One Summer Read Free

she was just about the only ally he had left in town, if not in the world.
    “Are you determined to make things difficult for yourself, Johnny?” she asked quietly.
    His eyes narrowed. “Don’t come all teacherish with me, Miss Grant. I’m not in high school anymore.”
    “Your manners were better then.”
    “So were my prospects. They’ve both gone to hell since, and you know what? I don’t give a big goddamn.”
    That shut her up, as it was no doubt meant to.
    In silence they passed the Wal-Mart, the Burger King, the Kroger, and the cluster of antique shops that hadsprung up on the corner of Vine and Main. With their destination now near at hand, Rachel began to relax a little. Just a few more minutes, and she would be rid of him. She concentrated on pulling without mishap into the parking lot at the rear of Grant Hardware, which her grandfather had founded just after the turn of the century and which she now oversaw.
    “There’s an apartment over the store. It’s yours. Just go around to the side and up the stairs.” Rachel stopped the car and put the transmission into park as she spoke. Reaching into the door pocket beside her, she handed him a single key dangling from a round metal ring.
    “Here’s the key. The rent will be deducted from your paycheck each week. As I told you in my letter, the hours are from eight in the morning till six at night, with an hour for lunch, Monday through Saturday. I expect you to be on the job at eight in the morning.”
    “I’ll be there.”
    “Good.”
    Still he sat, the key dangling from his fingers, looking at her with an expression she couldn’t decipher.
    “Why’d you offer me a job, anyway? Aren’t you just a little bit afraid of a man who’d rape and kill a teenage girl?”
    “We both know that you were innocent of raping Marybeth Edwards,” Rachel replied crisply, though such plain speaking caused her hands to close tightly around the steering wheel. “I, for one, am perfectly willing to believe that the two of you had consensual sex, just as you claimed. And that she was alive when you left her. Now, would you please get out of my car? I have things to do.”
    To Rachel’s secret relief, he opened the door and slid out without another word. How she would have ejected him had he proved difficult, she couldn’t imagine. Putting her foot on the brake, she carefully moved the gearshift down to drive. When she looked up again he was besideher, his arm resting on the roof of the car as he pecked with one finger on her window.
    Lips compressing, Rachel pushed the button that rolled the window down. The heat assaulted her anew.
    “There’s something I gotta tell you,” he said in a confidential tone as he leaned toward her. His face was close to hers, too close. He was making her uncomfortable again, as he no doubt intended.
    That notion stiffened her spine.
    “What?” she all but snapped.
    “I had a major case of the hots for you when I was in high school. I still do.”
    Rachel’s mouth dropped open in shock. He grinned at her cockily and straightened.
    It was only as she watched him saunter away that she realized her mouth was agape. She closed it with a snap.

2

    F rom the driver’s seat of a nondescript tan car that had pulled to the curb a little way up the road from the hardware store, an unnoticed observer watched them with an unwavering gaze. The watcher’s eyes were faintly glassy as they drank in every detail of the man walking with slow arrogance across the parking lot and around the corner out of sight. The blue Maxima reversed with a squeal of tires and pulled out into the street far too fast, then drove off heading away from where the parked car waited. But the watcher hardly noticed.
    He was back. Johnny Harris was back. The watcher had been waiting—oh, it seemed like forever—for this moment. The rumors had been true for once, though the watcher had scarcely dared believe them until he stepped off that bus and into view.
    Johnny