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“I had a feeling they would,” Sam replied. “I appreciate all the hard work you’ve put in to keep things going in that department.”

“You’re welcome. It wasn’t always terrible, but Henry had been getting worse and worse these last several weeks.”

“In what way?”

“He hasn’t been here all that much, but when he is, he’s been ranting and raving about something or other. He’s been nasty, too.”

Was Henry starting to lose it now that he didn’t have Joel’s protection anymore?

“What was he ranting about?”

“I don’t know exactly. Something about someone backing out of a deal. He kept saying that they made a deal. I offered to find the contract, thinking it was a disagreement with a vendor, but he told me to go sit down and mind my own business.”

A deal? Sam had a bad feeling about this. He didn’t like it at all.

If Henry was the father of Leigh’s baby, and they made a deal to keep it quiet, did he think that Leigh was going to back out of it? After thirty freakin’ years of keeping her silence? Walter had said that Leigh hadn’t even told him who the father was.

“Here’s the address where Henry is,” Miranda said, interrupting Sam’s thoughts. “818 Delrose Lane.”

Leigh’s address.

And that’s where Alli currently was.

Henry had no business being there.

“Are you sure, Miranda? Very sure?”

“I’m sure. His location is stationary right now.”

Sam thanked her and quickly ended the call. He didn’t know what Henry was up to, but something here was terribly wrong. Grabbing his car keys from the top of his desk, Sam hit the door running.

His gut told him nothing good would come of this. He had to get to Alli right now.

Just how off the rails was Henry? Sam had to find out.

In the meantime, Henry didn’t need to be anywhere in the vicinity of Alli…the woman Sam loved.

Trapped with a killer.

Alli didn’t know how she’d ended up in this predicament, but here she was. Funnily enough, she’d thought the worst thing that would happen to her today was that it would be weird between her and Sam. Now that was the least of her worries.

“You didn’t mean to hurt her,” Alli said to Henry. Stall. Stall. The movers would show up eventually. “And the police will understand. They’ll understand that you had no choice. Other people would have done the same thing.”

“They’ll put me in prison,” Henry said, still sweating profusely. His voice was high and whiny, as if he was a child complaining about not getting ice cream at the park. “I’m not going to prison.”

“You can say it was self-defense.”

“No one is going to believe that. They’ll arrest me for murder.”

Trying to empathize with him wasn’t working. Perhaps she needed another path.

“So, what now? What are you going to do, Henry? Kill me?” she challenged. “Because it’s one thing to kill someone in a moment of anger, but it’s a whole other thing to kill someone in cold blood. This would be premeditated murder. The kind that gets life-with-no-parole sentences. With Leigh, you could argue that it was manslaughter.”

“You’ll tell the police. You’ll tell Sam,” Henry said, brandishing the knife in front of her face. If he was trying to scare her, he was succeeding. She was sure the neighbors could hear her heart slamming against her ribs. “I can’t let you leave. I don’t want to do this, but I have to.”

“You don’t have to do anything. You can stop all of this now. Put down the knife and call Sheriff Finn. Explain what happened. It’s your only chance, Henry. If you kill me, your life is over, too.”

Henry didn’t get a chance to reply; the insistent ringing of her cell phone interrupted them.