Read Online What She Saw by Rachel Lee - Free Book Online Page B

wary.
    Then the phone rang. It startled her because she wasn’t used to having late-night calls. There’d been a time when such calls meant that her mother had taken a bad turn in the hospital.
    It was over now, but the dread of late-night phone calls remained. Her heart started hammering as she reached for the receiver as if it were a poisonous snake.
    “Hello?”
    “Haley, this is Gage Dalton.”
    That made her stomach lurch. Immediately her mind started scrambling for ideas of what might have gone wrong to make the sheriff call her at such an hour.
    “I just wanted you to know,” he said, “we had a complaint tonight that a truck driver, Buck Devlin, was harassing you at the funeral home.”
    Haley felt her stomach sink. She hadn’t wanted this, no matter what. He might be what he said he was, or he might be a nut, but he hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t even scared her enough to get the police involved. “Not really,” she managed to say.
    “I’m not saying he did. I’m just letting you know we had a report so we checked into him.”
    She caught her breath. “And?”
    “He’s exactly what he says he is and is doing exactly what he told you he’s doing. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether to get involved with him. But I don’t think you need to fear him.”
    That slight emphasis on him left her wondering if Gage thought she had something else to fear, but if he had, wouldn’t he have said so?
    All of a sudden she didn’t want to be alone. All of a sudden, despite the milk, she felt wide awake. Great. That was going to help on her test in the morning.
    Regardless, she pulled on a bra under her sweat suit, tugged on her jogging shoes, grabbed her purse and headed for the truck stop.
    She needed bright light, the swirl of people around her and some carbs to calm her down. At that moment nothing sounded better than a piece of Hasty’s cobbler and a bit of sensible talk with Claire.
    * * *
    As it happened, the place was pretty busy when she arrived. Claire and another waitress, Meg, were busy enough they could have used some help. Haley considered clocking in and digging a spare uniform out of her locker, but Hasty stopped her.
    “You’re supposed to be resting, what with that test tomorrow and the play the next two nights. What in the world are you doing here?”
    “I was called by your cobbler.”
    He unleashed one of his rolling laughs and promptly dished her up a serving big enough for two. “Coffee?”
    “Milk, please.”
    She would have settled at the counter except that a table near the window emptied. She headed straight for it and closed her eyes for a few moments as she savored the first mouthful of peach perfection.
    She opened her eyes again and studied the lot. The window really did act almost like a mirror. She could choose either to see what was going on around her in the restaurant, or to pick out the shadowy movements in the lot. And they were shadowy, until headlights came on.
    So how could she be sure of what she had seen the other night? Staring out there now, she decided she really couldn’t have seen anything, that her mind had probably manufactured the whole impression to explain sounds and shadowy movement. More, nobody except people she trusted knew she might have seen anything.
    She really didn’t have anything to worry about.
    “Hi, hon.” Claire slid into a seat across from her and Haley was startled to realize that she had apparently wandered so far away in her thoughts that she hadn’t noticed the place emptying out. The revving of engines and the bloom of headlights from the lot announced that the wave was moving on.
    “Hi, Claire,” Haley answered.
    “You’re supposed to be tucked in at home, resting for your big day tomorrow. Not taking a busman’s holiday here.”
    “Maybe I’m nervous. All of a sudden I was wide awake,” Haley said.
    “This is your first play, huh?”
    “Yeah. I didn’t even do it in high school. It’s only a few minutes onstage,