“That’s not necessary, but thank you.” Sarah understood Kyle’s anxiety over her—sort of. He’d been a friend of Harry’s, perhaps his best friend, and she could imagine that he felt he should look out for Harry’s widow. But, friend or no friend, she’d had enough. “Look, can you stop worrying about me? My doors and windows are locked,” she said. “Bill Larson has asked the dispatcher to send a patrol car by at intervals tonight. I’m fine.”
“But what about tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that?”
Sarah didn’t want to tell Kyle that this was exactly the question that had crossed her mind earlier in the evening. She tried to sound confident when she replied. “I’m hoping the police will have the person behind all this in custody soon.”
There was a moment of silence, and Sarah thought Kyle was about to hang up. Instead, his change of the conversational subject was so drastic it put her off-balance. “How long since you’ve been to church?” he asked.
“You mean sitting through a whole service without leaving because I couldn’t stand it? I know the exact date.” The last full church service she’d attended was the day she’d sat in the front row and stared at two coffins—one small, one larger. She couldn’t recall any of the words said from the pulpit that day, although she was sure they were meant to bring comfort to her and those who joined her in mourning the loss of her husband and child. But throughout the service her thoughts were elsewhere, and they were not thoughts that brought her comfort. Instead, one question ran through her mind again and again: God, why did You let this happen?
Kyle’s voice brought Sarah back to the present. “You mean you haven’t been back to church since the day of the funeral,” he said.
“I’ve tried to attend a couple of times since then, but my emotions got the best of me and I had to leave early. I kept flashing back to the service for Harry and Jenny. And probably my anger with God didn’t help.”
“I wonder if you’d like to go to church with me tomorrow,” Kyle said. “I’ll come by for you. I’ll make sure you’re safe, and I think it would be good for you.”
Sarah declined at first, but Kyle somehow managed to be persistent without being pushy, and eventually she said, “Okay. You can pick me up about a quarter to nine. We’ll need to come straight back here after the service ends, though. Tom Oliver said his crew was going to start back to work right after noon.”
“Why don’t I call Tom and ask him to hold off until about one thirty tomorrow? That way, I can take you to lunch.”
Sarah was tired of resisting. “Whatever you say.”
“Great,” Kyle said. “In the meantime, call me if you think you’re in danger.”
“Right after I call the police,” Sarah said. “But I’ll be fine. Every door is locked.”
“And you thought your garage door was locked,” Kyle said. “If this guy, whoever he is, wants to get in, he will.”
Sarah finally convinced Kyle that she’d be okay, but the uncertainty he’d planted wouldn’t go away. As soon as she hung up, she went straight for the garage. Until this episode, she’d depended on engaging the “lock” button on her electric garage opener each evening. Now that she’d learned that the emergency lever could be tripped with nothing more technically advanced than a coat hanger, she wouldn’t feel safe until she dealt with that.
She’d done an Internet search about ways to lock a garage door. Sarah wasn’t certain her roll-up garage door even had a manual locking handle—she’d never looked for it before but seemed to recall Harry having pointed it out once, saying newer doors often didn’t have these. Sure enough, in the spare keys hung on hooks in the washroom, she found a small key labeled “garage door.” Now if she could just make it work.
She didn’t want to go outside in the dark, but she also didn’t want to rouse at every noise through the night, knowing there was a way for her stalker to get into her house. You have to do this, Sarah. She grabbed a hammer from the tools in the pegboard at the back of the garage, as much for protection as for use as a tool. She turned on the outside light that illuminated her driveway. She guessed the garage door should roll up and back smoothly enough for her to do it without the help of the opener motor. If the stalker did it, she figured she could as well. She pulled the emergency release, manually raised the garage door with no real problem, and stepped outside.
Her first priority was to see if what she wanted to do was feasible. Sarah pulled the door down and looked in the middle, about a third of the way from the bottom, where she found a T-handle with a key slot in it. She took a deep breath. So far, so good. She tried to turn the handle, but it seemed to be frozen solid. After a liberal dose of lubricant on the mechanism, followed by a few gentle taps with the hammer, the handle moved. As it did, she could hear the rods it controlled sliding into slots in the metal tracks on either side, locking the door. She unlocked the door, raised it, went inside, added more lubricant, and tried the handle from inside to make sure it worked freely. It did. Finally, she stepped out one more time and checked to make sure the key would lock and unlock the door. It would be awkward to use this, but it was better than worrying about someone entering through her garage.
With the garage closed and locked this way, no matter if someone had a remote to control the motor on the opener, the door would remain firmly in place. Even if the emergency lever were tripped, the door wouldn’t move. True, it would be a pain to enter and exit the garage this way, but the peace of mind she gained was worth it. Let’s see you get past this, whoever you are.
Nevertheless, that night she slept with most of the lights on in her house.
* * *
When Kyle pulled up to her house the next morning, he was surprised to see Sarah coming out the front door and hurrying to his car as he brought his car to a stop. Normally, he opened a car door for a lady, but she was inside and fastening her seat belt before he could get his own unfastened.
She was obviously nervous, and Kyle figured there was no need to ask her how she’d slept. If her current nervous state was any indication, sleep at Sarah Gordon’s house had been somewhere between fitful and nonexistent last night. He decided on what he hoped was a neutral opening. “The weather isn’t as hot as the first of June usually is here in Texas.”
Sarah kept her eyes turned toward the side window. “I guess.”
After that, Sarah continued her silence until the car pulled into the church parking lot. Kyle honored her obvious desire to avoid conversation, but after turning off the car’s ignition, he turned to her and said, “Sarah, if you’re uncomfortable being at church today, just say so, and I’ll take you right back home.”
Sarah didn’t respond immediately. Instead, she seemed to concentrate her attention on people getting out of their cars and heading toward the church building. Finally, she turned back toward Kyle and forced a smile. “No, I guess I need to try it. And I don’t think whoever’s out to get me will do anything in the middle of a church service. After all, there are quite a few pairs of eyes watching.”
Kyle decided not to say what he was thinking—that the most important eyes were those of God, who was watching over her as He had always been. Sarah probably didn’t need to hear that right now, even from him. She’d made no secret of her anger at God because He didn’t intervene when another driver robbed her of both her husband and daughter. Kyle tried to ignore his frustration at Sarah’s failure to put her loss behind her. After all, that was what he’d forced himself to do following the death of his fiancée. Why couldn’t she do the same? But maybe this wasn’t the time to have that conversation. Maybe today he’d just let the service—the music, the prayers, the sermon—speak to Sarah. He’d bide his time.
* * *
“Thanks for taking me to church,” Sarah said. “And for lunch.”
“Glad church