What the—
“Come by the house when you’re finished gallivanting. I’ll give you some tuna. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
A meow sounded from deeper in the bushes. Nikki didn’t move even when she felt something soft rub up against her leg.
“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. Come out and let me see you.”
The cat didn’t budge. Instead, he pressed closer, gazing up at Nikki in the dark with wide, glimmering eyes.
“Have it your way,” Lila muttered as she turned back to the French doors. “But sooner or later, I’ll catch you. I always do,” she added in a whisper.
Chapter Eight
Adam sat on the deck, watching Dr. Nance’s cabin across the lake. He’d been out there since early evening, staring into the horizon as the colors shifted and the shadows cast by the pine forest lengthened. The water grew black as the sunset faded, and for a few breathless moments, heavy darkness descended until the moon rose above the treetops to cast a misty glow over the eerie landscape.
Somewhere downstream, the bellow of an alligator joined the background cacophony of the bullfrogs and whip-poor-wills and the eerie cry of his grandmother’s roosting peafowl. With nightfall, the mosquitoes came out with a vengeance. Adam sprayed his ankles with repellent and then got up to wander down the wooden steps to the dock.
The johnboat bobbled gently against the tire bumpers, tempting him to climb in and motor across the lake to have another look inside the cabin. But if someone else watched and waited, he didn’t want to scare that person away. He’d been on enough stakeouts to learn the value of patience.
He sat down in one of the bolted chairs and stretched his legs in front of him, settling in for a long night. Folding his hands behind his head, he relaxed into his mission. Given free rein, his thoughts drifted back to his earlier conversation with Nikki Dresden. He hadn’t been able to get a good read on how she’d taken his proposal. Not surprising, since he didn’t know her that well. At least, not this version of Nikki Dresden. But the old Nikki Dresden? The dark, dramatic teenage Nikki Dresden who’d dressed in black and claimed as her safe haven the tumbledown ruins of a former psychiatric hospital? That Nikki Dresden he knew only too well.
He wondered how surprised—or upset—she’d be to learn that he’d found her journal that summer while searching through the Ruins looking for clues to Riley Cavanaugh’s disappearance. His first thought when he’d pried up the loose floorboard and uncovered the notebook was that a former mental patient had left it behind. The writing was deep, despondent and hauntingly beautiful. It wasn’t until he’d come across a passage about Riley’s kidnapping that he realized the diary belonged to Nikki Dresden, the enigmatic girl with dyed black hair and soulful eyes.
He’d kept reading, justifying the invasion of her privacy by telling himself he might learn something that could lead him to the missing girl. He’d heard the rumors by then. The whispers of a satanic cult that had implicated Nikki and her friends. He’d found nothing, of course. The Belle Pointe Five were innocent in the kidnapping, but he wondered if the secrets and confessions that Nikki had poured out on the pages of her journal still haunted her at times.
He figured she’d gone up to the Ruins two nights ago to collect that notebook. Why else would she have pried up the loose board? Why else would she have been so flustered when he found her kneeling on the floor? Sure, the discovery of Dr. Nance’s watch had been a shock, but the realization that someone had taken her journal must have been a thunderbolt.
Adam could only speculate as to why she’d left it there all those years. She must have had her reasons. Was she home tonight, wondering who’d taken it? Worried if it would turn up when she’d finally been embraced by her hometown?
Or was she fretting about their earlier conversation? Contemplating his proposition?
Did he occupy her thoughts the way she was beginning to his?
His phone dinged an incoming text and he glanced down. Nikki Dresden was so much on his mind he almost expected to see a message from her. Stephanie’s name at the top of the screen stopped him cold. His ex was about the last person he wanted to hear from tonight, but she’d always had an uncanny instinct for catching him at a low point.
She wrote: I guess you’re surprised to hear from me.
An understatement. He stared at the screen, waiting for the old anger and bitterness to surface, but he felt strangely calm. Not indifferent, not yet, but he didn’t feel the need to respond or retort. He just wanted to go back to the solitude of his thoughts.
A few seconds ticked by before another message dinged.
We need to talk, Adam. Can I call you? It’s important.
His thumb hovered over the screen but he still didn’t answer.
I know you’re reading this. I’m going to call.
Still so sure of herself.
“Adam?”
The voice coming so unexpectedly out of the darkness startled him. He pivoted to glance up the steps where a silhouette hovered.
He rose. “Nikki?” How easily her name slipped from his lips. How natural his name had sounded on hers.
“Yes, sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, it’s okay. I didn’t hear you drive up.”
“I parked out on the road.” She came down the steps then, deliberately moving from the shadows so that he could see her more clearly.
She was dressed as usual in jeans, T-shirt and sneakers, but there was something different about her tonight. Her hair seemed glossier in the moonlight, her lips fuller, her eyes more luminescent. She wore an air of mystery like a subtle perfume. Or was that just his imagination playing tricks? Was he subconsciously trying to prove to himself he was over Stephanie Chambers by acknowledging his attraction to Nikki Dresden?
“I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you or anything,”
