Death with a Dark Red Rose by Julia Buckley

Author:Julia Buckley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

15

It’s almost impossible to write a suspense novel without a scene in which someone follows someone else. We are ever dogged by the footsteps of The Other.

—From the notebooks of Camilla Graham

THE FOLLOWING MORNING I woke up to find Sam gone. I sat up, shocked, and saw him sitting in a chair across from the bed and petting Lestrade, who sat peacefully in his lap.

“Sam! What—why is Lestrade in here?”

Sam shrugged. “He was mewing out in the hall. I opened the door and he strolled in, discovered the two visitors, jumped about four feet in the air, then ran to the windowsill. Eventually he came down and sniffed them, and now they’re friends.”

“Wow. Okay—and why are you out of bed?”

He stretched his legs, and Lestrade stayed in place, buoyant as a passenger on a boat. “I woke up and had some energy. I took a shower, snuck downstairs, and said hi to Camilla; she gave me some coffee and a sweet roll and a piece of Carl’s quiche.” He pointed at his coffee and a crumb-covered plate sitting on the table beside him. “Then I came back up and watched you sleep. You were having a dream, and it was making you jump sometimes.”

A hazy memory returned to me. “Someone was chasing me. I was thinking about those stairs last night—how the visitor probably came up that way. The image was in my brain, I guess.”

He grinned at me. “Your hair is all messy. I think you were doing a lot of tossing and turning.”

“I’ll bet I look great,” I said drily.

“You do.” He reached out to reclaim his coffee cup. “I feel about eighty percent today—well enough to go home and get some work done—but I was ordered by a no-nonsense Camilla to remain here for another day of recovery.”

“I agree with her wholeheartedly.”

“I bow to the wisdom of the two most important women in my life.” He took a sip of coffee. “So I guess I’ll be lying low, playing with the cats, helping you and Camilla with whatever you need.”

“That’s wonderful. It will be fun, all of us together in the house like a patchwork family. Camilla and Adam and you and me.”

His blue eyes met mine. “There’s another reason I’m glad to be staying close, obviously. If anyone lurks around again, I want to be here and ready to act.”

“Good. Although I’m guessing that Doug and Cliff will find out a lot at Plasti-Source today, don’t you think?”

“One can hope.”

“Camilla called it from the start. Every element ties back to that company. I remembered that the man I saw in the window looked like one of the men we saw on the side of the road when we came back to town. Remember those two guys?”

“You mean the ones we saw going into the woods?”

I had forgotten them. “No—we saw them before we even picked up Doug. Although I still wonder—”

“Oh, you mean Furtive and Unfriendly, outside the Plasti-Source skeleton! Yeah, I recall them. It seemed like one of them took a picture before they left.

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