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So Adam kept his distance the next day, watched her house during the morning and saw Tyler McBride and his little boy, Sam, pay her a visit around eleven o’clock. The kid was really cute, but he didn’t yell and jump around like other kids his age. Was everyone right? Had the son witnessed McBride killing his mother, or was it just talk?

Adam wondered what was going on between Tyler McBride and Becca Matlock/Powell. He watched Sheriff Gaffney pay her a visit, even overheard the sheriff speaking to her outside the front door, on the big wraparound porch. He heard them clearly.

“Nothing yet from the medical examiner’s office, Sheriff?”

“They say hopefully tomorrow. I just wanted to go over the basement again, see what I could sniff out. My boys didn’t find any fingerprints, but just maybe there’s something there that we all missed. Oh, and another thing, Rachel Ryan asked me to tell you that some boys would be arriving to remove the tree and fix the window for you.”

The sheriff left after an hour, a chocolate chip cookie in his hand. Adam knew it was chocolate chip. He could smell the chocolate from twenty yards and was salivating.

He sent an e-mail after lunch and within an hour knew all about how Becca Matlock had met Tyler McBride at Dartmouth College. Had the two of them been college sweethearts? Lovers? Perhaps. It was interesting. And now everyone believed the skeleton was Tyler McBride’s missing wife, Ann. He’d find out everything he could about Tyler McBride. He supposed there was a certain possible irony at play here. What if she’d managed to get away from one stalker only to stumble upon a man who’d done away with his wife?

Yep, her luck sucked, big-time.

He still wasn’t ready to approach her, she was too spooked. So he kept an eye on her that evening as well. She didn’t leave the house. Since it stayed light so late in Maine during the summer months, five guys, all armed with chain saws, came to take care of the old fallen hemlock that lay along the west side of the house. They pulled the limb out of the upstairs window and sawed it up. They cut off and sawed up the branches from the tree, then wrapped thick chains around the trunk and dragged the tree away.

Through all of this, Becca read outside on the wraparound porch, sitting in an old glider, rocking back and forth until he was nearly nauseated watching that slow back and forth, that never-ending back and forth, and hearing the small creaking sounds that went with every movement in between the loud grating bursts from the chain saws.

She went to bed early.

Around noon the next day, Becca was thanking the windowpane guy for replacing the glass in her bedroom window. Not half an hour later, Tyler and Sam were there, eating tuna fish sandwiches at her kitchen table. She said, “We should be hearing from Sheriff Gaffney soon, Tyler. It should be today, that’s what he said when he came yesterday. They’re sure taking their time. Then all this nonsense will be over.”

He was silent for the longest time, chewing his sandwich, helping Sam eat his, then said finally, some anger in his voice, which surprised her, “You’re quite the optimist, Becca.”

But she wasn’t thinking about the skeleton at that moment. She was wondering why that man—Adam Carruthers—was watching her house. He was standing motionless just to the right, in amongst the spruce trees, not twenty feet away. He wasn’t the stalker. It wasn’t his voice, she was sure of that. The stalker’s voice was not old, not young, but unnervingly smooth. She knew she would recognize that voice from hell anywhere. Carruthers’s voice was different. But who was he? And why was he so interested in her?

Adam stretched. He went through a few relaxing tae kwon do moves to ease his muscles. He was just in the process of slowly raising his left leg, his left arm extended fully, when she said from behind him, “Your arm is a bit too high. Lower your elbow at least an inch and extend your wrist, yeah, and pull your fingers back a bit more. That’s better.