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Gabe almost reached out to touch her. He resisted the urge with some difficulty.
He couldn’t afford for either of them to be distracted again now, not while she was finally talking. “I’m sorry, Page.”
She nodded. “I called the kitten Buddy,” she murmured inconsequentially. “He was very sweet”
She drew a deep breath. “I couldn’t stay there after that, of course. I...cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, so there would be no reason for anyone to be suspicious of my leaving, and then I turned in my key to the landlord. I gave him a phony story about my father being ill, and I left. I stopped on a country road to bury Buddy beneath a big tree. I couldn’t just throw him in a Dumpster like a piece of garbage.”
Gabe wondered what else she’d buried in that roadside grave. Hope? Courage? The lighthearted spirit of the happy woman she’d been before?
She continued without being prompted. “I went back on the road. I spent a few weeks in Joliet, Illinois, a month in New York City. I met Detective Pratt in Richmond, Virginia, one evening when I had a flat on the side of a highway. He helped me change the tire, and then he gave me a searching look, handed me his card and told me to call him if I ever needed help again.”
Gabe could feel his tension building. Page’s voice was emotionless now, but her eyes...her eyes spoke of a woman in torment. She hardly moved as she spoke. Her chin was high, her shoulders squared, her hands locked in her lap. She had the air of someone bravely facing a firing squad.
“You called him?” he asked.
“I called him. It was two days later. I’d been waiting tables at a grubby little diner for ten hours and I was exhausted. I was sitting in a dump of an apartment, alone, tired, depressed, hopeless. I went out for a walk and I found myself standing at a pay phone, Detective Pratt’s card in my hand. I thought of you, and of Jessie and her children. I prayed that I wasn’t making a mistake you would all have to pay for. And then I dialed his number.”
She jumped suddenly to her feet. Startled, Gabe stood, too, ready to block her if she tried to bolt:
“I’m thirsty,” she said. “I have to have a drink”
He motioned toward the kitchen. He was right on her heels when she t
urned and walked to the fridge. He wasn’t letting her out of his sight again.
The fulminating glance she shot over her shoulder told him she knew what he was thinking and resented it, but he ignored it. Impatience simmered through him. It was all he could do to restrain his questions until Page had rummaged through the fridge and pulled .out a soft drink. She closed the refrigerator door without waiting to see if he wanted anything.
“What did you tell Detective Pratt?” he demanded as soon as she’d taken a long swallow. “What did he say? What happened to him?”
Page turned to look out the window over the sink, though Gabe suspected that she wasn’t really seeing the moon-washed scenery outside.
“He wasn’t very old. Early-thirties,” she murmured. “Your age. He had a warm smile and an infectious laugh. He had a wife and twin children he loved dearly. I’m sure they miss him desperately.”
Her voice had thickened. She cleared it before she continued. “We met at a coffee shop close to my apartment. He bought me coffee and listened to my story without saying a word. I was sure he thought I was just another nutcase with a wild tale created for attention. He didn’t. He believed me.”
She took another sip of her drink, still staring blindly out the window. “He asked me to let him call you, so you would know that I was all right. It was just over six months after I’d left Austin, and he suggested that you would still be sick with worry. He thought we should warn you that there was reason to be concerned about your own safety. I almost agreed—but then I pictured Buddy’s poor, mangled little body and I begged Jim not to involve you. The caller had told me you were safe as long as I stayed away from you, and I felt I had no choice but to believe him. Jim didn’t fully approve. .He said if I were his wife, he’d want to know everything, whatever the risk, but he accepted my decision.” “I had a right to know the truth.”
She shrugged, as though silently pointing out that they’d been over this already. And then she went on. “He promised to help me. He was afraid there wasn’t enough evidence to convince his superiors, since all I had were a few relatively innocent-looking snapshots and an improbable-sounding story He said he would work the case on his own time until he came up with something more concrete. I don’t know what he did after that. Made some calls, I suppose. Dug around in may past, trying to find something...anything...to provide a clue.”
She set the cola can on the counter and looked at Gabe with tear-filled eyes. “A week to the day after I called him, he was dead.”
7
GABE LAID a gentle hand on Page’s shoulder. “Why don’t you sit down?”
She allowed him to guide her to the table, where she sat stiffly in a chair, her eyes staring into a painful past.
“What happened to Detective Pratt?” Gabe asked, keeping his voice low.
“I came home from work one evening and found an envelope that had been slid beneath my door. There was only one photograph inside. It was Jim Pratt—with his wife and children.”
Gabe remembered the shot of the happy-looking young man with a woman and twin toddlers. Detective James K. Pratt and family.
“I panicked,” Page whispered. “I rushed to a pay phone and called the police station. I had to warn him that he was in danger...that the man stalking me had somehow discovered that Jim was helping me. They...they told me...” She choked.
Gabe reached across the table to cover her icy hand with his own. “What were you told?”
“I learned that Detective Pratt had died the evening before in a car accident. Half in shock, I bought a newspaper, and read that the accident had happened under very strange circumstances. There was evidence that he’d been deliberately forced off a very steep curve, though there’d been no witnesses. The chief of police was calling for an investigation, but I...I knew they wouldn’t find anything. I knew Jim had died because of me. Because he’d wanted to help me. I killed him when I made that call,” she whispered.
