Sandra Brown - Low Pressure

“After her.”

“What do you mean, after her?”

Dent got into the driver’s seat and started the engine, but when he would have pulled the door closed, Gall was there, the six-pack in one hand, his other braced against the open car door. “Don’t go borrowing trouble, Ace.”

“Oh that’s funny. You’re the one who set me up with them.”

“I was wrong.”

“You think?” He gave the door a tug. “Let go.”

“Why’re you going after her?”

“She left her book behind. I’m going to return it.”

He yanked hard on the door and Gall released it. “You should leave it alone.”

Dent didn’t acknowledge the warning. He shoved the Vette into first gear and peeled out of the hangar. He knew the road well, which was fortunate, because while he drove with one hand, he used his other to wrestle his wallet from his back pocket, fish the check from it, and, after reading the address, accessed a GPS app on his iPad. In a matter of minutes he had a map to her place.

Georgetown, not quite thirty miles north of Austin, was known for its Victorian-era architecture. Its town square and tree-lined residential streets boasted structures with gingerbread trim.

Bellamy lived in one such house. It sat in a grove of pecan trees and had a deep veranda that ran the width of the house. Dent parked at the curb and, taking the book with him, followed a flower-bordered path to the steps leading up to the porch. He took them two at a time and reached past a potted Boston fern to ring the doorbell.

Then he saw that the front door stood ajar. He knocked. “Hello?” He heard a noise, but it wasn’t an acknowledgment. “Hello? Bellamy?” As fast as he’d been driving, she couldn’t have been that far ahead of him. “Hello?”

She appeared in the wedge between the door frame and the door, and it looked to him like she was depending on it for support. Her eyes were wide and watery, and her face was pale, bringing into stark contrast a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks that he hadn’t noticed before.

She licked her lips. “What are you doing here?”

“Are you okay?”

She gave an affirmative nod, but he didn’t believe her.

“You look all…” He gestured toward her face. “Was it the flight? Did it mess you up that bad?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

He hesitated, wondering why he didn’t just hand her the book and tell her to shove it where the sun don’t shine, as he’d come here to do, then turn and walk away. For good. Forever and ever, amen.

He had a strong premonition that if he stayed for one second longer, he would live to regret it. But despite the impulse to get the hell out of there and away from her and all things Lyston, he gave the door a gentle push, which she resisted. He pushed harder until she let go and the door swung wide.

“What the hell?” he exclaimed.

The central hallway behind her looked like it had been the site of a ticker-tape parade. The glossy hardwood floor was littered with scraps of paper. Brushing past her, he went in, bent down, and picked up one of the larger pieces. It was the corner of a page; T. J. David was printed on it, along with a page number.

“You found it like this when you got home?”

“I was just a few minutes ahead of you,” she replied. “This is as far as I got.”

Dent’s first thought was that the intruder might still be inside the house. “Alarm system?”

“The house doesn’t have one. I only moved in a couple of weeks ago.” She gestured toward sealed boxes stacked against the wall. “I haven’t even finished unpacking.”

“Your husband isn’t here?”

The question seemed to confuse her at first, then she stammered, “No. I mean… I don’t… I’m divorced.”

Huh . He tucked that away for future consideration. “Call nine-one-one. I’ll take a look around.”

“Dent—”

“I’ll be okay.”

He set the copy of her novel on the console table, then continued down the central hallway past a dining room and a living room, which opened off of it on opposite sides. The hall led him to the back of the house, where he found the kitchen and utility room. The door to the yard was standing open. The locking mechanism dangled from a neat round hole in the door.

A striped cat curiously peered around the jamb. Upon seeing Dent, it skedaddled. Being careful not to touch anything, he stepped out onto a concrete stoop, where a bag of potting soil and a stack of terra-cotta flowerpots stood against the exterior wall of the house. One of the pots had been broken. Pieces of it lay on the steps leading down to the ground. The fenced yard was empty.

He figured the house-breaker was no longer a threat, but he wanted to check the upstairs anyway. He retraced his steps through the kitchen and back into the wide hallway. Bellamy was standing where he’d left her, cell phone in hand.

“I think he came and went through the utility room door. I’m gonna check upstairs.”

He climbed them quickly. The first door on his left opened into a spare bedroom, which she obviously planned on using as an office. The computer setup on the trestle table appeared to have been left undisturbed, but, as in the entryway below, pages of her book had been made into confetti and strewn everywhere. He checked the closet, but there was nothing in it except boxes packed with basic office supplies.

Midway down the hall, a quaint pair of doors with glass panes stood open. He walked through them into Bellamy’s bedroom. Here, he drew up short. The room had been vandalized, but not with confetti.

Hastily he checked the closet, where he found clothes and shoes, several unpacked boxes, and a lingering floral scent. The bathroom was likewise empty except for the cream-colored fixtures, fluffy towels, and feminine accoutrements on the dressing table.

He returned to the bedroom’s double doors and called down to her. “Coast is clear, but you’d better come up.”

Moments later she joined him, doing exactly as he’d done when he walked in. She stopped dead in her tracks and stared.

“I take it that’s not part of the decor.”

“No,” she said huskily.

Scrawled in red paint on the wall was: You’ll be sorry .

The paint had run, leaving rivulets at the bottom of each letter that looked like dripping blood. In lieu of a paintbrush, a pair of her underwear had been used to write the letters.

The significance of that escaped neither of them.

Dent motioned toward the paint-soaked wad of silk lying on the carpet. “Yours?” When she nodded, he said, “Sick bastard. Police on their way?”

She roused herself, pulled her gaze away from the message on the wall, and looked up at him. “I didn’t call them.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I don’t want a big deal made of this.”

He thought surely he had heard her wrong, and his expression must have conveyed that.

“It was a prank,” she said. “When I moved in, a neighbor warned of things like this happening in the area. There’s been a rash of it. Teenagers with not enough to do. Maybe an initiation of some kind. They scatter trash across lawns. Knock over mailboxes. I’m told they hit a whole block one night last month.”

He looked at the vandalized wall, the garment on the floor, then came back to her. “Your panties were used to paint a threatening message on your bedroom wall, and you put that on par with scattered trash and banged-up mailboxes?”

“I’m not calling the police. Nothing was taken. Not that I can tell, anyway. It was just… just mischief.”

She turned quickly and left the room. Dent went after her, clumping down the stairs on her heels. “When I got here you were shaking like a leaf. Now you’re passing this off as a prank?”