“Does that make green your favorite color?”

“Yes, how did you … the tights. We’re calling this color Forest Shadows, pants and hoodie, the top Loden Explosion.” She sent him a bland smile as she put the key in the lock. “We also make men’s running tights.”

“No. Never. Death will come first.”

She opened the box, started to reach in for the stack of mail. He saw her hand stop, ball into a fist. He saw her face change. Amusement dropped away into apprehension. And, he thought, fear before she grabbed the mail, stuffed it in the bag she wore cross-body.

“Well, good to see you. I’ve got to get going.”

He closed a hand over her arm before she could bolt. “What’s wrong? What’s in there?”

“It’s nothing. I should—”

“Tell me what’s shaken you up,” he finished, and steered her outside. “Hey, Sadie.”

Before Adrian could do so herself, he untied her leash from the rack.

“None of my business, you’re thinking.” Sadie tugged him, as politely as possible, toward the pitiful whines coming from the lowered window of his car. “You’d be right. Then again, it was none of somebody’s business who hauled a ton of dumbbells over to my house.”

Jasper began to bark now—a thrilled bark as they approached the car. Inside, he bounced like a dog on springs.

Raylan handed the leash back to Adrian and went around to the passenger side to get the spare leash out of the glove compartment.

He found his arms full of desperate dog before Jasper broke free to rush to his heart’s desire.

The dogs greeted each other as if both had been off to war on separate continents. When Raylan finally managed to clip the leash on Jasper’s collar, he straightened, shoved a hand through his now thoroughly disordered hair.

“We’ll give the dogs their lovers’ walk, and you’ll tell me.”

“And people say I’m pushy.”

“You are.”

“You’re no slouch,” she tossed back, but fell into step with him as the dogs gave her little choice.

“Not when it matters.”

By tacit agreement, they took the side street rather than Main, and he gave her time to settle. She needed to; he could see that. He knew faces, expressions, body language. It played into his work.

And the usually confident, straightforward Adrian Rizzo was shaken, scared, and silent.

He waited until they’d walked by houses, the backside of businesses, to the pretty green park where the creek wound its way under the first stone bridge.

“You got something in the mail,” he prompted.

“Yes.”

“From?”

“I don’t know, which is part of the problem.”

They took the walking path along the creek, here where it ran slow and easy. Beyond the park, she knew, it widened, began to dip and rise. Beyond the town where the foothills rolled on, rougher, higher, where cliffs speared out and up, the water quickened its pace.

Deeper into those hills, the white water rushed. It could swell in the spring rains, in the sudden, flashing summer storms, and spill over its banks to flood.

Often, too often, in Adrian’s opinion, what looked innocent, harmless, could turn deadly.

“I need to ask you to keep what I tell you confidential.”

“Okay.”

“I know you’ll keep your word. For one reason, I’ve run into you about three times since Maya told you she was pregnant. I know she told you and your mom before she told me just a few days ago. But you never mentioned it.”

“She said not to, yet.”

“Exactly. I don’t want to upset my grandfather. Teesha’s in the last weeks of her pregnancy and doesn’t need the added stress. Nothing they can do anyway but worry.”

“What was in the PO Box, Adrian?”

“I’ll show you.” With the leash looped around her wrist, she dug into the bag, found the envelope.

“You haven’t opened it.”

“But I know what it is, because I’ve been getting them since I was seventeen, that same careful printing, no return address. The postmark on this … Detroit. They’re rarely from the same place twice. I don’t suppose you have a penknife.”

“Of course I have a penknife. Who doesn’t have a penknife?”

“Me, and I like to open them carefully.”

He dug in his pocket, handed her a small folding knife.

Despite all, she had to smile. “It’s a Spider-Man penknife.”

“I won it at the carnival when I was a kid. It works fine.”

“You don’t lose things,” she murmured, and carefully slit the top of the envelope.

They stopped by the next stone bridge to make room for some runners. And letting the dogs sprawl on the grass, Adrian took out the single sheet of paper. Raylan read over her shoulder.

Another season, another reason you should die.

As the autumn winds blow, on one thing you can rely.

Wherever you go, wherever you run, I will follow,

And when at last we meet, your pleas for mercy will ring hollow.

 

“Okay, Jesus, sick fuck. You need to go to the cops.”

“I have, since I got the first one. I was seventeen, my first solo DVD had come out the month before. The first came in February. They always came in February, like some twisted Valentine’s Day card.”

Carefully, she slid it back into the envelope, and the envelope into her bag. “There’s a routine—a kind of protocol. I make copies. The original goes to the FBI. I have an agent assigned—the third who’s taken this over since it started. I make a copy for the detective in New York. It started there, and it’s still an open case. I make a copy for the police here, one for Harry, one for myself.”

“So no prints, no DNA on the back of the stamp, no leads because there’s been no follow-up.”

“That’s right.”

“It isn’t February.”

“They came once a year, until I moved here. The first blog I did with the Traveler’s Creek address, two years ago in May, I got one shortly after. The next year, I got one in February, one in July. And this is the fourth this year.”

“He’s escalating.”

“That’s what they say. But it’s still just poems, four-line poems, every time.”

“Stalking’s stalking.” Raylan looked out over the park, all the pretty trees and paths. “Emotional abuse is emotional abuse. Someone who travels, that’s the most logical.”

“That ranks high on the list,” she said, and realized she felt steadier for talking to him. “Cheap, standard envelope, basic white paper, black—always black—ink. A ballpoint pen, that’s the analysis. Always printed, no cursive, no computer or typewriter.”

“Writing with a pen, by hand, is more personal. It’s more intimate.”

She frowned at him. “So I’m told by the criminal psychologist who weighed in. Why do you think so?”

He shrugged. “I mostly write the scripts on the computer, but I do the drawing, the lettering, the inking, the coloring by hand because—”

“It’s more personal.”

“And you’ve got no one you can think of who’d have this kind of grudge, this obsession? You’d have been asked that by every cop who ever interviewed you about it. You’d have thought about it a hundred times. So you don’t.”