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But if anyone wanted to hurt that woman?
They were asking for a very messy corpse.
CHAPTER FIVE
At the end of the following day, Anne reflected that public transportation in any city was always a Venn diagram, an if-this, then-that cobble-together of predetermined routes that had as much to do with efficiency as a mouse in a maze. Sitting three rows behind the bus driver, she stared out a cloudy window. She had about eight minutes left with this leg of her journey. And then about six minutes of walking.
To get to Bruce’s.
Moving her second-best purse higher on her lap, she swayed in the bench seat she had to herself, and winced as her bad hip was forced to bear more than half her weight. The pit in her stomach got worse as the bus trundled on, and when they arrived at her stop, she thought she was going to throw up as the brakes squeaked. Out of the dozen or so people riding with her, she was the only one who disembarked, and she pulled her light coat closer as she emerged onto the sidewalk. Left in the dust, the sweet smell of diesel made her nose tickle as the rest of the passengers were taken farther down the line.
Over to the west, the low sun glowed warm and beautiful at the horizon, and she told herself it was a good omen. In reality, it probably didn’t mean a thing.
God, she wasn’t sure she had the energy to do this. In addition to her normal responsibilities at work, the day had been full of people asking her to explain her injuries. She hadn’t known what to say, and the half-truth that she’d shared with almost everyone had been an exhausting repeat to pull out of her conversational pocket over and over again.
She’d only told the whole story to two people… one of whom had been a mistake. So the entire firm probably knew everything by now.
Well, everything except for her mystery man. She’d kept him totally to herself.
But she couldn’t worry about office gossip. No, she had other things on her mind right now.
One that note, she set off at a limp, and focused on the park that was on her side of the roadway. The tree line kept backing away and coming forward again, the rise and fall as if the collection of maples and oaks were inhaling and exhaling and the cement pavers she was on were its rib cage. Through the pale green new growth, she could see bike riders pedaling along a winding path just inside the city acreage’s limits, and way off in the distance, pedestrians were taking breaks on blankets and playing with dogs.
She envied them their easy lives, even though they were strangers and she knew none of their details.
Then again, that was how window-shopping other peoples’ destinies worked, right?
She stopped when she got to the set of tire tracks that jumped the curb, cut across the sidewalk, and scored the grass in a twin set of deep ruts. The tree that had been impacted was no more than ten or fifteen feet away, the fresh scars in its trunk like gouges in flesh. Pivoting to the road, she pinpointed where she and the BMW had shaken proverbial hands. It was where the skid marks started.
Crossing the street, she stepped over the black rubber stains on the dotted white line separating the outgoing lanes… and then she did the same at the yellow double stripe in the center. After that, she navigated the incoming lanes, and then finally the grassy rise up to Bruce’s building. Entering the breezeway, she felt herself clutch her handbag like there was a weapon in it. Which, of course, there wasn’t.
Out on the far side, in the parking area, his white Datsun was in its spot.
Closing her eyes, she put her hand on the stairwell’s balustrade—
Up on the second floor, a door opened and someone with hard-soled shoes exited an apartment. There was a muffled slam and then the jingle of keys.
Swallowing through a dry throat, Anne backed up onto the doorstep of the building’s first unit—
The waft of perfume was so strong that she had to rub her nose to clear a sneeze, and then a pair of ankle boots came down the steel steps. The blond woman in a bright blue coat walked off without realizing Anne was there, her confident strut taking her out into the parking area on a strident beat. The fact that she got into a red Chevy Chevette that had rainbow stripes down both sides seemed right, and as she drove off, Anne felt another flash of envy.
Surely that kind of self-assurance was Teflon to a bad day’s worth of crap falling on your head.
Going back over to the stairs, she ascended in an awkward shuffle, feeling like her hip was going to lock up at any moment. At the second-floor landing, she went over to Bruce’s door, straightened her jacket, and tucked her purse into her side under her arm. Like she was both at a job interview and about to get mugged.
