Fugitive Heart - By Bonnie Dee Page 0,60

Marty moved like lightning from the tables to the wait station, singing “Pumped Up Kicks” in a tuneless monotone. The air smelled of fry grease and apple pie, and the hum of conversation was as familiar and dull as the droning of bees.

But when Ames stepped out of the break room, the place went suddenly quiet. Everyone looked up. Her skin shriveled at all the eyes upon her, and she felt like she ought to say something, but she had no idea what.

Then a farmer in the corner began clapping, and several other customers joined in. What the hell?

Missy Holmes and Jenny Brown, the Realtor, bolted up from their booth and came to hug her.

“You poor, brave thing,” Missy gushed. “What you’ve been through!”

“If you need anything, anything at all, you let us know,” Jenny added.

“Um, okay, sure.” Ames extricated herself from their clutching manicured fingers, these women who’d barely given her the time of day before. Now she was supposed to be some kind of fifteen-minutes-of-fame celebrity? Why, exactly?

Luckily, the flurry of excitement died down within minutes, and everyone returned to their biscuits and sausage gravy or pile o’ pancakes. Ames earned a few more comments from customers she waited on. Questions about what had happened, which she neatly sidestepped by saying it was an ongoing investigation and she wasn’t allowed to talk about it, and wishes for her welfare, which she accepted with a smile.

But soon enough, everything was back to normal. It could’ve been any weekday morning BNR—Before Nick Ross—except Ames knew when her shift was over, she’d be going out to his house to finalize her plans for the remodeling project.

In the weeks he’d been gone, she’d been out to the farmhouse, cleaning, plastering and painting. Repairing the damage left by the mice and Nick’s search for Elliot’s stuff took days.

Ames hated feeling danger in the one place that had always meant safety to her. She’d drive out the ghosts. She felt too nervous to wear earbuds as she worked, but the silence unnerved her as well, so she lugged Elliot’s old boom box with her as she worked.

With the music pumped up, singing along as she worked, she shed the fear and soon felt happier than she had expected—even if she did check her phone every few minutes for text messages that didn’t seem to come often enough and were too short when they appeared.

She would have kept on working at his house, messing with web pages in the evenings and sleeping in the house, but Gopher begged her to come back to work.

Someday soon she’d have to quit the Back Porch, because apparently being held at gunpoint did wonders for web designers’ careers. She suddenly had a long list of people clamoring for her design services who were willing to pay. Not all of them were in Arnesdale. The story about the attack had been picked up by more than local news, although the whole thing had been vague and called a hostage crisis with unknown motivations. Apparently, the Espositos or someone knew how to handle cover-ups.

The warmth of the diner’s customers’ greeting might have been embarrassing and strange, but yeah, it felt good too.

“If I’d known you guys would treat me like some kind of heroine, I might have come back to work sooner,” she joked to Marty as she piled sticky, empty breakfast plates in a bus tub.

“You’ve been too busy pining over that Sam Allen.”

“His name is Nick,” she said, not for the first time.

Marty had obviously been waiting for this topic to come up again. “Yeah, and what exactly was that name change about? It wasn’t some official witness protection. He was that scared of those people?”

Ames just shrugged. He hadn’t explained, but she suspected it was also part of his attempt to find Elliot without Elliot spotting him coming. As a stalker… Well, Nick said he made a better curator than hunter. She wished she could go to New York and see his little museum.

She’d already spent hours hunting around the museum’s website, looking for signs of him. It wasn’t a bad site; the montage at the start was fun and loaded quickly. Maybe he’d helped put it together. She thought she heard his voice in some of the descriptions of the exhibits, and there was a blurry picture of him smiling next to a group of grade-school visitors. Did he like children? Would he want some of his own? Where would he go if he left New York?