“What about going to a counselor?”
“I can’t talk to shrinks. I had a shrink once. He abused me, too.”
Brayden exhaled loudly. “Son of a bitch.”
“Yeah. I’ve got the track record, huh? I just hope Michael grows up like Stride. Stride may be the only man I’ve ever met who isn’t a complete and total jerk. And yeah, I know, not every guy is a Dean Casperson or a Devin Card. You’re not.”
“Devin Card was accused of rape. To be fair, that doesn’t make him guilty.”
“Don’t tell me you think he’s innocent.”
“Well, I’m a cop. Everyone’s innocent until proven guilty. I know false allegations happen, particularly in politics. And I know good people can make mistakes in identifying suspects.”
“Rape victims don’t make mistakes,” Cat snapped.
Brayden hesitated, as if he were tiptoeing through a minefield. “Don’t hate me for saying this, but yeah, sometimes they do. The wrong men have gone to jail.”
“Now you sound like a jerk.”
“Sorry.”
Cat focused on Michael’s face until she was calm again, then she looked up and stared across the table at Brayden and felt herself wrapped up in his eyes. Strands of his blond hair had fallen across his face, and she wanted to reach over and smooth them back. There was something so compassionate and strong about him. If anyone tried to harm her, he’d be all over them. He’d take them to the ground. And yet when he talked to her, he had this soft voice, never getting upset, never getting frustrated with her, always smiling at her jokes and rants. When he looked at her, he saw her. He didn’t look through her as if she wasn’t there.
The trouble was, she couldn’t be with any man without seeing the other men she’d known in her life. They were all sitting behind Brayden in the cafe, hiding in his shadow. The ones who’d assaulted her, violated her, made her feel like nothing. They never left her. She didn’t know how to send them away.
“No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” Cat said. “You’ve been nothing but great to me, and you’re here giving up your free time to protect me, and what do I do? I call you a jerk.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ve earned that label plenty of times. My father would be the first to tell you that, and he’d be right.”
“What about your mom?” Cat asked.
Brayden shook his head, and Cat knew she’d touched a sore spot. “I was lucky like Michael was. The Pells were my adoptive parents. Grace Pell loved me just like Krista Olson loves this little guy. She was great. But she got ALS. Ugly, terrible, horrible disease. When she died, it was just me and Bob Pell. That wasn’t a good fit. He was devastated after losing his wife, and I don’t know, maybe looking at me always reminded him that she was gone. I loved him, he loved me, but we were like two dogs who growled at each other whenever we were in the same room. I had to get out of there.”
Cat said nothing in reply. She sat there in silence.
“Cat?” Brayden said. “Are you okay?”
Still she didn’t answer. She barely noticed Brayden opening up his heart to her. She was too focused on a bus coming and going at the stop on the other side of the intersection. As the bus pulled away from the curb, a man appeared like a ghost on the sidewalk, staring at the restaurant.
Staring at her.
“Oh, shit!” she murmured.
Brayden was instantly focused. “Cat, what is it?”
“It’s him. Jesus, it’s him.”
Brayden swung around in his chair.
Wyatt Miller smiled at them, his red dreadlocks shining in the sunlight. His eyes were covered by sunglasses, and he had a backpack slung over one shoulder. As they watched, he began to cross the street diagonally toward them.
“I’ve got Michael,” Cat said, her voice rising with fear. “He knows about my son! What if he comes after my son?”
“I’ll deal with this.”
“I can’t look at him!”
“Take Michael, and go inside,” Brayden told her. “He won’t get anywhere near you.”
Cat stumbled to her feet with her arms wrapped tightly around the boy. She hurried through the glass double doors, dragging the stroller behind her, but she found that she was too shaken to sit down. She went into a section of the restaurant lined with bookshelves, and she stood in the farthest corner, clinging to Michael and keeping her eyes tightly shut. She didn’t know how much time passed. It felt like forever. She wanted to leave, to run, but she couldn’t even open her eyes.
Then, finally, she heard a voice.
“Cat.”
She shook her head, still staring at darkness.
“Cat,” Brayden said again. He touched her face, and she finally opened her eyes.
“He’s gone,” Brayden told her. “I told him to leave. I said you didn’t want to see him.”
“What did he say?”
“He said you texted him and asked him to meet you here.”
“What? That’s a lie! I didn’t!”
Michael picked up on her stress and began to cry, and she cooed in the boy’s ear to soothe him. “I didn’t,” she said again, very quietly.
“He showed me his phone,” Brayden said. “I took a picture of the message.”
He enlarged the screen, and Cat read the text message from the photograph:
Hey, Wyatt, it’s Cat. Sorry about the mix-up at the bar last night. Some freaky stuff is going on with my life. Can I make it up to you with a late breakfast. At Sara’s Table?
“I did not send that,” Cat insisted. “It’s a fake. That number’s not even my phone.”
“I know.”
“The bastard must have sent it to himself,” she went on.
“Maybe.”
“But you can’t prove it. You can’t do anything.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Brayden, what does he want with me?” Cat asked, holding her son even tighter. “Why is he doing this?”
“I don’t know, Cat. He swears he’s not the one. He says meeting you last night was the first and only interaction he’s had with you. And he promised me he’ll stay away from you from now on. If he’s lying, he’s good at it. He seemed genuinely upset at the idea that someone was bothering you.”
Cat realized that everyone in the restaurant was watching them.
“Can we go?” she asked. “I need to go. I need to get out of here.”
“Of course.”
She put Michael down in the stroller and followed Brayden toward the street.
Cat didn’t know which was worse.
Either Wyatt Miller was an obsessive liar, and the police couldn’t do a thing about it, or the person who was doing this to her was still out there.
And still unknown.
17
Maggie climbed out of her banged up yellow Avalanche in the parking lot of the Two Bridges Motel. The cheap truck stop was located in an industrial area south of the city, on the other side of a rusted fence from the speeding traffic on I-35. Warehouses and auto shops surrounded it, and a maze of power lines ran overhead. Rows of motel windows faced the freeway, with identical white curtains hung in each room. The baby-blue building needed new paint.
Dan Erickson got out, too, and put his hands on his hips. He chewed gum at a rapid clip. “This is where Ned Baer stayed that summer?”
“Yup.”
“Man, the life of a reporter, huh?”
They headed for the motel office. It was mid-afternoon, and the parking lot was mostly empty, in the slump between checkouts and check-ins. The office was warm, and a fan with a noisy motor blew air around the snug space, but it couldn’t get rid of the mildew smell. A faded print of Jesus in a cracked glass frame was hung on the wall above an array of tourist brochures. Maggie found herself thinking that Jesus had already suffered enough and didn’t deserve to spend time here.