Page 151 of The Woman By the Lake

I ran to the back hall, slipped on my Birkenstocks, then raced to the front door.

I looked through the screen and ornate wrought iron scrollwork (Brenda had an eye), and saw two boys, probably around sixteen, one tall and scrawny who still looked more boy than man, but when he caught up, he’d be cute. The other one was much shorter, already built and already cute.

They both sat on their asses, back-to-back, and had white computer cable wrapped firmly and tightly around their wrists that were behind their backs, as well as around their ankles.

I couldn’t say I’d paid much attention to Dave and Brenda’s Wi-Fi setup, but it was clear they got the ultra-long cords so they’d have locational options, because, yeesh. That was a lot of cable.

“It’s okay, honey. These sacks of shit aren’t going anywhere,” Riggs called.

I stepped out on the porch.

Alas, in the kerfuffle, four of Brenda’s pots had turned over, and one had fallen off the porch. There was potting soil and flowers strewn everywhere.

I’d do my best with those tomorrow.

I went to where Riggs stood over the boys. When I arrived, he curved an arm around my waist and pulled me into his side.

“I guess Dave wanted choices as to where he put his router,” I noted.

I felt Riggs’s regard and looked up at him.

“What?” I asked.

“Princess, I just wired five cameras in your place last week. Left the overage in your storeroom since Dave insisted on paying for it.”

“Oh.”

He started laughing silently.

“How’d you cut it?” I asked.

“Carry an army knife.”

“Oh,” I repeated.

He kept laughing, still silently.

Both the boys were staring at their gym shoes looking a mixture of freaked and pissed (though more freaked, then again, there were two of them, one of Riggs, and they were the ones now tied up and facing what came next).

I pulled from Riggs, but he dogged me as I approached the shorter one and crouched carefully, due to my skirt.

“Hi, I’m Nadia.”

He kept his gaze averted, but red was creeping up his neck toward his cheeks.

Mm-hmm.

Easy to be a punkass when you’re not confronted with who you were punking.

Harder to have her right there.

“I get it might seem like fun to go into the woods and scare the crap out of a woman alone who you don’t know, but just to say, my mother was murdered five months ago, and I loved her very much.”

His gaze darted to me, it was wide, and the color reddened his entire face instantly.

“With age and maturity,” I went on, “I hope you’ll learn how cruel what you did is just normally. But maybe right now you can learn that you’ll never have any idea what someone else is going through in their lives, so being a total dickhead is never okay, no matter how fun it might seem when you’re hanging with your boy, thinking life in rural Washington is boring and looking for a thrill.”

It took him a second to dig deep past his mortification to find the punk within before he asked bitterly, “You gonna press charges?”

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