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Chapter Six
Maggie spends the next hour drivingaimlessly around Palm Beach Gardens, alternating between berating herself and trying to calm herself down. What on earth possessed her to go to the mall? She almost never goes to the mall, for God’s sake. And Lola’s Lingerie, of all places? What was she thinking?
Okay, calm down. Calm down. It’s not the end of the world. No one followed you. You didn’t see anyone suspicious.
Except, of course, that girl. That…what did she say her name was? Heather? Hilda? Something with anH…Heidi? Yes, Heidi. What difference does it make what her name is? What matters is that she knows where you live.
Of course she knows where you live. She’s your neighbor.
Or so she says. How can you be sure?
Maggie has a sudden image of a large moving van parked in the driveway of one of the two houses closest to Hood Road. She remembers watching from her window and carefully checking out the two men carrying boxes and furniture inside. She has a vague recollection of a woman, a woman several decades older than this Heidi person, directing the movers from the doorway. So how can she be sure the young woman she ran into in Lola’s Lingerie is really who she says she is?
I should have paid more attention. It’s one thing not to get too chummy with the neighbors. It’s another thing to ignore them so completely that you don’t recognize them.
“You’re being paranoid,”she hears Craig say, accompanied by the familiar sad shake of his head.“I thought it would improve with the move, with time, but you’re actually getting worse. I’m sorry, Maggie. I don’t think I can live like this much longer.”
“Fuck you,” Maggie says out loud, hearing her phone vibrate in her bag. She reaches inside it, the back of her hand brushing against the handle of the Glock 19. She recalls the stunned look on Heidi’s face when she saw it and wonders if the young woman really believed it was a toy.
She glances at the phone and sees the call is from Craig. “Sorry, but you’re the last person I want to talk to right now,” she says, switching off the phone and steering the car toward the ocean. Her husband has been pestering her about his coming over to pick up a few things he inadvertently left behind when he moved out—an old camera and some cuff links he rarely wears. Maggie promptly threw the items into a box and hid them at the back of the closet in her son’s room, claiming not to have seen them.
When did I become so petty?she wonders, pulling into a parking lot across from the public beach. “Petty and paranoid, that’s me.”
Of course, he could be calling because something has come up and he won’t be able to pick up the kids at school or take them to dinner as planned. So she’ll have to phone him at some point.
Just not now.
She gets out of her car and cuts across the already crowded lot toward A1A, the surprisingly calm ocean stretched out majestically before her.
She wonders if Craig is calling because he’s lonely, because he still loves her, misses her, wants to come home.
It’s possible. It’s been three months since he left and neither one of them has been to see a lawyer, so maybe he’s having second thoughts. Would she take him back?
Maggie breathes in the ocean’s heady scent as she crosses the road and descends the wooden steps to the beach. She glances at the young women in bikinis sunning themselves and the young men tossing Frisbees back and forth as she takes off her sandals and walks barefoot in the sand. Surely no one would risk attacking her on a public beach, she thinks, casting repeated glances over her shoulder nevertheless, reassured by the presence of the lifeguard sitting on his high perch and the sound of toddlers playing nearby.
She walks for maybe half an hour before plopping down on the warm sand and watching a group of teenagers trying to bodysurf the small, intermittent waves. She feels the sun on her legs, on her arms, in her hair, and she smiles, her body finally starting to relax, her insides to untwist. The ocean has always been a soothing influence in her life, regardless of what coast she’s on. It calmed her after the death of her parents, her father from a stroke when she was thirty-three, her mother from cancer five years later.
At least they’d been spared the events of the last few years, Maggie thinks, noticing two burly-looking men walking toward her. Instinctively, her hand reaches into her purse, searching for the gun’s handle. But the men, both wearing the skimpiest of bathing suits, don’t even look in her direction as they stroll past.
Maggie shakes her head as she pushes herself to her feet. Had she really thought there might be weapons secreted inside their Speedos?
Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Okay, Maggie decides. When she starts quoting Mae West, it’s time to go home.
The small cul-de-sac is quiet when she pulls her SUV into the driveway. No one is outside watering the lawn; no one is watching her from a window; no one is squatting behind a stubby palmetto palm. There’s a luxury car she doesn’t recognize parked in front of Mrs. Fisher’s house, but it probably belongs to the old lady’s son. Even so, she checks the license plate to make sure the car isn’t a rental.
She knows something is wrong the second her key unlocks the door. Her hand is reflexively reaching out to silence the thirty-second warning beep that precedes the full-blown alarm when she feels the house’s eerie quiet seep into her pores and realizes that the alarm isn’t on.
How can that be?I watchedErin set it this morning. Didn’t I?
She leaves the front door open as she pulls her gun and her cellphone out of her purse, holding one in each hand as the bag drops to the floor.Don’t be stupid,she tells herself as she tiptoes toward the stairs.You aren’t some girl in a cheesy horror movie, going where common sense dictates you don’t go.Maggie stops, about to call 911 when the realization that she could be mistaken stills her fingers. Is it possible that in the morning rush to get out, Erin had tapped in an incorrect code? She has to be sure before she calls in the troops. She can’t afford to be known as the girl who cried wolf.
Maggie proceeds slowly and cautiously up the stairs, gun in one hand, phone in the other, the first two emergency digits already pressed. But surely if someone has been waiting to ambush her, he would have heard her car pull into the driveway, and she’d be dead already.
Unless he wants to confront her directly. Unless he wants to see the look on her face when he follows through with his implied threats, to let her know he made good on his silent promise, that his will be the last eyes hers see before he closes them forever.
A sudden noise echoes down the hall. Maggie swings around, her phone dropping to the floor as she aims the gun in the direction of the sound and prepares to pull the trigger. “I have a gun,” she warns the intruder, as she was taught to do.
