figure out who she is and warn her off. I don’t want to have to keep looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, just in case someone’s trying to sneak up behind me.”
“You won’t have to. Another day or two at the most, and we’ll have her.” He plunged the fork back into the casserole. Now that he’d started eating he must have realized he was hungry.
“Just out of curiosity,” I said, as I picked at my own food and as Carrie kicked her feet in the bouncy seat and Pearl snored on her pillow, “what’ll happen when you figure out who it is? I mean… you can’t really arrest her, right? Is it illegal to take pictures of other people and posting them on social media?”
“Gray area,” Rafe said. “If they’re in public, you don’t need permission. There’s no reasonable expectation of privacy.”
“So someone could take a picture of us holding hands at Beulah’s because they thought we were cute, and that’d be OK.”
He nodded. “But anybody standing outside the house right now, shooting through the window, would be violating our privacy. We’re in our own home and have the right to expect to be by ourselves.”
Not an issue so far, although I cast a nervous glance at the back door. “You don’t think anyone’s out there, do you?”
“You’d see’em if they were,” Rafe said calmly. “It’s still light out. Besides, Pearl would be having a fit.”
And she was lying quietly on her pillow, napping.
“All of the pictures and videos so far were taken in public places. So it wasn’t illegal to take any of them. And I guess, if it’s legal to take them, it’s legal to upload them to social media?”
“More or less,” Rafe said.
“So she hasn’t done anything illegal.”
“Depends on your definition of illegal. And on the DA. I’m sure Satterfield’d be happy to charge her with something if you asked him to.”
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Todd wasn’t so enamored with me anymore, now that I was married to Rafe and he was engaged to Marley.
“What we can do,” Rafe said, “once we figure out who she is, is we can get a protection order and tell her to cease and desist. Once she’s been served, if she keeps doing what she’s doing, it’ll be felony stalking, and she can go to prison.”
“That’d work.” She’d be behind bars, and I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone trying to take my baby away.
“That’s unless she does something more now.”
Right. I grimaced.
We had finished eating and Rafe had taken Carrie into the parlor and was playing with her while I was filling the dishwasher under Pearl’s watchful eye when we heard the sound of tires on the gravel outside.
Or rather, what I heard—and saw—was Pearl’s ears twitch before she took off like a bullet across the kitchen and down the hallway toward the foyer, barking hysterically.
I grabbed a dish towel and followed. By the time I was halfway down the hall, Rafe had emerged from the parlor. Pearl was dancing in front of the door, her barks reverberating through the house.
“Knock it off,” Rafe told her, sternly.
She danced out of the way, still yipping. By now, I was close enough to hear the sound of a car door slam outside. When I peered through one of the sidelights, I saw a small, blue car pulled up to the bottom of the stairs, and a man starting to climb.
He wasn’t anyone I knew. Medium height and sort of weedy, he might have been in his mid-twenties, with a scrubby little goatee and a faded T-shirt sporting a picture of the Beatles.
“Hold the dog back,” Rafe told me.
I wrapped my hand around her collar and held on. “It’s OK, sweetheart. Daddy’ll take care of the bad man.”
She stopped barking, but the rumble in her throat made my hand vibrate.
Rafe, meanwhile, pulled the door open and blocked it. “Something I can do for you?”
The young man looked at him, up and down, and rather than look intimidated, he grinned. “Got a kid in the car who says you’ll pay the fare.”
I peered through the window again while I held onto Pearl. She had stopped growling now, so I thought it might be safe to let her go. As soon as I did, she bulleted up next to Rafe and stuck her face outside.
“Whoa.” The guy outside took a step back.
“Thought I told you to hold her,” Rafe said without turning his head.
“You did. But I figured he wasn’t a