The slender man turned. “Yeah?”
“You better not stay in town tonight to work the phones or you won’t be getting home.”
“I heard,” Calvin answered. “A good night to be by the fire.”
DeeJay swore she could feel his eyes on her as she and Cade walked out.
And for some reason she remembered the sheriff’s remark that in some ways she resembled the victims.
“Cade?” They were heading for the grocery now to get tonight’s salad makings and some other things in case they couldn’t get out tomorrow.
“Yeah?”
“Do you agree with Dalton? Do I look like the vics?”
“What brought that up?”
She wasn’t about to tell him that a young man’s stare had made her uneasy. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last.
Sheesh, it wasn’t even as if he had stared for long. “I don’t know. It just popped up.” She felt foolish already for her reaction to something so common, and to link it with a remark from the sheriff that had been clearly off-the cuff, the way some folks said others looked like movie stars? Or maybe the guy had known one of the victims and had, for an instant, seen the resemblance that Gage had noted. Still, she filed away his face and name in case he turned up again.
“Apart from being a woman, nearly a foot too tall and at least twenty pounds heavier?”
She thought he was going to laugh at her, but then he surprised her.
“Yeah,” he said. “You do.”
“Actually, thirty pounds,” she said, once her heart stopped skipping nervously. “Muscle.”
A laugh burst from him. “Well, then, you’ve got nothing to worry about. And isn’t that a guy’s line? It’s all muscle?”
Reluctantly, she laughed, too. “Yeah. But in this case it’s true.”
“Then even more reason he won’t look your way.”
Unless he decided to change his routine for some reason. The thought plagued her all the way home.
A ticking time bomb. One who made his own rules. Time seemed terribly short.
Chapter 6
They had barely finished carrying the groceries in when their landlord, Hank Jackson, showed up. He was so bundled against the cold that it was impossible to tell how lanky he was. They invited him in for coffee, but he waved the offer away. “Figured you don’t have the TV hooked up, seeing as how you’re not gonna be here long, so I wanted to warn you. We’ve got a really bad storm moving in, maybe a foot or more of snow by morning. Best lay in supplies and plan to hunker down. If you need anything, I’ll be at home.”
“Did they call off the search parties?” DeeJay asked.
Hank nodded. “No point in getting somebody else lost. High winds are coming in, too, so visibility will be shot.”
“That’s got to be hard on that boy’s family.”