day or two before I start freaking out?”
Pearl was up again, and on her way back toward the house. I opened the door for her.
“It can’t hurt to do a little investigating,” Charlotte said, and got comfortable on one of the stools in front of the island. “We may not be able to discover who she is. But it can’t hurt to look.”
Pearl bounded up the couple of steps into the kitchen and stopped to look at me, tongue hanging out of her mouth.
“Good girl,” I told her. “Sit, and I’ll give you a cookie.”
She thumped her haunches down on the floor and brushed the little bit of her tail that was left back and forth. I fished a dog treat out of the jar on the counter and held it out to her. She took it daintily from my fingers and proceeded to chomp it into bits.
“Good girl,” I said again, as she trotted over to her water bowl for a couple slurps of water. “Go on and lie down on your pillow. We’re going to be in here for a while.”
Pearl headed for the pillow, and Charlotte arched her brows. “She understood that?”
“I’m not sure she understood anything more than ‘good girl’ and ‘pillow.’ But it got the point across.”
Pearl circled twice and settled down with a sigh, and I turned back to Charlotte. “Let me throw some sandwiches together, and then we can get to work.”
“I’ll just get started while you cook.” She hunched over the phone. I started dragging containers of cheese and lunchmeat out of the fridge.
Two hours later, by the time Carrie woke up, we had eliminated several hundred of the commenters on the original video. Some because they were male—Jessica Rabbit didn’t sound like a guy—but most because they listed their location as somewhere other than Middle Tennessee.
“I’ll keep going at home,” Charlotte told me, as we both got up from the loveseat in the parlor (it was a lot more comfortable than the stools in the kitchen, so we had moved in there after the sandwiches were devoured). “After I relieve my mother of babysitting duty and spend some time with my kids.”
I nodded, as I headed for the stairs to rescue my squalling daughter. “Let me know if you find anything. I’m going to arrange to get the house photographed and back on the market in the meantime.” Since we’d forgotten all about that in the excitement of a possible stalker.
“Deal,” Charlotte said. She let herself out the front door, and I twisted the lock behind her. We live in the country, outside a small town, and random crime is pretty non-existent, but it never hurts to be careful. Especially since we both, Rafe and I, seem to attract trouble.
That done, I headed up the stairs to take care of Carrie and give her tummy time on the floor while I focused on real estate for a while.
When Rafe came through the back door and into the kitchen, it was after seven, and dinner had been pushed back to accommodate a late arrival. He hadn’t let me know why he’d be late, just that I shouldn’t expect him until after his usual time, but the black cargo pants tucked into black boots, and the black T-shirt that molded his chest and shoulders, told me all I needed to know. “I didn’t realize you guys were still doing SWAT practice,” I told him, as I turned up the heat under the pot of water on the stove to bring it to a quick boil for the angel hair spaghetti.
“Prob’ly gonna keep doing that for as long as I’m here, darlin’.” He gave Pearl a scratch between her furled ears, and dropped a kiss on top of Carrie’s curly head—she was kicking her feet in her bouncy seat— before he came over to me. And backed me up against the counter before he framed my face with his hands and leaned in for a kiss. By the time he lifted his head, those fingers had migrated into my hair, and the water in the pot was bubbling.
“Nice to see you, too,” I said breathlessly and reached for the box of angel hair. “Dinner in five minutes.”
“Guess I’ll shower later.” He moved a few feet so he could tickle Carrie’s feet and make her giggle.
“The threat’s over, though,” I said, as I nestled the pasta into the pot. “Isn’t it? You caught the guy who lead the neo-Nazi group, and put him away. along