Page 11 of Deacon

Lisa started to protest but he cut her off.

“Hear me out. I won’t tell him unless it involves your safety, and by that, I mean there’s an immediate threat. Does that work for you?”

She was quiet, watching him with narrowed eyes for a moment as if trying to determine if he was telling the truth, then nodded. Her body slowly relaxed against his. She turned so her back was against his chest. Deacon guessed whatever she had to tell him she didn’t want to look at him while she did it.

“I’m trying to decide where to start,” she said after a moment. “I guess it was almost a year ago. I think that’s the best place to start. You know I was living in Springfield, working in the library there, right?”

“That’s what Cowboy said.” He didn’t want to say too much. He was afraid of discouraging her from talking now that he’d gotten her started. He should get her to move off his lap, but she was so relaxed against him, and he loved the feeling of her in his arms.

“Ok, so I’m working in this library. I’d been there a while, and I was comfortable with my job. I had a little place I liked. Things were good.”

“Then something changed?”

She took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “I was dating. Nothing serious but you know how it goes, you have to meet people to find a circle, even if you only end up being friends.”

A bolt of some feeling he didn’t want to identify shot through him. Deacon ignored it and let her continue.

“Anyway, I met this guy, he seemed nice at first. I agreed to go out with him. We started with coffee, because you know, coffee is short and public. If you don’t like the guy or he gives you the creeps, it’s just coffee and he doesn’t know much about you. Everything went well. I agreed to dinner. I met him at the restaurant, because again. I didn’t know much about him and didn’t want him to know where I lived. That went well enough I agreed to a third date.” She was quiet long enough he wondered if had decided not to tell him.

“What happened on the third date?”

“Nothing really remarkable. I met him at the movies, then the restaurant, and I let him kiss me afterwards. There was nothing. You know how when you were a kid, and some kid gets it in their head that they’re going to be your first kiss and it’s a little peck on the lips? Randy and I kissed, and it was a real kiss, but it made me feel like that grade school peck. He asked me out again after that. I made excuses. He took it well, or so I thought.”

“But he really didn’t?” Deacon didn’t even know what this Randy had done but he wanted to find him and teach him a lesson about how to treat a woman. Obviously, someone had been lax in his lessons in the past.

She sighed. “No, he didn’t. In the beginning it was minor things, if irritating. He’d call every few days, asking me out again. I told him I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t leading him on or anything. He seemed to understand, then he’d call again in a few days. I finally stopped picking up his calls.” Lisa leaned her head back until it rested on his collarbone. “Then it started to get weird.”

“Weird?”

“It started out innocently enough, or at least that’s what I thought.”

“What do you mean?” Deacon was careful not to tense or let any of what he was feeling leak into his voice, but he was ready to hurt anyone who’d scared her this badly.

“At first it was little things, a rose left under the wiper on my car. A teddy bear left on my porch. I had no clue who it had done it until Randy started texting asking if I liked his gifts.”

“I take it that it didn’t end there?” He kept his voice soft and encouraging.

Lisa shook her head. “No, it got worse. Next, I started noticing things in my house being just a little off. Furniture in my house moved. Not far, a few inches, but enough I noticed. Weird things. Pictures switched, occasionally one flipped upside down. I started running into him in random places. I’d see him sitting at a table when I stopped at the coffee shop before work, bump into him at the store, that kind of thing. He didn’t always talk to me, but did wave and at least acknowledge me. Then I started feeling like I was being watched. In the beginning it was only when I was out of the house, going to work, running errands, that kind of thing. Then after a while I felt that itch on the back of my neck all the time.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“I did, but they can’t do anything without proof and things being moved a few inches or feeling like I’m being watched isn’t proof. It only makes me sound crazy. Randy had been careful never to put anything that could be used against him in text or anything that could be traced.”

“Then what?” Deacon didn’t say that what he really wanted to do was to introduce this asshole Randy to the business end of his fist. Maybe that would teach him a lesson. And if it didn’t, well, Deacon knew some other methods that were sure to work.

“Then it got really creepy. I felt like I was being paranoid, but I started being exact about how I left things, not only when I left the house but when I went to bed. I would make sure things were placed just so, so I would know if they’d been moved.”

“That’s not paranoid, that makes sense. Especially if you suspect someone of moving things,” he tried to reassure her.

“When I started finding things moved when I woke up, it got even worse. Someone had been in the house while I slept. I had the locks changed, I got cameras.”

“Did that help?”

“No. The cameras would cut out for hours. Things were still getting moved while I slept. That’s when I made it a priority to get out of town. I’d been trying to get on here for a couple of years, but hadn’t really pushed it. That’s when I really started pursuing a position here. I made some calls and a couple weeks later had an interview, then got the call that I’d gotten the position. I hoped that moving over a thousand miles away would put an end to it.”

“Any sign it hasn’t?”

“No, not yet. But I’m still so on edge that I can’t be sure. That first night, even after I’d figured out that it was that branch on the window, every time I heard it, I knew it was him trying to get in.” She let out a big sigh. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep watching TV, but I feel safe with you here. I know if Randy were to show up, you’d know it and you would take care of it.”