It was dark and there were no lights on those rural county roads, so it was impossible for me to tell from my angle who it was, or even if it was a man or a woman. Since my entire knowledge base of what to do when being followed came from what I’d seen in movies, I did what I thought Reese Witherspoon would have done if someone were following her. I adjusted my mirror, sunk low in my seat, and pulled over to the side of the road so the car would have to pass me. I figured this would accomplish two things: one, I’d be able to see who was doing the following when it drove past, and two, it’d put an end to the whole thing because they would then no longer be behind me.
I trained my eyes on the rearview waiting for the car to speed past, but before it got to me, the car took a sudden left turn onto a gravel road that headed back toward town. Huh? So, again channeling my inner Reese, I whipped around and followed the car down the road. From this vantage point, I could now see that it was a man driving—at least it looked like a man, judging by the height and outline of the head; both details looked familiar to me. A prickly hot sensation crept up through my chest. Was this Jay? Was Jay following me?
I punched at his name in my Favorites section and waited for him to answer as I followed the gray BMW down the dirt road.
“Hey Riley,” he said, his voice sounding perfectly casual.
“Hey. Just got done with work and I was thinking of heading over. What’re you doing?”
Short pause. “Just driving home from work.”
He sounded normal, but then again he’d been an undercover agent. He practically lied for a living. “Okay, cool. Will you be home soon? I’m not far . . .”
“Uh, yeah.” His voice was losing some of its coolness. “Shouldn’t be too long.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “How’s the traffic on I-95?”
He paused, this time longer. “Um, you know . . .” In that moment I felt certain Jay was driving the car in front of me. And what was worse was that I was sure he knew that I knew it. It was time to end this.
I stepped on the accelerator until I got right up on the tail of the BMW and laid on the horn for about ten seconds. As expected, I heard the sound reverberate through the Bluetooth. My pulse raced. “You’re following me?” I shouted.
“Riley, let me explain—”
“No need,” I said, slamming on my brakes to turn around. “I think I understand perfectly.”
There are a lot of good things about driving a used Nissan Cube. It gets good gas mileage; it’s one of only three in Tuttle Corner, so I could always find it; and, after my beloved Honda Fit was blown up a few months ago, it was all I could afford with the insurance money. The downside of driving a used Cube was that it was not the best for outrunning a BMW.
After I turned around, Jay starting calling me repeatedly, which I completely ignored. I was livid. I knew he had been worried about me going out to the Nichols house, he’d said as much right to my face, and even though I told him I could handle it, it appeared as though he had appointed himself my security detail. It was beyond insulting.
Jay caught up to me right before I was going to turn from the gravel road back onto the main one and pulled his car in front of mine. I had no choice but to stop, my blood boiling at the gall of this man—who not only clearly didn’t trust me, but who was now going to force me to talk to him when I so very obviously didn’t want to. But with literally no place to go, I put my car into park. He got out and walked toward me. I craned my face to the passenger window, refusing, princess-like, to even look at him.
“Riley,” he said through the glass. “Open up, let me explain.”
I turned my shoulders even farther away from the window to make the point that I had no intention of speaking to him.
“C’mon . . .” His voice sounded as soft as one could sound when needing to project through a car window. “Please.”
I didn’t move.
He walked around the front of the car to the passenger side. So of course I turned my shoulders one hundred and eighty degrees the other way. He pivoted, midstep, and came back around to the driver side. The headlights from my car illuminated his path from one coast to the other. I switched them off and felt a surge of satisfaction when I heard him knock his knee on the Cube’s left front bumper.
Now back at the driver’s side window, he leaned his face close to the glass. “Okay, fine. Have it your way. I’ll talk from here. You can listen.”
I kept up my campaign of silence, arms folded tightly across my chest.
“I did go out to the Nichols house this afternoon, but I only did it to make sure you were okay.”
At least he had the decency to not lie to me.
“I was worried about you. When I got back to the office I ran Bennett Nichols’s
