Matt—The Callahan Brothers (Brazos Bend Book 2) (8 page)

A storm of tears welled up inside Torie, but she battled them back. She wouldn’t cry in front of him. She wouldn’t give him that pleasure.

Matt cleared his throat and stepped out from behind the golf cart, his palms up. “Please put the gun down, Victoria. Les here has a weak heart. Gunshots tend to screw up his pacemaker.”

Les patted the left side of his chest with his right hand and offered her an apologetic grin. “He’s telling the truth about that. The ol’ ticker doesn’t do well with a lot of excitement.”

Matt took a step closer. “I’ll listen to you. I give you my word.”

Torie nibbled at her bottom lip. She was tired. She was scared. The last thing she needed was for Les Warfield to drop dead because of her. Was he looking a bit gray? Oh, dear. She slowly lowered the gun.

Fast as a striking snake, Matt covered the distance between them and stripped the weapon from her hand. Gigi, bless her heart, lunged and bit the fingers clutching Torie’s arm.

“Hey!” He yanked his hand away.

“Good dog,” Torie praised.

Man and dog glared at each other, the lips of both curling.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Les grumbled. “I could use a glass of sweet tea. You want to come inside, Ms. Bradshaw?”

“Thank you.”

“Hold on just one minute,” Matt protested as he released the magazine and dropped it in his pocket. He scowled at the gun and clicked on the safety. “Pink. Seriously?”

After tucking the firearm in his waistband at the small of his back, he continued. “She shows up here uninvited, takes potshots at my truck, and you want to treat her like a guest?”

“That about sums it up,” Les agreed.

Torie gave Les a warm smile before glancing at Matt. He looked frustrated, disgusted ... and older than he had back on the island. New lines were etched into his brow and weariness clung to his features.

Major medical trauma would do that to a person.

Torie sighed heavily as guilt settled on her shoulders. She’d put those lines there. Silently, she followed Les up the front porch steps and into the restored two-story Victorian complete with gingerbread and a wraparound porch.

“Come on into the kitchen,” the older man directed. The austere furnishings in the living room reflected a bachelor household. Other than the two recliners with a lamp table between them, the only items in the room were a huge plasma television, a bookshelf filled with a mix of hardbacks and paperbacks, and a card table with plastic pieces and the skeleton of a model battleship spread across its surface.

Not exactly James Bond luxury, she decided. Gigi squirmed in her arms, and Torie tucked her away into her shoulder bag as they entered the kitchen. There, she stopped in surprise. Behind her, Matt said, “Looks like a frosting bomb went off in here.”

Baked goods filled every inch of counter space and the entire surface of the kitchen table. Pies, cakes, cookies—the selection was vast and highly caloric.

“It’s your harem,” Les grumbled. “That’s less than a week’s worth of stuff. Some women have absolutely no pride. I’m telling you, Matt, you have to do something to stop it. My arteries clog up just from looking at all this.”

Harem? That figured. Guilt forgotten, Torie shot Matt a scathing glance. Only women with no pride adored men with no shame.

Les gestured for Torie to take a seat while he cleared a spot at the table. “Tea’s in the fridge, Matt. Why don’t you pour us all a glass?”

Matt bristled with offense. “Oh, so now I have to serve her?”

“Don’t be rude,” the older man responded.

“Yeah,” Torie agreed.

Callahan’s cold stare could have frosted the chocolate cake in front of her. Torie battled back with a glare hot enough to melt the ice cubes he added to the glasses he removed from the cupboard, muttering and grumbling all the while. When he opened the refrigerator door, two plastic bags filled with what appeared to be meatballs fell out onto the floor.

“Angie Rametti dropped those off. With sauce and a spinach lasagna. Her stuff, we’re keeping.”

“Angie? She’s closer to your age than mine.” When Les simply shrugged, Matt’s brows winged up. “Oh. I see. I’m not the only bull in the pasture, now, am I? How much of this stuff was brought by women over forty?”

“Not much.”

“Whose fried chicken is this?”

Les repeated his shrug. “Alice Moncrief’s.”

Matt smirked, his point apparently proved. “The meat loaf?”

“That’s from one of the young ones. She can’t cook worth a damn. You need to pitch that.”

Torie glanced past Matt to see that the appliance was literally stuffed to overflowing. A plastic tub filled with pasta salad slid out onto the floor. “This is ridiculous,” Matt muttered, and tossed the meatballs back into the fridge. The other stuff he pitched into the trash before grabbing the jar of sun tea from the refrigerator shelf. “I swear, women are the bane of my existence.”

Torie stifled the childish urge to stick out her tongue at him. “I can’t believe how wrong I was about you. You are so not James Bond.”

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Honey, in your case, you’re better off thinking of me as the Terminator.”

“I do.” That’s why she was here.

Matt sighed heavily as he poured three glasses of tea. Setting them on the table, he took a seat across from Torie, then perused the sugared offerings, choosing what appeared to be a banana muffin. Les Warfield said, “Would you tell us your story now, Ms. Bradshaw? From the beginning? I’d like to know why I almost got shot in my own driveway.”

Torie ducked her head, embarrassed. Seldom did she allow a man to put her in her place, but this aging hippie did it with a chastising look. “I’m sorry if I frightened you, sir. Believe me that you never were in danger. I’m careful with guns.”

“Yeah,” Matt drawled. “Right.”

Keeping her gaze on the older man, she continued. “It’s basically what I mentioned earlier. For the past six weeks, I’ve been stalked and terrorized. At first, it was little things. I noticed items in my apartment had been moved in my absence. I had the sense of being watched. It occurred to me that Callahan might be behind it.”

“Me!” Matt exclaimed. “Why me?”

Torie continued to address Les. “He despises me. He’s hated me from the moment he found out he’d rescued me—the Evil Twin—rather than my sister. That was well before the gun accident, I might add.”

Matt didn’t deny her charge. He took a bite of muffin and allowed her accusation to stand unchallenged.
 

“I know he broke into my home and stole from me,” she continued.
 

Les’s eyes widened. “Callahan! What did you—”

“The poster, Les.”

“Oh.” The older man nodded and picked a chocolate chip cookie off a plate. He chuckled softly as he added, “It makes me laugh every time I think about—”

“Les, please. Will you let her tell her story so this doesn’t drag out past lunchtime?” Frowning at Torie, Matt demanded, “Continue.”

This time she did let her tongue dart out in his direction. While he gaped, she said, “I pretty much mentioned everything before. The letters and phone calls. Finding the pictures in my kitchen totally creeped me out. That’s when I went to the police. They thought it was a publicity stunt.”

“Can you blame them?” Matt muttered into his iced tea.

Torie folded her arms. “Then I came home from work three days ago and discovered poor Gigi trapped in the oven. I went back to the police and they made a cursory investigation, but their hearts weren’t in it. They decided I’d probably made a celebrity angry and they were playing with me out of revenge. Without proof of who, they couldn’t—they wouldn’t—do anything.”

“Did they find any physical evidence? Any fingerprints on the oven door handle, for instance?”

“The only fingerprints they found were mine. That made me think of you again. You’re a spy. You’d know not to leave fingerprints.”

“Any idiot who watches television would know not to leave fingerprints,” he drawled. “You know, woman, it chaps my hide that you’d think I’d do something so sick. I like dogs. Hurting them in any way goes against my grain. If I’d wanted to trap any living being in the oven of your apartment, it would have been you, not your sharp-teethed vicious little purse pet.”

“Gigi isn’t vicious. She’s protective of me and maybe just a little high strung upon occasion.” Hearing her name, Gigi stuck her head out of the bag. The pink glitter bow at her cream-colored crown sparkled in the sunshine beaming through the kitchen window.

“I’m not the only person in the world who has reason to hold a grudge toward you, you know,” Callahan continued. “Your enemies are undoubtedly legion. And you decided I was the guilty one all because I reconned that poster?”

“I didn’t say I decided you were my stalker. I said I considered you.”

Callahan snorted and Les suggested, “Go back to the pictures you mentioned before. Tell us about those.”

Torie’s stomach went a little sour thinking about the eerie photos she’d found on her refrigerator, so she broke a homemade gingersnap in half and nibbled on it to give her digestion something to soak up all its excess acid. “I was chosen as the photographer for JJ’s new baby,” she said, referring to Hollywood’s latest darling couple, Jack Brunier and Julie Kelley.

“Didn’t I read that you were paid a cool million for those shots?” Disgust laced Callahan’s voice. “What did you do? Hide under the bassinet, then blackmail them?”

“They asked me to take pictures of the baby. The Jays then sold them for charity, to fight juvenile diabetes. Julie’s little brother died of that disease, not that it’s any of your business.”

“I do think I read that somewhere,” Les offered.

Matt gave his friend an incredulous look. “Since when do you read the tabloids?”

“I was in the dentist’s office.” Les shrugged. “Go on with your story, Victoria.”

She drew a deep, calming breath, then said, “I went to New York for the weekend. When I came home, I found a set of photographs of me on my fridge. They’d been taken at different spots around town during a three-day period the week before my trip.”

Les drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “I’ll bet you were spooked.”

“Scared to death.” She licked her dry lips and added, “A couple of them ... well ... he got close to me. Too close.”

“Do you have them with you?” Matt asked.

She opened her mouth to deny it, but something in Matt’s expression halted her. “Why?”

“Sometimes it’s possible to pick up clues from the backgrounds of photographs,” he said.

“I know that. I’m a photographer.”

“So did you analyze the pictures?”

No, she couldn’t bear to look at them. Whenever she tried, her knees turned to water and started banging together. She reached into her bag, gave Gigi a little pat, and dug around for the envelope containing the photos. She handed them to Matt, then stood up and walked over to the kitchen window and stared out at the vineyard. “I bet it’s pretty here when the grapes ripen,” she observed, turning her mind to something—anything—other than the photographs.

She didn’t want to look at the pictures. She didn’t want to think about someone stalking her. Peeping at her. Watching her.

Because it’s a taste of your own medicine? Isn’t that what you’ve done to countless folks? Only this time you’re not the stalker; you’re the prey. It’s not a nice place to be.

Behind her, paper crinkled as he opened the envelope. She heard the photos slide out and she started babbling. “I photographed a party at a winery once on a Saturday during harvest. Traffic was stop-and-go from one end of Napa Valley to the other from daylight to dusk. Beautiful place, though. The house was Spanish architecture and the rooms were huge. The party planner is a friend of mine and she told me—”

“Hush.”

“She didn’t tell me to hush.”

“I’m telling you to hush.” Matt looked up from the photographs. “Could these have been made from a remote position?”

Despite the gingersnap, her stomach continued to roll. She knew why he’d asked that particular question. “No. I checked, and the police checked, but there are no cameras hidden in my bedroom.”

There were three pictures of her asleep in her bed.

Callahan frowned down at the photographs. “Cold. Very cold.”

“I changed the locks after that. I put in good locks and an alarm and I thought I was safe. Obviously I was wrong because Gigi ended up in the oven.”

Matt slipped all but one photograph back into the envelope. That he handed over to her. “This one catches the photographer’s shadow. I’m surprised you didn’t see it.”

Wary, she took a look. It was a shot of her coming out of the dry cleaner’s, and sure enough, the shadow was unmistakable. “I didn’t look closely before. This is a man and ... hmm.” She studied the picture with a photographer’s eye rather than that of a victim. “Look at the proportions. Whoever took this picture is quite a bit shorter than you.”

“The defense rests,” Matt said, then took a long sip of his tea. “Although if you’re still not satisfied, I can get my passport out of my truck and prove that I’ve been out of the country for the last nine weeks.”