on my face immediately is lust, or all our conversations would begin with “okay,” or “not now, for goodness sake!” “What aren’t you telling me?” she asked.
My lips pursed with a “you just don’t trust me” look, but she wasn’t buying it. I showed her the note on the handkerchief.
Abby sat down on the bottom stair. She started to rub her temples with both index fingers. “It’s starting again, Aaron,” she said.
“Put your head between your legs.”
I got a sharp look for my trouble. “You know what I mean. The threats. The worrying. The constant feeling that we’ll be under attack at any moment. We swore we weren’t going to have this again, didn’t we?”
“I don’t know why we’re having it now. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Do rocks through a window usually make sense?”
I started picking up the larger pieces of glass and stacking them gingerly on the coffee table. “You like to think a message is being sent,” I said. “But there’s no message here.”
“I think the message is pretty clear. They don’t want you looking into Louis Gibson’s murder.”
“Who doesn’t? Every reporter in a three hundred mile radius is looking into the murder. I don’t have anything the others want. I’m not so close to the solution that whoever’s responsible has to be worried. Driving from house to house and throwing a rock through every reporter’s window would take months. I just don’t understand why they’re after me, and not anybody else.”
Abby stood up and walked into the kitchen. I followed, because there’s no point in trying to get her to stop going somewhere, and she generally has a good reason. Turned out she did this time, too, as she reached under the sink for the garbage bags. She was going to throw the glass and splintered wood away.
“Wait,” I said, and went into the closet for the contractor garbage bags, which are heavier and less likely to be torn by broken glass. “Did you hear any of what I said?”
“Of course.”
“So?”
She turned to me and did a perfect imitation of the face Leah puts on when she’s in her “I’m-about-to-become-a-pre-teen-and-boy-are-you-annoying” mood. “I’m thinking!” Abby fussed, and we both chuckled.
This time, she followed me back into the living room, and we started the process of separating the wreckage the rock in our window had caused from the wreckage that normally makes up our living room. I was already thinking about how to cover the pane of glass that had been damaged until repairs could be made, and decided that cardboard and duct tape were the way to go.
Abby exhaled, which I took to be a sign the thinking was over and she had something to say. And sure enough, she said, “You’re right. It doesn’t make any sense that they’d come after you as opposed to any of the other reporters. So there’s only one explanation.”
Intrigued, I looked up, and came close to cutting off my left pinkie on jagged glass. “Really? What?”
Abigail frowned, and spoke quietly. “They must be coming after me.”
Chapter
Nineteen
You have to understand, it was now after two in the morning, and my mind wasn’t firing on all cylinders. So I gaped at her for a few seconds, and not in the way I usually do.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have heard you wrong. I thought you said they were coming after you.”
“I did,” she answered, and I noticed she hadn’t met my eyes for a while. “That’s the only logical explanation.”
“We need a broom,” I told her, and got up to get one. Abby stared at me as I left the room, went into the same closet where I had gotten the bag, and emerged with a broom and dustpan. I came back into the living room, and she was still staring.
“Don’t you want me to explain?” she asked.
I began sweeping up the smaller pieces of glass. “I’d be willing to bet fifty bucks you can’t,” I said. “What the hell do you mean, the only logical explanation is that people are coming after you?”
Abby sat down on the stairs again and got a dreamy look on her face, as if she weren’t actually there in the room with me. When she spoke, it was as if she were talking to herself.
“I had a case a couple of months ago, a guy who shot his girlfriend and left her in an alley,” she began.
“I remember,” I told her. “The pro bono case you were assigned. She was in the hospital for a couple of