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“What? No, I’m not moving.”
“I didn’t think so, but there’s a moving van in front of your town house. I told the guy you aren’t moving, but he has a signed work order to move out your furniture.”
Leah imagined the floor wobbling under her feet. “What! I’m not moving.”
“The movers are loading boxes as I speak.”
Leah gripped the phone, leaning into the receiver as if it would convey more desperation. “Julia, do me a favor and call the cops. I’m headed home right now.”
“Will do.”
Leah explained the situation to Gail and then, grabbing her coat, hurried to her car. She drove home, running more than a couple of yellow lights. When she pulled up in front of her town house, a yellow Ace moving van was parked in her driveway. The back of the truck was open, the ramp lowered to the ground. Three large-muscled men stood in front of her door talking to two uniformed cops.
Leah parked in front of the house and ran up to her door. “What’s going on here?”
A tall uniformed officer broke away from the movers and came closer to her. “Are you Leah Carson?”
“That’s Leah,” Julia said.
The officer ignored her neighbor. “Are you Leah Carson?” “I am. What’s going on here?”
“Do you have identification?”
“This is my house!”
“Ma’am, we need to be sure.”
With trembling hands, she dug into her purse and fished out her wallet. She plucked out her newly minted Tennessee driver’s license with her Nashville address and handed it to him. He studied her name. “Would you mind waiting right here?”
“Why?”
“Just need to check out a few things.”
She folded her arms over her chest, irritated that she had to go to such lengths to get people off her property. But as much as she wanted to rant and rail, logic called and told her to calm down. “Sure. Go ahead.”
She glanced at her neighbor and the movers, who looked confused and annoyed. As the officer slid behind the wheel of his car with her license and typed into his computer, she looked at the movers. “Who sent you here?”
The tallest, a dark-skinned man with broad shoulders and flecks of gray at his temples, said, “The work order came in two days ago.”
“Who put in the work order?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that we were supposed to pack the whole place up and move it.”
“Move it where?” The tone of her voice spiked with anger and fear.
He glanced at his work order. “A storage facility north of town. There’s a unit waiting to take the furniture into storage.”
“Can I see your work order?”
“Sure.” He lifted the clipboard at his side and pulled off the top sheet. “This is what I had in my assignment box last night.”
She read over the order, keying in on the vital information. It was her name, address, even her phone number. Paid in full. Her gaze skipped to the last line. She wanted to know who had issued the order. The name was Leah Carson.
She gripped the strap of her purse as if it were her lifeline. “This doesn’t make sense. I didn’t order this move.”
He flipped through the pages and held up a paper with her name and the last four digits of her credit card number. “Your name is on the credit card receipt.”
The order had been placed last week. Before the bank had shut down this account. “I didn’t order any of this!” she said, louder than she’d intended.
She took the receipt, her stomach tightening with nausea. The bank hadn’t called her about this expense, but then, why would they? It was a local buy and not extravagant, and it had been made before they’d issued a new card. She’d have picked up on it when her credit card statement came in at the end of the month, but that would have been too late to stop today’s fiasco.
A black SUV pulled up behind the police car, and she instantly recognized Alex Morgan as he got out. The folds of his overcoat caught in the wind, revealing his badge and gun as he strode toward her.
She was glad to see him in an odd sort of way. The officer got out of his car and Alex spoke to him for several minutes. His gaze locked on Leah, and he strode toward her in long confident strides.
“Want to tell me what’s going on?”
His calm frustrated her. She wanted him to be upset and screaming. “I don’t know. I got a call from my neighbor asking me why I was moving.”
“Why’re you moving?”
“I’m not moving! I didn’t order this.” She held the now-crumpled work order in her fist. “My name is on the form, but I didn’t authorize it.”
“She paid for it,” the mover said.
“I didn’t pay for it willingly.” She looked at Alex.
“Someone skimmed my credit card and used it for the purchase. This is so classic Philip!”
Alex turned toward the officer. “I think we can establish that this is a mistake.”
The officer nodded. “Sounds like it.”
The lack of conviction in his voice irritated her, as if he was suggesting that she was lying. She glared at the officer as Alex stepped between them. He turned to the movers. “Whatever you took out, put it back.”
“I got to call my boss.”
“You can do that right after you put what you removed back.” Steel coated each syllable.
The movers glanced at each other, then headed toward the back of the truck. They spent the next fifteen minutes moving boxes back into the house. Leah noticed most were marked KITCHEN.
When her belongings had been put back in the house, she walked up to the mover. “I want the name of your supervisor.”
He handed her a card and her house key.
She studied the new key. “Where did you get this?”
“Under the mat, just like you said.”
“I don’t leave keys under the mat. Ever!”
He sighed, not sure how to handle her. “Lady, it’s what I was told.”
“Sure. Thanks.” She watched as he and his coworker got in the truck and drove off.
Leah turned to her neighbor and tried to smile. “Julia, thank you for calling. I don’t know what I would have done if I came home and everything was gone.”
Julia glanced from Leah to Alex. “Sure, Leah. Glad to help.”
Leah watched her walk away, so tempted to call out and say, “I didn’t do this! I’m not crazy!”
But she kept her silence, aware that when doubt had been sewn into another’s mind, shouting only reinforced it. She moved into her house to survey the damage. Most of the furniture was in place, but her pictures had been removed from the walls and wrapped in brown paper. Her kitchen had been stripped and packed away in the boxes that now stood in the center of the room. It would take her hours to unpack.
The front door closed softly behind her. She turned to see Alex surveying the house.
“I wasn’t moving,” she said.
“I know.”
God, how she wanted to believe it was a mistake. She wanted to ferret out a reason th
at would offer any explanation other than the actual one. Philip. “He’s playing with me.”
“Why would he bother with this kind of game?”
“Because he knows it will ruin my day. He’ll be all I think about. He had a knack for messing up my days with just a phone call or the click of a mouse.”
He drew in a breath. “Have you seen any sign of him?”
Hands on hips, she thumbed her index finger. “None. But that’s part of his thing. He never shows his face.”
He tugged his cuffs down over his thick wrists. “Okay.”
“He was always so good at messing with me. He could make me feel like I was going insane.” She raised fists to her temples and turned. “When I left him, he was furious. He stalked me for months.”
“Tell me what happened the night he stabbed you.”
The hard edge had softened. “You’ve read the reports.”
“You tell me.”
The story had been bottled up for years; she’d shared only bits and pieces with a very few people. “He broke into my apartment. When I woke up, he was standing in the corner of my room. I called nine-one-one, but we both knew I’d be dead before the cops arrived.” She shoved out a sigh, as if some poison had been trapped in her lungs. “After the first plunge of the knife, adrenaline exploded in me. I forgot about the pain. I assumed he would kill me, but I refused to go easy.”
A weight lifted from her shoulders. Alex had dug into her past without asking, but as they stood there together, she sensed some of her burden had shifted to his shoulders. She liked Alex. Appreciated his intelligence. But she couldn’t say whether she fully trusted him. She nearly laughed. He was here, listening, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“Anything else happen since we spoke?”
“Someone abandoned a dog at the clinic.”
“That happens, doesn’t it?”
“This would be the kind of thing Philip would do. He’d give me something he knew I’d care about and then take it away so I’d suffer.”
Alex stared at Leah’s flushed face and the unshed tears that glistened. She glanced at her hands twisting her thumb and index finger over an invisible wedding ring. “I was raised in a good home. I’m smart. I should’ve figured out this guy was trouble. But I missed all the warning signs.”
