Chapter Three
Emma stared ather home, wide-eyed. Speechless. For once.
“Fair to assume,” he murmured, “yer no’ just a messy housekeeper?”
Her eyes, when they met his, were brimming with shocked tears. She could only shake her head.
Stepping over the chaos, he lifted a wooden dining chair back onto its feet, out of her way as she staggered into the room, looking at what was left of her furniture.
“Who did this?” she whispered, picking her way through the detritus. She reached for a fallen picture frame—a photo of her and Aubrey—but her hand passed right through it. Her gaze frantically met his. “Who would do this to my house?”
Connor scanned the destruction. “Someone who’s not fond o’ cats?”
“Winston!” she shouted, moving through the house and taking in the absolute destruction. “Here, kitty, kitty! Here, baby!”
Connor followed her, a wary eye on suspicious corners where a cat might hide. He wasn’t scared of the buggers. He just didn’t like them.
But Emma’s question couldn’t be ignored. Who would do this to her? Or drive her off the road? Someone wanting something from her? Looking for something, clearly. Had they found it? Were they connected somehow to the accident she’d had? He didn’t believe in coincidence, so…likely. But what could they want from Emma, a woman with no obvious enemies but a roomful of friends in the waiting room, praying for her recovery?
Chances were the cat wouldn’t see or hear her calling him out. Only certain animals could. But he wouldn’t convince her of that.
“You live here alone?” he asked her. “Except for the cat, I mean.”
“No. Aubrey is staying with me for the summer. Only until she gets a place of her own. Her idea, not mine. I’d let her stay with me forever. She just graduated college. This place was fine when I left yesterday evening. This must have happened after Aubrey heard about my accident, after she went to the hospital. Thank God she wasn’t here, or—”
Or she might’ve been caught up in whatever was going on with Emma as well, he thought. It was not just this room that was tossed. Every room in her house had been gone through with sledgehammer precision.
After looking in every corner of the house, Emma stood in the middle of the living room, staring at the chaos.Overwhelmedseemed too poor a word to describe her state.Despairingseemed more accurate. Because not only had her life been imperiled by what had occurred last night but now, it seemed, her niece’s life might be as well. Whoever had broken into her place had spared no violence in their utter destruction here. As if to leave a message to her. With an effort, he reined in his impulse to comfort her. He couldn’t allow himself to care about this woman. She was a job, nothing more.
“Can ye see anything missing?” he asked her.
“My cat,” she answered. “I can’t find Winston.”
“Maybe he got out when whoever did this came in. The wee buggers always find a way. Nine lives and all that.”
“He’s never been out a day in his life. He wouldn’t.” She bit her lip. “Do you think they took him?”
Not if they valued their lives.
The cat was her one true possession, he surmised, the thing she valued most after Aubrey. Violet, too, had been an animal lover. She’d been mad for the mare he’d gifted her when they’d gotten engaged—a pretty, dapple gray she’d named Easter for the nearby Easterlin Valley she’d loved so well. Even now, he could recall the tender care she’d taken with the mare and the animal’s devotion to her in return. The horse followed her around like a pet dog. He could still remember her sparkling laughter at his gentle ribbing that she’d ruined a fine hunting animal with such tenderness. How ironic that such a woman could so easily betray the man whose heart she’d held in her hand, as she had him.
Connor slammed his eyes shut to gather himself, pushing away the memory of her. He had no will to dredge up Violet in his mind any more than he wanted to feel sorry for this version of her standing before him now. Emma might’ve been a different woman than the woman he’d once loved, but her soul was the same. If, instead of becoming a guardian, he’d returned for another go at the world, no doubt he would have stumbled into her circle once more as a mortal. Because this wasn’t the first time since that long ago life that he’d encountered her in the intervening centuries. But if he had his way, it would certainly be the last.
Distracting himself, he looked under a table beside the sliding glass door, which was open a crack. “Anything else obvious they took?”
She shook her head, rubbing the heel of her palm against her damp cheek. “Everything’s here. Electronics”—her television was upside down on the floor; a cracked-screen iPad was lying nearby—“photos. Even my jewelry, which is mostly worthless to anyone but me.” The entire contents of her jewelry box were scattered across the kitchen floor.
A half-dozen artifacts from long ago civilizations were scattered across the floor in various states of brokenness. “These were my sister’s. All of them from places she’d lived. They were all we had left of her.”
She knelt down beside a broken picture frame of a photo of her and Aubrey. She brushed her fingers against the cracked glass. “I don’t have anything anyone could possibly want. I don’t understand. What is happening?”
“We should go back,” he said, hardly tempering the sternness in his voice. “There’s nothing ye can do here now.”
“Back?No.I have to find Winston.”
“Cats are cunning. They can fend for themselves. Leave out a bit of food, and he’ll find it when he’s ready.”
Her expression sank. “I can’t. You know I can’t do that. My hands pass right through things. You do it. I’ll show you where the cat food is.”
