Page 60 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

That was a pretty neat psychological assessment. I was impressed. “Hey, you’re not just another pretty face,” I said, looking up at him. “And everyone says football players are dumb.”

He laughed and patted my butt, though his hand probably lingered too long for it to qualify as an actual pat. At the quick knock on his door, though, he dropped his hand and stepped away.

Forester popped his head in, a frown knitting his forehead. “I talked to the floor supervisor,” he reported. “She said there’s no one answering that description on her floor at all.”

Wyatt frowned, rubbing his bottom lip as he thought. “Could have been someone from the ER who saw Blair when she was brought in, took a little side trip up to see her. There should be security film of the hallways, almost every hospital has that now.”

“I’ll get in touch with hospital security and see what I can do.”

“How much trouble will that be?” I asked Wyatt when Forester had gone back to his phone.

His smile was thin. “Depends on what kind of day the chief of security is having. Depends on whether hospital rules say he has to clear this with the administrator before letting us see the film. Depends on whether the administrator is having a dick-head day. If he is, then it depends on whether or not we can find a judge to sign a warrant, which can be a little iffy on a Friday afternoon, and especially iffy if the hospital administrator plays golf with a few of the judges.”

Good God. And he’dwantedto be a cop.

“Do I need to stay?”

“No, you can go do your thing. I know how to get in touch with you. Just be careful.”

I nodded my understanding. As I rode down in the elevator I sighed. I wastiredof looking for white Chevrolets, and anyway, if she were smart, which she appeared to be, why wouldn’t she swap up her vehicles? Renting a car wasn’t difficult. For all I knew she could be in ablueChevrolet by now.

A chill went down my back.

Or a beige Buick.

Or even a white Taurus.

I’d let myself be blinded by the idea that I’d recognize her by what she was driving. She could be driving anything. She could have been following me all morning, and I wouldn’t have known it because I’d been looking for the wrong color car.

She could be anywhere.

Chapter

Twenty-six

Ihad a choice. I could bolt for Wyatt’s house, using the technique he’d taught me the night before to evade any followers, and hole up there like a scared rabbit, or I could use that same technique to break free and then go about my business. I chose to go about my business.

Why not? I had a wedding to pull off. What else could go wrong? What other complication could be added to my list of things to do? Not only did I have to be ready for a wedding in three weeks—a wedding for which I didn’t even have a gown yet!—someone was trying to kill me, my home had been burned to the ground, I couldn’t talk, I had to decide whether the man I loved truly loved me in return or if I should call off the wedding I was in the middle of planning, and I somehow had to repair the marriage of two people whose own children couldn’t get them to talk to each other. I felt like a crazed bee, unable to stop going from flower to flower despite the hurricane blowing the stems flat and sometimes ripping them entirely from the ground.

To top things off, the stores had put out their Christmas decorations. I needed to start my Christmas shopping in the middle of all this, because the decorations are a signal to all those lunatic early shoppers who descend on stores like locusts and strip them of all the prime gifts, leaving only leftovers behind for the sane people who like to do their Christmas shopping after Thanksgiving—you know, when the Christmas season actually starts. Even if I didn’t start my Christmas shopping now, the pressure was on, evidenced by the colored balls and little fiber-optic trees popping up in stores.

I couldn’t play it safe and hide out. I had too many things to do. I could even rationalize it and say any on-the-ball nutcase out there wouldexpectme to play it safe, therefore I was actually safer by not playing it safe, or something like that.

So I went to see Sally.

She had started working outside the home, at an antiques auction house, when her youngest finished high school. Basically Sally drove around to estate sales, yard sales, junk sales, searching for antiques she could get at low prices, which the auction house then spruced up and sold for profit. The auctions were every Friday night, which meant that on Fridays she could be found at the auction house helping with the stickering, cataloging, and arranging. The other four days of the week, and sometimes on Saturday, too, she was out doing her thing.

There was a mix of cars and pickup trucks, plus a midsize delivery truck backed up to a loading dock, parked outside the auction house, but the door was locked since they weren’t open for business yet. I walked around to the loading dock and found a set of steps leading up, and I went in through the open bay door.

A skinny middle-aged guy with bug eyes and Coke-bottle glasses, pushing an empty hand truck, said, “Y’need help, ma’am?”

He was probably twenty-years older than I was, but this was the South, so he “ma’amed” me. It’s just good manners.

I held up my hand, signaling he should stop, because no way could he hear me from where he was, and hurried over. “I’m looking for Sally Arledge,” I whispered hoarsely.

“Right through there,” he said, pointing toward a door at one end of the small dock area. “That’s a bad case of laryngitis, if you don’t mind me saying so. You need to take some honey and lemon in hot tea for that, and if that don’t work, then put some Vicks salve on your throat and wrap it with a hot towel, and take a spoonful of sugar with kerosene dripped on it. Sounds crazy, but that’s what my mama always gave us when we were little and had the sore throat, and it worked. Didn’t kill us, either,” he said, his bug eyes crinkling merrily.

“You actually took kerosene?” I asked. Huh. That sounded like something I needed to ask Grammy. The salve and hot towel remedy actually made sense, but I wasn’t about to take kerosene dripped on anything.

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