Page 27 of Calling All Angels
Jacob swallowed hard. “Now I do.”
He’d worked for the local prosecutor’s office prosecuting criminal cases in their smallish town for the last three years. If Jacob was worried, they should all be worried.
“None of this makes any sense,” Aubrey told him as they left the small room together. “I mean, I could have as easily been driving there that night.”
“What?”
“Do you remember that I was supposed to be taking that meeting Emma was on her way to? With the seller of that penthouse down by the beach? You asked me to come to dinner to meet your parents instead?”
“Right. You felt bad about ducking out on Emma. But she was okay with it.”
“That meeting had been set up for days, and Emma had wanted me to do it because she thought it would be good experience for me to close that deal. Bruce Waller, the owner, was close to signing a sales contract, and since I’d been doing a lot of the negotiating, Emma wanted me to close. But, of course, she let me go with you instead. But it would have been me going that night. I would have been driving Emma’s car, with mine still in the shop. We’ve been sharing her car for weeks. It could have been me.”
Emma shook her head, moving closer to Aubrey. “No, Aubrey…that’s—”
The possibility seemed to shake him. “But why would anyone want to hurt either one of you? That’s the question that needs an answer. What were they doing in your house, and what were they looking for?”
“Thatisthe question,” Connor said, leaning closer to Emma as they followed the pair down the hallway. “Can ye not think of anything?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t even take anything I could see. What could they want?”
“Somethin’ ye don’t see as valuable?” he suggested, ushering her onto the elevator alongside Aubrey and Jacob, who had no idea they had company.
“But if they were after something,” Emma said. “Why try to kill me to get it? Why not just break into my house when we’re gone?”
“What if they thought ye had it wi’ you?”
“But I didn’t. I had nothing of any value with me. Nothing.”
He tipped a look at her niece. “What if they thought Aubrey did? What if they thought it was her in the car?”
“But…she’s practically a college student. Her parents left her with virtually nothing. I’m all she has. What could they possibly want?”
They turned to look at the young woman who was cradled against her boyfriend’s shoulder.
Connor said, “Perhaps we need to figure out the ‘they’ before we can figure out the ‘what.’”
*
The police interviewedboth Aubrey and Jacob again. Another team investigated the break-in at Emma’s home. But they seemed no closer in figuring out what had happened or why. The “who” was just as mysterious as the rest. The police had taken impressions of tire marks at the scene and had a make and model of car that had run Emma off the road, based on the paint scraped off her car. But there were a thousand cars like that in this part of the state. Narrowing that down seemed a herculean task.
Emma had watched all of this with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. It seemed like some clock was ticking down. She just might run out of time to protect Aubrey.
Connor either didn’t know or wouldn’t say whether Emma herself would live or die, but she had resigned herself to being in the moment now. There was no use worrying about death while she still had time to live.
“Connor?” she said as they watched the sun rise the next morning. Orange feathered the dark blue sky in wispy streaks that brightened as they watched.
“Aye?”
“If I live, after all of this will I remember you?” Her voice broke the tiniest bit as she asked the question. The notion that she would forget him seemed impossible.
“Hard t’ say.” He peered out the window harder, as if something had caught his attention.
“What does that mean exactly?”
“To be truthful, mortals who encounter us down here…when we’re physical…canna remember after. Their memory of such a thing disappears. ’Tis a protection for ye, after all.”
“It must be a rare thing, I suppose.”
