The Nosy Neighbor (22 page)

“Don’t shoot yourself in the foot, Wylie. How long should I give you before I go out looking for you?” Jake asked.

“Forty minutes,” Wylie responded grimly. “Not a minute longer.”

“Gotcha.”

The moment Jake slammed and locked the front door behind Wylie, Lucy started to pace, her eyes glued to the watch on her wrist. Jake noticed that she carefully avoided walking past any of the windows in case her shadow could be seen from outside. At least, that’s what he surmised.

Lucy circled the dining room, the kitchen, and then the foyer. “Do you think Jonathan is here, Jake?”

“Yes,” he said. There was no point in kidding himself or Lucy. “Yes, I do,” he said again.

Lucy twisted the watch on her wrist as though by moving it back and forth, the time would go faster. “You know what, Jake? I do, too.”

“Well, there’s three of us and one of him. We have two guns. I want you to think about something else, Lucy. Remember how difficult it was and how cold and exhausted you and Wylie were, and all you did was walk back and forth across the yards. If he’s here, he’s on foot. The police are citing people and giving them five-hundred-dollar tickets if they’re caught out on the roads with a vehicle. Your guy doesn’t sound like the mountaineer type. You gave me the impression he’s a bit of a dandy. Don’t go giving him too much credit, Lucy.”

“Then why were the dogs going nuts like that? Who made those footprints at my house? He’s here. Hey, with all we now know, he could have weaseled himself into someone’s house by saying he was stranded. No one would turn him away in this weather. He’d flash wads of money to make it harder to turn him away. Jonathan loves money and assumes everyone else does, too.”

Jake brought his arm up to see the numerals on his watch. “Wylie should be on his way back by now. Come on, Lucy, nothing is going to happen to my buddy. You like him, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do, Jake. I like him a lot. I just wish I hadn’t gotten him involved—you, too—in this mess. I feel like such a fool. I am really having a hard time accepting how stupid I was where Jonathan is concerned.”

Jake walked to the window and parted the vertical blinds to peep out. “The bad news is, it’s still snowing, but the good news is I see Wylie. He’s near that little grove of cedars that separates your property from his. Don’t be so hard on yourself, Lucy. At one time or another, most of us have done things we wished we hadn’t. You found out in time, and we’re going to make it right.”

“Why does he feel he has to kill me, Jake?”

“We don’t know for sure that he does want to harm you. That was a statement the FBI threw out to scare you. We don’t know if it’s true or not. If it is, my guess would be he thinks you’re onto him and will try to trap him for the authorities. He wants to keep his good life. A stretch in the slammer doesn’t fit in with his game plan. That’s the best I can come up with.”

Lucy threw herself into Wylie’s arms the moment the door opened. She looked up at him and gave a shaky laugh. “You have icicles on your eyebrows. What took you so long? I was so worried.” Lucy jabbered, as Wylie took off his jacket and sat down on the small bench across from the front door. She struggled to pull off his boots.

Jake trotted off and returned with clean socks and the bottoms to a pair of flannel pajamas. Lucy backed off and watched as Wylie dropped his pants and shed his wet socks. He wasn’t a boxer man. It pleased her. She took a full minute to appreciate his hard, muscled thighs. She grinned wickedly when he caught her eye.

“Don’t even think about it,” he groaned.

“Okay,” Lucy said agreeably.

Wylie reached over to his jacket, took Lucy’s gun out of his pocket, and handed it to her. Then he took out his own. “I’m going to bed,” Jake said, looking at the guns. “I’ll be upstairs if that makes a difference. Are you guys going to sleep down here?”

“Yes,” they said in unison, as Wylie reached for the gun in Lucy’s hand and made sure the safety was on both hers and his before he returned the .22 to Lucy.

Lucy led Wylie to the sofa in front of the fire and handed him the quilt he’d used earlier that day. After adding a log to the fire, she sat down next to him. Wylie wrapped the quilt around them both. The guns on the coffee table glared up at them. Wylie reached down and opened a copy of
Time
magazine, which he spread on top of the guns before he cuddled next to Lucy. Within seconds, the dogs were on the couch with them, burrowing in the quilt for comfortable positions.

“Go to sleep, Wylie, you look exhausted. I’ve got the guns and the dogs, and I’ll wake you if anything goes awry. The phone is here, too, and Jake is upstairs. I’d give up everything in the world that I hold dear if I could go back and avoid getting you involved in my problems.”

Lucy smiled when she heard Wylie’s light snoring. She stroked Coop’s head. “He’s a real okay guy, this master of yours,” she whispered to the dog. She leaned back into the softness of the couch and stared into the fire.

As Lucy stroked Wylie’s dark hair, aware of how wonderful he felt next to her, she thought that maybe some good would come of all this intrigue and angst she was going through. Meeting Wylie and falling for him, and she was falling for him, was the icing on the ugly cake named Jonathan St. Clair.

She had an analytical mind, at least where the law was concerned. Maybe she should think about this whole mess as though a client had dumped it in her lap. She nodded to herself.
Go back to the beginning. Way back.

Lucy knew she was ordinary, not spectacularly beautiful, but she wasn’t ugly either, nor did she have the best figure in the world. She knew how to apply makeup, fix her hair, and cover what she perceived as her flaws. What was it that had attracted Jonathan to her? Her capabilities, her professional success, her personality, what? She’d been flattered, that much she did remember, when he’d singled her out. Flattered by his attentions because he was so handsome, so virile, she’d thrown caution to the winds and plunged into an affair with him.

It had taken some juggling, what with working eighty-hour weeks and staying true to her clients, as well as maintaining her legal winning streak. It didn’t hurt that Jonathan traveled and was away more than he was in New York. When he did return, their get-togethers were that much more intense. More often than not they spent the two or three days in bed, only getting up to eat or have some wine.

She realized that what she had loved was the sex, not necessarily the man. But the magnificent engagement ring and his marriage proposal had helped to convince her that marriage to Jonathan would be fine. When the passion and sex were gone, what would their marriage be like? How many times had she asked herself that question? She hated the word
divorce.
But there it was. When she’d expressed these thoughts to her fiancé, he’d pooh-poohed them away, saying their love for each other would last a lifetime. Then he’d pour her more wine and, like a fool, she’d guzzle it, and they’d hop in the sack.

She’d had doubts from the beginning, she just hadn’t acted on them. She’d been so happy to have a sexy man in her life who had appeared to want to commit himself to her.

What had they talked about? Had there ever been any meaningful, profound discussions? None that she could recall. Somehow or other, Jonathan had always managed to relegate any serious discussion to another time.

What a fool she’d been.

Red flags should have gone up when she asked him
exactly
what he did, and he evaded the question, simply saying he brokered business deals and received a commission for his efforts plus a generous expense account. There were never any precise details or even little anecdotes. He’d gone on to say she shouldn’t worry her pretty little head about such things. He would take care of her in the style she deserved.

Her brother Steven hadn’t liked Jonathan. She should have paid more attention to that, too, but she hadn’t.

Then there was the sudden deluge of clients—less-than-savory characters—right after Jonathan came into her life. Clients who didn’t balk at her outrageous fees and always offered a bonus when the acquittal verdict came in. Steven always chortled at their robust incomes. Now that she thought about it, Jonathan always seemed to phone her the evenings the verdicts came in. At first she hadn’t paid much attention, but when Steven had commented, “your boyfriend acts like he knows these guys,” she’d started to pay attention until she came to the same conclusion herself.

Bad actress that she was, she’d tried to pry something out of Jonathan, and all he’d done was look at her with cold, narrowed eyes. “What are you trying to say, Lucy?” was enough for her. She’d never brought up the subject again. She’d cut back, though, refusing to take on more cases or dumping them on Steven. When one prospective client pitched a fit right in the office when she turned him down, she knew for certain he was a referral from Jonathan. She’d never said a word to Jonathan, waiting for him to work his way around it. He did, and she’d looked him right in the eye and said she was too busy to take on any new clients no matter what they were willing to pay. Eventually, Steven came around to her way of thinking and refused to take cases they both thought were suspect. Of course, she could prove none of this. And that’s why she hadn’t told all this to the FBI agents when they’d asked about José Rafael and Manuel Aroya. For all she knew the people she’d turned away could have read or heard about her impressive winning record in the courtroom.

Maybe that’s where she made her first mistake. Maybe her first mistake wasn’t when she told Jonathan about the “upcoming IRS interview.” Then again, maybe it was when she told Jonathan she was leaving the firm and turning down the judgeship.

Whatever it was, it no longer mattered. As Steven was fond of saying, the fat was in the fire.

Knowing and understanding all that, why did Jonathan want to kill her? Assuming, of course, that what the FBI agents said was true. Why didn’t he just fade away, call off the wedding, and drop off the face of the earth? Surely he wasn’t madly, passionately in love with her. No, it had to be more than that. Maybe he thought she knew something she didn’t realize she knew. Like signing those documents the night he got her drunk? He was too cocky, too arrogant to believe the authorities were on his trail. Or was he?

He’d canceled the Thanksgiving trip, then moved up his Christmas trip. Now, if the FBI was correct, he’d changed his plans again and was back in the States. Figuratively, if not literally, in her backyard. She thought about the ruckus the dogs had made earlier. Maybe he
was
in the backyard. Maybe he had tried to get into her house.

Lucy’s eyes snapped open. She hoped to God that she was safe here in Wiley’s house. She didn’t want any harm to come to him, Jake, or the dogs. She didn’t want to die either. She wanted to have a relationship with Wiley and maybe, just maybe, marry him and have children, a little girl to dress up in a bonnet and starched pinafore, and black patent Mary Janes. Did they still make pinafores for little girls? A little girl she could push on a swing attached to the big apple tree in the backyard, a little girl she could teach to ride a bike and to play hopscotch. A little girl who would run to her shouting, “Mommy, Mommy!” A little girl to kneel with at the side of her bed to say her nightly prayer. A little girl who smelled like warm sunshine and fresh flowers. A little girl to love, to hug, to squeeze, and to kiss. A little boy to deck out in sneakers and blue jeans, a little boy who looked like his daddy. A little boy who skinned his knees and waited for that kiss and the Band-Aid that would make it all go away. A little boy who would throw his arms around her neck, and say, “I love you, Mommy, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” A little boy with a red wagon filled with treasures. It would be the first thing she bought him. Every little boy needed a bright red wagon. Tears blurred in her eyes. Would she ever come out of this whole?

There were so many things she still wanted to do. She wanted to go to the seashore and paint pictures. She wanted to hang new wallpaper in her kitchen and paint the woodwork. She’d always wanted to swim with the dolphins. She wanted to go to the cemetery to visit her parents’ graves.

She wanted to run the New York Marathon, too. Someday. Building a small front porch onto her house was another thing she wanted to do. She hated the stoop, hated the small overhang. She wanted a front porch so she could sit on it in nice weather in the evenings. Preferably with someone like a husband and that little boy and girl she wanted so desperately. Strange how until meeting Wylie she had never wanted children. Had she somehow realized that Jonathan was not the type to be a father? If that wasn’t to be, then with Sadie and perhaps a neighbor stopping by just to chat with over a cup of coffee.

She wanted to belong to the neighborhood like Nellie, Rachel, and Wylie belonged. The neighbors counted on each other. She wanted them to count on her, too, just the way she wanted to be able to count on them. Plus a whole host of other things. Things she hadn’t thought about until the FBI agents warned her of her own mortality. Now, suddenly, those things seemed like the most important things in the world.

“I hate you, Jonathan St. Clair. I damn well hate your miserable guts.”

“Amen to that,” Wylie said groggily. He sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. His voice turned anxious when he asked, “Did something happen, Lucy?”

“No, Wylie, nothing happened. I was sitting here trying to figure out where I messed up. You know what I think. I think he picked me. Picked me, Wylie. I really think he thought he could mold me into whatever scheme I was to play a part in. I didn’t play the game right, though. Somehow or other I screwed up and threw his plans into a tailspin. Now, if we could just figure out what those plans are, maybe we could make this all go away and get on with our lives. How do you feel, Wylie?”