In the center of her yard, she took a moment just to breathe, eyes up, arms out. She was here, alive, damaged, but coming back. She slid her hands into her pockets and looked around the postage stamp of a yard, its scraggly grass littered with leaves from the one crooked tree planted at the foot of it. The snow would come in a month or so, but next spring, maybe she’d do something with the grass. Sod it or whatever. Life. Full of maybes.
A shiver swept over her, and she flipped her collar up. The night felt different. This was the second time she’d had the feeling that someone was watching her, and she turned three sixty, slowly peering into the shadows, watching for unexpected movement, but finding nothing. Paranoia. It was the case getting inside her bones.
A large truck rattled down the street out front, and the dog took its cue, barking itself hoarse. Somewhere close, the steady beat of rap music blasted out of a window. That sealed it. She headed inside for the quiet but caught sight of something she hadn’t noticed before on the grass. Cigarette butts. About a half dozen of them clustered maybe ten feet from her back door. Too many to have just blown in on the wind. Too close together to be by chance.
Squatting down, she noted the slight indentations in the lawn. Shoe prints. Too big to be hers. She shot up, turned in a circle, listening again to the night, feeling eyes she couldn’t see. The calm she’d had a moment ago was gone, and so was the hopeful outlook she’d managed to conjure up.
Someone had been in her yard, watching her house, watching her. They had stood where she was standing now. She stared at the house to see what her intruder might have seen. Her kitchen window, the curtains partly open. Her refrigerator, her kitchen sink. Her eyes trailed up to the second floor, to her bedroom window. It was a violation, theft of her privacy.
An angry fire started deep and bubbled up to lodge in her throat. Maybe fear should have been the prevailing emotion, but she wasn’t afraid. She was hyperalert—eyes, ears, all senses on point—and she was pissed. Her first thought: Bodie Morgan, the twitchy stalker who’d stood in Reese Tynan’s yard watching her windows. That thought made her even angrier.
She stomped up her back steps, flung her door open, and barreled into the kitchen, where she yanked open the catchall drawer, pulled out a flashlight, and slammed the drawer shut. From the pantry shelf, she pulled down a small Ziploc bag and stuffed it into her pocket on the way through the house and out the front door. She stood on her front stoop and scanned the street, daring someone to show themselves.
Her car sat where she’d parked it. Nothing looked out of place, no busted windows, no flat tires. She walked around the vehicle, shining her flash along the chassis. She got down on all fours and checked underneath: clean. On her second pass, the flash hit a spot on the back end of her muffler, and the metal lit up like Christmas. A circle the size of a tennis ball, reflective, bright. Down on her back, she scooted her way under the rear of the car and ran a finger over it. Dry. She sniffed her finger. Whatever it was had a metallic odor, pungent. Some kind of spray?
After wiggling out from underneath, she stood, dusted herself off, looking up and down the block, fuming, unsettled. Reflective spray, the kind cyclists used at night so cars could see them in the dark. Someone had tagged her car. They wouldn’t have had to follow close. Anyone could have trailed her from more than a block away and not lost her. She’d led them right to her place.
Foster walked up and down the block, checking parked cars for skulking occupants. She walked both sides of the block, listening for running engines. No one was there. Back at her front door, she called Li from the porch.
“Whaddup, pard?” she answered.
Foster let a beat go, not sure how to say it, fighting the vulnerable position she found herself in. “Are you alone?” She moved away from the porch light into the shadows and kept her head on a swivel. “Is your mother or your husband in the room with you now?”
Foster could sense Li clock in over the phone. “It’s after ten. He’s at the hospital. She’s in bed. What’s going on?”
Foster went inside, locking the door behind her, then passed through the kitchen to the yard, plucking the baggie out of her pocket as she went. The butts were still there. Reaching down, she plucked them up and secured them in the bag. “Someone followed me home. I found reflective spray on the back of my car the size of a satellite dish. He couldn’t have lost me if he tried. Someone’s also been in my yard. Could be unrelated, but I don’t think it is. I’m hoping it’s just me he chose to tag, but you need to go out and check your car right now.”
“Already moving,” Li said. Foster could feel the tension in Li’s voice and hear the rustle of her clothing, her breathing, and the opening and closing of a door. “You say ‘he’？ You mean Morgan?”
Foster didn’t move a single muscle while she waited for Li’s report. “I hope so,” she said. “If it isn’t, we’ve got a bigger problem.” She listened to Li’s end of the line. For a time, she heard nothing but Li walking and breathing, and then . . .
“Son of a bitch.”
“He knows where you live too,” Foster said.
“Son of a bitch!”
It sounded like Li was running. Her breathing was heavier now, panicked, short. “I’m moving my family. They can stay with my brother. Then I’m coming in. Meet you there.”
The line went dead. Foster slipped her phone back in her pocket, then decided to take another look around the yard, reclaiming it as hers. Standard search pattern, though there wasn’t much ground to cover. He’d elevated the game. Morgan, or whoever. And made a mistake.
She didn’t scream when she found the cat’s body lying against her back fence. His eyes were bugged, his tongue hanging out of his mouth. From where she stood, the flashlight shaking in her hand, she could see his neck had been broken. She flicked the light off and stood there in the dark. She barely registered the sound of the dog barking down the street. Lost wasn’t her cat. Neither of them had claimed the other, but she cried anyway.
CHAPTER 63
He walked around the old house, a small flashlight pointed downward, not wanting to draw attention to his presence this late at night. He knocked on walls, flexed the floorboards, getting a feel for the place. It wasn’t much. Not like the perfect house they’d had before, but it would do for now. He’d made sure of the basement. It was wide and deep with thick concrete walls. There was a separate entrance and sturdy stairs, room enough for a table and plenty of wall space for his tools, for crafting and creating. He was satisfied. For now.
He eased open the basement door and peered down the stairs before slowly making his way down in the dark, his feet thudding decisively on the wooden planks. There was a stale reek of dust and damp and long-ago sewage, but he could air things out when he moved his things in. Mornings, there would be natural light flooding in below from glass block windows that ran all along the basement’s length. They would have to go. He’d block them out or cover them up, in the meantime. Easy job. When he pulled the string attached to the single light bulb overhead, the dull light didn’t reach far into cobwebby corners, though there was nothing much to see yet, only a few discarded rags, a junked bed frame covered in years of dust, and an old rusty bucket someone had left behind.