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We gathered up her stuff and my instruments as we climbed the stairs. A peek inside the fiddle case showed me that the tough fiberglass had done its work well, cracking heads on the outside, protecting the instrument on the inside.
The door didn’t look forced, but I took the key from Nancy’s stiff, trembling fingers anyway and opened the door myself, hesitating as I peered inside.
“Light’s over the stove,” Nancy forced out, through chattering teeth. “Yank the string.”
She was acting shocky. She by God had the right to, but it still worried me.
I peered inside suspiciously, but there wasn’t much to the place. I could take it all in with a single glance.
A long narrow room with a barred, grilled window at one end. A tiny water closet in the back behind the tiny kitchen.
No place for an attacker to hide.
I pulled her inside, grabbed an afghan off the couch, and wrapped it around her. She landed with a whump on the couch, legs giving out. I flipped on the light dangling over the minuscule kitchen corner.
“You swing a mean violin,” I commented.
That earned me a shaky smile and a swift peek up through those long, dark, curling lashes. “I did what I could,” she said. “But you. Whoa. Liam, where did you learn to fight like that?”
I shrugged. “Hank, my stepdad, was a cop and a Marine. He served in Vietnam. He taught me the basics. I did some training on my own, too, later. I like martial arts.”
“You were amazing,” she said.
“Hardly,” I said sourly. “I let the bastard get away. Amazing would’ve been knocking that dickhead out and tying him up, so that we could hand him over to the police. After we pounded some answers out of him. That would have been useful.”
“So you think this is connected to ...” Her voice trailed off as the look on my face answered her question. She shrank into the couch, hands to her mouth. “Liam. My sisters. I have to warn them. Right now. My phone. Where is my fucking phone?”
I helped her find it and handed it over. “Breathe deep,” I soothed. “Calm down.”
I was grateful to see a teakettle in the small array of kitchen stuff on display. I rummaged for tea bags while she talked to her sisters. She was scolding and haranguing them to go stay with friends, get out of town. Good advice. She should take it herself.
Some digging turned up an off-brand box of stale tea, but I was more concerned with getting sugar and caffeine into her than to worry about flavor.
When she hung up, it was ready, and I held out a sweet, milky cup to her. “See if you can get some of this down while I call the police.”
She sipped it while I called 911. My whole body ached now, and I had no one but myself to blame. This was what happened when a guy poked his nose into a woman’s big, hairy problems, and I’d done it voluntarily. I’d insisted on it. I’d bitched and moaned and bullied my way right into this.
When she’d drunk her tea, I took the cup away and sank down in front of her. Her hands were cold, despite clutching the hot cup. So slender. I chafed them tenderly to warm them, and contemplated a potentially life-changing realization.
This woman’s life was a fucked-up mess. I was right smack in the middle of it.
And there was no place on earth that I would rather be.
Chapter Fifteen
Nancy
Liam kept my teacup loaded during the whole police routine. He did most of the talking, for which I was grateful. All I had to do was shiver, sip, utter monosyllables.
And that was the least of what I had to be grateful for. If it weren’t for him, I would be dead. Or else in the kind of trouble that might make death look good by comparison.
I was afraid to contemplate it, but there was no avoiding the thought. It kept backhanding me whenever I tried to think about something else, or better yet, to not think about anything.
Those guys had not been trying to rob me. Or kill me.
Those guys had been trying to snatch me. To carry me away for some dark purpose that I couldn’t fathom. To pry secrets out of me that I didn’t have to give them.
That would not have gone well for me.