Low Pressure (5 page)

He was well aware of the weather system, knew from consulting the radar where it was and the direction and speed at which it was moving. He had filed his flight plan accordingly. “Nothing to worry about,” he said into his mike. “Those storms are miles away and won’t amount to much anyway.”

“I just thought . . . maybe we could take another route?”

“I filed a flight plan.”

“I know but . . . Couldn’t we fly farther away from the storms?”

“We could. But I’d rather dodge a thunderstorm than have an MD80 that doesn’t know I’m there fly up my ass.” He turned around so she could see his face instead of the back of his head. “But that’s just me.”

She gave him a drop-dead look, yanked the cords from the outlets on the wall near her chair, and removed her headset. He focused his attention on the job at hand, but when the turbulence became even rougher, he looked back to check on her. Her eyes were closed and her lips were moving. She was either praying or chanting. Or maybe cursing him.

Gall, whom he’d notified of his approach, had turned on the runway lights. He set the airplane down with the ease of long practice and skill and taxied toward the hangar, where he could see Gall silhouetted in the open maw of the building.

He brought the airplane to a stop and cut the engines. Gall came out to put chocks on the wheels. Dent squeezed himself out of the cockpit and into the cabin, opened the door, then climbed out first and turned to help Bellamy navigate the steps. She ignored the hand he extended.

Which piqued him. He reached for her hand and slapped a sales receipt into it. “You owe me for the gas I got in Houston.”

“Mr. Hathaway has my credit card. Excuse me. I need the restroom.”

She hurried into the building.

Gall rounded the wing and glanced into the empty cabin. “Where are her folks?”

“They stayed in Houston.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. The old man looked like he was on his last leg. Otherwise, how’d it go?”

“Don’t make nice with me, Gall. I’m mad as hell at you.”

“You’re richer tonight than—”

“I want a straight answer. Did you know about her book?”

“Book?”

“A book. You know, like people read.”

“Does it have pictures?”

“No.”

“Then I didn’t know about it.”

Dent searched Gall’s eyes, which were rheumy but free of deceit. “I’ll kill you later. Right now, I’m ready to put up my airplane and call it a day.”

While he was going about it, Bellamy and Gall conducted their business in the hangar office. But he kept an eye on them, and, as she came out of the hangar, he placed himself directly in her path.

Stiffly, she said, “Thank you.”

He wasn’t about to let her getaway be that easy. “I may not use words like ‘expunge,’ but I know how to fly. I’m a good pilot. You had no reason to be scared.”

Not quite meeting his gaze, she said, “I wasn’t afraid of the flying.”

T
ogether Dent and Gall got the airplane into the hangar. Dent climbed back in to retrieve his sunglasses and iPad, and spotted the copy of
Low Pressure
lying in the seat Bellamy had occupied. “Son of a bitch.” He grabbed the book and, as soon as he cleared the door of his airplane, made a beeline for his Vette.

Gall turned away from the noisily humming refrigerator, a six-pack of Bud in his hand. “I thought we’d crack a couple of—Where are you going?”

“After her.”

“What do you mean, after her?”

Dent got into the driver’s seat and started the engine, but when he would have pulled the door closed, Gall was there, the six-pack in one hand, his other braced against the open car door. “Don’t go borrowing trouble, Ace.”

“Oh that’s funny. You’re the one who set me up with them.”

“I was wrong.”

“You think?” He gave the door a tug. “Let go.”

“Why’re you going after her?”

“She left her book behind. I’m going to return it.”

He yanked hard on the door and Gall released it. “You should leave it alone.”

Dent didn’t acknowledge the warning. He shoved the Vette into first gear and peeled out of the hangar. He knew the road well, which was fortunate, because while he drove with one hand, he used his other to wrestle his wallet from his back pocket, fish the check from it, and, after reading the address, accessed a GPS app on his iPad. In a matter of minutes he had a map to her place.

Georgetown, not quite thirty miles north of Austin, was known for its Victorian-era architecture. Its town square and tree-lined residential streets boasted structures with gingerbread trim.

Bellamy lived in one such house. It sat in a grove of pecan trees and had a deep veranda that ran the width of the house. Dent parked at the curb and, taking the book with him, followed a flower-bordered path to the steps leading up to the porch. He took them two at a time and reached past a potted Boston fern to ring the doorbell.

Then he saw that the front door stood ajar. He knocked. “Hello?” He heard a noise, but it wasn’t an acknowledgment. “Hello? Bellamy?” As fast as he’d been driving, she couldn’t have been that far ahead of him. “Hello?”

She appeared in the wedge between the door frame and the door, and it looked to him like she was depending on it for support. Her eyes were wide and watery, and her face was pale, bringing into stark contrast a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks that he hadn’t noticed before.

She licked her lips. “What are you doing here?”

“Are you okay?”

She gave an affirmative nod, but he didn’t believe her.

“You look all . . .” He gestured toward her face. “Was it the flight? Did it mess you up that bad?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

He hesitated, wondering why he didn’t just hand her the book and tell her to shove it where the sun don’t shine, as he’d come here to do, then turn and walk away. For good. Forever and ever, amen.

He had a strong premonition that if he stayed for one second longer, he would live to regret it. But despite the impulse to get the hell out of there and away from her and all things Lyston, he gave the door a gentle push, which she resisted. He pushed harder until she let go and the door swung wide.

“What the hell?” he exclaimed.

The central hallway behind her looked like it had been the site of a ticker-tape parade. The glossy hardwood floor was littered with scraps of paper. Brushing past her, he went in, bent down, and picked up one of the larger pieces. It was the corner of a page; T. J. David was printed on it, along with a page number.

“You found it like this when you got home?”

“I was just a few minutes ahead of you,” she replied. “This is as far as I got.”

Dent’s first thought was that the intruder might still be inside the house. “Alarm system?”

“The house doesn’t have one. I only moved in a couple of weeks ago.” She gestured toward sealed boxes stacked against the wall. “I haven’t even finished unpacking.”

“Your husband isn’t here?”

The question seemed to confuse her at first, then she stammered, “No. I mean . . . I don’t . . . I’m divorced.”

Huh
. He tucked that away for future consideration. “Call nine-one-one. I’ll take a look around.”

“Dent—”

“I’ll be okay.”

He set the copy of her novel on the console table, then continued down the central hallway past a dining room and a living room, which opened off of it on opposite sides. The hall led him to the back of the house, where he found the kitchen and utility room. The door to the yard was standing open. The locking mechanism dangled from a neat round hole in the door.

A striped cat curiously peered around the jamb. Upon seeing Dent, it skedaddled. Being careful not to touch anything, he stepped out onto a concrete stoop, where a bag of potting soil and a stack of terra-cotta flowerpots stood against the exterior wall of the house. One of the pots had been broken. Pieces of it lay on the steps leading down to the ground. The fenced yard was empty.

He figured the house-breaker was no longer a threat, but he wanted to check the upstairs anyway. He retraced his steps through the kitchen and back into the wide hallway. Bellamy was standing where he’d left her, cell phone in hand.

“I think he came and went through the utility room door. I’m gonna check upstairs.”

He climbed them quickly. The first door on his left opened into a spare bedroom, which she obviously planned on using as an office. The computer setup on the trestle table appeared to have been left undisturbed, but, as in the entryway below, pages of her book had been made into confetti and strewn everywhere. He checked the closet, but there was nothing in it except boxes packed with basic office supplies.

Midway down the hall, a quaint pair of doors with glass panes stood open. He walked through them into Bellamy’s bedroom. Here, he drew up short. The room had been vandalized, but not with confetti.

Hastily he checked the closet, where he found clothes and shoes, several unpacked boxes, and a lingering floral scent. The bathroom was likewise empty except for the cream-colored fixtures, fluffy towels, and feminine accoutrements on the dressing table.

He returned to the bedroom’s double doors and called down to her. “Coast is clear, but you’d better come up.”

Moments later she joined him, doing exactly as he’d done when he walked in. She stopped dead in her tracks and stared.

“I take it that’s not part of the decor.”

“No,” she said huskily.

Scrawled in red paint on the wall was:
You’ll be sorry
.

The paint had run, leaving rivulets at the bottom of each letter that looked like dripping blood. In lieu of a paintbrush, a pair of her underwear had been used to write the letters.

The significance of that escaped neither of them.

Dent motioned toward the paint-soaked wad of silk lying on the carpet. “Yours?” When she nodded, he said, “Sick bastard. Police on their way?”

She roused herself, pulled her gaze away from the message on the wall, and looked up at him. “I didn’t call them.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I don’t want a big deal made of this.”

He thought surely he had heard her wrong, and his expression must have conveyed that.

“It was a prank,” she said. “When I moved in, a neighbor warned of things like this happening in the area. There’s been a rash of it. Teenagers with not enough to do. Maybe an initiation of some kind. They scatter trash across lawns. Knock over mailboxes. I’m told they hit a whole block one night last month.”

He looked at the vandalized wall, the garment on the floor, then came back to her. “Your panties were used to paint a threatening message on your bedroom wall, and you put that on par with scattered trash and banged-up mailboxes?”

“I’m not calling the police. Nothing was taken. Not that I can tell, anyway. It was just . . . just mischief.”

She turned quickly and left the room. Dent went after her, clumping down the stairs on her heels. “When I got here you were shaking like a leaf. Now you’re passing this off as a prank?”

“I’m certain that’s all it was.”

She rounded the newel post and headed for the kitchen, Dent only half a step behind her. “Uh-uh. I ain’t buying it. What are you going to be sorry for?”

“I have no idea.”

“I think you do.”

“It’s none of your business. What are you doing here, anyway?” She dragged a chair from the kitchen dining table into the utility room and pushed it against the door to keep it closed. “The neighbor’s cat comes to visit uninvited.”

When she turned back, Dent was there, blocking her. “I’ve a good mind to call the police myself.”

“Don’t you dare. The media would get wind of it, and then I’d have that to deal with, too.”

“
Too
? In addition to what?”

“Nothing. Just . . . just please let it go. I’m waiting for the call that my father has died. I can’t take on any more right now. Can’t you understand that?”

He understood that the woman was on the verge of a meltdown. Her eyes were stark with something. Fear? Her voice was unsteady, like it was about to crack. She was holding on to the ledge by her fingernails, but she was holding on, and he had to give her credit for that.

He softened his approach. “Look, thanks to your family, I’m no fan of cops, either. But I still think you should report this.”

“They’ll show up with lights flashing.”

“Probably.”

“No thank you. I could do without the circus. I’m not calling them.”

“Okay, then a neighbor.”

“What for?”

“Ask if you can crash on their sofa.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“A friend? Someone who could come—”

“No.”

“Then call the police.”

“You want to call them, you call. You can deal with them. I won’t be here.” She pushed him aside and made her way back into the hall. “I’ll be at my parents’ house.”

“That idea gets my vote. You’d be crazy to stay here alone. But wait an hour. Let the police come—”

“No. I want to make the drive before the storm gets here.”

“It’s not coming here.”

She glanced toward the window. “It may.” She leaned down to retrieve her shoulder bag from the floor, where she’d apparently dropped it when she came in. She hauled the strap onto her shoulder. “You still haven’t told me why you followed me home.”