Gingerbread Man (6 page)

She knew which cabin Vince O'Mally had rented
the second it came into view. The very last one at the end of the
row. The most private one, out of plain sight of the others because
of a curve in the drive. Its curtains were all drawn tight, not a
bit of light coming from within. His car was nowhere in sight,
either. Nor was there a boat at the dock.

Holly bit her lip and took a quick look up
and down the driveway. No one was around. Swallowing hard, she cut
across the lawn, and ducked around to the rear of the building.
Nothing back there but weeds, a giant propane tank, and a stack of
nicely seasoned firewood. Squatting low in the weeds, she waited,
listened. Her heart was pounding so hard she couldn't hear much
else, and it wasn't from exertion. Hell.

She caught her breath eventually and,
gathering her courage, rose. She still didn't see anyone. Standing
on her toes, she leaned close to the nearest window, and tried to
find a spot where the curtains parted enough to give her a glimpse
inside.

Something moved in there. The barest shadow
among the shadows.

She jerked backward so fast she lost her
balance, and fell, hitting the ground hard, then scrambling to her
feet again, her heart pounding as her mind sought answers. What had
she seen, exactly? A dark form, a man, or was he the nightmare that
kept replaying in her mind? She stood motionless, listening,
waiting. The woods were at her back, the lake to her left, and the
road to safety, right. Straight ahead was the house, and she didn't
know if the shadow man was even now coming around it after her, or
if he was, which way he would come, or if he were even real. So she
froze there, questioning her mind, her senses, with her breaths
rushing in and out of her lungs uncontrollably. She crouched and
waited.

Something creaked.

It could have been a tall tree, bending in
the wind.

Or it could have been the creak of a screen
door opening and softly closing again.

Oh, God, he was coming, he was coming! Her
heart hammered her chest mercilessly. She was gulping each breath.
He would hear her if she didn't quiet down.

Something moved, off to the left. A twig
broke, and she launched herself around the house to the right,
running full tilt, pushing her legs as hard as she could
manage.

She slammed into something hard. Heavy arms
dropped what they'd been carrying, came around her and held her.
"Red? What the hell?”

She lifted her head, and saw the damned
Syracuse cop frowning down at her as she sucked in breath after
gasping breath. This was all his fault. She was going to die. Her
heart was going to explode and she was going to die.

"Someone," she gasped. "There." She
pointed.

He looked where she pointed, and she jabbed
her finger insistently when he looked back at her. So he let go of
her shoulders, and ran to the rear of the house. Seconds later, he
was back. "There's nothing there, Red. Okay?'

"No." She was still panting, her heart still
hammering like a runaway train.

He knelt down, and she saw what he'd been
carrying. A paper bag of groceries. He dumped out what remained in
the bag, though most had already spilled, and then he squeezed the
bag shut around its neck, and held it over her mouth. "Breathe
slower," he told her. "Come on, slow down. Easy."

Her lungs expanded the paper bag and deflated
it, over and over, and the dizziness eased. Too much oxygen would
put you on your back fast, she knew it from experience. It had been
a long time, but not long enough that she had forgotten.

He was talking. Saying the things her mom
used to say to talk her through the panic attacks. "You're
perfectly safe. I'm right here. Nothing can hurt you. You're safe,
and everything's all right."

She fought to control her breathing, tried to
consciously slow it down. He led her toward a tree, and she put one
hand flat against its rough bark. Her breathing finally slowed. Her
heartbeat eased. She sat down, leaned against the strong tree
trunk. It helped, for some reason.

"There was a man ... in your cabin."

He nodded, looking around them. "If there
was, he's long gone now. Did you get a look at him?"

"Not really." She took another breath, and
another.

He was still standing, but no longer
examining the area quite as intensely. "You didn't see him?"

"No."

"Then how do you know he was there?"

"I..." She averted her eyes. "There was
something ... a shadow. And then the door creaked."

He remained silent, studying her face.

"And a twig snapped," she added for good
measure, refusing to back down. "I didn't imagine it."

"Okay. All right. You didn't imagine it."
Again he looked around, and she noticed he'd unbuttoned his denim
jacket. Better to reach his gun she thought.

"And I'm not crazy."

He looked at her sharply. "Did I say you were
crazy?"

"I'm not."

"Are you all right now?"

"Yes." She reached a hand up, and he took it
and pulled her easily to her feet. "You ... should call Chief
Mallory."

He nodded as if considering her words. "Do
you have panic attacks often, Holly?"

She looked at the ground. "Not in years."

Taking her by the hand, without even
bothering to see whether she objected, he led her to the cabin and
up the three steps to the front door. He tried to be casual about
it as he searched the place to be sure it was safe. It was a small
cabin, so it wasn't a major job. Bedroom, closet, bathroom,
kitchen, that was it. But she got the distinct impression he was
only doing it to humor her.

She sank onto the plaid camelback sofa,
embarrassed to the roots of her hair, wondering what he thought of
her. He came back, went to the door, and locked it. Then he brought
her a glass of water.

Sitting up a little straighter, she took it
and sipped. But she nearly choked on it when he said, "So you wanna
tell me what you were doing snooping around my cabin?"

"I wasn't," she lied.

"No?"

"No. It's a... a shortcut. To my uncle Marty
and aunt Jen's place. There's a path through the woods. It forks in
the middle. Left goes to my uncle and aunt's place. Right goes
farther, all around the west bank of the lake."

"Uh-huh." It was obvious he didn't believe
her.

"Look, I come out here all the time. My uncle
Marty owns these cabins. I used to stay a couple of weeks in one of
them every summer when I was a kid."

"Should I assume that means you'll be out
here snooping often?"

"No!"

His mouth narrowed. "Do you have a key?"

"Oh, don't be ridiculous." She sighed, sipped
more water, set the glass down. "How did you know what to do?" she
asked, partly to change the subject, and partly because she was
curious.

"About the panic attack, you mean?" He
shrugged. "It's not the first time I've seen one."

"Because you're a cop?"

"Yeah. Partly that."

They looked at each other for a moment. Then
he took a cell phone from his pocket and dialed the chief's mobile
number as Holly recited it to him.

While he spoke to Chief Mallory, Holly looked
around the cabin. There were a half dozen foam coffee cups around,
most of them with coffee still in them. There were newspapers
spread on the table, a T-shirt flung over the back of a chair, and
she could see the unmade bed through the open bedroom door.

The man was messy.

She was uneasy. She disliked questioning her
own senses. She disliked it more than just about anything she could
think of. But for the life of her she couldn't be sure of what she
had actually seen, and what her mind had embellished.

"No," he was saying on the phone. "It looks
like Holly scared him off before he had time to take anything.
Okay, sure. Thanks, Chief." He hung up and turned to face her.
"Chief says to wait here. He'll be out in a few minutes to take a
look around. Then he'll take you home himself."

She nodded. "I should have known better," she
muttered, half to herself. "Bad things always happen when I take
the long way home."

***

THE CHIEF ARRIVED with one of his officers
right behind him. Bill Ramsey, the lanky blond one, and that was a
good thing because it provided someone to sit with the still-shaken
redhead while Vince and the chief took a look around. Though Vince
really didn't expect to find anything.

And he was right. There wasn't much to find.
One decent footprint in the soft ground underneath the rear window
that probably belonged to Holly. It was too damned small to be a
man's. And there wasn't anything else.

The chief glanced back at the cabin. "You
working on anything that might make someone nervous,
Detective?"

Vince shook his head slowly. "I told you, I'm
here on vacation."

"Right. And this library book connection ...
?"

"It's probably nothing."

"Right," the chief said. "And you say Holly
didn't actually see anything?"

Vince shook his head. "Does she ... um ...
have a history of this sort of thing?"

"What sort of thing is that?"

Now the man sounded slightly defensive.

"Well, seeing things that aren't there."

"No. She's honest as the day is long. But...
delicate."

"Delicate in what way?"

The chief sent him a look that told him that
was none of his business. "What I want to know is, what was Holly
doin' out here in the first place?"

"Don't know. She never really said."

The man was too sharp for Vince's comfort,
but he supposed he was going to have to tell him the truth sooner
or later. He just hoped it would be later. He wasn't altogether
sure he even trusted the man yet.

Finally, the chief realized he wasn't going
to get any more information, and took Holly home.

It was a relief to be alone. For a long
moment, Vince just stood on the small porch, arms braced on the
railing, staring out at the water and trying to get a grip on his
blood pressure. If he'd needed a warning, this had been it. He
hadn't talked a woman through a panic attack since the runaway teen
he'd tried to help last year. He'd known better than to get too
involved, but he had let the kid hole up at his place until he
could get her into a good halfway house. Why? Because she was
needy. Homeless, unstable, and had the crap beat out of her the
night she stumbled onto his path. He did not do well with needy
women. He'd put his heart and soul into seeing Shelly through her
crises, and he thought he'd helped. He really did.

Until she turned up on a restroom floor with
her wrists slashed.

And here was another one—maybe not just like
Shelly. None of them were just alike. But he'd been around long
enough to know damaged goods when he saw them. Red was on shaky
ground, and there were deep secrets haunting her eyes.

He had a weakness for needy women. A tendency
to get involved, to try to fix things for them. He knew it,
recognized it as a character flaw, and recently had managed to walk
the other way every time a needy woman had crossed his path. Up
until he met Sara Prague.

He wasn't going to make that mistake again.
No more playing the hero. No more promises that would haunt his
nights when he couldn't keep them.

Cute or otherwise, Holly Newman was strictly
off-limits. It was important that he acknowledge this up front. It
would save complications later on. He hated complications.

What he needed to do was analyze the woman's
behavior from a purely objective point of view. She was obviously
nervous about him being in town. She'd come out here to snoop and
apparently had interrupted someone else who was also nervous about
him being here, and snooping. Or she'd imagined the intruder, which
seemed just as likely. There was no evidence anyone had been inside
the cabin. The lock hadn't been broken, but it wasn't much of a
lock. He supposed Holly could get hold of a key easily enough,
since her uncle owned the place. He wondered if she had been inside
rummaging through his stuff. Nothing too revealing in here. Not yet
anyway.

Her fear had been real, though. Whether she
was lying, imagining, or had really seen someone, she had been
scared into a panic attack. And it seemed unlikely a shadow and a
snapping twig were enough to bring that on all by themselves. No,
they'd probably acted as a trigger for something else. Something
old. She told him as much when she admitted she hadn't had an
attack in years.

He wondered briefly about the source of her
fear—the kind of fear that could come back to knock her flat on her
ass, years later, at the slightest scare. Then he reminded himself
that was beyond his strictly defined area of interest. Back on
track.

Just suppose there actually had been someone
in the cabin. Who could it have been? Hell, he'd only been in town
just over a day. Who could know what he was up to? He headed out to
his car, unlocked it, and slid his laptop case out from under the
passenger seat. He noticed his groceries still scattered in the
dying grass out by the side of the cabin. A bag of coffee. Coffee
filters. A six-pack of beer and a few other essentials. They would
have to wait.

Inside the cabin he dialed his cell phone
while he waited for the laptop to boot up. A woman picked up on the
fourth ring.

"Katie? It's Vince, I need to talk to Jerry."
He could hear his partner making motor sounds in the background,
his four-year-old twins mimicking him and squealing with
delight.

"Nice to hear from you, too, Vince," Kate
muttered.

Chagrined, he said, "Sorry. How are you, hon?
How are the kids?"

"Molly wants her ears pierced, and Sydney is
arguing her case for her," she replied. "I figure I have a fashion
model and a litigator on my hands."

"Just as long as they don't grow up to be
cops," he said. "I really need to talk to Jerry."