And the weird corpse-looking charm, she didn’t want to think about.
Carlotta took a final deep drag on the cigarette, then exhaled leisurely while she glanced over the roofs of the quiet neighborhood. Where she and Wesley lived in Lindbergh, she’d grown accustomed to the boom of car radios and the scream of sirens. Here, the only thing disturbing the peace were suburban crickets.
She squinted at a flash of something—light? metal?—from the house closest to Peter’s, which was slightly up the hill and partially hidden by trees. There was a movement outside a window. As she continued to stare, she could make out more details and realized that someone was standing on a terrace in partial light.
Staring at her with binoculars.
Unnerved, she walked back inside and secured the door, dismissing the incident as typical neighborly snooping. In light of Angela’s scandalous behavior, she suspected more than one set of binoculars had been trained on the Ashford house over the past few months.
She suddenly felt very exposed.
After washing her face and donning silky tap pants and a matching camisole, she snuggled down in the mountain of pillows and set the alarm on her phone so she wouldn’t oversleep. She needed to allow extra time to get ready for work, not to mention drive an unfamiliar car along an unfamiliar commute. While she was scrolling through the features, her phone rang, startling her so badly she nearly dropped it.
She hadn’t realized how skittish she’d become.
But when she looked at the caller-ID screen, she smiled. Jack.
She connected the call. “Are you calling to tuck me in?”
His sexy laugh rumbled over the line. “Yup. What are you wearing?”
“Sweatpants and big fuzzy socks.”
“Good, that should keep Ashford in his place.”
She sighed. “What do you want, Jack?”
He made a rueful noise. “I mentioned that the GBI is coming on board The Charmed Killer case.”
“Yeah.”
“They want to interview you as soon as possible.”
Her heart raced—when would this ghastly situation end? “I can come down in the morning before I go to work. Eight o’clock?”
“Okay.”
“Jack, will you be there?”
“Couldn’t keep me away.”
“Good night.”
“You, too.”
6
Carlotta woke to a piercing noise. As she reached for her cell phone to turn off the blaring alarm, her mind raced to orient herself. Light poured in from a veranda—Peter’s veranda. In a rush it all came back to her—coming home with him and being ensconced in the lap of luxury, sleeping like the dead imbedded in a mattress fit for royalty, the ugliness of The Charmed Killer far, far away. She stabbed at her phone, but the frantic alarm didn’t stop.
And then she realized the wail wasn’t the alarm on her phone. It was the house security alarm.
Her heart vaulted to her throat. As she leaped out of bed, she wondered if Peter had inadvertently tripped it as he’d left for work. But the clock showed it was seven-thirty—much later than he said he’d be leaving. She rushed to the closed bedroom door and scanned the small security panel on the wall above the light switch. A red light glowed next to the words Motion Detector. Someone had set off the device on the first floor—meaning they were inside the house.
Carlotta’s throat convulsed in fear. If Peter was running late and had accidentally set off the alarm, he would’ve disarmed it by now. She turned the dead-bolt lock on the door and backtracked to her cell phone, only to find the battery dead.
The crashing noise of glass breaking sounded from the first floor, confirming her fear that someone was in the house. From the nightstand, a landline cordless phone rang, startling her so badly she cried out, then she clamped a hand over her mouth, realizing she’d just advertised her whereabouts to the intruder. She scrambled to answer the phone. “Hello?”
“This is the security monitoring service,” a man said. “We were alerted that your home alarm has been tripped. What is your password?”
Carlotta frowned. “Password? I don’t know. I don’t live here.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, I’m a guest in the house. I think there’s an intruder—I heard something downstairs.”
“I’ll send the police,” he said, his voice full of solemn concern, “but I need to put you on hold and contact the owner at an alternate number. What’s your name?”
“Carlotta Wren. When you call the local police, give them my name and tell them to contact Detective Jack Terry of the APD. This might have something to do with a case he’s working on.” It was possible that Michael Lane could be stalking her again. And there was a serial killer on the loose.
Assuming they weren’t the same person.
“Will do, ma’am. Stay on the line.”
“Okay, please hurry.” She looked around the room for an escape route. The veranda was on the second floor, so unless she was willing to jump to the concrete driveway below, it wasn’t an option. There was the back stairway down the hallway, but that meant leaving the relative safety of the bedroom.
She looked for a chair to wedge under the doorknob, but the only ones in the room were two upholstered models and a stool for the vanity, all too short. She set down the phone and tried to slide the dresser in front of the door, but the furniture wouldn’t budge.
Then she heard a sound outside the door on the landing, a scuffing against the wood floor. Panic seized her. In the distance she heard the wail of sirens, but they were still far away. The peal of the alarm ended abruptly, leaving a whine of stunned silence in the air.
A thump sounded against the door.
“Go away!” Carlotta screamed. “The police are here!” But she knew it would still take precious minutes for them to arrive, possibly break into the house, and find her.
Plenty of time for her to be strangled and have a charm stuffed down her throat.
Carlotta retreated until her back slammed into a wall. She considered fleeing to the closet or the bathroom, but that would only take her farther from the last-ditch escape route of the veranda if she had to jump or shimmy down a tree in her skimpy pj’s.
“I have a gun,” she yelled, then picked up a lamp and wielded it like a baseball bat.
A scratching noise sounded against the door, sending terror rippling through her.
Then Carlotta frowned. Scratching? She took a step forward, then stopped. It was probably a ploy to draw her closer. Then an ax would crash through the door and the face of a maniac would appear.
She stood stock-still, her heart thrashing in her chest as a muted sound came from the other side of the door. Carlotta crept forward and pressed her ear against the wood.
Meow.
Carlotta’s shoulders fell in abject relief. If the maniac “intruder” was deranged, it was on catnip. Peter’s cat must’ve escaped from wherever he kept it and set off the motion detector.
She set down the lamp and unlocked the dead bolt. When she carefully opened the door, a yellow streak of fur shot through her legs and under the bed. Carlotta stuck her head out in