Page 74 of Secrets in the Dark
“Empty pitcher!” the young woman announced suddenly. “And we have a late call tomorrow morning! That means another pitcher!”
“Our turn,” Mason said.
“No,” she laughed. “This one is mine. You may get the next two! Oh, and we have baskets of chips coming to the table. They should arrive shortly!”
She hopped up and went to have the pitcher refilled. There were still several people at the bar, still several standing behind those seated in the old wooden bar stools. Mason watched her as she chatted with the bartender and waited for him to pour a new pitcher.
As she waited, Mason felt his phone buzzing. He answered it quickly.
Edmund was on the other line.
“I just heard from the paper—they’ve received an email from our friend, they don’t think it’s a hoax, the content and syntax are similar to his other missives.
“And what does this one say?”
“Tonight’s the night I don’t need the light, she’ll be two, but I’m far from through. Saucy Jack is deliciously back and trust me, this Jack truly has the most perfect knack.”
“So, he’s out here somewhere. Anything on your end?”
“I have police as far as I can possibly spread them. We’ve tried a few pubs and the streets—I can’t find our lovely Mrs. Abigail Scott, either. I’d risk being locked up in an asylum tonight to talk to her in front of others if I had to... We need help. There are too many dark alleys and corners and too many people about and—”
“We can only stay vigilant,” Mason told him. “No man can do more than his best.”
“Right. I know. But I don’t want this bloke ecstatic and gleeful tomorrow because he managed to do what he said he was going to do.”
Mason had kept Stacey in his sights as he’d listened.
He saw her frown, looking toward the door. Someone was exiting; the heavy door was closing behind him.
“Hey!”
Stacey was suddenly moving, heading toward the door herself.
Mason leaped to his feet and Della and Sean, watching as he had been, did the same.
He was first out the door, anxiously looking up and down the street. Impossibly, it seemed that Stacey had disappeared.
It was growing late, but the pubs were still open and yet the street were crowded here and there as those who had been out knew that it was reaching closing time and were headed home or back to one of the many hotels in the area.
“I’m going left!” Della called to him.
“Right, Sean, talk to the people out here, see if anyone knows—”
“On it!” Sean promised.
They headed in the three possible directions in which anyone might have gone. Mason weaved quickly through the small groups of people moving along the street, having called it a night.
He looked ahead.
There was no moon that night but streetlights offered illumination, filtering weakly through the London fog that had settled soon after nightfall.
He looked for doorways, for alleys, for any possible corridor through which Stacey might have disappeared along with the man she had followed from the pub.
Just a friend?
Or had she thought that she’d witnessed Jesse Miller in one of his guises and chased after him, afraid that in calling for help, she would lose him?
“Mason!”
