the closest entrance to the pasture.
He got back in and pulled through, and I jumped down from the truck while he was closing the gate again behind us. I’d reluctantly put my shoes back on, because there would be rocks and glass on the side of the road. I did scuff them as I walked, however, to get as much bat crap off as I could.
The pickup’s headlights lit our path as Ben insisted on walking me over to the car. But as we neared it, my steps slowed, because Stella was listing slightly, and I hadn’t parked on a slope.
Ben noticed, too, and went around the driver’s side, putting out a hand as if warning me to stay back. That was not going to happen. Rounding the car after him, I saw that her rear tire was flat and somehow … lifeless. I’d had a flat tire before, but tonight there was something chilling about the way the black rubber seemed to pool ominously in the gravel.
“Could that have happened when I slammed on the brakes?” I asked, too tense to even curse. “Or maybe I ran over something when I pulled off the road.”
“I don’t think so.” Crouching by the wheel, Ben sank his finger into the two-inch hole in the sidewall of the tire. There was no way that had been made by anything other than a knife.
Stella had been stabbed.
I stepped back, as if I could distance myself from this sickening fact. As I did, a flutter of white on the windshield caught my eye. With trembling fingers, I pulled a folded slip of paper from under the wiper.
Leave the dead in peace.
26
“get in the truck.”
Ben’s voice left little room for argument, but I tried to squeeze one in anyway. “I don’t think—”
“Amy, I am not messing around.” His face was grim, and he held out his hand. “Give me your key so I can get your purse and whatever else you want. I’ll drive you home.”
“I am not leaving her here on the side of the road.”
“You did before, to hare off across the pasture.”
“That was different. I didn’t think I’d be gone long. I wasn’t expecting your land to be booby-trapped.”
He took my arm, turned me toward the truck. “I’ll call Triple A from your house.”
“I can call them from right here,” I said, pulling out of his grip and turning toward Stella.
He turned me right back. “At least call from in the pickup. In case whoever did this is still around.”
I could have pulled away again—he was persistent, but not rough—only his words distracted me. “What? You think someone is waiting in a tree to snipe me?”
We reached the truck and he backed me up against its side before I could react, taking my shoulders in his hands—my bare shoulders in his hands, and oh my God, the places that made me shiver. He seemed blessedly ignorant of that, unobservant of the blush spreading up from the blanket or the hitch in my breath as he gazed intently into my wide eyes and said, “What kind of idiot are you?”
That snapped me, mostly, out of my haze. Before I could form words, however, he went on. “Someone slashed your tire. With a knife. Not a ghost, a person.”
“I know that.” I met his stare, willing him to see the reasonable Amy beneath the flake I knew I must seem.
He studied me for another moment, his thoughts visibly shifting in patterns I couldn’t read. His hands, though—I didn’t think he realized his hold on my shoulders had softened, and that as he was thinking his thoughts, his right thumb was sliding back and forth over my skin in an unconscious motion that, if we had been any other people in any other situation, would have been a caress. The traitorous flutters in my pulse didn’t know the difference.
Or maybe he did realize it, an instant before he dropped me like I was hot, and not in a good way. His gaze zipped away from mine as he stepped back and cleared his throat. “So. Your key?”
“I’m not leaving Stella here,” I said, putting iron in my voice. “I bought it with my own money when my dad didn’t want me to and my mother said she’d pay for it for my graduation present. It was almost new, and it’s not a Goodnight car, it’s mine.”
I broke off—hell, I nearly slapped a hand over my own mouth—because some insight clicked behind Ben McCulloch’s eyes and