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"I wasn't planning to. Just let me call Kayla Miggs and tell her not to come in." Tom Bennett lived farther away, and he would have already left by now, so it was too late to contact him.
Odell let her make her call, then had her accompany him to inspect the damage and see if anything was missing.
The hundred dollars in change Gabe had left in the register was gone, along with the radio he liked to play when he worked, but she couldn't tell if anything else had been taken. As she stared at the desecration, she remembered Gabe's awful stillness. Would this send him back to that empty place he'd been dwelling in before she'd come to Salvation?
Tom appeared and, after he'd been filled in on what had happened, accompanied them to the projection room. The FM receiver that controlled the sound equipment had been flung to the floor, but the projector itself was too large for that, so the intruder had pounded it with something heavy, probably the folding metal chair that lay on the floor.
The destruction was so mindless that it gave Rachel the chills. She turned to Odell. "I have to block off the entrance before the customers start arriving. Tom can tell you better than I if anything's missing up here."
To her relief, he didn't protest, and she fled. But she had just descended the outside stairs when a white Range Rover roared into the lot. Her heart sank. Of all the people she didn't want to see right now, Gabe's big brother headed the list.
Cal jumped out and stalked toward her. "What's going on? And where's Gabe? Tim Mercer heard on his police radio there was trouble out here."
"Gabe's not here. I don't know where he went."
Cal caught sight of the drive-in screen. "What the hell happened?"
"Someone vandalized the place last night after we closed."
He cursed under his breath. "Any idea who did it?"
She shook her head.
Cal caught sight of Odell and rushed up the steps. She made her escape to the ticket booth.
As soon as she got there, she fastened the chain across the entrance, then dragged the sawhorse with the Closed sign into place. She'd painted that sawhorse herself. The same purple as the ticket booth.
When she was done, she stepped inside the ticket booth and stared out at the highway. Had it only been six weeks since she'd come to Salvation? Images began to flip through her mind like a music video of all that had happened.
A shadow fell over the doorway. "Odell wants to talk to you."
She whirled around and saw Jake Armstrong standing there, looking even more insolent than the day he'd tried to arrest her. She felt a prickle of foreboding, then dismissed it. "All right."
Jake was standing too close to the door, forcing her to turn slightly so she could pass through without touching him. She'd barely taken three steps before she realized that the police chief, Cal, and Tom were all standing around her Escort, and the hatchback was open.
Her first thought was that they had no right to be poking around inside her car, but then she remembered the car belonged to Cal's wife. Still, she didn't like it. Her uneasiness increased, and she picked up her pace.
"Is there a problem?"
Cal turned to her, his expression vicious. "There's a big problem, lady. I guess you wanted a little revenge before you left town."
"Revenge? What are you talking about?"
Odell ambled around the hood of the car. In his hand, he held a crumpled white paper sack, the kind they used in the snack shop. It was smeared with what looked like melted chocolate ice cream. "We found the hundred dollars missing from the register. It was stuffed in this sack under the front seat of your car." He jerked his head toward the boxes in the backseat that were filled with her meager possessions. "Tom's small-screen TV was under one of those boxes and that radio you told us was missing."
Her heart kicked against her ribs. "But… I don't understand."
Tom looked hurt and confused. "It was the TV my wife gave me for my birthday. Remember I told you? So I could watch baseball while I was working."
Realization struck. They thought she was responsible. Her skin prickled with alarm. "Wait just a minute. I didn't do this! How could you even—"
"Save it for the judge," Cal snapped. He turned to Odell. "Since Gabe isn't around, I'm pressing charges."
She lurched forward, grabbed his arm. "Cal, you can't do this. I didn't steal these things."
"Then how did they get in the Escort?"
"I don't know. But I love this place. I could never destroy it like this."
