Ben greeted the women, then turned to him with a smile. “Hey, man.”

“Hey.”

“Luke is going to be doing some puppy-sitting for the next few days,” Finley told Ben. “It’s possible that he could use a hand from an old friend.” She sounded like a mom arranging a playdate between two preschool boys who didn’t like each other.

Luke wished, painfully, that Ed had never asked him to come here and protect Finley. He wished he’d never entered the doors of this place. He wished he’d never met Finley.

Most of all, he wished she didn’t stir up feelings in him that he’d never wanted to feel again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Foreboding jolted through Finley the moment she stepped into her house that night after work.

She froze just inside her front door, senses straining. Sally ran up to her, panting and wagging her tail. Usually Sally woke from sleep to greet Finley, so the panting was somewhat unusual.

Finley waited, testing the environment. The sun hadn’t yet set. Though the house was dim with coming dusk, there was still plenty of light, and she didn’t see anything suspicious.

So what had set off a clang of warning in her?

Oscar the Pomchi puppy shifted sleepily inside the sling Finley wore diagonally across her body. She registered the soft squeaking of Dudley the hedgehog’s wheel, but that was normal. She peeked into her office and, sure enough, saw him running on his wheel inside his cage.

She made her way deeper into the house. In the living room, her cat sat on a shelf, regarding her with irritation. That, too, was unusual. Not the irritation, which was his default expression, but the fact that Rufus had jumped onto that particular shelf.

“Everything okay here?” she asked him.

Rufus scowled.

The items surrounding her were exactly as she’d left them. Even so, she set down her purse, then peeked into one room after another, checking to see if anything was amiss.

Nothing was.

The front door had been locked and the sliding door was locked, too. A strong gust of wind sent the trees in the backyard shuddering. A storm front was sweeping across the mountains, which likely explained her pets’ odd behavior. From time to time, harmless things like shifts in the weather, the noise of the trash truck, or the sound of a car backfiring unsettled them.

She was being paranoid. Maybe her dad’s concerns about the dangers that might be wrapped up in the treasure hunt had burrowed into her subconscious.

She let Sally outside, then filled her tiny watering can. Caring for her miniature cactus collection always calmed her.

For years she’d been adding to her stash of cacti. In the winter, they lived on this sunny shelving unit. In the warmer months, they lived outside. Methodically, she watered each of the fifty varieties in turn.