She Wore Mourning by P.D. Workman (best desktop ebook reader .txt) 📕

They moved together, awkward and slow. Zachary’s heart was still beating too fast, and he was reeling with Bridget’s words. It was his fault that she got cancer because he was too needy, too much of a strain on the relationship. No wonder she hated him.

At the door, he couldn’t get his key out and fitted into the lock properly, so Kenzie took it from him, unlocked the door, and ushered him in.

“Do you want a pill?”

Zachary looked around the apartment, not sure what to do. Entertain her? Sit down in front of the TV? Head to bed? What was Kenzie expecting? What was the protocol when a date ended with the appearance of a raging ex-wife and emotional collapse?

“Zachary? Do you want me to get you a pill?”

Zachary settled on the couch in the living room. There he could sleep, watch TV, or talk with Kenzie. He dug his flip phone and his wallet out of his pockets and put them on the side table.

“No… I don’t think I can.”

“You can’t?” Kenzie frowned and shook her head.

“Because I had a couple of drinks. The doctor said I couldn’t mix them.”

She went into his bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. It was nearly bare after Bridget’s Christmas Day visit. She picked up the Xanax prescription, with a few white pills kicking around the bottom. She looked at the bright orange warning stickers affixed to it.

“Yeah, you’re right,” she agreed. “Is there something else? Anything else that would help?” She looked at a couple of other bottles. Zachary shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He didn’t like her snooping through his prescriptions.

“No. I’ll be fine,” he told her. “Don’t worry about it.”

After pawing through the cabinet for another minute, she closed it and returned to the living room, sitting down on the couch next to him.

“That was scary,” she said. “I thought it was a heart attack. I can’t believe Bridget could stay so calm about it.”

“She’s seen a few anxiety attacks… maybe not that bad, but…”

“It must be scary for you, too.”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

She took his hand and sat with him for a few minutes in silence. “Do you think Bridget had something to do with the car brakes?”

“No,” Zachary answered immediately. “She couldn’t ever do something like that. Besides, I checked the tracker. She wasn’t anywhere near the inn. She had no way of knowing that’s where I was.”

“What if someone had a tracker on your car? I don’t see how anyone could have known you were there, otherwise. Did you tell anyone?”

Zachary’s brain was still in a soup of stress neurotransmitters; he couldn’t sort through the question calmly and logically, and wouldn’t be able to until he had crashed and recovered. “I don’t know.”

“You wouldn’t have told any of your clients. Any of those cases that you’ve been working on. Would you?”

“No… I don’t think so. I don’t remember.”

“Someone would have had to have recognized it. Or followed you. Or tracked you.”

“Yeah.”

“Zachary.”

His brain was going fuzzy.

“Zachary.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll leave you to go to sleep, should I?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” She got up off the couch and stooped to kiss him on the forehead like a mother might kiss her child. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Chapter Nineteen

His dreams were always disrupted after a panic attack. Like his brain couldn’t stop repeating the attack over and over. That was one of the reasons he would normally have taken a Xanax even though the attack had already subsided. He wanted to forget it and sleep, to stop the endless loop of crazy images in his head.

Bridget was a prominent feature in his dreams. So were the images from his distant past. His parents, the fire, some of the subsequent homes that he preferred to forget when he was lucid. Because Kenzie had been present, she was in his dreams too, iterating and reiterating all night.

“He said he’d drop it,” Kenzie said, talking on an old-style desk phone with a rotary dial and tightly twisting handset cord. “You don’t need to do anything else. He said he’s done now.”

Zachary couldn’t tell who was on the other end of the call. Perhaps his mother, if the twang in the voice was any clue. He couldn’t make out the words, just the angry, insistent tone, like Bridget’s voice.

“It’s over,” Kenzie repeated. “I told you that. Just leave him alone now.”

Who was she talking to? And why? Who was she reporting back to while he slept?

“He’s not going to figure it out. I’ve told you everything. He doesn’t suspect a thing.”

Zachary puzzled over her words, trying to unwind the clues. In all the time he’d been investigating the Bond case, he’d never suspected Kenzie of being complicit. She didn’t have any connection with Isabella. He’d discussed the case with her openly. All the evidence and his ideas. She’d told him the blood levels were all normal, making no mention of the cough medicine until pressed for an explanation. She had repeatedly suggested he drop the case and not make any waves.

What did she know that he didn’t suspect?

“I’ll give him something to make him sleep,” Kenzie said on the phone. “He won’t know anything.”

Zachary tried to raise his voice to tell her again that he couldn’t take anything. Not after being out drinking. Like in many dreams, especially those anxiety-triggered ones, he had no voice. He was as helpless as a child. Completely at her mercy.

The voice on the other end of the phone continued to squawk. Zachary saw his mother in his mind’s eye. It had been so long since he’d seen her that it was only a vague, shadowy memory. He saw long, dark hair like Isabella’s. But she was not The Happy Artist. Had he ever seen her smile? Their home had not been a happy one. He knew from the time he was small that they were unwanted. All the children. They were vermin, like rats, always in the way, eating the meager supplies of food. They kept her from