The Man from Nowhere

“Well, I’ll give you credit for guts and curiosity, but I’m not going to tell you that was a wise thing to do with a total stranger.”

“Well, since I’m getting concerned about the state of my own mind right now, I have to agree. I bounced from he’s not really a threat to feeling stalked, and now I’m on my way back again.”

At that Gage really laughed. “It’s hard to reach a conclusion in the absence of facts. But I have some facts for you. Interested?”

“In anything that might help me get my balance back. When I have to stand back and look at my own mental workings, something’s not right.”

She could hear the smile in his response. “Smart people do that all the time. It’s the idiots who never selfexamine. Anyway, I do have some info for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“I couldn’t find anything on him yesterday because he used a fake name on the motel register.”

“Not good.”

“Not a crime. When I stopped last night and talked to him, I got his driver’s license. No wants, no warrants, great credit rating and he owns property in California.”

“That’s a long way away. Anything else?”

“Actually, yeah. But nothing that raises a red flag.” Gage fell silent a moment. “Did he give you his full name?”

“No, just Grant.”

“Well, until the guy does something wrong, I don’t feel I have the right to share any more. Sorry, but there are limits. Just ask him his full name. Then you can find out what’s in the public record just as I did. But I don’t have the right, legally or ethically, to go beyond what I just told you.”

She almost sighed, but knew he was right. How much would she want Gage to invade her own privacy just because she made someone feel uneasy?

“Thanks, Gage. I appreciate your help.”

“You’re more than welcome. If he does anything else to concern you, let me know immediately, okay?”

“Sure thing.”

She closed her phone, slipped it back into her pocket and felt an urge to laugh at herself. Oh, it was so shocking! Yep, really shocking. Some guy sits on a public park bench, legal even at one in the morning, and nobody could do anything about it.

For some reason, her grandmother’s voice floated into her mind, the woman’s plainspoken way of telling someone to think about what they were doing: Are you tetched in the head? Always delivered in a kind voice, but always in its own way like a jerk back to a calmer state of mind.

“Are you tetched in the head, girl?” she asked out loud.

Yeah, maybe she was. And maybe tonight she’d go out and ask Grant for his full name. Or maybe not. Just because Jackson was a lying scoundrel didn’t mean every other man on the planet was.

She finished her sandwich in a calmer frame of mind. Then she grabbed a heavy flannel shirt and her book and went out back. Ten minutes later she had a small fire burning, and she curled up on a chaise with her coffee to read.

Clouds might be moving in, but that didn’t mean winter had arrived.

Yet.

The deepening night chill, which had begun its arrival with rain in the late afternoon, bit at Grant’s exposed skin as he limped his designated path from the motel to Mahoney’s, where he spent fifteen minutes sipping an excellent rye, and then again as he limped his way toward the park to sit in front of Trish Devlin’s house. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, but the night managed to bite even through his jeans, and his hood couldn’t cover his cheeks. If he was here much longer he might have to upgrade his clothing.

But he had no choice yet. His path was ordained, by what he couldn’t really say. All he knew was that he’d ignored something like this before and had lived to regret it. He wished he hadn’t lived.

So he followed the plan, according to what he knew, even though it was entirely possible he couldn’t make any difference at all to the outcome. How would he know? Science didn’t like these questions and had never tried to answer them. Theology even tried to steer away from this place.

But here he was in the midst of it. After nearly a year of thumbing rides around the country, trying to deal with his demons, he’d become aware of a different demon. And somehow he’d known he’d arrive in the right place at the right time.

The minute that last rig had pulled into the truck stop here, somewhere deep inside, he’d known: this is it. Certainty as strong as a compulsion had led him to check into the motel, then hunt for the bar he was sure he’d seen before. The clock he recognized over the bar. The time that had been nagging at him. The subsequent walk to a park and a bench that were somehow familiar.

Sometimes he wondered if his experience was something like that of serial killers who talked about a compulsion, an inner pressure to hunt a victim whom they somehow recognized even if they had never met.

Sometimes he wondered if he’d gone off the deep end. Sometimes he wondered if he himself was the demon he was hunting.

But he was here, guided by God knew what to this out-of-the-way place, and fear of failing yet again made him follow this set path night after night. The only reassurance he had that he wasn’t the demon was his own distaste for making Trish Devlin nervous.

He wished there was another way.

But there wasn’t. He just knew he had to be on that bench at that time. Period. And he couldn’t explain it to another soul without getting himself committed.

Smothering a sigh, ignoring the grinding pain in his hip and the stabbing pain in his thigh and the incessant ache in his back, which probably came from limping around so much, he plowed through the night, feeling as if he were walking through an iceberg rather than air. At times it was almost as if something pushed back at him, told him to turn around. But the compulsion overrode everything else, and because he hadn’t trusted that compulsion before, to his great grief and horror, he had to trust it now.

Time, he reminded himself, was an artifact of the large-number world he existed in. At the quantum level, past and future became one in a timeless present. So his experience was possible.

Possible.

Just possible.

A lot of rational people would tell him he was nuts. There’d been a time he would have agreed. But not since the…accident.

Except now he lived in a world where he knew there were no “accidents,” only probabilities, and there was one probability he had come here to prevent.

It was possible he had already prevented it just by coming here and making this walk every night. But the compulsion remained, so he remained, too.

He lowered himself to the bench again with a gasp of both pain and relief. Maybe when this compulsion let go, maybe when he dealt with whatever he’d come to deal with here, he’d be able to allow himself the gift of the hip replacement the docs had wanted to give him. A hip replacement he’d denied himself out of guilt.

He almost smiled then, realizing that he might actually be doing penance for something that had arisen from the morass of quantum probabilities, probabilities over which he could exercise only minimal control by making decisions. He had made a rational decision that time.

This time he was making an irrational one in order to atone.

And he was evidently scaring the woman who lived in that house. He felt bad about that, but maybe his whole purpose in doing this was to scare her. Because if he was right, she needed to be scared.

The last thing he expected to see was Trish Devlin come out of her house and march toward him. After their meeting at the truck stop, he expected her to avoid him like the plague. Instead, here she was, striding purposefully toward him, her snorkel hood up on her parka, her hands in her pockets.

When she reached him, she stood over him. The snorkel hood, even though it wasn’t fully zipped, managed to shadow her face completely.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“A very cold guy who is sorry he keeps disturbing you.”

“I’m finding that hard to believe. The sheriff says you appear to be okay.”

“Then you shouldn’t worry about me.”

“Well, I can’t stop wondering about you. I go from being annoyed to being frightened to being just plain curious. Either way, I can’t sleep until you leave. So why don’t you just come into my house and tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Why should anything be going on?” He genuinely wanted to hear her answer to that.

“Because after what I told you about feeling stalked, a gentleman would have chosen a different bench tonight.”

“Reasonable,” he said. “But not possible.”

“Why the hell not?”

His answer was simple, and as true as he could give her. “Because I can’t.”

“That’s not true. You can walk any direction you want, sit on any one of another dozen benches.”

“Theoretically.”

She made a disgusted sound. “Why do I feel as if I’m caught up in a conversation with an evasive Zen monk?”

“I should be so lucky.”

“Then just give me your full name.”

“Why?”

“So I can do a Google search on you. So maybe then I’ll be able to sleep.”

“I don’t want you to sleep at this time of night.”

She swore then, a phrase he suspected was totally uncharacteristic. It didn’t seem to pass her lips easily. “Do you always talk in riddles?”

“Enigmas, actually. I can’t explain.” He hesitated, but sensed there was no danger in the revelation. And feelings were about all he had left to guide him in this unknown territory. “But I will give you my full name. The search engines should take you on an interesting journey.”

“I hope so.”

“My full name is Grant Frederick Wolfe.” He spelled the last name for her. “You’ll probably find me most often as Grant F. Wolfe, or even G. F. Wolfe, which is the name I used on most of my papers.”

“Thank you,” she said stiffly, then turned to walk back to her house.

This should be interesting, he thought as he watched her disappear inside. Because he had a pretty good idea what the search engines would bring up.

He glanced at his watch. Ten more minutes, then he could go back to the motel’s warmth.

Maybe, at some point, the universe would reveal to him why he’d been chosen for this particular hell.

Because he sure didn’t have any idea why.

Chapter Four

The morning was chilly enough to cause Trish’s breath to fog. The rain yesterday had cleared the air so well that the trees seemed even more colorful, the sky even bluer and the sun even brighter. They were in the height of autumn, with a brief burst of Indian summer in the forecast for tomorrow. She looked forward to those few warmer days.

But this morning she had a mission. By nine-thirty, she was hammering on the door of Grant’s room at the motel. A few minutes passed, then the door opened and he looked out at her with sleep-puffed eyes.

“Come in,” he said. “Except you’ll have to excuse my state of dress. I haven’t even brushed my teeth yet.”

She stepped into the warmth and glanced around the room. It showed its age, of course, but Grant was evidently a neat person. His few possessions appeared to be stowed away.

On the other hand, Grant himself was something else. Maybe he slept in the buff, but he’d pulled on nothing but a pair of jeans to answer the door, and he hadn’t even bothered to snap them.

Trish’s thoughts raced down an alley she didn’t want to enter, but it proved impossible for her to ignore the fact that he had a broad, smoothly muscled chest, arms that said he could lift more than a laptop. And then there was that faint sprinkling of dark hair below his navel that acted like an arrow, pointing directly to the open snap of his jeans.

The man was beefcake, for crying out loud. He could have posed for one of those calendars.

But then he turned swiftly away, grabbing a sweatshirt on the foot of the bed, and she saw his back. Her awareness of his musculature vanished as she saw the patchwork of scars. They looked like surgical scars, but she could only imagine the injuries they represented.

Almost as if the strength had been sucked from her, she sank into the one chair beside the window.

Sweatshirt on, he dropped onto the end of the bed, facing her. “So,” he said. “Can I buy you a coffee or breakfast? I could use a cinnamon roll myself.”

“I want to talk.”

He nodded. “I figured that out. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. But wouldn’t it be better to talk somewhere public?”

“For you or for me?”

“For both of us, maybe.”

Thinking about what she had learned during her Internet search, she could understand that answer. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll meet you across the way.”

“Actually, I was thinking about the diner. Mahoney told me the food is fantastic.”

“It is if you’re not worried about the state of your arteries.”

At that he smiled faintly. “I’m not. Are you?”

“All right, I’ll drive you there. My car’s right out front.”

Outside she stopped to pull in a lungful of cold fresh air. How could she have forgotten how attractive a man could be or how good one could smell?

Shaking her head, she climbed into her car, switched on the ignition and turned up the heat. Grant Wolfe now posed a new kind of problem, one she felt less able to deal with than a stalker. She absolutely could not afford to feel attracted to him.

Five minutes later he emerged from his room, dressed for the weather now and quite a bit less distracting. He climbed into the passenger seat of her little four-wheel Suburu and smiled. “Thanks for the ride,” he said. “I honestly don’t feel like walking this morning.”

She managed a smile in return. “Too cold,” she said. “In another few weeks I won’t even notice it, but this change was too sudden and too big. I’m freezing.”

“I come from near L.A. Nice climate. Moderate, most of the time.”

“That’s what I hear. But I think I’d miss the seasons.”

“I hear that all the time from people when they move to my area. The funny thing is, after a year or so they don’t seem inclined to move away.”

She gave a little laugh and nodded. “From what I’ve heard, it can be pretty seductive.”

“It can be.”

“I don’t know if I could handle the earthquakes.”

He cocked his head. “That’s another thing I hear a lot about. But if you really give it some thought, you realize that no place is totally safe from Mother Nature’s wrath.”

She nodded slowly as she pulled into a diagonal parking place in front of Maude’s. “You’re probably right about that.”

At this hour of the morning on a weekday, Maude’s diner was empty of all but a couple of knots of retirees and a couple of tables occupied by somewhat younger women—probably ranch wives who’d come to town to do the weekly shopping. Glances came their direction from everyone, but conversations barely stopped. Just enough noise and activity to make quiet conversation possible.

After the chill outside, Trish chose a table by the window where a bright sunbeam made its way inside. It was getting close to that time of year when, because it was too cold to stay long outside, she’d stand at a window just to feel the sun on her face.

Grant limped behind her and lowered himself gingerly into the chair.

“You really hurt,” she remarked.

“It’s worst when I first get up. Once I move around a bit, it eases.”

The inevitable cups of coffee arrived, slammed down by Maude herself, who regarded Grant with evident suspicion. “Know what you want?” she asked in her graceless way.

“Cinnamon roll, please,” Grant said.

“They’re big,” Maude warned. “‘Course, you look like you could use some fattening up.” Then she turned to Trish. “Don’t see much of you around here. Watching that tiny waistline?”

Trish almost blushed. “Actually,” she said carefully, “I just like to cook at home.”

Maude sniffed. “Well, you’re here now, so what’ll it be?”

“I already had breakfast, so the coffee will be fine.”

“Rude not to eat when you’re with somebody who’s trying to enjoy his breakfast. I’ll get you a roll, too. I figure that one—” she pointed at Grant “—will probably want whatever you don’t.”

As Maude stomped away, Grant cocked a brow at Trish. “You get a roll, too, even if you don’t want one?”

Trish grinned. “She’s an institution in this town. Maude’s way or don’t set foot in here.”

“I get that sense.”

An awkward silence fell. Understandable, Trish thought. She didn’t really know how to address what she’d learned about him, or where it was safe to start, or even how to frame an appropriate apology. She felt as if anything she said might break eggshells.

And, of course, Grant wouldn’t want to talk about some of it at all.

But at last the huge, hot, fresh cinnamon rolls occupied plates in front of them, along with butter for those who needed additional calories, and their coffee cups had been topped off. Impossible to avoid talking any longer.

It was Grant, however, who broke the silence. “I doubt,” he said, “that you found out anything about me that I don’t already know. I imagine you have questions.”

“Not questions, really,” she said, trying not to squirm. “More like a feeling I owe you an apology.”

“You don’t owe me one at all. I scared you.”

“I leaped to conclusions.”

“Maybe not such bad ones. Especially given that I’m a total stranger.”

She cocked an eyebrow at him and caught again that haunted, hunted look, but this time she knew where it came from. “I’m sorry about your family.”

He nodded, his lips compressing.

“But we don’t have to talk about that,” she said hastily. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about, anyway. I read the newspaper stories. It was awful. I can’t imagine surviving a plane crash that took your wife and daughter.”

Again he nodded, his face twisting a bit. “Some things you just have to live with.”

Words deserted her, leaving her with no other option than to return his nod and look down at the roll she now wanted even less than when Maude had slapped it down in front of her.

After a minute or so Grant sighed. He picked up his fork, cut off a bite-size piece and popped the sweetness into his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, then said, “There are still good things in life. And this must be one of the best cinnamon rolls I’ve ever eaten.”

“Maude is without compare in the kitchen.”

“So it would seem.” Back to inconsequentials. She was happy to keep the conversation on safe ground. “You wrote a lot of papers.”

He almost smiled. “I think I was a little manic. I loved my work, and sharing the things I learned was one of the best parts. Working the ideas through in my head enough to actually express them cogently in papers.”

“Well, I couldn’t understand a thing you said, but I was impressed by the number of your publications.”

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