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  And that was the thing. He could be anyone. He really could be anyone.

  At some point before the victims had died, they had crossed paths with their murderer. He had seen them somewhere: in a store, on the street, in the mall. In a movie theatre. In a waiting room. He had seen them and known them as his next victim, and they had never suspected. They had just gone on with their lives.

  Who knows what each of them had thought when they’d started receiving the mementos. Maybe they’d ascribed the gifts to a new boyfriend or an ex-husband or a secret admirer. Perhaps they had even been excited, expectant, looking forward to having the secret revealed.

  Rachel shivered.

  Such dark thoughts didn’t seem to trouble Ann. She leaned back in her seat with her feet up on the seatback in front of her as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

  About halfway through the film, Rachel shifted forward, pulled a bottled water from her bag, and leaned over toward Ann. “Do you have any ibuprofen?” she hissed.

  “Of course,” Ann hissed back, not taking her eyes off the screen. “It’s right here in this medical kit that I carry around with me everywhere.”

  Rachel sighed. Point taken.

  A sudden lull in action caused the sound to drop. Rachel could hear the people around them shifting in their seats, whispering, and chewing.

  And behind them, in the dark, a quiet breathing.

  ~*~

  As it turned out, the Memento Killer wasn’t in the theatre with them that night—at least, it was highly unlikely that he was, since that evening, he claimed a new victim. Barbara Ingram, 38, was strangled with a pair of pantyhose taken from her own bureau drawer. Her bedroom window had been jimmied up and the bureau drawer left hanging open. A cut-glass crystal swan—almost certainly the fourth memento—was found on the kitchen table next to torn wrapping paper and a small notecard, reading simply, Yours.

  No matter what he’d been in the past, the Memento Killer was now almost certainly a home invader.

  9

  Sunday morning dawned bright and clear. On such a morning, it seemed impossible to believe that they lived in a world in which an unsuspecting woman could be murdered in the comfort of her own bed. Mostly, Rachel dealt with this worry by trying not to think about it. She drank her coffee, strapped a plastic bag around her cast, took a shower, wrestled herself into something presentable, and rode to church with Ann.

  Just before the service started, Rachel looked up from her Bible and there he was: Call-Me-Matt, dressed in a clean button-down shirt, neat brown slacks, and shiny dress shoes, clutching a gold-tipped walking stick. He looked altogether less disreputable than she would have liked. Over the weekend, in various versions of the story that she’d told, she had played him off as if he were a creeper.

  Matt advanced on her position with halting speed but dignified precision.

  Rachel wished he had shown up looking more like a poor, desperate soul. Then people would respect her for being such a good Christian and inviting him to church. As the matter stood, she dreaded the knowing smiles and prim looks that would slant her way if anyone discovered she had invited to church a man who had hit on her in a waiting room.

  Rachel tamped down a surprising surge of nerves and concentrated on making her face look normal. “Oh, hello,” she said in what she hoped was a light, unaffected tone.

  Matt smiled and sat next to her. She would have scooted over, but she had her cast up on a chair in front of her and could not move much without causing a minor commotion. She looked around desperately for Ann, Lynn, or any other friends likely to come to her aid. No one made eye contact.

  Matt rubbed the back of his neck. “You remember me?”

  Rachel could smell a clean, fresh scent and a whiff of minty chewing gum. She tried not to think about her own potential coffee breath as she answered. “Of course. Sebastiano. But people call you Matt.”

  He smiled, his eyes brightening. “They do! And you are Rachel.” His voice caressed her name. He took one of her hands in a warm, dry clasp.

  “Yes,” said Rachel. Outwardly, she kept herself prim as a politician’s wife. Inwardly, she burst into flames. She felt a deep blush scorch its way up her neck. Stupid fair complexion.

  Lynn sent Ethan to sit with Rachel. An eight-year-old wasn’t much protection, but Rachel’s relief when he stuck himself between her and Matt was practically palpable.

  As soon as the service started, the awkwardness eased. Matt gave the proceedings his full attention, and although he had not brought a Bible, he listened closely. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see his head nodding.

  Meanwhile, Rachel couldn’t sit still. She fidgeted, twitched, and fretted. The sermon from John 9 on the man born blind went completely over her head. She found it impossible to concentrate with the entire church sitting behind them, staring. Rachel could practically hear them all thinking. They would be assuming things.

  Of course they all wanted her to marry, and since Rachel was rarely spotted within shouting distance of an attractive man—let alone sitting close enough to smell his aftershave—this had to be an exciting development for them to process.

  While the pastor rounded third base on his sermon, Rachel prepared her battle plan. When the service ended, she would turn to Matt, say something appropriately polite, thank him for coming, and then quickly start circulating. On most Sundays, whenever Rachel wanted to stand talking to a particular person after church, she would find the conversation interrupted by at least five other people coming over to talk. But could she depend on such interruptions on the one day she needed them most? Unlikely.

  Mrs. Hammond, she nodded to herself. Mrs. Hammond could carry on a satisfying conversation with a corpse, and she was sitting just two rows away. If Rachel could catch Mrs. Hammond’s eye and engage her at the critical moment, then she was home free.

  Still, this plan was not without flaws. Mrs. Hammond might zero in on Matt instead of on Rachel, trapping him in conversation until the room was empty and Rachel had no place left to hide. In that event, she would simply wait until Mrs. Hammond had gotten her talons into Matt before escaping up the center aisle and straight out the back door into the parking lot, crutching like the wind. It felt good to have a plan.

  The congregation rose to sing. Thankful for a chance to stretch the small of her back, Rachel rose with them, bracing herself with two hands against the chair in front of her. Open our eyes, Lord, she sang along with the congregation, as she tried to catch someone’s eye. Anyone’s eye. Everyone in the row seemed fully absorbed in the song, like good Christians, including Matt, who seemed to know the lyrics by heart. Interesting. Maybe he attended his nameless church more often than Rachel had given him credit for, or maybe by some fluke they happened to be singing the one Christian song he knew. Of the alternatives, Rachel found the latter option more likely.

  During closing prayer, she reached out two arms to trap Ethan in front of her, fully prepared to use him as a buffer if necessary. Ethan went suddenly boneless and slithered to the floor, crawling down the aisle toward his parents. Ethan was really too old to be allowed to crawl around in church, but as the last amen sounded and Rachel opened her mouth to scold, she felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to find Matt standing very close.

  “I am sorry I cannot stay longer. I must go.”

  Rachel absorbed this unexpected turn of events. “Oh—you—what?” she stammered.

  “Yes.” He folded both hands over the top of his gold-handled walking stick and leaned forward a little as if taking the weight off his bad leg. Rachel did something similar with her hands on the chair, blushing a bit as she realized that she’d inadvertently mirrored him. “There is something important I have to do,” he said, his voice low.

  “Oh.” Rachel felt at a loss. In all her calculations, she had not foreseen this. Out of the corner of her eye, she spied Lynn making a beeline toward them. Mrs. Hammond hovered dangerously near. Once they converged on her and Matt, he would never be able
to escape. “Well,” she said quickly and reached out her right hand in a gesture of friendly dismissal. “Thank you for coming.”

  Instead of reaching out his corresponding right hand to shake hers, Matt put out his left hand and folded it under Rachel’s right, holding her fingers in a light clasp. For a moment, Rachel thought he might kiss them. Instead, he squeezed once and released. He then turned to limp quickly up the aisle.

  Lynn had just reached Rachel’s side. “Man!” she hissed. “I wanted to meet him.” She turned and made eye contact with her husband, Alex, before jerking her head slightly toward the side exit. Alex nodded at this silent signal and headed toward one of the side doors.

  “What’s going on?” Rachel asked.

  “Never mind that. You need to tell me everything he said, and you need to tell me right now.”

  “Later—Stu’s,” she hissed as Mrs. Hammond descended on them.

  ~*~

  “Except for the weird hand-grasping, he seems nice,” Ann said. “Perhaps he’s put a moratorium on direct flirting.” She looked both ways before pulling off the church parking lot and heading toward Stu’s. “Unless you want to count following you to church as direct flirting.”

  Rachel sat with her cast propped up on the dashboard, happy to be in the passenger’s seat and not driving one-footed. With Ann at the wheel, the sun shining, and an afternoon of relative leisure ahead, Rachel still managed to find a fly in the ointment. “Don’t you think it’s sort of creepy, though?” she asked.

  “You invited him to church and he came. What’s creepy about that?”

  “He thought I was nineteen,” Rachel reminded Ann. “What grown man hits on teenage girls and follows them around, even if it is to church?”

  “Plenty of them. And the thing about you looking like a teenager was probably just a line.”

  Rachel flipped down the visor and peered at herself in the small vanity mirror. “Do you think?”

  Ann laughed.

  “I invited him to church as a deterrent!” Rachel reminded her. “I mean, really. What guy who hits on a woman expects her to invite him to church?”

  “He doesn’t seem to realize that you meant it as a deterrent.”

  Rachel folded her arms and glared out the passenger-side window at the scrubby pines and palm trees whipping by. Robert Burns was right. The best-laid plans of mice and men, not to mention red-headed spinster English teachers, often do go awry.

  ~*~

  “Rachel has a boyfriend,” Ann announced to Coach Donovan the next morning as she rolled under his right hook.

  “I do not have a boyfriend!” Rachel squawked from where she sat on the mats, legs straight out as she pumped a set of ten-pound dumbbells, rhythmically alternating arms. She paused mid-lift to glare at Ann from across the studio.

  “Keep pumping, Rachel!” Coach Donovan called. He slipped left to avoid one of Ann’s sizzling jabs. “Curl and press for another minute.”

  Rachel blew wispy tendrils of hair from her forehead and obediently fell back into rhythm, panting slightly as she defended herself. She continued to alternate arms, curling the dumbbells up toward her shoulder before turning her wrist and pushing them overhead. “I do not have a boyfriend,” she repeated. “Just some creepy stalker who followed me to church from the doctor’s office. Not my boyfriend.” It seemed important to clarify this.

  “I guess we should call him her man friend anyway,” Ann huffed as she threw a fast 1-2-3-2 combo, “considering how old he is.”

  “He’s not my man friend either,” Rachel wheezed, pushing the right-hand dumbbell up toward the ceiling and groaning. “And he’s not that old. At least, I don’t think.”

  “He’s thirty-one,” Ann said. “So a man, not a boy.”

  Rachel sat up, working to catch her breath. “How would you know?”

  Coach Donovan interrupted to issue a command. “Rachel, switch to straight-arm raises, three minute rounds. Ann, let’s do some kicks.”

  Rachel rotated her neck and arched the small of her back while Ann worked off her gloves and strapped on shin guards. Coach Donovan selected one of the large sparring pads lined up against the wall and tossed it to Ann.

  “He is thirty-one. It’s true.” Ann braced the pad to take Donovan’s first kick. “At least, that’s what Lynn said.”

  “How would Lynn know?” Rachel switched her grip on the dumbbells, rested one on each thigh, and lifted them one at a time, arms straight in front of her body. “She didn’t even talk to him.”

  “Alex talked to him after church yesterday,” Ann said, “and that’s what he told Lynn.”

  “I didn’t think Matt stayed around to talk to anybody.”

  “Lynn made Alex chase him down in the parking lot,” Ann explained as she and Donovan traded off the kick pad.

  Rachel set down both weights, swiping at her sweaty temples in frustration. “This is so humiliating.”

  “Rachel, stay focused!” Donovan let out a swift breath as one of Ann’s kicks landed.

  “Yeah,” Ann panted. “How humiliating, to have a handsome, available man following you around town. That must really be terrible.”

  “He’s a stalker,” Rachel qualified, a bit breathless now. “And he’s not that handsome.”

  “He’s pretty good-looking,” Ann said. “And he’s not a stalker. You invited him to church. That’s why he came.” She shifted her weight and threw a swift roundhouse from her back leg.

  “I meant that as a deterrent—”

  “Say deterrent one more time,” Ann invited Rachel, bouncing on her toes in fight stance.

  “Come on, girls, step it up.” Coach Donovan snapped his fingers. “Focus.”

  They finished out the round in relative silence, Ann and Donovan grunting as they landed their kicks, Rachel panting as she swung her weights and stewed.

  The buzzer went off, signaling the end of the round. Rachel flopped back against the mats, panting and perspiring, wondering why she had even bothered trying to come back to the gym before she’d gotten her cast off.

  “I need to keep my girls strong,” Donovan said, folding his arms over his chest and watching them seriously. “There’s a lot of weirdos out there, and I want any man who messes with you ladies to regret it.”

  10

  Rachel arrived at work just in time to see Lee’s shabby four-door rattling into the space next to hers.

  “A bit early for the riffraff to be showing up,” she called as if she fully expected him to hear her over the sound of his clunky car and through both sets of car doors. Even if he couldn’t hear her, he seemed to understand her intent. He rolled his eyes as he put up his sunshield.

  In the time it took Rachel to angle her crutches out and heave herself from her car, Lee had shut off his engine—ignoring the various hisses and pops that emitted from under the hood—and had walked over to lean against her car. His hair, still wet from a shower, clung to his head. The awful beard, already drying at the tips, bushed out from his face. It was not a flattering look. Rachel loved it. It was so quintessentially Lee.

  Lee said nothing but observed Rachel as she balanced on her left foot. She had traded her shoulder bag for a bright purple backpack. She swung it around behind her and worked her arms through the loops before jamming her crutches under her arms and rocking back a step. She then indicated with a grand sweep of her hand that he could shut the car door for her at any time.

  “I could have gotten that for you,” Lee said grumpily, indicating the backpack.

  “What, this?” Rachel adjusted the straps to make it more secure. The tighter she wore it, the less it threw off her balance. “That’s OK. You’re headed over to D Wing anyway. My room would be out of your way.” She smiled and pivoted toward her wing, only to look up in surprise when Lee fell in step beside her.

  “I can’t take a few seconds to get the door for you?” Lee asked, frowning. At least, she assumed he was frowning. It was hard to tell under all that hair. But he sounded as if he were
frowning.

  Lee always did hate mornings. As a student, he had slouched into homeroom like one of the undead: glassy eyes, vacant stare, pallid complexion; full of moaning, grunting, and dire predictions about life in general and that day specifically. By mid-morning he would begin to look a bit more human. By lunch, he would be more or less functional. By afternoon, he was downright obnoxious.

  Although Rachel and Lee had been colleagues for two full years, she currently had no way of gauging if his days still followed a similar trajectory. With him stationed out in D Wing, she and the rest of the staff rarely saw him—which was just how he liked it. Yolanda Martinez kept fairly close tabs on him, however. Word on the street was that she trusted neither his tender years nor his unruly beard.

  “It still feels weird to me that you have your own access code,” Rachel told Lee as he thumbed the keypad and swung the door back, holding it wide for her to pass in ahead of him.

  “Me too,” he grunted as she crutched around him into the dim interior. He came through the door behind her and the two started down the hall. “I keep waiting for someone to tell me it’s all been a big mistake.”

  Rachel loved these silent, pre-homeroom moments. If she were to stand still enough, she felt that she might hear the building breathe. During certain seasons, a soft, buttery sunlight slanted through the windows and bathed the halls in a golden glow. Those mornings were the best. On mornings like those, Rachel loved walking the quiet length of the halls, sipping her coffee and savoring the calm before the storm. The clear light and the still air were usually enough to make her forget her problems, if just momentarily. Granted, her list of problems didn’t generally include a broken bone, a potential stalker, and a murderous psychopath on the loose, but lately life had been nothing if not unexpected.

  Using the key she wore on a band around her wrist, Rachel unlocked her classroom door and stepped back to let Lee open it for her. He then stepped past her, flipped on the lights, and set his coffee down on the desk.