Page 163 of Paranoid

Or would she?

With the dog bounding in front, Rachel hurried down the stairs, nearly stumbling in the dark, slapped at a light switch at the foot of the staircase. She threw open the door to Harper’s room, hit the switch, and stared at the empty bed with its crumpled bedding. A glance at the window indicated it was cracked. What the hell? What about the damned security system?

She flew out of Harper’s room and into Dylan’s. Again she hit the lights. He was asleep in the bed, one arm flung over his head, mouth agape. In a second his eyes flew open and he was blinking. “Mom? What’re you doing?”

“Where’s your sister?”

“What? In bed . . .” And then he came to completely. “Oh.”

“Right. ‘Oh.’ She’s not. She just snuck out, probably to meet with Xander again. Where are they?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

“God, no!”

“But the security system?”

He groaned.

“Dylan?” Rachel said, closing the littered gap between the door and the bed.

“Okay! Okay,” he said, as if she’d beat it out of him when all she’d done was drill him with her gaze. “Yeah. She asked me to fix it and I did.”

“You mean fix it so it wouldn’t go off when she snuck out again. Like break the circuit to her window like before.”

He nodded mutely.

Fury grew deep inside her. “You are so grounded,” she said, trying and failing to calm down and telling herself that as long as Harper was with Xander, she was safe.

But that wasn’t true.

People were being murdered, people Rachel knew, people connected to her, a classmate having disappeared. Bruce Hollander, a known felon, was on the loose, probably had been stalking her, chasing her, probably had lurked in the shadows and watched the house only to spray that horrid message on her door. Didn’t Harper understand how dangerous it was?

Nowhere was truly safe.

“Stay here!” she commanded her son, who looked like he wasn’t about to go anywhere but back to sleep. “Hook up the system again, and make sure it’s working and stay here!”

Back up the stairs she sprang, grabbed her phone fro

m its charger. She tapped out a message to her daughter: Call me! Come home! Now!

After sending the text, she stopped at Dylan’s room again. He was falling back to sleep. “Fix it!” she ordered before speeding to the kitchen, where she snagged her purse and keys. With Reno barking in protest in the kitchen, she locked the door behind her, pulled on the running shoes she’d left on the porch, and was inside her Explorer in less than a minute.

This was crazy, she knew, trying to find her daughter, but Rachel was desperate, her heart racing, panic threatening.

At the stop sign, she checked her phone; although she hadn’t heard the ping of an incoming text she prayed her daughter had gotten back to her.

Nope.

She called Cade on the fly, hitting the gas and searching the deserted city streets of Edgewater. The call went to voice mail and she left a quick message: “It’s Rachel. Harper’s snuck out again, with Xander. I’m trying to track them down. Call me.”

A part of her brain told her that what she was doing was nuts, that she couldn’t possibly locate them, that she should just go home and wait. But that would be impossible. She knew that she’d go out of her freakin’ mind.

What if Harper didn’t come back until morning? What if she didn’t come back at all? What if Xander had talked her into moving to Eugene or they’d decided to just keep driving and leave everything and everyone else behind? Wouldn’t she have done the same with Cade if he had suggested it when she was seventeen?

So trying to find them wasn’t crazy; it wasn’t paranoid.