quickly shook his head. “Nothing. Listen, I hope you don’t mind having your lemonade in the backyard. I’m remodeling, and the place is a construction zone in there—lots of exposed nails and stuff. It’s not safe. C’mon, follow me to the back.”

Taking Mattie by the hand, Susan trailed after Tom Collins. They moved along the side of the house, past the carport. He glanced over his shoulder. “So—you’re engaged, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Just my luck,” he mumbled, with a crooked smile. “C’mon…”

Susan paused for a moment. Yes, you’re engaged, she reminded herself. And her fiance was missing right now. What the hell was she doing, stopping to sip lemonade in this man’s backyard? Susan told herself that she should turn back, go to the house, and wait for Allen.

Then again, one glass of lemonade wouldn’t hurt.

With Mattie at her side, she followed the man toward his backyard.

“Why that house on Birch? There are at least twenty other rental cabins around here, not to mention one of the inns or several B and B’s in town.” Standing in front of the worktable, Jordan folded his arms. “Why did you pick my mother’s house this weekend? Why did you take that woman and her son there?”

Allen closed his eyes. “I already told you,” he groaned impatiently. “I went shopping online for a rental, and it looked like the nicest place available. I didn’t know anything about a murder there.” He curled his lip at Jordan. “It wasn’t one of the selling points they mentioned in the rental ad.”

Leo sat on the cellar steps and watched them. But he was thinking about Moira. He hadn’t finished packing her bag yet. They’d locked the front and back doors upstairs to make sure she couldn’t let herself in. Once she knocked, he’d throw the rest of her stuff in the bag and meet her outside. He still hadn’t thought of a good excuse to get rid of her. Maybe he’d just act like he was still mad at her, and he and Jordan wanted her to go. “We’ve voted you off the island,” he imagined telling her.

At the moment, Leo wondered if she’d ever return. It was after four and would be getting dark soon. She’d been alone in those woods for three hours now.

Something had happened to her. Leo felt it in his gut.

They really needed to go back into those woods and search for her. But Jordan couldn’t leave his prisoner. And Leo didn’t trust his friend alone with that man.

Jordan and Meeker were glaring at each other right now. “Listen, kid,” Meeker said. “If I murdered your mother in that house, I’d hardly go back there. It’s not like some cheap detective novel. I wouldn’t be returning to the scene of the crime—and I’d hardly bring my fiancee and her son along for the ride. It doesn’t make sense.”

“But you’ve already returned to the scene of the crime at least once before,” Jordan maintained. Bending at the waist, he leaned forward so his face was close to Meeker’s. “You came back to dump my mother’s body in the woods right next to her house. And by the way, don’t pretend to be ignorant of the facts with allusions to murdering my mother ‘in that house.’ You abducted her while she was standing on the dock off the backyard. You didn’t strip, beat, and strangle her ‘in that house.’ You took her somewhere else and killed her there.”

“I’m sorry for not getting all my facts straight,” Allen shot back. “Since I wasn’t even there, it’s kind of