In a lightning change of mood, Margo said with sudden gravity, “Jeez, I was sorry to hear about Sarah’s house. She loved that place, poured her heart into restoring it.”
“How did you hear about it?” he asked casually.
“On TV—the news last night. That’s why I came back ahead of schedule, of course, even though she didn’t call me. Maybe especially because she didn’t call me. I know Sarah. She’s as strong as bronze—”
“Steel,” Tucker murmured, unable to stop himself.
“Yeah, steel. Strong as steel, thinks she can handle anything and everything on her own—but she’s had a fairly bad year, and I just don’t know how much more she can take. First that damned mugging, and then David—” Her gaze cut swiftly to Tucker. “You know about David?”
He nodded without comment.
Margo was obviously still trying to size up the relationship since Tucker had introduced himself only by name, and was clearly disappointed that he didn’t react in some dramatic way to mention of the last man in Sarah’s life.
“Yeah, well. First we find out the bastard was not one of your basic in-sickness-and-in-health guys when she got hurt; he could barely bring himself to visit her every couple of days, for Christ’s sake, and made it screamingly obvious he wanted to be someplace else when he did show up. Then, when she finally comes out of the coma…”
“Able to see the future?” Tucker supplied when her voice trailed off.
She grimaced. “Yeah. I didn’t know if you knew.”
Again, he nodded without comment.
Margo flipped a fried egg—the fifth so far, with two more still in the pan—onto a plate on the counter beside the stove, and Tucker was mildly tempted to ask how many people she planned to feed. But he didn’t want her to be distracted from the subject at hand.
“She really can do it,” Margo said, defending her friend staunchly. “It scared the hell out of her at first—still does, I guess. Well, wouldn’t it you?”
“Definitely.”
Margo nodded. “Yeah, me too. In fact—Well, never mind that. The point is that Sarah’s life has been hell this year. And now the house…jeez. The news said the cops suspected arson?”
“So I understand.” He didn’t mention the stranger who might still be outside watching; he hadn’t been able to casually look out a window without drawing her attention, and he wasn’t sure how much—if anything—Margo knew.
“That means the insurance won’t pay off for ages,” she said in a practical spirit. “Damn. She can stay here as long as necessary, of course—this place is half hers—but it would be a lot better if she could concentrate on rebuilding right away. With everything at fives and sixes like this, she’ll have way too much time to think about…stuff.”
Tucker didn’t bother to correct her. “About what happened to David…?” he probed, wondering whether she knew that Sarah’s latest prediction supposedly concerned her own death.
Margo’s exotic face darkened. “That son of a bitch. I know you aren’t supposed to speak ill of the dead, but if you ask me, he got what he deserved. If he’d treated Sarah with a modem of respect, things might have been different.”
Tucker cast about in his mind and settled on modicum. Yeah—a modicum of respect.
“But he didn’t,” Margo continued, oblivious of having misspoken. “Oh, he was charming enough—Sarah’s a sucker for charm—but he sure as hell backed off fast enough when she got hurt. He made a pass at me while she was in the hospital. Can you believe that?” She shot Tucker a fierce look. “Poor Sarah, lying there with a head injury and the doctors shaking their heads because they don’t know if she’ll ever come out of it, and that bastard’s leering and pinching me on the ass!”
Tucker just stopped himself from commenting that he could understand that other man’s urge, base though it had certainly been; as complimentary as he meant the words to be, he was both old enough and wise enough to know she wouldn’t appreciate them. “But things really changed when Sarah got out of the hospital?” he asked instead.
“With David, you mean?” Margo nodded. “Oh, yeah. Well, before that, really. When she predicted the nurse would have her baby. And the hotel fire, she predicted that in front of a bunch of us, David included. He thought she was crazy when she said it’d happen. Then, when it did—he really thought she was crazy.”
“And it scared him?”
“I’ll say. But before he could come up with a halfway decent excuse to break it off with her, she saw his future. He lasted about a week with Sarah worrying about railroad crossings, then bolted for California so fast you’d have thought his ass was on fire.”
“And died out there—at a railroad crossing.”
“I didn’t grieve for him. But Sarah nearly fell apart. For weeks, she wouldn’t even leave her house, wouldn’t talk to anybody except me—and hardly to me.” Margo frowned a little as she finished the eighth and final egg and turned the burner off, then plugged in the toaster and reached for the loaf of bread on the counter. “I don’t know if she would have come out of it, except that the visions—I mean the waking nightmares—stopped for a while. It gave her a chance to get her bearings, I guess.”
“And when the—waking nightmares came back?”
Margo shook her head. “Well, either they didn’t come very often, or she didn’t tell me about all of them, because I only know about a few. Mostly minor things—except for that serial killer out in San Francisco. That one really freaked her out.” She paused for a moment or so, then added soberly, “But she’s been awfully quiet these last months. Awfully quiet.”
Tucker drew a breath and said, “You’re afraid of her too. Aren’t you?”
She looked at him, those brilliant eyes darkened, and said shakily, “Oh, I’m afraid. But not of her. I’m afraid of what she can see. Because she saw my future. And she won’t tell me what it is.”
The morning sun was halfway to its noon position, and long shadows stretched from the west side of the building in downtown Richmond. A tall woman with short and rather spiky blond hair stood motionless on the balcony, virtually invisible in the shadows and among tall potted plants. She cursed absently as a palm frond stirred by the breeze waved in front of her binoculars, shifted her weight just a bit, then went still again as her field of vision cleared. Her attention was fixed on the rather shabby hotel across the street, and a particular room a floor below her own fifth-floor vantage point.
The drapes at that window had not been drawn, and a generous percentage of the room was visible to her.
Careless. Duran must be losing his touch.
Two men were in the room. She would have given a lot to know what they discussed as they sat so casually across from each other. But there had been no time to plant listening devices, and from her angle, it was impossible even to make an attempt at lip-reading—a skill she had worked very hard to acquire.
She lowered the binoculars, lips pressed so tightly together there was no hint of softness there, and vivid green eyes furious. “Damn,” she whispered. “Damn, damn, damn.”
She eased back through the balcony doors into the apartment she had—so to speak—sublet and bent over a lovely Regency desk. The former occupant’s work had been unceremoniously shoved aside, and an open laptop sat in the center of the pretty floral blotter.
“Jeez, enough with the plant motif,” she muttered, momentarily distracted as she glanced around at the very pretty, very feminine, and very floral bedroom in which she stood. Frilly was hardly Murphy’s style. Barely suppressing a shudder, she fixed her attention on the screen of the laptop.
A section of a city map, brilliantly colored, met her intent gaze. She studied it for a long moment, frowning, then tapped a few keys to produce a close-up of the section. Her index finger traced the distance from a square representing the hotel across the street to a quieter street where former residences had been turned into small businesses.