“Sure.” I shrugged. “Mightbe a spider or something in there. Gotta protect you.”
“I’m not positive there area lot of poisonous spiders around here,” Ashley said. “But you’re definitely incharge of killing it if thereare.”
I laughed, heading over tothe table and sitting down, my leg thanking me for it.
I couldn’t show weaknessin front of Ashley. Not right now. Not when he needed me to be strong.
The shoebox on the table infront of me sat where Ashley had left it, giving off the same aura I assumedcursed relics did. If it’d been an ancient sarcophagus, I would’ve been justas hesitant to open it.
But this was my job, andAshley needed me to do this.
Pulling it over, I crackedthe lid open and tucked it underneath, staring down into the collection ofpapers and notes.
Notes from his stalker.
There were more than Iexpected. Too many.
How long had he been puttingup with this?
“The oldest ones date backabout ten months,” Ashley said, as if he’d read my mind. It was an obviousquestion, wasn’t it? “I kept them because they actually seemed cute at first?Like, as if the creepiness was just someone being awkward. Stupid to thinkanyone’d be afraid to talk to me, I guess.”
He petted a still-twitchingMr. Lumpkins with trembling fingers.
“And then they got…threatening. I’ve showed them to the police, but they’re right when they saythere’s nothing direct in there. It’s all… coded. Details about my life that astranger shouldn’t know. I can’t even figure outhowthey know.Unless it’seither Gabe or my grandma.”
“Do you think it is?”
Ashley shook his head. “Not for a singlesecond. They’re the two people who love me most in the world. They wouldn’t dothis. And it’s not… I mean, some of them have handwriting.”
He plucked out a birthdaycard with balloons and a clown on it and passed it to me. The clown was creepyenough. What wasupwith clowns? Who the hell thought they’d be fun forkids?
I opened it and found anote.
Twenty-seven yearswasted. See you again at twenty-eight.
“This handwriting is…”
“Like a kid’s, yeah,” Ashleysaid.
The letters were smudged,too.
“And Grandma’s handwritingis beautiful,” he continued. “Gabe’s is… y’know, medical professional chickenscratch, but it’s not like that. That’s legible in comparison. I’ve seen enoughof his handwritten shopping lists to know.”
“It’s also probably not aneight year old,” I said, running my fingers over the note. It wasn’t justcreepy, it wasmean.
That didn’t seem likenormal stalker behavior to me. I only had movies to go on, but it didn’tfeelright. Somethingabout it was off.
It was too personal and notdirectly threatening enough. A stalker should havewantedsomething fromAshley, his attention, or something he had, or whatever. They weren’tangry. The ones I’d seen felt morelike blackmail, but as far as I knew Ashley hadn’t had a demand.
Maybe there was a clueburied in this pile of horror, but I wasn’t about to go through it infront of him to find out.
Ashley was genuinely scared,and it wasn’tas if he was faking this. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe thiswaswhat stalkerswere like.
“The post marks come fromall over the place,” he continued. “Mostly way at the bottom end of California,nothing closer than LA. I got… the last one before they started again came fromLA, two months ago.”
Ashley reached out with hisfree hand, leafing through the notes in the box. His fingers trembled again,the paper rustling as he searched them, as though he was looking for something.
He passed it over to me whenhe found it.
