Page 67 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

Laughing, he went to get more coffee. The phone rang while he was downstairs and he answered, only to come upstairs a few minutes later to get his badge and weapon. “I have to go in,” he said. That wasn’t unusual, and it didn’t have anything to do with me or he’d have told me. This was more about the police department being understaffed than anything else, which was pretty much a chronic situation. “You know the drill. Don’t let anyone in.”

“How about if I see someone carrying a gas can and sneaking around the foundation?”

“Do you know how to shoot a pistol?” he asked, and he wasn’t kidding.

“Nope.” I was regretful, but I figured that was something I shouldn’t fudge.

“By the time I’m finished with you next week, you will,” he said.

Great. Something else to take up in my spare time, assuming I had any. I should have kept my mouth shut. On the other hand, knowing how to use a pistol would be cool.

He kissed me and was out the door. Absently I listened to the rumbling sound of the garage door as it opened, and a moment later closed again, then I returned to my sorting and arranging.

Some of the stuff that had been in the dresser could clearly go somewhere else, like the baseball glove (?!), the shoeshine kit, a stack of books from the police academy, and a shoe box full of photos. As soon as I opened the shoe box and saw the contents, I forgot about the other stuff and sat cross-legged on the floor by the bed, looking through them.

Men don’t care much for photographs, which is why these were dumped into a box and forgotten about. Some of them, obviously, his mother had given him: school pictures of both him and his sister, Lisa, at various ages. Six-year-old Wyatt made my heart melt. He’d looked so innocent andfresh,nothing at all like the hard-as-nails man I loved, except for those glittering eyes. By the time he’d been sixteen, though, he was already getting that cool, piercing expression. There were pictures of him in his football uniforms, both high school and college, and then other pictures of him as a pro, and the difference was obvious. By then, football hadn’t been a game anymore, it was a job, and a hard one at that.

There was one picture of Wyatt with his dad, who had been dead for quite some time. Wyatt looked about ten, and he still had that innocent look. His dad must have died soon after the picture was taken, because Roberta had told me Wyatt was just ten when it happened. That was when his innocence had begun to go; all of the pictures taken after that showed an awareness that life wasn’t always safe and happy.

Then I found the picture of him and his wife.

I saw the writing first, because the picture was upside down. I picked it up. In a pretty feminine handwriting was the inscription:Wyatt and me, Liam and Kellian Greeson, Sandy Patrick and his latest bimbo.

I turned the picture over, looking at Wyatt’s face. He was laughing into the camera, his arm draped carelessly over the shoulder of a very pretty redhead.

A pang of very natural jealousy shot through me. I didn’t want to see him with any other woman, especially one he’d beenmarriedto. Why couldn’t she have been someone either plain or hard-looking, someone obviously unsuited to him, instead of being so pretty and—

—my stalker.

I stared at the photograph, not believing my eyes. The photograph was easily fifteen years old and she looked so young, not much more than a teenager, though I knew she’d been just a couple of years younger than Wyatt. The hair was very different, of course: 1980s big hair, carried forward into the nineties. Too much makeup, not that I was judgmental or anything. And those long, long eyelashes that made her look as if she were wearing artificial ones.

There wasn’t any doubt.

I reached for the bedroom phone.

No dial tone.

I waited, because sometimes it takes a few seconds for a cordless unit to get a dial tone. Nothing happened.

Now, there have been more than a few times when I’ve been unable to get a dial tone and it’s no big deal, but when a homicidal stalker is after me and there’s no dial tone, yeah, I automatically assume the worst. My God, she was here! Somehow she’d cut the phone lines, which can’t be easy.

That’s when I noticed how still and quiet the house was. There was no background hum of the heating unit, electrical lights, refrigerator. Nothing.

I looked at the digital alarm clock. Its face was blank.

The power was off. I hadn’t noticed because the bedroom had enough windows to let in sufficient light to see, even on a rainy day, plus I’d been engrossed in the pictures.

The power had been on when Wyatt left, because I’d heard the garage door. He hadn’t been gone more than fifteen minutes, so it couldn’t have been off long. What did that prove? Anything? That she waited until he was out of the house before she came in? How could she even know where he lived? We’d been very careful, no one had followed us here.

But she knew where he worked.Knowing that, all she had to do was wait there and follow him home, probably even before she started following me. Following him would haveledher to me.

Silently I got to my feet and retrieved my cell phone from where I’d tossed it on the bed. I’d taken it upstairs with me because so many people call my cell if they want to reach me. The lack of electricity wouldn’t affect my cell phone, unless it was an area-wide problem that took out the cell towers, too, but if it was an area-wide problem then I didn’t have anything to worry about. It was the localized-to-this-house scenario that scared the crap out of me.

I was shaking as I punched in Wyatt’s cell number, my hair lifting from my scalp. No doubt about it, I was spooked. As quietly as I could, I crept into the bathroom and closed the door, to muffle the sound of my voice.

“What’s up?” he said in my ear.

“It’s Megan,” I blurted. “It’s Megan. I was looking through your old pictures, and…it’s her.”

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