her last life. She caught her long hair in an artfully messy ponytail high on her head with a Dollar Tree scrunchie and chose Tiffany earrings with tiny diamonds that the Feds had passed over.
She was standing at her bedroom window, fastening the second earring, when she saw movement at the edge of what she considered her yard. Janya said that the leggy border shrubs, badly in need of trimming, were oleander, which had bloomed sporadically in bursts of pink and white last summer, although they were unadorned now.
Tracy was less interested in the shrubs than what had just gone behind them. She was sure she had glimpsed a man dressed in earth tones, fading into her scenery as if garbed expressly for that purpose.
CJ!
No, she wasn’t going there again. She ticked off the possibilities, starting with her unoccupied thumb. Ken Gray, the lone male resident of Happiness Key, although she’d never seen Ken walk his greyhound in her yard. She held up her index finger and stared at it. A fisherman? Somebody hunting alligators? There’d better not be any alligators within a mile of her house!
She held up her middle finger and realized exactly what that one connoted.
“Great.” She balled all her fingers into a fist. Somebody was in her yard again. It was time to put a stop to this. Just as soon as she found something to protect herself.
The utilitarian cottage had no fireplace, and consequently no poker. She ate very little meat, so she was minus a carving knife. She only played baseball at the rec center; she was not an archer, and she’d tried target shooting in college and found it a bore. She did have one mean golf umbrella, though. She grabbed it on her way out the door, brandishing it over her head like a club.
Death by umbrella.
She looked ridiculous, but she didn’t care.
Halfway around the house she faced the fact that this burst of derring-do was not about scaring away a stranger. No, she had to convince herself once and for all that CJ was not tormenting her. Then she could laugh at herself, a skill she still needed work on.
Someone was definitely crunching through the palmetto underbrush ahead, and she followed as quietly as she could. To her untrained ear, it sounded as if the man was attempting to be as quiet as possible. She had only rarely walked in this direction herself, because it was overgrown with clinging vines and led to the marshy side of the island facing the bay. Still, she wasn’t afraid of getting lost. She was just glad she could still see where she was stepping. This was, after all, the state that bragged about harboring every variety of poisonous snake in North America. Unfortunately, she was wearing skimpy little flats.
The noise stopped suddenly, and so did she, flattening herself against the trunk of a Sabal palm. She’d never been a fan of slasher movies, but they’d taught her how not to handle this sort of situation. Of course, if the man was CJ, she would have a few things to say to him.
The noise began again, a whisper of feet, the faintest brush of clothing against tree trunks. Her senses tingled. The stranger was making a serious attempt not to be heard. And now he’d moved west, as if making for the swampy cove just up the road. The fact that he was approaching it from this angle was suspicious. He could have parked and walked in. The place was normally deserted. She couldn’t imagine why he was hiding his approach.
He moved, and so did she. She’d left her house far behind before she began to seriously question her actions. She was distant enough from the other cottages that if she screamed for help, nobody would hear her. She hadn’t grabbed her cell phone. No, she’d grabbed…an umbrella. At least if a thunderstorm began—unlikely, since there wasn’t a cloud in the sky—she was ready.
The noise stopped. She stopped, too. Then she heard crunching to her right. Was earth-tone man circling back? Had he spotted her? She squatted behind a stand of coastal willows and waited.
Frozen in place, she thought she heard a noise to her left. She might be in view from that direction. She was more than concerned, a bit less than panicked. She inched forward at a crouch. The bay was somewhere up ahead, after a stretch of what passed for marsh. If she cut right just before she reached that point and