Jacqueline Diamond - The Baby's Bodyguard

He wished things could be different, but her pregnancy had wiped out any chance of the two of them returning to their old life in LA. Maybe they should have spent more time discussing the implications of having a child—financial and otherwise—but he had a feeling Casey would shut him out as she’d done when he offered to pay the doctor’s bills.

He wasn’t the only one who kept his most complicated feelings to himself. Sometimes she did, too.

It was time to put useless hopes behind him. In a few days, he’d call and inform her that he was signing the divorce papers. If she refused to accept money to help support their daughter, he’d open a trust fund for the little girl’s college expenses. Just because he couldn’t be a real father didn’t mean he intended to abandon his responsibilities.

From the carport attached to the house, he heard a car start. His ear marked Casey’s progress as she backed out and headed down the driveway.

The motor stopped just beyond the house, still humming. What was she waiting for?

He didn’t know her routine. Maybe she gave one of the tenants a ride. Curious, Jack got up and went to the porch.

From the front, he saw that she’d stopped next to the parking area and exited the car. A cloud of dogwood blossoms obscured his view of the lot.

“Casey?” he called, and stepped down from the porch. Receiving no answer, he shouted louder. Still nothing.

Jack hurried down the driveway. The car sat idling, with the driver’s door ajar. No sign of Casey.

He shouldn’t have let her go out until he’d checked the premises. Why did he let himself get distracted? If some guy was stalking her, the arrival of another male might have roused him to further action.

Surveying the surroundings for suspicious movement, Jack noticed a squirrel dart across some sunny rocks but nothing more troubling. “Casey?” he called again. The name echoed faintly.

The crunch of footsteps straight ahead brought him up short. From behind a screen of branches, his wife appeared on the blacktop.

“Jack!” She hurried forward.

“I’ve been calling you.” That wasn’t the issue, of course. “What’s going on?”

“You’d better take a look.”

He moved closer, keeping a lookout all the while. These unfenced, heavily wooded premises provided too much cover for his taste.

His attention turned to the parking area. The other vehicles from last night had vanished, leaving his blue rental sedan sitting isolated. Isolated, but not undisturbed.

A large, leafy tree limb half obscured the windshield, where it had apparently fallen. Then he noticed a broken side window.

The damage also included a bent antenna and windshield wiper, both possibly attributable to the fallen branch. The broken window and the scratches on the hood, however, didn’t correlate, and neither did the angle of the branch compared to the locations of nearby trees.

There’d been no storm last night and no winds to carry tree limbs any distance. This had to be intentional.

Jack circled the car without touching it. When Casey reached for the branch, he waved her away. “Don’t disturb anything. I need to get the whole picture.”

She withdrew her hand. “These trees are kind of overgrown. I’ve been meaning to have them trimmed.”

He noted a rock on the pavement below the broken window. Dried soil clung to one side as if it had been wrenched from the ground. On the hood, the depth and straightness of the score marks reminded him of key scrapes.

“I don’t think the branch fell by itself,” he said. “I don’t think it caused all this damage, either.”

“That’s what I was trying to figure out,” she admitted. “It seemed accidental but it doesn’t look right.”

It ticked him off to see the vandalism. Jack didn’t doubt for a minute that he’d been personally targeted. What outraged him even more was the sense that someone felt possessive toward his wife. “This is definitely vandalism, and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that my car was chosen.”

“Wait a minute.” Casey peered through the window. “You left food inside.”

He followed her gaze to the empty wrapper from his beef jerky, lying on the passenger seat where he’d tossed it. “So?”

“An animal might have tried to get in,” she pointed out.

“Would that be the same bear that squirted you with the hose?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I was thinking of a raccoon. They can do amazing things with their hands.”

“Ever see one throw a rock?”

She admitted she hadn’t.

Jack returned to his line of thought. “Whoever did this was lashing out at me. He probably acted first on impulse, breaking the window and scratching my hood, then decided to try to make it appear like an accident. He either pulled the branch down or found it in the woods and arranged it to try to fool us.”

“Jack, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean for you to become a target. This could be expensive.”

He shrugged. “I’ve got insurance. It’ll just cost me the deductible, and the car’s still drivable.”

Those were deep scratches, though. And the rock had been thrown with force. Whoever had done this carried a lot of anger.

Yet until now, he reminded himself, there’d been no indication that Casey was the stalker’s primary concern. He’d been heard or seen near two tenants’ cabins, not her house.

Usually, perpetrators stuck to a pattern. This guy’s unpredictability and his hostility made the hairs stand up on Jack’s neck.

He checked his watch. A quarter to nine. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let me come to church with you. If whoever did this is fixated on you, he knows you’ll be there and he may show up. I might get a gut feeling about somebody.” People revealed more than they realized through their body language.

Casey released a long breath. “What about your flight?”

“I can still make it. Just let me pack my bag. I’ll caravan behind you to town, and afterwards I can head directly for Nashville.” He’d have to push the speed limit, but he hadn’t seen a sign of any state troopers on his way north.

She hugged herself. “I guess that makes sense.”

Don’t overwhelm me with enthusiasm. Well, what had he expected? “We might be a few minutes late. I’ll need to photograph the car before we leave, so don’t touch anything.” He always packed a couple of disposable cameras. In his line of work, they came in handy.

“You’re treating it like a crime scene.”

“You got that right.”

Casey regarded the car unhappily. “I wish this guy would just leave us alone. We’d be so much happier.”

“If only bad guys thought that way!” Jack teased.

She gave him a reluctant smile. “You’d better get started. I can pack your gear for you, if you like.”

“That would help.”

After he finished snapping shots, stowing his suitcase and collecting the rock in a plastic bag as a precaution, it was clear they would be late for church. Too bad. Jack would have liked to watch people arriving. It might have helped him spot the guilty party, if he were there.

As he followed Casey’s car into town, he realized that for once he belonged in a church, because he had a very appropriate assignment: to catch a sinner.

Casey didn’t know which upset her more: the possibility that the prowler was becoming violent, or the fact that he’d forced Jack to stay, even for a few hours, out of what was obviously a sense of obligation.

All the same, gratitude for her husband’s presence helped to ease her delayed shock. When she first spotted the damage to the car, she’d instinctively reached for some reassuring explanation, but the more she stared, the more unavoidable Jack’s conclusion seemed. This couldn’t have happened by chance.

Maybe she’d made a mistake when she ordered him to leave. Still, sooner or later, he had to go. Maybe they’d get lucky and he’d spot the likely culprit right away.

The Richfield Community Church lay on the far side of town, a small white clapboard building with a picturesque steeple. Cars and trucks spilled over onto an adjacent lot.

As she and Jack walked across the pavement, Casey noticed him straightening and realized he must be focusing on the task ahead. He probably had no idea what a stir the arrival of her previously unseen husband was likely to create among the congregation.

When they entered the foyer, she could hear the deep voice of the pastor, Joshua Norris, issuing from the sanctuary, although the doors had been closed. Jack hesitated. “What’s the etiquette?” he murmured. “I hate to just barge in.”

“Let’s wait till they start singing.” The noise should cover the disturbance caused by their entry.

A few minutes later, Casey heard the piano—which she knew was played by the minister’s wife, Bernadette—launch into a popular hymn. As the congregation swelled with song, she opened the door and led the way inside.

Brilliance poured through the stained-glass window above the pulpit and the arching side windows. To her, the whole place seemed to shine.

As always, the hymn lifted her spirits. Nothing seemed quite so unmanageable or threatening as it had before.

The congregants faced away from them. Only a few people appeared to notice their arrival, although she could already see them whispering to their neighbors.

When she pointed out two seats in a nearby pew, Jack gave a jerk of the head, indicating that she should sit. He, however, clearly intended to stand in the back where he could view the proceedings.

Although she’d have liked to stay with him, Casey couldn’t stand for the whole service. She slid into place and picked up a prayer book.

Once the song finished, more heads turned. Her friend Bonnie smiled, her interest obviously perking when she caught sight of Jack. Royce studied the new arrival with something less than enthusiasm.

Casey remembered Jack’s suspicions about him. She had to admit her ex-boyfriend didn’t even try to disguise his mistrust of the newcomer, but she couldn’t imagine him sneaking around the Pine Woods. And if he’d wanted to harm Jack, as a mechanic he could have done something far more deadly and hard to spot than scratching the paint.

The possibilities that came to mind alarmed her. Thank goodness Royce was no criminal.

Casey forced herself to look to the pulpit, even though her mind continued to buzz. Usually she enjoyed the service and tried to apply the sermon to her personal life. Today, she kept glancing around, wondering if one of these folks had become her enemy.

Not everybody in town attended, of course. Enid was the only one of the tenants in view, which didn’t surprise her, since she knew the others liked to sleep late. There were also some people she didn’t immediately recognize from this angle, including a woman in a scarf who sat with the Rawlinses.

Nearly an hour later, when the service ended, Casey rose stiffly. She’d never noticed how hard the pews were until she began carrying a baby.

Her friend Mimi approached. “I’ll teach your class, honey,” she volunteered. “You’d better keep your eye on that sexy guy of yours or somebody’s likely to make off with him.”

“Thanks.” Casey had to chuckle at Mimi’s cheerful manner. “That would help a lot.”

“Did you see who’s here?” Bonnie arrived with her younger sister, Angie, in tow. “They say a bad penny always turns up. I’m willing to give a person a second chance, but this one’s got enough attitude to fill a barn.”