Heroes Are My Weakness(29)

Jaycie finally looked at her, a long piece of blond hair falling over her pale cheek. “We both know he’s going to. I can stay with Lisa for a couple of days, but what do I do after that? My baby . . .” Her face crumpled. “Livia’s already been through so much.”

“I’ll talk to him.” It was the last thing Annie wanted to do, but she couldn’t think of any other way to offer Jaycie comfort. “He’s . . . still in town?”

Jaycie nodded. “He took the recycling in because I couldn’t do it. I can’t blame him for wanting to get rid of me. It’s impossible for me to do what I was hired to do.”

Annie could blame him, and she didn’t like the wistful softening in Jaycie’s eyes. Was being attracted to cruel men her pattern?

Jaycie pushed herself up from the table and reached for her crutches. “I need to check on Livia.”

Annie wanted to hurt him. Now, while he was away from the house. Send him back to the mainland. She grabbed a bottle from the refrigerator and went upstairs, entering the turret through the door at the end of the hallway. She made her way to the turret’s only bathroom, where a damp towel hung next to the shower stall.

The sink looked as though it had been wiped clean since his morning shave. She turned the ketchup bottle she’d brought with her upside down and squirted a few drips in her hand. Not a lot. Only a trace. Spreading her fingers, she ran them down the bottom left corner of the mirror leaving the faintest red smudge behind. Nothing too obvious. Something that might or might not look like a bloody handprint. Something so faint he’d have to wonder if he’d overlooked it that morning or, if he hadn’t, what had happened since then to put it there.

It would be so much more satisfying to leave a knife plunged into his bed pillow, but if she went too far, he’d stop suspecting ghosts and start suspecting her. She wanted to make him question his sanity, not look for a perpetrator, exactly what she hoped she’d accomplished when she’d sabotaged his grandmother’s clock last week.

She’d made the trek back to Harp House in the dead of night, a treacherous trip she’d had to talk herself into. But her trepidation had been more than worth it. Earlier that day she’d checked the hinges on the turret’s outside door to make sure they wouldn’t squeak. They hadn’t, and nothing had given her away when she’d let herself in shortly before two in the morning. It had been a simple task to creep into the living room while Theo slept upstairs. She’d pulled the clock just far enough away from the wall to slip in the fresh battery she’d brought to replace the dead one she’d removed earlier. Once that was done, she reset the time so the clock would chime midnight, but only after she was safely back at the cottage. Pure genius.

But the memory didn’t cheer her. After everything he’d done, these pranks felt more juvenile than menacing. She needed to up her game, but she couldn’t figure out how to do that without getting caught.

She heard a noise from behind. Sucking in her breath, she spun around.

It was the black cat.

“Oh, my god . . .” She fell to her knees. The cat stared at her out of golden eyes. “How did you get in here? Did he lure you in? You have to stay away from him. You can’t come in here.”

The cat turned its head and flounced off into Theo’s bedroom. She went after him, but he’d gone under the bed. She got down on her stomach and tried to convince him to come out. “Come here, kitty. Here, kitty.”

The cat wouldn’t budge.

“He’s feeding you, isn’t he?” she said. “Don’t let him feed you. You have no idea what he’s putting in your Fancy Feast.”

As the cat continued to elude her efforts, she grew increasingly frustrated. “You stupid cat! I’m trying to help you.”

The cat dug its claws into the rug, stretched, and yawned in her face.

She reached under the bed, extending her arm. The cat lifted his head, and then, miraculously, started to crawl toward her. She held her breath. The cat approached her hand, sniffed, and began licking her fingers.

A ketchup-loving cat.

As long as she kept a little ketchup on her fingers, the cat was content to let her pick him up, carry him back into the main house and down to the kitchen. Jaycie was still with Livia, so there were no witnesses to Annie’s struggle getting an extremely pissed-off animal into the lidded picnic basket she found in the pantry. The cat howled like a car siren all the way down to the cottage.

By the time she got him inside, her nerves were scraped as raw as the scratches on her arms. “Believe me, I don’t like this any better than you do.” She flipped open the lid. The cat jumped out, arched his back, and hissed at her.