Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,31

surged through her and she spun around. Officer Gruder had followed her into her office. Diana clapped her hand over her mouth and the scream she hadn’t realized she was making stopped.

Gruder’s eyes widened and his hands flew up in a gesture of surrender. He stumbled, tripping over his own feet in his haste to back out of the room and down the hall toward the front of the house.

Diana sat in her desk chair, gasping for breath.

“Sorry if I startled you,” he called.

Sorry? What the hell was the matter with him, violating her space? Had she invited him in? Surely it wasn’t standard procedure to follow a citizen, deep into her home.

“I’m going outside. I’ll wait for you by the car,” he added.

She steadied herself against the desk. She had to stop overreacting to every unexpected thing that happened. She couldn’t afford for this police officer to dismiss her as a nutcase.

“That sound okay?” Gruder’s voice came from farther away.

“Okay,” she managed to call out, her voice hoarse. “I’ll be right there. I just have to . . .” She remembered the alarm. It would go off any second. She raced to the keypad. What the hell was the code to cancel? Her mind had gone blank.

When the eight-digit code finally came to her, her fingers felt like fat sausages. Twice she keyed it in wrong and had to start over. Again she tried. Just as she was about to press in the final number, a deafening Klaxon started, blaring from speakers both inside and outside the house.

Moments later, her phone rang. She grabbed it. “Ashley?” She had to hold her hand over her ear to block out the clanging. “Ashley?”

“Twenty-three Linden Place?” said a woman’s voice.

“Yes?” Diana shouted.

“This is Metro Security. Verifying an alarm.”

Of course. This was what they were supposed to do. “It’s a false alarm. Can you turn the damned thing off?”

“I need your name and verbal password?”

“What?”

“The name on the account?”

Diana gulped for air. “Diana Highsmith.”

“Password?”

She cupped her hand over the receiver. “Daniel.”

“Thank you. Verified.”

An instant later, the alarm fell silent.

“Thank God,” Diana whispered.

She hung up the phone and lifted the shade to look out the front window. Officer Gruder was out front by the patrol car, waiting for her as promised, apparently unfazed by the alarm. She slipped the pill bottle from her pocket, took out a pill, and rolled it between her fingers. But that didn’t help. She still felt jumpy, on the verge of a meltdown.

Another whole pill would knock her out. She broke the pill and swallowed half of it dry. Automatic pilot, she told herself. Don’t think, just do.

She set the alarm again. At the last moment, she remembered to grab Ashley’s laptop.

Chapter Fourteen

This time she was out of the house with time to spare. The cruiser was parked not more than twenty feet away from her front door. She’d ridden in a car a million times. It would be like riding a bike, she told herself. You climbed on and it came back to you.

But as she started down the front walk the distance seemed to lengthen. She stumbled and fell, and in an instant Gruder was out of the car, coming toward her. He put his arm around her and helped her up.

“You sure you can do this?” he asked, studying her closely.

She nodded. She had to.

Gruder walked her to the cruiser, supporting her like she was old and infirm. The sight of the mesh barrier between the front and backseat forced her into reverse. She scrabbled back, feeling the same panic she’d felt when that cage had dropped over Nadia.

“Whoa,” Gruder said. “Take it easy. I know, it looks like jail in there. Freaks a lot of people out. Would you rather follow me in your own car?”

“I . . .” A car, a black limousine with dark tinted windows, accelerated past, followed by a battered red pickup truck, its muffler pipe dragging. Diana swallowed. “I don’t think I can.”

“How about this?” Gruder opened the front passenger door. “You ride up front with me.”

She leaned down and peered in. Static crackled from an oversize console installed roughly where a car radio would be. This she could manage.

Diana sat. Reassuring smells of coffee and vinyl enveloped her.

Gruder leaned down. “Okay?”

She managed to nod and swung her legs into the car.

Gently he pressed the door of the cruiser shut. Was that pine? The scent that she so associated with Daniel unnerved her, but just for a moment. Then she