Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake #5) - Rachel Caine Page 0,58

there would be some kind of consequences for the action. I’ve been bracing myself for a long, long time. Treating Melvin Royal like a threat even when he’s gone.

Treating him like junk mail feels astonishingly like freedom.

“You’ve still got the address it came from?” Sam asks.

“I have the mail center envelope. That gives me a place to start looking for the sender. If we can find the source of those letters . . . we can put a stop to it. Maybe, finally, forever. We could shred every single thing that’s left of Melvin Royal.” I swallow. “I’d like that. That would be great.”

“It would,” he says. “We start tomorrow. We owe the kids a movie today. I don’t want to let them down.”

Neither do I. So we wait until they are ready to pause the game, and we load up the SUV, and we spend a glorious couple of hours not home, out of our too-full heads, transported to another world.

It’s a temporary escape. But God, it matters. Happiness, however brief, always matters.

Even if it makes things that much more jolting when we get home.

The night’s chilly; people are still burning fireplaces, and I smell the pleasantly pervasive scent even through the closed windows as we turn off into our neighborhood. It’s calm, well lit, quiet, totally normal. Our house sits at the far end of the block, and we glide past glowing houses and neatly kept yards, and I make the turn into the driveway.

There’s something taped to our door. I focus on that sheet of paper and feel the hair raise on my arms, pull tight at the back of my neck. No. Oh God. Then I get hold of my anxiety and push it down, hard. Maybe it’s a pizza delivery ad. Or a note from a neighbor. Or . . .

It isn’t. I know it isn’t.

I pull the SUV into the garage and take the alarm off as everybody crowds into the house after me. Relocking the garage door is second nature, and so is scanning the place to be sure everything’s just as we left it.

Nobody mentions the note on the front door, but when I look around, they’re all staring that direction. Connor says, “Should I get it?” His tone is so calm and adult that it almost scares me. He is facing things head-on.

Lanny doesn’t wait for anyone to give permission; she just stalks straight ahead, unlocks the door, opens it, and grabs the flyer as she kicks the door shut again. Even as she’s studying it, she’s turning deadbolts and setting the alarm. My girl.

“Anybody want to guess?” she asks. “Because this is a super easy one.”

“Wanted poster,” Connor and I say at the same time. Sam doesn’t speak.

“You win the awesome prize of even more harassment!” She brings the flyer over and puts it into my hand. “So. What do we do?”

“We check the video and see who thought they were being clever,” Sam says. “Doorbell camera.” He’s already walking down the hall, and the rest of us follow.

Sam pulls up the feed and scrolls back. It happened about an hour ago, just after dark; the front door camera shows two people in black hoodies with bandannas over their faces. From their build, I’d say teens, maybe a little older. One has the piece of paper, tape already applied. They’re both wearing gloves. Once the paper’s on the door, they both back up and flip off the camera.

“And another country asshole heard from,” Lanny says. I don’t try to police her language, not now. Maybe not ever again. I like the dismissive, pissed-off way she says it. “Where are they going now?”

They run to the right, toward the garage. Sam switches cameras to follow the progress. They bypass the garage and go around to the side of the house. The fence meets the house halfway down the length, and I keep the gate padlocked from the inside.

They don’t get that far. They take out cans of spray paint. From the camera’s angle, I can’t see what they’re doing, but it’s pretty obvious it’s not Banksy creating a masterpiece on our south wall.

“Great. So original,” Connor says. “They must be freshmen at Troll School.” He doesn’t sound shaken either. Or scared. He just sounds . . . normal. I spare a second to mourn for the fact that this is normal for them, that they have a connoisseur’s appreciation for the finer points of vandalism, but honestly, in the next second