At the front door, he paused. “We’ll get this done, Rory. You’ll see.” He smiled, and then he was gone.
Rory closed and locked the door. She watched through the window as he drove away. She turned and leaned against the door. For a long while, she just stood there and thought about the fact that this would be her first night in a real bed—her bed in more than two years.
Her composure started to crumble. The tears spilled over first. She struggled to steel herself so that she could hold them back, but that wasn’t happening.
She cried. Her body shuddered so hard she put her arms around herself and held tightly. She felt so alone.
At first—after what happened—she had been in shock. Wounded and needing to heal, physically and emotionally. Then the new nightmare began—the investigation turned toward her as the murderer of her own husband. She had never been allowed to grieve Pete, not properly. She’d been in a fight for her life from her injuries and then from the investigation. Once she was in prison, she had lapsed into a flood of grief so overwhelming she still didn’t know how she had survived it. Finally, she had reached that hollow place. The place where there were no more feelings, no more anything. There was only existing.
Now all those numbed feelings suddenly came rushing back. Loneliness. Fear. Uncertainty. Hope. Dear God, how long had it been since she dared to hope?
The Colby Agency was her only hope.
CHAPTER THREE
Kindred Residence
Tupelo Pike
Scottsboro, 11:30 p.m.
Rory told herself she should be in bed by now, but there was something about being able to stay up as long as she liked—with the lights on. No one could tell her when the lights were to go off. No one could tell her when she could eat and when she couldn’t. To that end, she had a snack cake, a soft drink and a bowl of popcorn on the coffee table in front of her. Also, scattered across the battered wood top was an empty snack cake wrapper as well as one that had held cheesy crackers. And the bowl of popcorn was half empty. To her credit, she also had a bottle of water.
She leaned back and groaned. She was stuffed. Couldn’t eat another bite if her life depended on it. A smile spread across her lips. It was awesome. She patted her belly and reminded herself that she couldn’t keep doing this for long. But tonight, if she were a drinker or a smoker, she would overindulge in those wicked activities as well. But she’d never been a smoker and not much of a drinker. Wine occasionally and the champagne on her wedding day.
Her smile wilted. Images from that day flashed rapid-fire through her mind like a good movie that suddenly turned bad on fast-forward. She pushed the painful images away, didn’t want to look just now.
Pushing to her feet, she grabbed her cell phone and headed to the kitchen. She needed some air. She tucked her new cell phone into the pocket of the nightgown she’d dug out of one of Lulu’s drawers. None of the clothes that Austin had brought had included sleepwear. Mr. and Mrs. Harris had probably burned everything else. Not that she would have wanted to sleep in anything she’d worn before…when Pete had slept beside her.
She shook off the thoughts. Didn’t matter. She had worked really hard not to hold his parents’ beliefs about her against them. Their son had been murdered, and the only evidence of who killed him pointed to Rory. Of course they hated her.
“Looking forward,” she murmured, “not backward.” At least for tonight. Dissecting every moment of that terrible time was necessary, but she didn’t have to start tonight.
She slipped out the back door and sat down on the porch step. The air was cooler now that it was well after dark. She stared up at the moon and stars. The sight brought back her smile. She hadn’t seen those in a long time. There had been no window in her cell. What little time she had been allowed outside was during the daylight hours. Funny how you didn’t realize how much you would miss something until it was gone with no possibility of ever being available to you again. As if Nature had decided she needed the break, a shooting star flashed across the sky.
Rory smiled. Maybe this was a sign that everything really was going to be all right.
Glass shattered.
Rory shot to her feet and hurried to the back door. Listening for trouble, she slipped through the house, stalled at the front window. A white four-door pickup truck roared away, the sound fading in the night as it disappeared.
She froze, the remembered sound of shattering glass echoing in her mind.
The windows in the living room were all intact as far as she could see. She headed for the hall. The first room on the right was the one Austin had made into an office. She flipped the switch for the overhead light.
Broken glass glinted on the old hardwood floor. A big rock lay in the middle of it.
The window wasn’t that large, but it was big enough to have made a mess.
“Damn it.”
She retraced her steps to the kitchen. The broom hung on a nail by the back door as it always had. Dustpan sat on the floor, propped against the wall behind it. She grabbed both and headed back to the home office. The windows were old, so the glass had shattered in dozens of pieces big and small. Some shards remained in the sash like broken teeth.
“That’s what happens when you let your guard down, Rory.” Just when she’d started to relax, there was a reminder that she had no right to do so. She was theMurder Bride, and no one believed her story.
Time was required, but she finally swept all the shards into the dustpan without cutting herself. She shoved the rock into a corner with the broom, then emptied the glass into the kitchen garbage can, walked back to her new office and swept the room all over again. In her experience, you never got up all the broken glass the first time. Inevitably a piece would wind up in your foot. A round with the vacuum cleaner was next. It was old, and she wasn’t sure how well it worked, but she gave it a try nonetheless.
When she was satisfied that she’d done all she could to clean up any remaining fragments, she grabbed her phone and the flashlight that stood on the counter next to the back door. Lulu had kept one there for as long as Rory could remember. Way before flashlight apps had been invented for cell phones.
