I pulled back the curtain on the side window and peered out.
It wasn’t a reporter with a microphone or a grown man with an axe to chop me up. So, that was something.
Instead, a petite woman stood on my porch. The one I’d seen hauling boxes into the bungalow next door. Alone, with a beat-up U-Haul and exhaustion written all over her face. Her breath clouded in small puffs, and she’d wrapped her arms tight around herself. No coat, despite the bite in the air.
She glanced nervously toward her house, then back at my door.
I opened it a few inches. The porch light caught the frost already forming on the dead grass, even though it was barely teno’clock. Cold rushed in immediately, and behind me, I could feel my heat bleeding out into the night. Dollar bills floating away on the wind. “Can I help you?”
“Hi, I’m, uh …” Her gaze flicked nervously to the little house next door, then back to me. “My name is Harper. I just moved in, and I thought I’d introduce myself.”
“At ten o’clock at night?”
“Right …” She shifted her weight, hands wringing together. “I know it’s late. I just thought I heard something outside and?—”
“You a reporter?” I asked curtly.
With that little furrow between her brows, she looked like I’d just asked her if she tended zoo animals in her spare time. “What? No.”
“If you are, you need to tell me. Journalistic integrity and all that,” I claimed, but in fairness, that probably wasn’t legally binding.
“I’m not a reporter.” She looked genuinely confused. For some reason, I believed her. “Why would you?—”
“Long story.” I studied the way she kept glancing over her shoulder. The streetlight flickered, throwing shadows across the empty sidewalk, and a gust of wind rattled the stubborn leaves still clinging to the maple next door. “You worried someone’s lurking outside your place?”
She swallowed, and I got the sense she didn’t know how to answer that.
“Would you like to come inside for a drink?” I offered.
I expected her to say no. After all, I’d merely said it to be polite. Ryker would strangle me if I invited a stranger inside.
“I don’t want to bother you,” she answered. But her body was already leaning toward the warm sanctuary of my house, seeking shelter with someone she apparently trusted more than whatever waited for her in the darkness.
Well, crap.Given she was already afraid of something, I didn’t want to invite her inside and then have her realize she might have seen me on the news after all. And then freak the hell out on me.
“Look,” I said, leaning against the doorframe. “I should probably warn you: I was arrested and charged with first-degree homicide.”
She laughed a nervous, disbelieving sound. But a second later, she registered the dead-serious look on my face, and her smile died. “Oh shit, you’re serious.”
“I am.” I lifted my ankle to show off the digital tracking device. The little green light blinked steadily, like a heartbeat that wasn’t mine. “So, I won’t be offended if you run the other way and never come back.”
After staring at my ankle monitor for a moment, she returned her attention to my face. “You’re a killer?”
“Afraid I can’t answer that question on the advice of counsel.”
“And you … open conversations with that?”
“Not generally. But you’re my next-door neighbor. You’re bound to watch the news, and my face might soon be plastered all over it.”
She laughed again, seemingly to herself, as she looked up at the star-scattered sky and started to speak in a voice barely above a whisper. “You have to be shitting me. I moved to this godforsaken town for safety, and I moved next door to a killer?”
“Alleged killer,” I corrected.
She shook her head, running trembling fingers through her hair. “It’s like that movie,Final Destination, where danger just keeps finding me everywhere I go.”
“Well, if you’re expecting sympathy, you won’t get it from me. My plate is kind of full with, you know, trying to stay out of prison and all that.”
She studied me with those tired eyes, weighing something I couldn’t read. “Are you dangerous?”
