“That night. With Megan. I remember.”

She swallowed hard. “Oh.”

“I thought you should know.”

Her heart began to pound. “Tell me.”

“Face-to-face.”

“No, I don’t think—” she started to argue, then looked frantically around her small hotel room: the unmade bed, her computer on the covers, the clothes she’d worn earlier tossed over the back of a chair. The thought of him in her room—her space—was intimidating. She began cleaning up, straightening the covers. “Not here.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, but just not here.”

“We’ll figure it out.” He sounded so sure of himself.

Her heart was hammering. She needed to talk to him. She wanted to talk to him. Wasn’t that the reason she’d come all the way to Riggs Crossing to begin with? To find out what he knew, what he remembered?

Or was there another reason? Now that Megan was gone—

“I’ll come down,” she said quickly, breathlessly, cutting off that thought.

“I’ll meet you by the front door.”

She clicked off and wondered if she was about to make the worst mistake of her life.

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 26

“Come on, lady, let’s go.”

The security guard, a big, burly man in a too-tight uniform, motioned Charity off the front porch as a fine mist, visible in the light from the streetlamps, fell around them. The Northern California night was close, the air as thick as it was cold.

“I wasn’t doing anything!” she declared when the guy tried to grab her arm. She yanked it away and glared at Lenora Travers, who was standing in the doorway of her town house. What an A-1 bitch! And she knew it!

Lenora was wearing a long dressing gown cinched tightly around a wasp-thin waist, house slippers, and a pained expression that said it all.

“You’re trespassing,” the guard rebuked Charity loudly enough for Lenora to hear. She could tell he wanted to prove that he was in control. More softly, into Charity’s ear, he singsonged, “Come on. Just get in your car and drive away. Before I have to call the cops.”

“You mean the real police? You’d actually call them?” Charity demanded.

The security guard made another reach for her arm, this time catching an elbow, his beefy fingers clamping over the sleeve of her raincoat.

“Let me go!” she hissed. “I just wanted to ask her some questions.”

“Yeah, well, Ms. Travers, here, she don’t want to answer any. You got that?”

Oh, Lenora Travers’s attitude was all too clear. Arms crossed imperiously over her chest and backlit by the interior lights, Megan’s mother hoisted her chin toward the sky. Eyeing Charity as if she were little more than a cockroach, she announced, “You’re not an invited guest.”

“I told you I’m with the press.”