The Chesapeake Diaries: Coming Home by Mariah Stewart

Author:Mariah Stewart
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9780345520333
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2010-03-22T09:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

HAL’S still not answering his phone,” Gus told Vanessa, “so I’m going to take a ride over to his place, let him know what’s going on.”

“Don’t do that, please. Right now, he’s probably sitting in the Inn’s bar, catching up with old friends who came to the wedding,” Vanessa pleaded. She had a sinking suspicion of just which old friend Hal might be catching up with, and if that was the case, she really didn’t want to know. “Anyway, there’s nothing he could do tonight except worry.”

“Or he could be home, sleeping soundly,” Grady offered. “In any case, Vanessa is right. You’ve got two people out there going over the car, two people over at Vanessa’s shop. You probably don’t need Hal, too. At least for now.”

“All right,” Gus said. “We’ll let it go until the morning. But you just pray that this guy”—he pointed across the parking lot toward Grady’s bashed-up rental car—“is done for a while.”

“If he has any sense at all, he’s got to be thinking that he’s pushed his luck enough for one night. He did get away with the break-in without anyone seeing him, but …” Vanessa said.

“Not so sure about that. We’ll be canvassing the neighbors in the morning,” Gus reminded her. “Right now, we don’t know who saw what.”

“True enough,” Grady agreed. “But he walked away from that and from the car without getting caught. This guy is no amateur. He picks and chooses his time and his target, but he’s also opportunistic. He hit the shop when half the town was at the wedding, and he hit the car when everyone was focused on the burglary. Now, I’m pretty certain that the break-in was planned in advance, but vandalizing the car … that couldn’t have been planned. He’d have had no way of knowing that you’d be with me, in that car, and that the car would be parked in the lot down here, but he took advantage of the opportunity. If we believe that he’s targeting Vanessa for some reason—and I believe that he is—he must have seen her get out of my car, possibly when he was finished at the shop.”

“Why would he have even been back near the lot? If he’d just burglarized Bling,” Vanessa wondered, “wouldn’t he want to be far away?”

“I think he wanted to watch—which is another reason I think this is personal. Look, there’s that long dark section of the road out there. He could have been hiding just about anywhere. He’d have watched the police cars head for Charles Street, and he’d have known that was the focus of everyone’s attention. So while the breaking glass would have made noise, there wasn’t anyone around to hear it. Steffie was gone by then, and she was the last one who’d have been in that area of the parking lot, other than Ness and me. Once we were drawn to the shop, he had the lot to himself.” Grady paused to think.

“Or,” Vanessa suggested, “he

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