Page 47 of Secrets Beneath the Waves (Beach Read Thrillers #2)
CHAPTER
THREE
Although she doubted she would sleep, Jules carefully undid the clasp on her silver locket and laid it reverently in the china dish on her dresser before lifting the blankets and sliding beneath the soft, cool sheets.
When she’d arrived home from the police station half an hour earlier, Jules had headed straight to her computer to email Brie and Kelli, who had to be going out of their minds wondering what had happened to her.
No doubt, if and when Jules did get her phone back from the police, there would be a hundred texts from the two of them, demanding answers and expressing concern.
Hopefully they’d both gone to bed and were sound asleep by now, but Jules wanted them to see the message that she was fine first thing in the morning. Not wanting to get into everything that had happened last night, she only shared that she had lost her phone and would need to email for a few days.
After punching her pillow a couple of times to fluff it up and then tugging her white No Coffee, No Talkee T-shirt down over her flannel pajama bottoms, Jules crossed her arms on top of the duvet and stared up at the ceiling, at the faint glow of moonlight drifting through the glass to shimmer across the stucco.
Given the privacy fence lining the back of her postage-stamp-sized yard, she usually left her blinds up and curtains open, as she loved falling asleep to the soft light and the gentle shadows of tree branches slow dancing against her walls.
The soft light and slow dancing that were doing nothing to still her racing thoughts tonight.
What was up with Dante de Marco’s Jekyll-and-Hyde behavior?
If she hadn’t met him earlier, on their sorry excuse for a date, she might have actually thought the man she’d encountered at the police station was a decent human being.
He had been patient while talking to her, gentle, even.
In contrast to how riled up his every word, gesture, and tone had gotten her at the pub, he’d calmed her and helped her deal with the trauma of what she had witnessed.
Even eased the guilt that had been consuming her over not making more of an attempt to save the victim.
Of course, he had been at work. No doubt he’d called upon his training to talk dozens or hundreds of witnesses off a ledge.
He could likely slip into and out of the placid, understanding interrogator persona as easily as he’d pulled on his uniform after being yanked from his bed to come talk to her.
The nice-guy schtick was a tool, nothing more. A weapon, even. A means to get the information he needed to make him look good to his colleagues and boss. Jules absolutely, positively couldn’t fall for it.
It made a lot more sense that her first impression of him, when he was making no effort to win her over, was the real Dante.
He didn’t want to be there, had zero interest in her, and therefore had nothing to lose.
Alienating her at the police station, however, would have meant getting even less from her than he had.
Either way, it didn’t matter. Apart from any other brief, case-related interactions they might or might not need to have in the future, she never had to see the man again.
Flopping onto her side, she closed her eyes and pulled that thought as close as the body pillow she’d tucked between her knees and elbows.
The light scratching of branches against glass woke her from a fitful sleep. Jules rolled over to glance at the alarm clock next to the bed. 4:43. She’d been dozing less than an hour. Good thing her shift didn’t begin until four pm.
When she started to turn onto her side again, movement in the window caught her eye. What was…?
Her breath caught in her throat as she scrambled to a sitting position.
No . A face stared at her through the glass, framed like a portrait.
A face she had not been able to call to her mind but that she recognized immediately.
Lord. Even as her heart thudded wildly in her chest, Jules forced herself to breathe. Take note. Take note.
White face, yes. Long with a slightly pointed chin.
Dante. She tore her gaze from the window for two seconds to lunge for her phone on the table next to the bed. Nothing. Right. Her phone was gone. Did the cold-blooded murderer on the other side of the glass have it?
Jules spun back toward the window. The man had disappeared.
Where had he gone? Was he coming around to the front door? Had she locked it after arriving home that morning? She’d been beyond exhausted, and the thought that the killer might be able to figure out where she lived and come after her hadn’t occurred to her, so maybe not.
If he did go around to the front, at least the doorbell cam would capture his image. The sheets were tangled around her legs, and Jules wasted precious seconds extricating herself before leaping from the bed onto the soft, beige carpet. As it had in the alleyway, blood thrummed in her ears.
Take three or four deep breaths . Dante’s advice floated through her mind. Jules planted a palm against the wall and inhaled deeply through her nose before exhaling through her mouth. After three breaths, the thudding subsided.
The fear gripping her eased, replaced with a rush of intense heat. Why was this man tormenting her? She hadn’t done anything to him but be in the wrong place at the wrong time. No way she was going to let him continue to terrorize her.
She pushed away from the wall, cast a searing, defiant look outside and, seeing nothing, yanked the curtains closed.
Then she stalked to the front door. She had locked it, and when she peered out the peephole, nothing moved on the other side.
Taking a measured, deliberate stroll around the interior perimeter of the small bungalow, she checked every window, gazing out for a few seconds to make sure the man was not lingering on the property before checking that the lock on each was secure and the blinds pulled down.
Of course, if he chose to break the glass, there was little she could do to stop him, but she would take every precaution she could.
Should she contact Dante? As much as the idea of running to him for help galled her, he was working on the case, and the fact that she had spotted the murderer the police were hunting for was extremely relevant. She was a dutiful citizen, not a damsel in distress.
Huffing out a breath, she strode to the kitchen, grabbed a knife from the block on the counter and then, for good measure, climbed on a chair to stick the block containing the rest of her sharp knives high up in a cupboard.
Once she’d clambered down, Jules made her way to the living room, where her laptop sat on the coffee table. Setting the knife next to the computer, she composed a short email to Dante:
Killer on my property. 17 West Dover Lane. Seems to be gone now. Jules.
When she finished, she returned to her bedroom to retrieve his email address from the business card she’d stuck in her bag.
The message sent, Jules glanced in the direction of the room that had always been a sanctuary from the world for her.
Would she be able to sleep if she went back there?
Even though the thick blackness outside her windows had lightened to gray, probably not.
She could leave, go stay at Brie’s or Kelli’s.
Somehow the killer had found her here, though.
Was he tracking her somehow? If so, she couldn’t lead him to the home of either of her friends.
Besides—heat scorched her insides again—there was no way she was letting that guy drive her out of her own home.
Instead, she curled up on the couch, tugged the soft, white afghan off the back of it, and draped it over herself.
Clutching the knife to her chest, she closed her eyes again.
Lord, keep me safe . She pursed her lips.
Her third prayer in eight hours. Where was that even coming from?
She hadn’t prayed in years. Did she have any right to ask God for anything at this point?
It was unlikely he had any interest in being her emergency contact if that was the only time she talked to him. Would he even remember who she was?
She tugged the blanket up to her chin. How was it possible that the murderer had found out where she lived?
Jules bolted upright. Maybe he hadn’t. Chances were good that, in her over-tired and over-stimulated state, she had dreamed the face in the window.
Although she didn’t dream often, not that she could remember anyway, the rare times she did, she woke up aware that she’d seen intense, vivid images in her sleep—much more vivid than the dreams Brie and Kelli described to her.
The problem was, she couldn’t share them because, once awake, she was unable to recreate them in her mind.
Occasionally, though, in the seconds between asleep and awake, she had experienced a hypnopompic hallucination—a brief glimpse of an image before it faded away.
Something even some aphants could capture.
It had always fascinated her when it happened, as it gave her a hint of what it must be like to be able to call those kinds of pictures to mind at will.
And sometimes she caught an achingly beautiful glimpse of her sister…
Maybe the bizarreness of last night—the trauma of witnessing that violent act—had invoked such a vivid dream that the image of the man had stayed imprinted on her mind an extra few seconds after she woke.
If so, she had bothered Dante for no reason.
It would be mortifying if he decided to show up here, and she had no proof that the face she had seen was anything more than the lingering vestiges of a particularly terrifying nightmare.
Which was a much more rational explanation than the murderer actually coming here.
No doubt he was on his way out of the province by now, possibly the country.
Jules swung her legs over the side of the couch and reached for her laptop.
She’d send a quick follow-up, tell Dante she had over-reacted and everything was fine. She paused with the cover half raised.
The question was, would the dream image be accurate? Could her brain have called up the face of the murderer as she had seen him in that alleyway, or at least close enough that she could provide Dante with one more detail about his appearance? If so, it might be worth sharing that with him.
She closed the laptop and collapsed against the couch cushions. Unless he was still at work—unlikely if he had only been called in to get enough of a description from her to draw a sketch of the perpetrator, which had turned out to be a bust—he probably wouldn’t get her email until morning.
Might as well try and get a little more sleep herself.
Maybe she would even dream about that poor blonde woman’s attacker again.
If she did, and if she happened to hallucinate once more upon awakening, Jules would note every detail of that psychopath’s face so the police could figure out who he was and lock him up forever.