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Using the side of her fist, she knocked on the window. “You can pretend all you want, but I’m not leaving until you tell me who you are.”
People lingered, taking a comically long time to get in their cars and adjust their kids’ seat belts. They probably thought... hell, who cared what they thought.
The standoff lasted about two minutes but felt like hours. The redhead finally rolled down her window. “Move your car.”
Yeah, that was not going to happen. “Why are you following me?”
“Everyone can see you’re the one blocking my car.” The woman held out her hand to the people pretending to be bustling around them. “You nearly hit another car getting into the lot.”
“So, you did see me, then.”
The woman sighed. “You should tend to your son like a good mother.”
Elisa knew that was true. She also guessed Nathan would race home and tell Harris all about Mommy’s scary driving. A boy who just turned seven could be counted on for that sort of tattling. In that moment, standing right next to the woman she’d feared was nothing more than a hallucination, none of that mattered.
Elisa pulled out her phone, which had only reappeared in her purse this morning after being missing and not locatable even with the fancy app she had to find it, and snapped a picture of the redhead. A side view, but it was something.
The woman gasped. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Last chance.” She stuffed the phone back in her jacket pocket. “Who are you and why do you keep popping up in my life?”
She didn’t say anything. She gnawed on her lip but sat quietly shaking her head.
Elisa took a good long look... and, yeah, she still had no idea who this woman was. Pretty. Thirtyish. Dressed in an expensive-looking pantsuit. The kind that would fit in at an office.
“Do you really think I can’t track you down with this photo?” Elisa had no idea if she could or not, but better to be bold.
“Meredith,” the redhead said in a whisper.
Still not helpful. “Meredith who?”
“Meredith Grange.”
That really didn’t help either and now Nathan was tugging at his seat belt, so Elisa was almost out of time to get this done. “Why are you following me, Meredith Grange?”
“I’m not.”
“I swear I will call the police.”
Meredith snorted. “And tell them what? You’re the one acting like a psycho.”
Elisa hated how people threw that word around, but this didn’t strike her as the right time for a lesson in decency and the seriousness of mental health issues. “I can start yelling. The people here know me. Do they know you? Do you have a kid who goes here, or do you just happen to be hanging around a school? You should know that sort of thing makes parents twitchy.”
The moms would likely think she caught Harris’s mistress or some awful thing, but Elisa would bet they’d support her over this Meredith.
“Fine.” Meredith turned off her car but didn’t say anything else.
Elisa took a quick glance at Nathan and saw him fiddling with a breakfast bar box he’d opened but not trying to escape. “And?”
Meredith sighed. “I’m Josh’s girlfriend.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Josh.
The man literally had women tucked away everywhere. Some dead. Some alive. Some missing. Elisa needed a scorecard because keeping track was becoming somewhat daunting.
“Josh’s girlfriend.” Elisa repeated the words Meredith just said, but they didn’t make any more sense in her own voice.
