Smelling fresh from the body wash, she toweled off and slipped into her comfy things. She ran a brush through her hair and applied moisturizer to her face. And then she walked out of the door and into the hallway, turning back to flip off the bedroom light. Then she thought better of it and left it on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Back downstairs, Tess found Wyatt at his kitchen table, the dogs nowhere in sight. She noticed the oven was on, and the intoxicating smell of pizza filled the room.
“That delivery was quick,” she said.
“It doesn’t take them long. I kept it warm in the oven.” Wyatt pushed himself up from his chair and crossed the room to the cabinets, where he grabbed two plates. He held them out to Tess, along with a roll of paper towels. “You take these. I’ll take the pizza. Into the den we go. I suspect that’s where the dogs are.”
Tess followed Wyatt down the hallway to his cozy den and saw that the fire was already blazing. And sure enough, there were the three dogs, curled up together like a pack of wolves in the snow. What an impressive sight they were, tails curled around their noses. All three pricked up their ears when Tess and Wyatt walked into the room, but none stirred. Even Storm was as content as Tess had ever seen him.
“I guess all of that barking tired them out,” Tess said, reaching down and giving Storm a little scratch behind the ears.
“It’s not every day they get to do battle with the unseen,” Wyatt said. A big tray with a tiled top emblazoned with a drawing of a chef was positioned on the sectional, and he set the pizza box on it. Then, he poured glasses of wine from a bottle chilling in an ice bucket on the side table.
The pizza, the wine on ice, the fire—he had done all this while Tess was in the shower?
“I’m sorry I took so long up there,” she said, wincing a little. “I couldn’t resist washing some of the day away.”
“Think nothing of it,” he said. “I’m glad you made yourself comfortable.”
Wyatt sank onto the sofa and motioned for her to do the same. And with the pizza and wine on the tray between them, their first evening together at Wyatt’s house began. Somewhere in her heart, Tess knew it wouldn’t be their last.
She took a bite of her first slice and closed her eyes in food rapture. “This is delicious,” she murmured. “Small-town pizza. There is nothing better.”
“The best,” Wyatt said.
Tess took a sip of her wine. “I really should call my dad to tell him about what the police found,” she said, wrinkling her nose and resting her back against the sofa’s soft cushions.
“And yet, she makes no attempt to pick up the phone.” Wyatt raised his eyebrows.
“Is that bad?” Tess said, with a sigh. “After all that’s happened today, I just feel like . . .” She didn’t finish her thought. She didn’t quite know what she felt like.
Wyatt took another slice of pizza. “You don’t have to call him tonight if you don’t want to,” he said. “I get it. It’s a lot. You should take a little time to process it before you bring it up to him anyway. I’m thinking you don’t know quite what to say. I know I wouldn’t. And plus, it’s an hour later there right now.”
Tess thought about this for a moment. Wyatt was right. She didn’t know what exactly she’d say to her parents. A lot of information had been thrown at her that day, from Joe and his stories about Daisy, to Kathy and her stories about Grey and Frank, to the police and their revelation that the studio bathroom had been covered in blood. And not to mention the figure in the window and the unholy screaming. She wanted it all to stop, even for just a few hours.
“I’ll call him in the morning,” she said. “It would be ideal if I could wait to see if the police could identify the DNA. But can they even do that after so many years? Does it degrade or anything like that?”
“I’m no expert in police procedure, but I have watched every episode of Law & Order,” he said with a grin. “Seriously, though, I think they can extract that information after many years, yes. I mean, we hear all the time about the police opening cold cases after decades and solving them using DNA evidence, right? They’ve even exhumed bodies to do DNA matches.”
He was right, Tess thought. The police would surely run DNA tests on the blood at the crime scene. She wondered how long it would take. Weeks, maybe?
She grabbed another slice and noticed her hands were still shaking. So, the shower hadn’t washed the day away, after all.