Page 69 of Dead Girl Running

“I didn’t know Priscilla. I wasn’t here when she was alive. Everyone who knew her tells me she wasn’t very smart and she wasn’t particularly principled. Assuming my information is correct, she might have taken the art, one assumes because she recognized the potential for profit, and she could have stashed it anywhere. The resort is huge and old, riddled with closets, storage, even some secret passageways.”

“I know it’s difficult, but—”

“But perhaps she didn’t realize its worth, or she wanted revenge on the Librarian and put it in the garbage.”

He put his hand on his chest as if his heart hurt. “Why would she want revenge?”

“If she was romantically involved with the Librarian and discovered he—or she—was using her as camouflage… A woman scorned, Mr. Brooks. You may never recover that tomb art. You may never uncover the Librarian.”

She was quite enjoying Nils’s horror, when out of the corners of her eyes, she saw something move outside the window. Someone was looking in.

Slowly, heart thumping, she turned to face the intruder.

Her husband, Gregory, was there, looking in. Dead and looking at her, a soft green light on his evil face.

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Kellen gasped and slammed her back against the wall.

“What?” Nils swiveled around.

Gregory had vanished.

She cleared her throat, swallowed, said, “Nothing.” Because the cottage was elevated above ground level. No one could stand on the ground and look in unless they were ten feet tall.

“A light?” Nils walked over and looked out into the winter darkness. “Are the smugglers out there tonight?”

“No. Just…an overactive imagination. Mine.” She pressed her hand to her forehead over the scar and worked to bring her heart rate down to acceptable levels. Ever since the Army had discharged her, she’d been afraid something like this would happen: optical illusions, madness, another year lost and no idea where it went, what happened, what she had done.

“We don’t need toimagineanything bad.” The big, strong man waschidingher.

But right now, she was glad of the company of this patronizing, mansplaining jerk. She was glad she wasn’t alone.

In a businesslike tone, he said, “It’s all happeninghere. I don’t exult in the disappearance of a law officer, but you and I both know the loss of Lloyd Magnuson and Priscilla’s body means the Librarian ishereand taking steps to conceal his crimes. We are so close.” His eyes gleamed with radical fervor.

When he looked like that, he made her uneasy. “Nils, you’re rocking the boat, and rocking this particular boat will result in someone going overboard. That someone could be you.”

He half turned his head, and his profile was sharply etched against the shiny dark of the window. “I’m remarkably well-balanced.”

She got to her feet. “Let me be clear. You should be careful, because I won’t go over the side with you. I didn’t survive Afghanistan to recover a penis statue.” She donned her oversize coat, walked to the door, opened it, looked behind her and saw him watching her, his beautiful brown eyes avid, his face speculative.

She stepped out onto the porch and firmly shut the door behind her. Alone and aloud, she said, “I didn’t survive Gregory Lykke to take a second lover I don’t trust.”

She looked around, saw no smuggling lights and no disembodied heads.

She found that comforting. But she’d run to Nils’s cottage to avoid being seen as a target. Now…now she was more spooked by the phantom she’d imagined than the killer she knew was out there. So she sprinted to the resort, keeping to the lighted paths, taking her chances with smugglers and knowing in the corner of her mind that she was trying to outrun the ghost of her long-dead and viciously brutal husband.

* * *

“Mara. Mara! Did you see?” Destiny Longacre peered out the blinds in Mara’s cottage. “That’s Kellen Adams, and she’s sneaking out of that guest cottage!”

“Really?” Ellen leaped up from the coffee table, where Mara was filing her nails, and ran to the window.

“Wait. Wait! I want to see, too!” Daisy hobbled over, her newly painted toes separated by cotton balls. “Whose cottage is that?”

Xander lifted his hands from Mara’s shoulders—he had been massaging her and urging a regime of stress-relieving yoga breathing—and wandered over to look. “That’s Nils Brooks’s cottage. The author. Nice-looking man and I spoke to him today. Intelligent, insightful and curious about how the resort works.”

Mara was hosting a spa worker evening to get their minds off the past two days, and they had been fixing hair, massaging tense knots of muscle and snacking on caramel corn while waiting for the pizza to bake.

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