“Anna?” a voice said.
“Yes?”
“It’s Mary. Mary Patrick.”
Anna felt her heart leap in her chest. Mary?
“Sorry to call out of the blue like this. I sort of need a favor.”
Anna was breathing hard. She couldn’t believe it. Sister Mary Patrick is alive. “Where are you?” she managed to say.
“I’m at a McDonald’s in Louisville” — she incorrectly pronounced it Louieville, like Kentucky — “having lunch. The folks I’m riding with stopped here. Hope you don’t mind that I cut out on you.”
“No, that’s fine,” Anna said, trying to keep her voice steady. She pictured Louisville on the map in her head: Mary wasn’t far away. “What favor do you need?”
Anna looked at Woody, who was happily eating his turkey sandwich. He’s innocent, Anna thought, her eyes brimming with tears. Thank God. Thank God I was wrong. And she knew what Mary was going to say before she said it.
“Anna, I think I lost my bracelet, the green one, when I took my stuff out of the car. I remember snagging it on the door handle. I know it’s a long shot, but I was wondering—”
“Woody found it,” Anna said, loud enough for Woody to hear.
He looked up at her, his eyebrows raised. Anna pointed to her wrist and silently mouthed the words Mary Patrick. It took a second, then he understood and nodded and said, around a mouthful of turkey and cheese, “I found it after she left, put it in the glove compartment. Forgot to tell you.”
Anna turned her attention back to the phone, and to Mary’s gushing thanks. “You’re most welcome,” Anna said. “This is turning out to be a crazy day.” As the thought struck her, she added, “Your address is on the card you gave me. I’ll mail the bracelet to you soon as we get back.”
“Great. I sure appreciate it, Anna. And hey — thanks again for the ride.”
They exchanged goodbyes and Anna disconnected. She felt light enough to fly. One friend was alive and well, and another was innocent and exonerated. An incredible weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
Just as she was about to confess everything to Woody, including her ungrounded suspicions, she realized she should call off the reinforcements; after all, Jack Speerman was on his way here at this moment. Already feeling guilty about the false alarm, she picked up her phone and was about to punch in Jack’s number when the phone buzzed in her hand. She checked the display and saw that it was Mary again.
“Anna? Sorry to be a pest, but I just remembered something. Could you just give that bracelet to Jack when he gets there? He can bring it to me.”
Anna frowned. “Jack?”
“The patrolman. He’s on his way there, right? He said he’d be back soon, and my ride says they’ll be glad to wait, so—”
“Wait a minute,” Anna cut in. “How’d you know he’s coming here?”
“I overheard him talking to you on the phone awhile ago. He called your name when you phoned him about your car trouble.”
Anna felt her head spinning. Car trouble?
“He stopped and was eating with us here at McDonald’s when you called him,” Mary said. A silence dragged out. “Anna? You still there?”
Anna’s brain seemed to have gone numb. Her head was roaring.
She had told Jack she thought Mary had been killed — and yet Jack had been there with Mary at the time, while they were talking? He was sitting right there with her? Why didn’t he tell me that?
There could be only one reason. Dazed, she peered up at Woody, who was still wolfing down sandwiches, and then looked past him, focusing as if for the first time on the roofline of the house just above the trees behind him. The house owned by someone Woody said he knew, someone who wouldn’t mind their trespassing...
Oh my God.
Anna felt her stomach turn over. She lowered the phone and said to Woody, “That’s Jack’s house, isn’t it?”
Woody had turned away and was digging around in the picnic basket. “What?”
But she knew it was true. Jack Speerman lived there — about a hundred yards off the road, Woody had said. He lived there — here — and the well was on his land. The well with the wheelbarrow ruts running toward it from the direction of the house. Anna’s thoughts were flying now, zinging around in her head.
And then she heard something behind her. She whirled around—
And stared straight into Jack’s face. Anna yelped and clapped a hand over her mouth.
Woody heard her and turned. “Jack?” he said. “What are you doing here?”
She just kept staring. This wasn’t the mild, friendly Jack Speerman they’d seen at Wendy’s. This face was drawn and flushed with anger — but also with something else. Frustration? Guilt? Regret?
Anna was breathing in ragged gasps, trying to think. Had Jack heard enough of the phone conversation just now to know she was talking to Mary? “Jack,” she said, panting. “Thank God you’re here.” She leaned closer and whispered, “I haven’t said anything to Woody about all this. In fact, I think I might’ve been wrong. I was just about to call you back and—”
Vaguely, as if from a distance, she could hear Mary’s voice in the phone she held in her hand: “Anna? Are you there?” Anna looked dumbly down at it, knowing that Jack had heard it too, but before she could say or do anything more, the phone was suddenly gone, slapped out of her hand and onto the ground six feet away. Her fingers were stinging.
Jack Speerman looked as if he wanted to hit her again, and not in the hand this time.
“So you know Mary’s alive,” he said softly, “and you probably know by now that I was with her when you called. And if you know that...” Jack paused and shook his head. In a voice heavy with sadness he continued, “What have you done, Anna?” He glanced past her at Woody, who was standing now, the picnic forgotten. “What in God’s name are you two doing here anyway, snooping around?”
“You invited me,” Woody said, sounding hurt. “You said to stop by sometime and take pictures—”
“A year ago. Things have changed since then.” Jack’s gaze moved to the gray rooftop beyond the trees and then back again, and Anna saw the heartache in his eyes. “What are the odds?” he murmured. “Couldn’t you have left well enough alone?”
Woody, Anna could tell, was beginning to understand. He had backed up several paces, his eyes narrowed and alert. He looked at the house too, then at the well behind him, and at the wheelbarrow tracks between the two. Putting it all together. Last of all, he turned again to stare at the pain and guilt on his old friend’s face.
Except for the regular screech and creak of the windmill, the scene had gone dead silent. Anna could feel her heart thundering in her chest.
“It’s you,” Woody said, with something like awe in his voice. “You’re the Night Stalker. He looked like someone impersonating a policeman because he was a policeman.”
Jack ran a beefy hand over his face. He had perspired all the way through his uniform shirt. “No,” he replied miserably. “It wasn’t me.”
“It was me,” a voice said, from off to the side. All three swiveled to look.
Standing there on the rutted path to the house was a carbon copy of Jack Speerman. The eyes, mouth, even the build was the same. The only differences were hair color and height: this brother was darker, and shorter. That, and the fact that there was something odd in his eyes.