pick up, or had I been completely blind to the signals?
I shook my head. “You’re wrong,” I said. “You have to be. I can be clueless sometimes, but not that clueless.” My voice went up at the end, making my words sound more like a question than a statement of fact.
“Maybe,” Maggie said with an unconvincing shrug. “But I bet you anything that Emma’s seen the same thing I have, and that’s what set her off.”
“Guess that means you’re both nuts,” I grumbled. So much for the peaceful oblivion I’d been looking for when I decided to go running.
I was in even less of a mood to deliver bad news to Anderson now than I had been before. How could I look him in the eye after what Maggie had just said? I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from overanalyzing every nuance of his behavior, looking for any hint that Maggie was right. If Anderson had the hots for me, I didn’t want to know it. I had more than enough complications in my life as it was.
I took a long, hot shower, and by the time I got out, I’d convinced myself I had to tell Anderson that Emma was behind the fires, no matter how much I didn’t want to. It could turn out to be dangerous for him to underestimate her level of malice, and the sooner he accepted what she had turned into, the safer we would all be.
Dread making my stomach feel twisted and cold, I descended the stairs to the second floor and forced myself toward Anderson’s study. The door was open, but when I stepped inside, I found the room empty.
I could have gone looking for him, or I could have tried again later. Instead, I decided to take the coward’s way out. Maybe the “right” thing to do would have been to wait until I had a chance to sit down with Anderson and deliver the news in person, but I’d had more than enough confrontation for one day, and I just couldn’t face more.
Hoping Anderson wouldn’t come back and catch me in the act, I rummaged through his desk for a pen. Then I took the screen shot that Cyrus had given me and scrawled a brief note on it. I saw Cyrus today, and he gave me this. He says he got it off of Emma’s computer. Remember not to shoot the messenger. I left the paper on the seat of his chair, and then hustled out of there, glad to have escaped without having to face him.
FIFTEEN
Thursday and Friday passed without me once catching a glimpse of Anderson in the house. I kept expecting him to show up on my doorstep, or call me and demand I come to his study, but he didn’t. I might have thought he’d gone off somewhere for a vacation, except when I casually asked Maggie at lunch one day if she’d seen him lately, she told me he was home. I wondered if he had just chosen to ignore the message I’d left him, or whether he was pissed at me for being the bearer of bad tidings and was simply avoiding me.
Another storm was due to roll into town sometime Saturday morning, with a slight chance of snowfall. As usual, it was still dark out when I woke up in the morning, but I could almost feel the threat of the approaching storm. I needed to make a grocery run, and it looked like I’d better do it soon if I didn’t want to risk having to drive in the snow. The only grocery store I knew of that was open at six in the morning was a good twenty minutes away, but it would be worth it if the snow came.
It started raining as soon as I pulled into the grocery store’s parking lot, but it was nothing more than a chill drizzle. No snow yet, but the temperature had dropped ominously. Predictably, the parking lot was almost deserted at this time in the morning, and I hoped that meant the hoarders hadn’t hit the shelves yet and bought out all the milk, bread, and eggs as sometimes happens before a snowfall.
It was raining a little harder when I exited the store, and if I hadn’t had two paper grocery bags in my arms, I would have put up my umbrella. Instead, I merely hurried a little more, ducking my head to keep the droplets out of my eyes.
The parking