Page 33 of Silent Threat
“Sometime after we left last night.” He ran a hand over his bald head, his wide shoulders stiff as he considered the mess. “I would have seen this kind of damage as we drove away. It’s a big fricking hole.”
She didn’t grind her teeth, but only because she couldn’t afford the dentist. “Someone went off the road. Did they leave a note?”
“Not here.”
She checked her phone. Nobody had sent her a text or left a message while she’d been talking with Ed. If a neighbor had done this, they might have. “I’m going to check the mailbox.”
Whoever had run over her fence had better step up to the plate and accept responsibility—pay for the repairs. She had to have the fence fixed. The llamas, along with Esmeralda the donkey, and sometimes even Dorothy the pig, spent most of their day outside. It would be bad enough when the weather turned cold and they had to be cooped up inside.
She searched through her mailbox and groaned when she found nothing but junk mail and bills. She put them in Cole’s pickup. She’d look through them at Hope Hill.
By the time she returned to Cole, he was standing on the shoulder of the road, among her small field of colorful whirligigs. His expression was closed, his body even tenser than when she’d left him.
Then she saw the small lump in the grass next to him, and she tensed too.
Not again.She moved forward with dread.
The fully grown fox lay motionless, eyes glazed over, limbs frozen in death. His beautiful autumn-red fur ruffled in the slight breeze.
Annie’s throat tightened. Her heart clenched. Shehatedseeing an animal hurt. She hated seeing one dead. What people felt for the loss of a beloved pet, she felt for every deer, woodchuck, and raccoon she saw by the side of the road. She’d always been that way. She couldn’t even stand it when people ran over the worms on the asphalt after a rain.
“I hate this stupid curve in the road.” Misery and frustration thickened her voice. “You have no idea how many animals get hit here.”
“Is that why you have all these?” Cole jerked his head toward the slowly clattering whirligigs.
“Yes. To scare animals away from crossing the road here where people can’t see them as they drive around the curve.”
Cole watched her with that expressionless gaze of his, probably thinking she was a nutjob for being this upset over a stray fox and for trying to stop animals from getting run over. But when he opened his mouth, he didn’t bring up her weirdness.
Instead, he said, “Whoever hit your fence didn’t lose control of their car. They hit the fence on purpose.”
She glanced between him and the fence as she processed his words.
“No skid marks on the road,” he pointed out. “No skid marks on the shoulder. No skid marks on the grass.” He watched her. “Your stalker ex?”
Her mind, too, immediately jumped to Joey, but she rejected the idea just as fast. “Joey wouldn’t do this. Nobody would do something like this on purpose. Why would they?”
She wanted agreement from Cole, but Cole wasn’t done yet.
“The fox wasn’t hit here.” He toed the animal with his boot and turned the stiff body, making Annie’s stomach lurch. “No blood on the ground. No blood on the road. No blood on the shoulder. Somebody hit this fox somewhere else, or found the carcass on the side of the road, and brought it here.”
She blinked at him and shivered. She rubbed her arms, frowning in her effort to understand. Someone brought her a dead animal?For what possible purpose?
“You say this happens a lot,” Cole said in a careful tone. “How often?”
She had to think. “Once a week? Sometimes more than once.”
“Since when?”
“It started a couple of months ago. Around the time when they broke ground on that new development on Victoria Circle. I figured the noise was scaring animals this way. I started finding—” She flinched. “When I come out in the morning.”
“Do they do construction at night?”
What?“No.”
Then she caught his meaning.Oh.She always found the broken little bodies in the morning. The animals were hit at night. But they wouldn’t be running from the construction noises at night.
She felt stupid for not having thought of that before. Yet she still wasn’t ready to concede. “That doesn’t mean someone is bringing them here.”
