The Admirer's Secret (17 page)

Chapter 34

B
y the fourth call, Haley asked the cabbie to turn down the volume of the radio and picked up her cell phone.

“Hello?” She didn’t bother to cover the agitation in her voice.

“Did you see the news today?” The beat of Gabrielle’s hysterical words resembled a drum roll.

“No, Mom, I’m on my way home from the airport right now. I haven’t had time to watch TV.”

An audible exhale reached Haley’s ears. “So you’re not on the plane then?”

“No, I’m not going,” Haley answered with intentional defeat. She really needed some sympathy, though her woeful tone went unnoticed.

“You’re not with that teacher of yours?”

“No, I’m by myself right now.”

“Thank God you’re not on that plane, Haley! I’ve been trying to get ahold of you all day. I was watching the news and you wouldn’t believe what I saw. They’ve been covering this story for the past couple days.”

Haley groaned. Nearly every night her mom spent half of their suppertime reciting all the day’s news, so this stampede of information was nothing unusual. Though, this time it sounded a bit more urgent than usual.

“Go ahead. Tell me, Mom.” Her mom would tell her one way or the other, so she figured she’d go without a fight.

“Allen Michaels is all over the ne
ws. Well, apparently his wife, ex-wife or whatever she is, went missing, and they found her body last night.”

It took a minute for Haley to find her voice.
“What? Are you serious?”

“I wish I wasn’t. She had several stab wounds in her abdomen and he must have dumped her in the woods and tried to cover her body up with brush. Apparently s
he’s been missing for weeks. Some hiker found a partially decomposed body and it’s her.”

“Do you think he did it
…?”

“Evidence points to him. They can’t find the weapon, though. The police are looking for him now. He disappeared from his
Los Angeles home a few weeks ago, but they weren’t able to trace him. They had questioned him when she first went missing, but there was nothing to imply foul play. And up until they found her body, they couldn’t do anything, but the media’s saying they had a pretty ugly separation and she filed for divorce, giving him motive to kill her. He’s worth a fortune and her demands would have left him pretty bad off after the divorce.”

“Have you been reading the tabloids
again, Mom?”

“This is for real, Haley.”

“I know… I just can’t believe this. He seemed so… normal, y’know? Well, as normal as an eccentric Hollywood person can be.”

“People aren’t always what they seem, I guess. You should know that more than anybody.” A truth that Haley still couldn’t stomach. “He’s a murderer, Haley. Just stay away from that man.”

“I will. He left this morning.”

“So you saw him get on that plane?”

“Well, no, but…”

“What? So he could still be around?” she shouted.

“No, no, Mom. I’m sure he’s gone. He was boarding when I got there.” Haley didn’t want to tell her that he ran after her to stop her from leaving. There was no sense worrying her when there was nothing anyone could do.

“You should alert the police anyways. They should know to expect him at
the Los Angeles airport.”

“I will.”

“I just want him out of our town. Oh, and the police might want to question you about him and his whereabouts, so be prepared.”

“Why me?”

“Well, you were the last one to see him. And you know where he’s heading. So make sure you call them, okay?”

“Okay, I’ll take care of it.” Could she pile anything more onto her already burdened shoulders?

“Call me if you need anything, honey. I’m just glad you’re okay. I don’t know what I would have done if…”

“Mom, it’s okay now,” Haley said with a touch of irritation.

“I know, but I just couldn’t bear to lose…” 

“Mom.” Haley couldn’t listen to another pleading word. Though she knew her mother was just looking out for her, it was too much too quickly—first Marc’s cheating, then this whole thing. “It’s okay. I will call you later. But right now I need to take care of something. I’ll talk to you later.”

A rushed apology later, Haley hung up knowing she was about to embark on the longest day of her life.

Chapter
35

I
t wasn’t a body part. With the cardboard lid opened, the surprise package revealed a pile of papers. Marc pulled out the thick stack. The curvy writing on a note strategically placed on the top faced him dead on. The calligraphy was so perfectly aligned, it was apparent the author had spent innumerable hours perfecting his craft. Marc’s stomach felt like it was wriggling to digest rocks as he read the flawlessly scripted cursive:

Marc,

Stay away from her. If you don’t, I hope you’re ready to die for her, because you’ll be next.

He fought the instinct to crum
ple up the letter as he stared at it. His fingers, like the rest of him, were in shock. But anger soon replaced the shock. Slamming the note on the table, he pulled the box toward him, ready to shred the whole batch of letters. He wondered how many more threats waited for his wrath, but then he thought better of it. This was evidence. At least fifty pieces of evidence, he guessed as he gauged the thickness of the stack.

As he reached to return the original letter back to the box, he discovered an image on the back. A picture. The threat had been written on the back of a photograph. It was a candid of him and
Sheba sitting on his back porch. A black marker had scratched out Sheba’s face. So he was right. Sheba’s death was not an accident.

And he was next.

This was it. This was his life—a series of meaningless moments that had amounted to nothing. While on some level everyone knows their time will be up one day, no one ever expects it when it actually happens. Marc, now acutely aware of his mortality, had done nothing of consequence with his life. His days were numbered, and yet as he faced the very real possibility of its end, his personal accounting revealed little. He’d helped out a person or two, but what did that matter in the grander scheme? He’d die and the world would go on just as it had been, missing not even a beat without him. The sad reality of his existence felt worse than the fear of dying.

And now his life was threatened without a chance to rectify
his transgressions or lack of accomplishments. A psycho planned to end it and he didn’t even know why. He spent so much time obsessed with his own life that somewhere in the middle of wooing a girl and filling his work schedule he’d managed to make someone angry enough to kill him.

Wooing a girl.

Stay away from her,
the note said
.

Either his aggressor was a jealous ex-boyfriend or someone who simply wanted to make his life a living hell. But without more information, there was no way to stop
this.
Was there?

He couldn’t be next. Death couldn’t win. Though he could never know for certain if today or tomorrow would be his last day on earth, he knew that he had someone greater to take care of him, to protect him. If he was going to die, it wouldn’t be because of a deranged person. It would be because it was his time to go, period. But a small still voice told him it wasn’t his time, and he believed the voice.

“Not yet,” he said aloud, and with conviction, too.

As determination settled in, his fear made way for regimented resolve. He would stop whomever it was. He
would hunt him down and… he hadn’t gotten much further than that, but he certainly wasn’t giving in without a fight.

It was easier to imagine the police kicking in some stranger’s door, bringing justice full circle as the creep was put behind bars. But there was one pro
blem with that hopeful visage: How could he stop someone whose identity was a mystery? He had two clues to work with: the letters and the phone messages.

Out of the corner of his eye, the answering machine blinked the messages he never got around to listening to earlier that morning. He forced himself back to the answering machine. Maybe if he listened closely, he could figure out if the caller was male or female. He hit play.

The breathing was soft but forced; it didn’t sound natural. More like puffs of air. The caller definitely forced the sound. But there was no way to determine the gender. He backtracked through a list of anyone and everyone whom he had ever wronged, taking a mental inventory of anyone who’d want him dead and why. There was really no one that came to mind. Things were going well. He had no known enemies that he knew of.  

As the proverbial lightbulb went on in his head, there was only one person whom he imagined had any sort of resentment against him of this magnitude: his ex-fiancée. After all, they never really did have closure. Upon unofficially breaking up, neither had made
formal contact in years. Perhaps she didn’t know he saw her that night at the restaurant with that guy. Maybe all this time she thought he simply left her for no reason, and when things fell through with the other guy, she got lonely… and now she wanted him back. Could that be it? Would she be so full of bitterness or resentment that she’d kill his dog? It seemed too far-fetched to make sense. She would have called and left a normal message. An angry, screaming message, but normal for her nonetheless.

Who else, then? Nobody. There was nobody that Marc felt would be this angry with him, or this deranged. It wasn’t going to be easy putting the sparse pieces together. Without a voice, he had nothing.

There was always
*69.
Why hadn’t he thought of that before? He quickly dialed the number that he hoped would allow him to trace back to his last caller. A piercing beep hurt his ear, so he held the phone away as he listened to the subsequent digital message telling him the number was blocked.

“Figures,” Marc mumbled.

There was no choice but to involve the police. Perhaps they could trace the number or figure out how Sheba was killed, since there was no discernable cause of death. Marc hoped they would analyze the box of letters and find out if there was any way to start narrowing down his offender’s identity.

**

The police had come and gone, taking his statement and filing the police report. He had handed over the letters and pictures. After spending hours leafing through the discomforting artifacts, there was no substantive evidence that pointed to any particular person. They’d determined that Sheba was fed antifreeze—based on the remnants of a pool of it near the end of the driveway—and died from the toxic poisoning. But everyone had antifreeze, so that clue led to a dead end. There was little doubt that it was intentional.

With a mere case of animal cruelty and communications harassment, the police department’s hands were tied until a dead
body showed up, and by then it’d be too late for him. Marc figured it’d be up to him to protect himself.

He retreated outside to his back porch for fresh air to clear his head. Agonizing over the details wasn’t getting him any closer to the big picture; it was driving him crazy. He stood staring at the horizon, releasing the strain he held on his thoughts. He was tired of trying to force an answer. It wasn’t up to him anymore. It was beyond him now.

As the sun dipped into the surface of the water, its descent reminded him of something. He couldn’t pinpoint what, though. He turned to go back into the house. He couldn’t enjoy the view with so much stress weighing him down. The back door slammed shut behind him and he walked through the kitchen to the living room. He paused at the picture on the wall that Haley had given him during their dinner together when Allen Michaels had stopped by. His memory wandered to that night. He remembered thinking that Allen was a little on the eccentric side, but Marc contributed it to Allen’s Los Angeles background. It had definitely been an interesting night.

He pulled the frame off the hook on the wall and examined it for a moment. For some reason he was compelled to look closely at the picture. He unhinged the back flaps that held the thick cardboard backing on and pulled it off. A personal note was written on the back of the picture. Nothing unusual, just a generic note about lasting relationships and the date and year in the corner. He turned it back over and stared at the image. Nothing. Or maybe there was something. Flipping it over, Marc searched for the answer. And then he saw it. He found what he was looking for—a
scribbled word that told him exactly who was behind the threats.

Chapter 36

I
t was getting late and she was anxious to see Marc. Not an excited anxious, but a worried anxious. After listening to his strained voice mail on her cell phone, she recognized his urgency. He hadn’t said much more than that he needed to see her as soon as possible, and for her to be careful. His disconcerting message was from earlier that morning, but she hadn’t checked her messages until later that evening. When she tried to call him back, his cell phone was off and his landline was busy. Something wasn’t right.

She sped down the highway, passing slower traffic with determination. She glanced in her rearview mirror during one such maneuver, and noticed that the same headlights had been behind her for past few miles.

Thinking little of it, she continued her drive, subconsciously gripping her steering wheel tighter with each passing minute. Knowing several back roads that could get her to Marc’s faster, she pulled off the next exit. The headlights followed.
Strange
. It wasn’t the most well-traveled road, since it was a country road that only local residents used. But at this time of night it could have been anyone behind her. Tossing the thought aside, she continued on to Marc’s.

Searching for her next turn, she decided to detour down some even more obscure roads th
at cut through the dormant cornfields and vineyards to shave a couple minutes off her time. Half expecting the all-too-familiar headlights to have been long gone by now, she glanced up anyway. Still, the headlights pursued her. Only about a mile until she’d be in town; perhaps they’d turn off of Main Street. Her follower seemed to keep a safe distance behind her, never tailing her, but always within view.

When
Main Street came and went, and the same headlights threatened her from a little closer behind, she tested her pursuer even more. She slowed down at the first green light she came to, cruising up until it turned yellow, then darted through just before it went red. Sure enough, her resolute follower stayed on her tail.

“What the—?”

Fear set her heart into a panic. Her fingers reached into her purse, probing for her cell phone. She found it and flipped it open, noticing her battery light blinking. Would there be enough power left for a phone call? But then the screen went dark as it died and she tossed it back into her purse. She was on her own.

Why hadn’t she charged it? But there was no time for regret. She glanced in her rearview mirror. The car was inches away now, it’s nose uncomfortably close to her bumper. It continued inching closer by the minute—the car was aiming to hit her bumper!

She struggled for self-control and pressed the accelerator. Alone and being chased by some stranger with who-knows-what intention, she picked up speed as she flew through every possible side street she could find. With every turn, with every increase in speed, the yellow-white lights from behind reflected directly into her sight, blinding her as her rearview mirror bounced the light directly into her eyes.

When she glanced down at her gas gauge, the arrow hovered just above empty. A dead cell phone battery
and
a near-empty gas tank. Could things get any worse? The night was growing late, and she just needed to find somewhere public to stop. But she was miles from a pay phone. There was nothing left to do but pray.

“God, I need Y
ou right now. Please help me out of this situation.”

She almost thought her prayer was answered when the headlights disappeared. She must have lost the pursuer at her last turn. The road ahead was dotted with a few trailers and a long abandoned gas station. Without a second thought
, she pulled into the empty parking lot where weeds grew through the cracked concrete and she hid the car behind the building. She shut off her lights and strained to listen for the sound of passing cars.

Everything became penetratingly dark and quiet. She couldn’t stop her hands from shaking as she anticipated the lurking vehicle
that had followed her. Her palms were sweaty as she gripped the wheel, and the silence of the night added to her fears. Her gaze roamed around her in search of a slice of light that would cue her to the pursuer’s presence. A car rolled by the vacant lot and continued down the street as quickly as it came.

Her heart pounded in her chest, and her lungs tightened as she wheezed for air. She again pleaded with the chilly emptiness to help her, to calm her, to guide her to safety. As she prayed, she realized her pursuer had likely given up on the chase. But that didn’t mean she was safe.

She came up empty-handed for a logical explanation of the evening’s adventure, then wondered if this had anything to do with Marc’s bizarre urgent call to meet him at his house. It had been hours since he had left that message, and her imagination conjured up the worst. Was he okay? She feared what she would find if she ever made it to his house.