Page 5 of Hunted

“He’s a great man, Lexi,” her mother had told her. “He’ll save a lot of lives. But in some ways, he’s helpless too. Our job is to take care of him so he can take care of the world. In that way, we save lives, too.”

She remembered that. Those words of her mother’s had been repeated to her over and over. Always she’d emphasized how different her dad was, how brilliant men didn’t feel emotions the way others did, and how she must never take that personally, and never let it sway her from caring for him, enabling him to do his great work.

She still didn’t know what had killed her father. He’d left explicit instructions for his remains, forbidding autopsy or obituary, and requesting immediate cremation. There was nothing all that mysterious about a man of eighty-two suffering dementia or dying in his sleep. And since he’d have hated the notion of her interfering with his final wishes, she hadn’t.

She’d been surprised to learn that everything he’d owned had been quietly transferred into her name a month before his death. She wondered if he’d known, somehow, that he was out of time. And she wondered why he’d given everything to her when he’d always seemed to hate her, and why he’d always seemed to hate her. Her mother had insisted he was just emotionally crippled, but it sure felt like hate to Lexi.

She wondered if coming up here to die had somehow made him feel closer to her mother, the way it did her. She wished she’d asked her questions while he was still alive.

“Who am I kidding?” she asked aloud. “He wouldn’t have told me anyway.”

Jax looked up at her from his spot on the rug, as close to the fireplace as he could get without singeing his yellow fur. Lexi sat in a rocker only a little bit further from the warm, yellow flames. It was good up here. Quiet. Comfortable. Serene. It was the perfect place for her to figure out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. Odd how hard that was. Caring for her father had been her prime directive for so long, she hardly knew what to do now that he was gone.

The wind outside moaned a little louder than before, compelling her to get up and wander to the nearest window. The place had lots of windows, tall, broad ones that followed the lines of the steeply peaked cathedral ceilings in the great room. They provided a panoramic view of the snow-covered pines and the mountains all around the place. An eighteen-foot spruce tree stood in front of the tallest of them, decked in soft white lights and nothing else.

The tree farmer had sent his teenage sons up with it a week ago, lights already attached. She hadn’t put another thing on the tree, and she rarely even bothered to plug it in. She kind of liked the serenity of the darkness with nothing but the orange and yellow fireplace flames to break it.

Nighttime was different up here, she thought, gazing outside. Star-spangled and natural. Alive and real. Nothing like night had been downstate. The night up here spoke in whispers, but at least it spoke.

The house tended to creak in response to the wind outside. It was as if the night moaned a question and then the house creaked an answer.

She paced away from the window, bending to stroke Jax’s head when he twisted around her calves. There was nothing out there. Just forests and lakes and the speck-on-the-map town of Pine Lake a few miles down the mountain, where old men still sat around a checkerboard in the general store.

She ought to go back to bed, try to sleep, she supposed. She turned toward the curving staircase and started up it.

Then she stopped dead in her tracks and listened to what sounded absurdly like an upstairs window scraping open.

A heartbeat later, the doorbell chimed, and she almost jumped out of her skin. No one visited her up here. Especially not in the middle of the night.

Her stomach turned queasy as she tried to decide which to investigate first. She turned toward the door, because a doorbell was certainly real, while a weird noise her brain interpreted as an upstairs window scraping open, was probably not.

Maybe it was a hunter who’d got himself lost. Or maybe one of the locals needed something. Still, there was a tingling along her nape, and her hand on the doorknob trembled a little as she turned it and pulled the door open.

The man who stood on the other side of it looked … desolate. A face of harsh angles, and eyes that held no light. Dark hair that had gone too long without a trim, and a face in need of a shave. Thick, expressive brows. Black jacket, jeans, boots.

He was looking her over just as carefully, and she shivered a little in her white flannel nightgown and bare feet.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I hope so.” There was something about his deep, rough voice that made her nerve endings go alert and tense. “I’m looking for Dr. Elliot Stoltz.”

“No one here by that name. You must have the wrong address.” She had no idea what made her blurt the denial. Maybe the ghost of her father’s delusional warnings before his death, that if anyone called or came by asking about him, she should deny knowing him or his whereabouts. Yes, that was part of an old man’s paranoia, but the denial spilled from her lips before she had time to think better of it.

“You’ll find,” the dark stranger said slowly, “that it’s not a real good idea to lie to me, Lexia.” She blinked rapidly, drew in a shallow gasp. “That is who you are, isn’t it? Dr. Lexia Stoltz?”

"Lexi Stoltz,” she said. “Now it’s your turn. Who are you? How do you know my name? And what are you doing at my door in the middle of the night?"

“I told you, I’m here to see your father.”

Another sound came from upstairs, and it shouldn’t have. A tingle of ice crept up her spine and she glanced over her shoulder toward the stairs. There was definitely something going on up there. Maybe a raccoon had got in, like in the fall.

“My father isn’t here,” she said. “I’m sorry you came all the way up here for nothing.” She started to close the door, but he stuck a foot in the way, and her heart gave a warning flutter. “What do you think you’re–”

“Sorry. I’m not buying it." He shouldered his way past her into the house. Then he took a long, slow look around as Lexi stood there watching him and trying to decide what the hell to do. She was alone. There were no landline phones and cell service was spotty at best. But he wouldn’t know that.

His soulless gaze swept the room, from the flickering scented candles burning here and there, to the fireplace, to the giant spruce tree standing in the window.

“Where is he?” As he said it, he took a deliberate step toward her.

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