“It hurts,” I told Steven.
“Your fingers’ll get used to it,” he said.
I picked up the Taylor again, and he made me review everything I’d learned so far, and it still didn’t seem like I was learning anything at all. It just seemed like we were playing with the guitars, having fun with each other.
Joan came back and announced that it was past one, and that she was going to go to bed.
“You go on up, hon,” he said. “Mim and I are going to work at this a little longer.”
“Don’t stay up too much later,” she told us.
“We won’t,” I said.
We were up until dawn.
CHAPTER 11
After Tommy left, I spent the day getting my life, and myself, back in order. Just checking through the now over a hundred voice mails took most of an hour, and almost every message was like the first had been, reporters wanting a story, demanding a comment. Near the end there were separate calls from Click and Graham, each wanting to confirm that I’d made it home safely. It bought them some grace, but not much.
There were two messages from Mikel, each left Wednesday, one in the morning and one that evening, check-in calls, much like Click’s and Graham’s. He left his mobile and asked me to call him back, and I didn’t. It was clear to me that he’d told Tommy where I was, maybe even had told him it was safe to visit, and I was pretty fucking angry at my big brother.
I rewarded myself with a late lunch of cold Chinese food, another beer, and a trip down to my music room. The nice thing about playing in the basement was that I could play volume. I fed the Gibson through the VOX AC-30 and wailed on that for a while. It’s a great unit, classic tube design, and it plays soft pretty well, but when you crank it up you get a lovely, shimmery sustain on the notes, as if the amp is breathing. I wasn’t playing anything in particular, just noodling. I switched to one of my Strats after a while, trying to emulate some of the Knopfler I’d heard the night before, but my left just doesn’t have the strength his does, and I can never get the same pop from the strings.
The cut on my palm opened again, and I shut everything down and went upstairs to change the bandage, and that’s when I saw it had grown dark.
I also saw that my front door was wide open.
It wasn’t like I went straight to panic, but I sure as hell accelerated to nervous. The alarm was off, had been throughout the day, ever since Tommy’s visit, and I gave myself a mental kick for not having reset it.
I froze, straining to listen. Vague traffic sounds from the street, and the echo of the notes in my head, and now my heartbeat. But I didn’t hear anything from the house, didn’t hear anyone moving around upstairs.
Had I locked it? I couldn’t remember if I’d locked it after Tommy had left. If I hadn’t locked it, it was just possible that the door could have opened on its own.
No, it wasn’t.
I slid forward and shut the door slowly, turning the knob so it wouldn’t click when the latch struck, and looking over my shoulder the whole time, thinking that if it was the stalker, I didn’t want him coming at me by surprise. But I didn’t see him, I didn’t hear him.
I suppose a different woman would have headed to the kitchen for the biggest knife in the rack, gotten herself all set to go hunting, geared herself up to reclaim her home or some bullshit. Someone maybe a few inches taller than me and a few pounds heavier, or who had taken lots of classes in self-defense or martial arts. A different woman would have assessed this situation, would have decided to be sure if her home had been invaded, and then would have gone on to kick ass and take names.
That woman sure as hell wasn’t me, and it didn’t look like she was going to drop by for a visit, either.
I had no illusions; if it was the stalker, he had a gun. There wasn’t anything in my knife rack to beat that. Even if there was, I wouldn’t have the first clue how to use it. And somehow, I didn’t think plugging in the Tele and blasting some diatonics would save my skin.
But if I could trap him inside while I was getting outside, that wouldn’t hurt.
The alarm had a thirty-second exit delay once it was armed. After that, the motion sensors in the hallways would be active, and anyone moving inside would trigger the system. Anyone trying to get in or out would trigger the alarm. At which point the Scanalert people would call the cops.
So if there really was someone lurking around my bedroom and rifling through my lingerie, I could trap him. If he stayed put for those thirty seconds, I’d own his sicko ass.
And thirty seconds, that was enough time for me to get the hell out of Dodge.
I put my thumb on the “arm” button and held my breath for the three seconds it took before the tone chimed and the countdown beeps started. As soon as they did, I bolted. My coat was on the kitchen chair, my keys were on the counter, and I grabbed each without breaking stride, then flew out the back door, slamming it behind me, making straight for my Jeep and keeping time in my head.
At eighteen beeps I was behind the wheel, and by twenty-seven I was screeching out of the driveway onto the street, and when I reached thirty and the alarm was armed, my headlights were splashing across the front of my house, over the fence and trees and the door, and I saw no one, I saw nothing.
“Got you, motherfucker,” I said.
Then I saw him, pounding at an angle across my neighbor’s yard, heading away from me in a desperate run. He was in the puddle of my headlights for barely an instant, and it wasn’t long enough to be sure, but I thought it was the same guy, the same stalker, and I floored it down the street, trying to catch him. So what if he had a gun? As long as he kept heading away from me, I could run the bastard down.
His lead was enough that he beat me to the corner and he flew across the street without hesitating, and my lights caught him again, and again I thought it was the same guy, the same stalker, but he’d shaved his head, now, the long hair gone. I tore into the intersection after him, and there was a horn, shrill and to my right, and I slammed my brakes to keep from colliding with a blue Honda. I hit the horn and screamed some pretty crude outrage, trying to get around the Honda, but there was a Lexus SUV behind me now, and I couldn’t go that way, either, couldn’t do anything but watch as my stalker raced over a lawn, pulled himself over a fence, and disappeared into the darkness of a neighbor’s backyard.
Just like that.
I drove aimlessly for twenty minutes, then found myself on Hawthorne, turning onto one of the side streets. It was just past ten when I pulled up outside the only place that had ever made me feel truly safe. There was a gentle glow from the north side of the ground floor, from one of the music rooms. It made things easier, but it made things harder. If the house had been dark, I probably would have just stayed in the car for a few minutes, then turned around and gone to a hotel, if not home.
I climbed out of the Jeep and cut across the lawn, then up the steps to the door. The porch had been redone while I was away; the last time I’d been by, it’d been the same rotting and sagging boards that had been in place for one hundred years. Now there was new cedar planking, and a new railing to match. The porch swing was still where I remembered it, though, and a puddle of rainwater sat beneath it, a couple of leaves sodden in the water.
There was piano audible through the door, and I listened for a second. Beethoven, and while I couldn’t name the piece, it was Joan on the keys, and she was playing the way she did when she played for herself, and not an audience or a student. I pulled back the screen door and rang the bell, and the music stopped abruptly.
The door opened a fraction, then wider when she saw it was me, and Joan stood there, looking tired and a lot older than the last time I’d seen her.
“Miriam. This is a surprise.”
I stepped into the hall. “I’m sorry it’s so late.”
“It’s all right, of course it’s all right. I didn’t even know you were back in town.”
