Page 67 of The Vigilante's Lover
“It’s been my aunt’s forever,” I say. “Why do you people keep calling it a safe house?”
“Never mind all that. Sounds like a miscommunication from the beginning.” Her smile is genuine, even though I know she’s lying. “Jax wrote letters to the wrong place.”
“No,” I insist. “Jax said Klaus was killed here. He was very clear about it.”
Colette stares up at the ceiling. “You know, I think I saw a cat wandering in the field behind your house. You want to go see? She will help with the mouse problem.”
What? I stare at her, and her eyes get very big. She taps her forehead. “You want that, right? A cat for the mouse?” she says.
She heads for the back door, and I start to understand. We’re being monitored here, just like in the car.
“That’s a great idea,” I say.
We leave the house and walk a ways through the field. Aunt Bea’s land stretches for several acres, a buffer against the rest of the world.
And easy to defend, I realize, seeing the house and fields through new eyes. It’s flat and easy to spot people arriving. There aren’t any trees or places to hide.
Did she know and never told me?
“How does a Vigilante stop being a Vigilante?” I ask suddenly.
Colette stops and turns to me. Her short bob swings against her cheekbones. She slides her sleeve up and taps her watch. Only when it tells her what she wants to know does she answer. “You can retire, justlike with anything.”
“Does your family have to know you are one?”
“It’s through your family that you become one,” she says. “Why all the questions?”
“Why didn’t I know this was a safe house?”
“Only your aunt could answer that.” Colette’s dark eyes search the fields and follow a car that drives along the road in the distance. “But there are parents who retire and never tell their children.”
“My parents are dead.”
This gets her attention. “How did they die?”
“Boating accident.”
Her lips push together in a tight line.
“I know,” I say. “It’s like a spy cliché. But they were huge regatta racers. They liked boating in storms. They lived for that sort of danger. It was really only a matter of time.”
She nods absently, eyes back on the road. “There are reasons for everything,” she says. “Do you have the option of selling this house and moving?”
“I hadn’t thought about it yet,” I say. “Aunt Bea only died a couple weeks ago.”
“You have no other family?”
I shake my head. “No. My father was an only child, and Aunt Bea was my mother’s sister.”
Colette reaches out to squeeze my arm. “You really are alone in this world, aren’t you?”
It sounds so bleak when she says it. “I want to go with Jax,” I tell her. “I have nothing else.”
She sighs and starts a slow walk back. “Jax is a charismatic man,” she says. “No one ever wants to leave him.”
I picture all the women she is probably talking about and frown, but I step alongside her. The cold, stiff weeds crunch as we step on them.
I don’t really want to go back to the silence of my house, although Iam anxious to explore the pantry. But if Colette leaves, so does my only connection to Jax.
