Eye of the Storm - By Hannah Alexander Page 0,4

maybe a patient in trouble? She’d decided not to have a landline, despite the spotty cell coverage in Jolly Mill. If there was an urgent medical need, it was feasible someone could be coming for help, though there was a hospital in Monett less than twenty minutes away and in Cassville only a little farther in the other direction.

She checked the dead bolt lock on the front door. Of course she’d locked it. The past few years had taught her that. No one had ever locked the doors when she was growing up in Jolly Mill. Something else people seldom did was close the curtains, but right now lowering the Roman shades over all the windows seemed like a good idea.

The tight cords bit into her hands as she jerked them down, one by one. Her movements double-timed as lights crested the hill and shot through the tiny cracks in the woven material. The sharp, quick sound of her breath was harsh as it hit the matted shades. This was no dream. One set of cords tangled together, the shades tilting drunkenly as she worked a knot free and straightened the bottom edge. She rushed to the next window and then the next until she had a pseudo-barrier from the onslaught of light.

Megan’s suddenly overactive imagination transformed her little patch of wooded paradise into a battleground. Even as she castigated herself for her fear, she could do nothing to ease it.

Calm. Stay calm. Joni’s killer is dead. There’s no one after you. She wouldn’t call for help just because of a car approaching the house. She didn’t need anyone in town to think the doctor at the new clinic was unhinged. But who was coming here? Mom and Dad would have called if they were planning a trip across the state, and they wouldn’t have driven all night to get here.

Megan retreated into the shadows of the far corner of the sitting area. She curled into the love seat, clutching the throw pillow to her chest as she waited.

The holy scent reached her from the homemade sachet her former Sunday school teacher had sewn into the pillow. Martha Irene called it one of her “prayer pillows,” but Megan couldn’t pray. Who would hear her? She just squeezed the cushion hard against her chest and tried to slow her panicked imagination while the rhythm of her heart encroached on the chambers of her lungs.

She should definitely have sought treatment for PTSD.

The vehicle lights went off and the engine died, plunging her into dark silence for another few seconds before she heard a door opening and then footsteps brushing through unmown grass and last year’s leaves. There was a soft sound of someone stepping onto her wooden front porch and then a pause while she tried to still her panicked breathing, fingernails digging into her hands. This was crazy. If someone wanted to hurt her, they wouldn’t approach this way. And yet she hadn’t been totally rational since arriving here. Everything was still too fresh, and the dreams each night reminded her that the world was a dangerous place.

No one knocked. There was no doorbell. The pain in her hands distracted her.

A familiar voice reached her. One word, softly spoken. “Megan.”

She silently gulped in a great lungful of air. It couldn’t be.

“Megan? It’s me. Gerard.”

She stared through the darkness toward the door, and at once her fear metamorphosed into something even less manageable. How dare Gerard Vance follow her here?

TWO

Gerard didn’t want to knock. “Megan, please.” He could hear the cracking fatigue in his own voice. Could she hear it too?

According to his late-sleeping sister, Tess, who’d taken a couple of road trips with Megan last year, Megan had never slept this late when she lived in Corpus Christi. In fact, Tess complained that Megan never even allowed the sun to rise before her on a day off.

He knew she was here because as he’d driven up his headlights had flashed across her bright yellow Neo parked beneath the limbs of a huge oak tree around back—no missing that color. Megan was nothing if not safety-conscious. When he’d helped her pick out a replacement car last year after her old one breathed its last, her only requirement was a bright color. The front window of the car was illuminated by a few streaks of moonlight that filtered through the leaves.

“Megan, I’m not going away. I may camp out here until daylight, but I’m not leaving.”

He waited. Nothing. No movement inside at all.

Hadn’t