“There a problem, Nathan?” he asked.
Janie’s cheeks grew warm. Rafe—no, she had to think of him as Sheriff Salazar—was acting like her protector.
But her earlier gushy feelings about him were gone, thanks to the reminder of her past. She could take care of herself, thank you very much. “Do I need someone on my side, like a lawyer, detective?”
“Maybe you do,” Detective Williamson said. “You said you didn’t know Brittney Travis.”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, three of your students wrote about seeing the two of you together.”
“What?” Janie was so surprised, her knees almost gave out. “They’re wrong.”
“No, they’re not. I verified the connection.”
Detective Williamson pulled a piece of paper from a folder. Janie squinted at it.
“A copy of an appointment calendar from the tutoring center?”
Detective Williamson nodded. “And according to this, you met with Brittney Travis quite a few times.”
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS AFTER midnight when Janie let herself into her cottage. She hurried to the front window, waving at the sheriff to say she was safe, and then watching as the rear lights of his vehicle grew dimmer and dimmer before disappearing.
He’d wanted to come in, stay awhile, make sure she was okay.
But one way or another, all her life, she’d been trying to find that elusive “safe.” For a while, she’d believed she’d had it here, in Scorpion Ridge, with her sister.
She didn’t believe that any longer. And, once again, it was because of her experience with the police. It had taken Rafe, Janie and the supervisor from the tutoring center a good hour to convince Detective Nathan Williamson that Janie’d helped an average of ten students a day, and that average doubled during midterms or at the end of a semester.
Janie only remembered the students she tutored if there was something about them that stood out. The kids who came, asked questions, listened and then went away weren’t so easy to remember. There were too many of them, marching in a line, always one to take the place of the one before.
Janie let the curtain fall from her hand. One light blazed from the living-room lamp, but suddenly one wasn’t enough. Janie went through the whole house and turned on every light.
Then she changed from her school clothes—blue dress pants, white blouse, blue-and-white smock, for once not covered with paint—into pajamas. She was an oversize-T-shirt-baggy-shorts kind of sleeper.
Though tonight she wouldn’t sleep at all. It wasn’t even worth trying, so Janie headed for the kitchen, poured herself a glass of tea, and sat at her round table with a sketchbook open to a blank page. She spread out colored pencils in front of her, all newly sharpened.
She’d already re-created Derek’s art book twice.
Tonight she wanted to do something else: the actual crime scene. Derek hadn’t drawn it. Maybe he hadn’t been able to.
Since the age of ten, there’d barely been a day when Janie hadn’t drawn something, be it places, things or an animal. The one thing she’d never drawn was people.