Page 25 of Silent Watch
She threw herself inside, yanked the door closed.Caleb hit the gas before she had her seatbelt on, the car lurching forward with a scream of tires.
In the mirror, she saw the SUV hesitate at the intersection—then turn the other way, melting back into the darkness it had come from.
"You're okay."Caleb's voice was steady, but his knuckles were white on the steering wheel."You're okay.I've got you."
Harper couldn't speak.Her chest heaved.Her hands shook.The album was still clutched against her, its corners digging into her arms.
Caleb took a circuitous route back toward town, checking the mirrors every few seconds, taking turns at random.The SUV didn't reappear.
Finally, when they were back on familiar streets, the lights of Main Square visible in the distance, Harper found her voice.
"They were watching her house.They knew I was there."
"I know."
"They'll go back.Geri?—"
"I already made a call."His voice was tight."We'll figure out protection.Right now, I need to get you somewhere safe.We have a safe house."
Harper looked down at the album in her lap.Thirty years of evidence.Names, dates, photographs.A roadmap to everything Geri Crane had seen and never dared to speak.
She thought of Isak, bleeding out in a parking garage with the truth still locked in his head.She thought of Margaret Crane, dropping dead in her kitchen a week before she could report what she'd found.She thought of Nova Boone, falling down stairs she'd climbed a hundred times.And Daniel Bennett.
All of them silenced.All of them erased.
Not this time.
"I got it," she said quietly."Everything Geri collected.Thirty years of proof that these people have been killing anyone who gets close to the truth."
Caleb glanced at her, then back at the road.
"Then we make sure it wasn't for nothing."
Harper held the album against her chest and watched the dark road unspool in the headlights.Behind them, the SUV was reporting back to whoever had sent it.Ahead, the safe house waited.And between the two—this car, this man, this fragile alliance held together by shared purpose and something neither of them had named yet—was the only thing standing between her and the people who wanted her dead.
Chapter 7
The safe house sat at the end of a gravel road past the Sandbar property, where the scrub pine thickened and the nearest neighbor was a quarter mile of silence away.
Caleb had rented it six months ago through three layers of shell companies.No one in Blossom Springs knew it existed.The cottage was small—living room, galley kitchen, one bedroom, one bath—but the walls were thick, and the nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away.On the kitchen counter, a chess set held a game he'd been playing against himself for two weeks.Black was winning.
Harper stood in the center of the living room, Geri's album pressed against her chest, taking in the space.She didn't do the full scan this time—just a quick sweep of the windows, the exits, before her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch.
"They were watching her house," she said."The whole time."
"I know."
"What happens to her now?"
Caleb didn't have a clean answer for that.Geri Crane had handed over thirty years of evidence, and someone had witnessed the exchange.By morning, Douglas Sattler would know.Maybe Harrison Montgomery, too.
"We work the problem," he said."That's what happens now."
Harper's grip on the album loosened.She crossed to the couch and set it on the scarred coffee table, then sank down beside it like her strings had been cut.
"Coffee?"
"Please."
