I told him I was fine.
Who put Molly outside?
What did the hooded young guy have to do with Molly? With our family photos? With the night Belinda died? His visits could not be a coincidence. And they carried a definite message, be afraid, presumably meant for Stefan. But Stefan had not been with me on my little fact-finding journey. So he meant to scare me. Why me? I didn’t kill anybody. This was part of…something. It made no sense. Maybe it made no sense because you have to be crazy for it to make sense.
How could this guy creep around for months without anyone else but me ever seeing him, except for that one time on the highway on the way back from the prison?
But since then, it had only been me. Was there an image? I realized that I hadn’t checked the CCTV across from the parking lot at Ferber Humanities Hall. I made a mental note to suggest that someone from campus police do that, if they preserved the surveillance tape that far back and didn’t tape over it. What did I care if they thought I was nuts? They probably already thought I was nuts.
The other thing I thought about were those cases, maybe not even a dozen, but I’d read about them. All you had to do to find out about them was to open the trap door under human doings and drop down into the darkness. They were those cases in which the police had photos of a suspect, perhaps even video, even a few seconds of voice recorded on a victim’s phone, and they still couldn’t identify the person. They had eyewitnesses who could describe people well. The eyewitnesses watched as a short middle-aged man with cropped ginger hair sprinted across a picnic park to grab two fourteen-year-old cousins, by the shoulder and force both of them into a minivan （silver, with a tan interior, possibly leather）。 In yet another unsolved case, at least two observers heard an eighteen-year-old girl cry out for her father and the shriek of her personal alarm when it deployed. The witnesses saw two men, both of them wearing stocking caps with Chicago Bears logos, both of them wearing navy-blue quilted jackets. One of the women, whose big German Shepherd was roaring and straining at his leash, and who said she would regret the rest of her life that she didn’t let the dog go, was close enough to heard a man’s rough grumble instruct “Jerry” to “get her to shut up.”
Yes, those witnesses told police; yes, that drawing the sketch artist made looked like the guy who was shorter. Yes, the guy who seemed older was over six feet tall. They would tell police about that summer evening near the old dam in detail—but not until two days after the teenager’s body was found. They didn’t come forward. They didn’t want to get involved in somebody else’s business.
* * *
The next day, I called Pete Sunday, knowing that I would sound at best paranoid, at worst institution-ready. I was sure the hooded figure was after us.
“If nothing was taken…”
“Nothing I know of.”
“It’s clear that somebody’s trying to scare you, Mrs. Christiansen…”
“Thea.”
“Thea, thanks. Still, I would say the same thing to you as the police down there told you about the car fire and the photographs. Yes, someone was watching you. Now, yesterday, you were alone, you were unarmed, so you were vulnerable. If…whoever it is wanted you dead, or badly hurt, you’d be dead or hurt now.”
I’d thought of the same thing. If he wanted to kill me, I’d already be dead. He could have killed us that first time he harassed us on the highway. He could have killed me in the rest area. He could have killed me here in my own driveway. He didn’t have to play games. That he was playing games meant he wanted something else, that there really was another story, no matter how adamant Stefan and Jep were. That guy had followed us down the highway from prison, and to my office, and then the cemetery and then to Black Creek again. He might even have been the one to set Stefan’s car on fire.
“True, of course. But isn’t threatening to scare somebody a crime?”
“Harassment is a crime. But it’s hard to prove, like stalking, on the basis of just a few events. Menacing is a crime of assault. But nobody has attempted to directly hurt you, correct.” He paused. “There has to be something else he wants and the big riddle is what, but the even bigger riddle is why.”
I thought the same thing. “Why me? If my son is the one who’s being warned, why scare me?”
“No idea.”
I pointed out that hearing a detective say “no idea” was not reassuring.
“I assume it has something to do with the murder, but that crime is over and Stefan has been punished. So what is the loose end?”