(1995) The Midnight Hour by Karen Robards

Author:Karen Robards [Robards, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Mystery, Suspense
ISBN: 9780440225041
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1995-07-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

“YOU SCARED THE LIFE OUT OF ME,” Grace said furiously, recognizing Marino.

“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.” It was an idle observation. He took another drag on his cigarette, making the tip glow bright red again.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” she retaliated, walking toward him. He was wearing his leather bomberjacket, she saw, which was zipped almost all the way up to his throat, and jeans, Cigarette smoke, white and wispy, curled around his head. Its acrid smell was in the air.

“Seems like there’s a lot we don’t know about each other, then, doesn’t it?” He eyed her and put the cigarette to his mouth again. “Nice outfit, by the way.”

“What are you doing here?” A thought seized Grace by the heart. “Jessica… “

“She’s fine.” He took a final drag on the cigarette and then flipped it over the railing, into the big snowball bush by the steps.

“You shouldn’t do that. You could start a fire,” Grace protested, distracted.

“It’s too wet. Anyway, you probably should know that the cigarette wasn’t mine. I used to smoke, a long time ago, but I quit, I found a pack with two cigarettes and a lighter in it hidden under the cushion here when I sat down. I decided to smoke them for the hell of it, to see if they tasted as good as I remembered. They didn’t.

“Whose?…” Grace began, but the snorting sound he made told her his opinion as eloquently as if he’d put it into words. “You think they’re Jessica’s?”

“Unless you sit out here on the porch and smoke.”

“Oh, she doesn’t…” Grace began, then broke off under the weight of that derisive look. He was right, she realized, however much she hated to admit it. If cigarettes and a lighter had been hidden on the porch, their most likely owner was Jessica.

“What are you doing here?” she asked again, abandoning the topic of Jessica and the cigarettes for the moment. After everything she had been through with her daughter lately, discovering that she snuck cigarettes was almost small potatoes.

“I promised you I’d take this seriously, didn’t I? It occurred to me that if someone really is stalking Jessica, or you, they have to be hanging around your house a lot. I thought I’d sit out here in the dark awhile and see what I could see.”

That made sense. It made such dazzlingly good sense that Grace was surprised she hadn’t thought of it herself For someone to have done the things that had been done, whoever it was had to be watching the house pretty closely. It should not be all that difficult to catch them in the act.

“Have you seen anything?” she asked, suddenly feeling much better.

“Not a creature’s stirred,” he said. “That is, until your boyfriend pulled up.”

At the thought that he had witnessed that kiss-Grace snuck a quick look over the porch rail, trying to gauge exactly how much he could see, and decided that, as the kiss had taken place right in the pool of lamplight, he could see plenty-she felt a squirmy kind of embarrassment.

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