As soon as I finished eating, I grabbed the tube of aloe vera and made him sit on the edge of the bed.
“That first note is innocent enough,” Mark said. “But you’re right. Unless your PI finds something solid to show Cary’s her stalker, I don’t think it’s him. Besides, if he was trying to use the card to make nice, he would have signed his name.”
I squirted a dollop of gel onto my fingers. “Maybe he assumed she’d recognize his writing.”
I touched my fingers to Mark’s skin. He gasped and recoiled.
How badly burned was he? He was a doctor, so he should know if it was bad enough to go to an ER, but he did always say he had more experience with dead people than with live ones as a medical examiner. “Should we have gotten this looked at?”
He stuck his arm back out. “It’s just cold.” He inclined his head toward where my phone rested on the bed, the picture of the first note still on the screen. “Would you recognize my handwriting?”
Yes jumped to my lips but stuck there. Mark and I texted and emailed and called each other, none of which involved writing by hand. I’d never even seen his handwriting, and we were engaged.
His lifted his shoulders a touch. “Because I wouldn’t recognize yours. People don’t write much out by hand anymore. Even most appointments are entered into computers or phones, and reminders are sent by text and email.”
It explained how this looked like someone Ahanti knew well and yet she didn’t recognize their handwriting at all.
I finished Mark’s first arm and moved on to the second one in silence. The thought that this might be someone other than Cary made my back and shoulders ache like I’d been trying to haul the sleigh my Clydesdale horses pulled in the winter back home.
My fingers stalled near his elbow. “Did you think Geoff was telling the truth about why he was outside Ahanti’s apartment?”
If my hand hadn’t been on his arm, I wouldn’t have felt his muscles tense, the movement was so subtle. “I don’t know him well, but it’s something I would have done.”
It was something he’d done on a smaller level. Back when I’d thought he was married and I told him I couldn’t be around him anymore, he’d still sat outside the animal shelter until Russ arrived to make sure a murderer didn’t catch me there alone.
“You introduced them, didn’t you?” Mark asked. “So Geoff didn’t even know her back when she was working with Cary.”
As far as I knew, I’d introduced them that night we accidentally bumped into him at the movies.
I wished I could shut off the part of my brain trained by my parents to think up all the alternative explanations. Like that he’d only pretended to bump into us there. Like that he’d actually followed her there, hoping I’d introduce them and ask him to sit with us, which is exactly what I did.
“I started going to Geoff as my chiropractor because we always seemed to be standing in line at the same time at the Starbucks right down the street from Ahanti’s and my apartment building. I’d never been to a chiropractor before, but I’d been in pain since I fell off my bike.”
I crawled up onto the bed behind Mark so that I could work on his neck, but I kept my hands on his shoulders for a second instead. I wanted to hear his reaction.
“Was his office near there?” His voice was a little too measured.
His current offices weren’t, nor was his apartment. “At the time he said they were but that he was in the process of changing locations…I never saw the old office that he claimed was nearby.”
“Have you asked the private investigator to look into Geoff as well?”
I hadn’t yet. I’d intended to after our lunch meeting, but then the text from Ahanti drove it from my mind. “I’ll call him first thing tomorrow.”
“We’d still have to explain why he’d have sent Ahanti a picture of him with his own face burnt out, though. Even if we could establish that he might have seen her somewhere, become obsessed, and then been looking for an introduction, that photo doesn’t fit.”
The only thing I could think of was that Geoff was getting jealous of how much of Ahanti’s attention was going elsewhere, onto her clients, onto wedding plans, onto hunting for a new apartment. “Maybe he thought she was too focused on other things. If someone threatened him, it would bring them closer together. But it backfired on him.”
I gently applied the aloe vera to the back of Mark’s neck. Along with talking to the PI, I’d also have to find a way to subtly ask Ahanti how the wedding plans were going prior to this and how Geoff was handling all the stress.
Mark snagged my hand with his, stopping my progress on his neck. “Might be time for you to go back to your room, or I’m going to want you to stay.”
The lines we’d drawn in our relationship were getting harder and harder to maintain the longer we were together and the closer we got to our wedding. Sticking to what we believed meant that we had to respect when the other person was tempted to cross those lines. I’d been thinking about sunburns and stalkers, but apparently, my ministrations had taken Mark’s mind somewhere else.
I capped the aloe vera gel, handed it to him, and kissed him gently on the cheek. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
When this was all over, I’d turn my attention to planning a honeymoon for Mark and me in whatever country had the lowest murder rate.
9
Mark settled in beside me on the bow of my parents’ yacht. His sunburn had faded some after two days, and now he complained about it itching more than hurting. We’d made sure to pack extra sunscreen and a hat before we left yesterday for the weekend trip.
My parents had actually taken a weekend off to spend it with us on the Chesapeake. It was a minor miracle.
Mark smiled big enough that his dimples came out in full force, warming me more than the summer sun did. “You had a rough childhood, didn’t you?”
My return laugh stuck in my throat. At one time, I’d thought I had. My parents had been always working and were emotionally unavailable when they were home. I’d always felt the pressure of living up to their seemingly unreachable expectations.
Now that I had seen more of life outside of the wealthy DC area and the equally wealthy vacation spots we’d been to, I had a new appreciation for how easy my life had been. I could have easily turned out spoiled and entitled had my parents not emphasized the value of hard work and responsibility, and had my Uncle Stan not taken the time to show me that even those were worthless if you didn’t also have compassion.
I leaned my face back and let the breeze ruffle through my hair. I’d almost forgotten how much I loved being on the water. Despite owning this boat, my parents rarely had time to use it.
“Maybe we should have a boat someday. Not one this size, obviously, but I’d like to be able to take our kids out onto the lake on weekends.”
I glanced over at Mark, but both his dimples and smile were gone. There was a tenseness to his jaw that sent a chill over me from the inside out.
He took my hand and ran his thumb over my knuckles. “Is what you were raised with the kind of life you want?”
“Why are you asking that?”
