Nancy Bush's Nowhere Bundle: Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide & Nowhere Safe. Nancy Bush
looked into the bottom of her empty soup container. “This was really good.”
“I know. Sometimes I’ve gone there every night for a week.”
Her lips tightened. “How did you pay for the soup?” she asked carefully.
He didn’t miss a beat. “I stole from your purse.”
“You couldn’t have. It was in my backpack.”
He grinned, then, looking so boyish and unrepentant that she was afraid to hold his gaze, afraid what he would see in her face. “Okay, I scrounged some money out of my car. No easy trick. Luckily there was a bunch of change in the glove box.”
She hadn’t noticed any extra cash when she’d popped it open, but she hadn’t looked all that closely, either. She’d been so undone that he’d lied to her about the car charger.
And also he’d lied about having an ex-wife.
“Just how much of what comes out of your mouth is the truth?” she asked.
Chapter 13
For a moment she thought he was going to pretend offense, but then his gaze narrowed a bit and he inclined his head. “About 92 percent.”
“So, how am I to know when we’re in the other 8 percent?”
To her shock he reached over and covered her hand with his. The heat of his skin sent a prickle of warning up her arm. Dangerous. He was dangerous. To her.
“Right now, it’s all about truth,” he told her, sounding so serious that she wanted to jerk her hand free of his and wrap her arms around her torso for protection. “I need to talk to you about your neighbor. Trask Martin.”
“You found out what happened to him. Who did you talk to?”
“There was a newspaper left at the deli, and I read what was there. Not much more than what we heard on the news. But I do believe his death, the timing of his death, has to do with you.”
“You do?”
He nodded. “I want you to tell me exactly what happened between you and him. He saw the photograph. Who else knew he saw it? His girlfriend?”
She carefully withdrew her hand. “No, she wasn’t there. No one else knew.” She thought back to Trask, feeling a weight on her heart. Another weight, along with the one already in place for Aaron. After a moment, she told him, “Trask did say something to me.”
“What?”
“After I saw Hague, I stopped by his apartment Thursday night, and we had drinks with Jo and then he walked me back to my place. He told me he’d seen someone outside my door, kind of lurking, I think. It gave me a jolt.”
“Did he talk to the guy?” Auggie asked, watching her closely.
“No. The guy took off when he said something to him.”
“What’d he look like?”
“He was wearing a hoodie, so Trask thought he might be young, but he really couldn’t tell how old he was. The guy just turned away and Trask watched him, I guess. Anyway he left in a truck . . . a gray GMC. 2005. Trask said he noticed, because he used to have one just like it.”
“When was this?”
“Sometime in the last couple weeks?”
“Before you got the package from your mother?”
“Yeah . . . I guess so.” Liv stirred, uncomfortable, and got to her feet. “It just made me feel, again, like I was right: someone’s following me.”
Auggie also stood up, clearly rolling that over in his mind. “Maybe that’s how he learned about the package, because he was keeping close tabs on you.”
“I got it at work. I don’t know how he could possibly know. It was always in my bag. Even the people that worked there didn’t know about it, except Paul de Fore, and he never saw what was in it.”
“What about when Trask saw the photos? You said no one else was around. Could there have been someone? Someone you didn’t notice?”
Liv thought back to when Trask stopped by her apartment unannounced. “The door was open for a few minutes. If someone was there, they might have heard him say something about the photos? But there was no one on the balcony when Trask left. I just don’t see how.”
“Somebody killed him, and if it has to do with you, it probably has to do with the package, too. And that may, or may not, have to do with the Zuma killings. But there’s some connection to you.”
She was happy to have an ally. Happy and surprised. She knew she should ask him more questions about himself; something just wasn’t ringing true. But she almost didn’t care. It was just such a relief to have someone listening to her. “What now?” she said into the growing silence where she could tell he was thinking hard.
“You don’t have a cell phone.” He said it as a fact.
“No.”
“You’re twenty-five. I can’t name you one other twenty-five-year-old I’ve met in the last few years who doesn’t have a cell phone.” He paused, then added, “I’m guessing it’s another way to keep the bogeyman from finding you.”
“I do have a land line,” she pointed out.
He half-smiled. “You and everybody else over fifty.”
“That’s . . . not accurate.”
“Close enough, but okay, we’ll use my phone.”
“Who are we gonna call?”
“Your doctor. The one who treated you at Hathaway House.”
“Dr. Yancy . . .”
He nodded. “Maybe she can remember the zombie doctor, and then you won’t have to go through all those bureaucratic hoops.”
“I don’t know where she is,” Liv protested.
“I can check the white pages on my phone. What do you know about Dr. Yancy?”
“Nothing really.”
“No idea where she lived?”
“Somewhere in the Portland area? Not that far from Hathaway House, I think. She mentioned something once.”
He clicked a few buttons, scrolled around a bit, waited a few minutes, then said, “There are about four Yancys listed with a ‘y’ ending, and another three, with an ‘ey’ ending.”
“There’s no ‘e’,” she said.
“Okay, then, how about Buzz Yancy?”
“She wasn’t married.”
“What’s her first name? There are some initials listed for first names here. That’s usually women.”
Liv pictured the slim, middle-aged woman with the dark hair and solemn eyes. Dr. Yancy wore reading glasses, which she had a tendency to set down on her desk and pick up with some regularity, even when she didn’t put them on. “Her first name was Fern. I remember thinking it was a plant. There was a notepad on her desk with initials. FSY. I don’t think I ever knew what the S was for.”
“There’s one F. Yancy listed.”
Liv felt her pulse start to beat hard. “Well, that’s probably her, don’t you think?”
“One way to find out . . .” He dialed the number, then handed Liv the phone.
Auggie’s stomach muscles were tight. He’d put his phone in her hand and there was a chance, even though she wasn’t familiar with cells, that something could give away his deception. September could call back, for Chrissake. He was pushing it, but