When she reached the highway, she hit the pavement and twisted the wheel, forcing the SUV to jump sideways. Before she’d gotten the vehicle straightened out, she slammed her foot down on the accelerator and it lurched forward, swinging from side to side a couple of times before the wheels finally locked onto the road and the SUV leaped forward. She grabbed her phone and checked. One bar.

She dialed Jackson’s number, praying he’d listened to her earlier and was on his way to Emma’s house. He answered on the first ring.

“It’s Patty, the Realtor,” Shaye said. “She’s the stalker.”

“What?” Jackson’s tone left no doubt that he thought she’d lost her mind.

“I know it sounds crazy, but you’ve got to trust me. Emma was going to drop her house key off to Patty. Patty will kill her. Game over!”

“Okay. Calm down. Detective Reynolds and I are already on our way.”

“How long?”

“Fifteen…twenty minutes, tops.”

The call dropped and Shaye cursed as she threw her phone onto the passenger’s seat.

Then prayed that Jackson reached Emma in time.

###

Patty stood in the bedroom doorway, a pistol trained directly at Emma. “It pleases me that you’re surprised. I worked long and hard at this disguise, and at no small expense to myself.”

Emma stared at Patty in disbelief. It wasn’t possible. Patty was tall, but her physique couldn’t possibly be confused with that of a man, and her long hair and facial features only made it that much harder to believe. Patty couldn’t be the man she saw in her bedroom that night. And besides, why in the world would Patty want to hurt her?

“I don’t understand,” Emma said.

Patty smirked. “Of course you don’t. All this time, you’ve thought your dead husband was stalking you, or should I say, my dead brother.”

“Your brother? David never told me he had a sister.”

Patty’s face flushed red. “I’m not his sister! I’m his brother. I’ve always been his brother.”

Emma’s mind whirled. Was it possible? Could Patty actually be a man?

“There were three of us…Nathan, Jonathon, and me. She called us her three blind mice because we couldn’t see things like she did, but then when your mama is a crazy bitch, it’s hard to agree with her. Nathan died when we were kids. Drowned. Mama was beside herself because Nathan was her favorite. She never beat Nathan. Never starved him. Never tied him up and cut him with a knife then laughed while he bled. Jonathon wasn’t as lucky. He looked just a little bit too much like our no-show daddy. And then there was me.”

Patty stepped closer to Emma. “I was the really unlucky one. You see, according to mama, I’d been born evil. You know why? Because I was born a woman. Mama hated women and she refused to acknowledge she’d given birth to one, so I become a boy. But she didn’t trust me to keep my secret, so she never let anyone know I existed. Until Jonathon figured out how to undo my handcuffs when I was a teenager, my entire world was four walls and a moldy mattress on the floor. I watched closely and learned how to free myself, always careful to do it only when Mama passed out from her booze.”

Emma tried to process the horror Patty described, but it was so far outside of anything she knew that she couldn’t get a grasp on it.

 “I didn’t want to be a woman,” Patty continued. “Women were bad, that much I knew to be true, because a bad woman stole our daddy away and left us destitute and living in a shack. I never wanted to be like the bad woman. I would never be a worthless whore. I would be a man. A man who protected my family rather than abandoning them. I shaved my head like my brothers, and we wore the same clothes. I knew I wasn’t a woman and mama started to believe, but my body betrayed me. I grew breasts and my hips widened until I could no longer fit in my brothers’ clothes.”

Emma’s heart sank. Patty was crazy. She’d known that whoever was stalking her wasn’t completely right, but Patty was so far beyond rational thought, there would be no reasoning with her. And Emma had killed her only savior. She glanced down, but Patty’s legs were hidden under one of the long skirts she always wore. She claimed her muscles were cramping earlier, but then if Patty was the stalker, she’d killed Mrs. Pearson and she was could have been lying about that as well. Still, with her MS, Patty didn’t have half the physical ability that Emma did. If Emma could launch at her before Patty got off a round, she might be able to get past. If she could get to the stairs, Emma had no doubt she could get away. Patty would never be able to keep up with her.

Patty cocked her head to the side and smiled. “You’re wondering if you can get past me. Thinking that if you can, you’ll be able to get away from a cripple. The problem is, I’m not a cripple. Never was. The MS was all part of my disguise, just like the dresses and makeup were. I knew a nurse wouldn’t be able to resist someone with a disability. And I knew my disability is what you’d see before anything else, because that’s what you were trained to do. I’m not overweight or out of shape either.”

Patty reached under her shirt with one hand and yanked. Emma heard something rip and Patty tossed a pad with breasts and stomach padding at her feet. “As soon as I left home, I had my breasts removed. Had my uterus taken out as well. No bleeding for me. No sacks of fat on my chest taunting me. It was one of those back-alley jobs, but it worked. I was finally rid of the pieces that tried to betray me. Tried to betray what I was.”

“You’re sick, Patty,” Emma said desperately. “You need help.”

“Don’t call me that! My name is Alan. Until David married you and moved to Algiers Point, I lived happily as Alan Frye, and as soon as I’m done here, that’s exactly what I’m going back to. Back to my real life. I’m burning all these whore clothes and woman things. If it weren’t for you, I could have been myself and been close to David, but you ruined it. I couldn’t look like myself or you might have guessed our secret.”

Patty reached up and pulled at the back of her head, ripping off her wig and exposing her military haircut. From her pocket, she withdrew a toilette and wiped it across her face, over and over again, until the thick, bright makeup she always wore had been almost stripped away.

Emma stared in horror at the thing in front of her. Eyeliner was smudged under her eyes and onto her cheeks. The bright red lipstick clung to her lips in blotches. She stood there, in a white blouse and blue flowered skirt, smiling at Emma, those blank black eyes locked on her. No wonder she’d thought it was David in her room that night. Without makeup, Patty’s square jawline and cheekbones were more prominent. She was a little shorter than David, but without the padding, her body was probably similar in size. Emma dropped her gaze to the chest pad and every ounce of hope drained out of her. No one would come to rescue her, because no one knew she was in trouble. She was out of options. Patty had won.

Even worse, no one would ever know what happened to her.

“He thought he could change,” Patty said. “He joined the military to get away from our childhood, thinking he could become someone else. And he came close. With you, he almost managed it, at least for a little while. The only part of his past that he couldn’t shed was me. He’d always been my protector and he didn’t know how to stop, even though he was afraid to be around me.”

Patty smirked. “Afraid I’d drag him back to the darkness. But I didn’t have to. Something happened to him on his last tour. He wouldn’t tell me what, but I could see it in his eyes. My brother was back.”

Exhaustion and despair racked Emma’s body. “Why didn’t you just kill me?”

“Because you had to pay for what you took from me. You had to feel what it was like to suffer. What it was like for your life to be on the line and to have no one who could help you.”