Still Lake - Anne Stuart [35]
So what was a copy doing back in Gracey’s possession? How could she possibly have gotten it, when nowadays she was only just capable of seeing to her own physical needs and not much more?
She should set down her coffee and sneak back into Gracey’s room to get the book. Her mother would never miss it—she probably didn’t even realize it took place in the same town, some of it in the same house. Or if she did, it was only on some subconscious level.
Maybe the so-called Mr. Smith had given it to her. She still couldn’t rid herself of the firm belief that he was something other than what he said he was. No tourist immured himself in a falling-down house in the middle of nowhere, no matter how beautiful it was. Colby and Still Lake were well-kept secrets, and almost everyone who ended up here could trace their arrival to a long-time resident. Mr. Smith had appeared out of nowhere, and she didn’t trust him.
She was still stuck on the idea of him being a reporter, someone doing an update on the unsolved Colby murders. He was probably asking Gracey all sorts of questions, confusing her even more than she already was, sending her scurrying back to her dreamworld of serial killers and innocent victims.
Sophie was going to have to have a word with him. Order him to leave her mother the hell alone. Gracey had enough problems without having some blood-sucking journalist confusing her even further.
She’d make cookies, that’s what she’d do. Three-ginger cookies, and take them down to her reluctant neighbor. They could sit on his decrepit porch and she’d tell him, very politely, to keep away from her vulnerable mother. And at the same time, maybe she could find out for sure who he was and what the hell he was doing there.
For heaven’s sake, it wasn’t as if she was truly scared of the man. She didn’t let people intimidate her, and if Mr. Tall Dark and Brooding wanted to be standoffish, that was just fine with her. As long as he left her family alone, they’d get along just fine.
No, she’d face him, whether she wanted to or not, whether he frightened her or not. For some reason the notion was bizarrely irresistible, and she didn’t want to stop and consider why. To think about why the necessity of bearding the lion in his den was so appealing. Unless, at the advanced age of thirty, she’d developed a taste for lions.
Vermonters woke too damned early, and they started work at an obscene time of day. Griffin hadn’t slept well—for some reason he kept thinking about Sophie Davis’s bare feet beneath that silly nightgown. He’d drifted off sometime around dawn, and it was only a couple of hours later that the barely muffled sound of the chain saw rasped through his sleep.
He put one of the limp feather pillows over his head and groaned. He could have closed the window, but that would have meant getting up, and if he got up he might as well stay up. So he shut his eyes and his mind and willed himself back to sleep.
Only to be jarred awake by the thunderous pounding on the front door below his bedroom. He cursed, loudly, distinctly, and hauled his ass out of bed. He ignored the fact that that peremptory pounding sounded like the police. He had nothing to fear from the police, hadn’t in years. He was a lawyer, for Christ’s sake, and unlike Annelise he didn’t even skirt the limits of the law. It was his own special challenge to get what he wanted within the confines of the system that had put him in a maximum-security prison for five years for a crime he didn’t commit.
By the time he stumbled down the stairs he half expected to see old Zeke waiting there to arrest him. Behind the grimy lace curtains he could see several people standing on the porch, and he yanked the door open with a snarl.
For a moment he thought they were some kind of religious fanatics on a door-to-door mission for Christ. The tall