Huh?

  I glanced toward the gate. Rainey had left it open, and Lacy was trotting across the lawn toward us. “Come, girl.” She came to me and touched her nose against my outstretched palm—the basic signal that reinforces the connection between service dog and handler. “Sit.” She plopped her haunches down next to me.

  When I tuned in again to the conversation, my mouth dropped open.

  Rainey was giving my name as the owner of her house, carefully spelling my first name so the deputy could write it down on his little pad.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “So where did the could-be-dangerous part come from?” Will asked.

  I shook my head, even though Will couldn’t see me. “From me, I’m afraid.”

  When I’d finally found my voice, I pointed out that a target on one’s window was hardly a kids’ prank.

  “Did anyone see this guy?” the deputy asked.

  Rainey and I spoke at the same time.

  “No,” she said.

  “Yes.” I scowled at her.

  She narrowed her eyes back at me, her mouth pressed into a grim line. “Uh, my friend thought she might have gotten a glimpse of him. She’s inside. I’ll get her.”

  What friend? Carrie? She had left already.

  Rainey made a gesture toward me—hand partway up, palm out—that I read to mean she didn’t want me to follow. I was pretty sure that was more about her not wanting the deputy inside the house.

  This was getting stranger and stranger, but I went along for now. I didn’t want to inadvertently cause my client a problem. At least not until she’d had a chance to explain all this to me.

  “Why didn’t the Ocala Police Department respond?” I asked the deputy, to fill the awkward silence.

  He gave me a strange look. “You’re outside the city limits.”

  “Oh.”

  No wonder the strange look. He must be wondering why I didn’t know where my own house was. I opted to let the awkward silence stretch out after that.

  Rainey finally returned. “My friend has a migraine but she said the guy was six-foot, medium build, with blond hair and blue eyes.” She gestured to the street. “He ran off that way.”

  The deputy wrote in his notepad. “Did she say what he was wearing?”

  Rainey crossed her arms over her chest, then uncrossed them. “Jeans and a red jacket.”

  I was pretty sure she was making that part up, especially since the temperature was in the eighties, not exactly jacket weather.

  The deputy turned to me, glanced at his pad. “So Marsha, do you know this guy? How dangerous do you think he is?”

  “It’s Mar-see-a, Deputy. Not Marsha.” I glared at Rainey.

  Her eyes were wide and red-rimmed, and her lower lip trembled. She was terrified, but of what?

  “No, I don’t know his name,” I said. “But I think he might be dangerous.”

  Rainey’s eyes bore into mine.

  “He...he’s been stalking me,” I said.

  It took another fifteen minutes to get rid of the deputy. He insisted on walking all the way around the house, and he took pictures of the red letters and the target on the window.

  Once he was gone, I turned to Rainey, hands on hips. “What was all that about?”

  She covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.

  I waited patiently for her to get control of herself. Since I wasn’t real sure what she was upset about, other than the stalker that is, I was clueless as to how to offer comfort.

  Lacy whined softly from where she sat beside my feet. I touched the top of her head and she quieted.

  Finally, I put a hand on Rainey’s still shaking shoulder.

  Her hands dropped from her tear-streaked face and she lunged, almost knocking me off my feet as she wrapped her arms around me in a tight hug. “Thank you so much for going along with me.”

  I gently extracted myself from the bear hug.

  She swiped at her cheeks with the backs of her hands and sniffed loudly. “You see, my sister hates the police. She’s kind of a throwback to the sixties.”

  “The sixties? She wasn’t even born then, was she?”

  “Oh no,” she shook her head vigorously. “But she’s into all that stuff—organic food, and... you know.” She looked away, made a show of searching through her pockets.

  The light finally blinked on in my attic. Her sister had drugs in the house. That’s why she wanted nothing to do with the police.

  Having finally found a tissue, Rainey blew her nose. “She’s a bit older than me. We had different fathers.”

  “You probably shouldn’t be telling me about the drugs part,” Will said.

  “I’m just guessing, and most likely it’s only marijuana.”

  “Still illegal in this state, last I checked.”

  Ignoring that comment, I lifted my hair—which Will calls red, God bless him—off the back of my neck. It might technically be spring, but today the high temperature was supposed to be eighty-eight.

  “Hey, how come you’re just now getting the BOLO? All this happened yesterday morning.”

  Will sighed again, but this time I was pretty sure his frustration wasn’t aimed at me.

  “The printer hooked to the statewide system was probably the prototype from when computers were first invented. It works when it feels like it. The Marion County sheriff usually sends me a courtesy email, to make sure I get his BOLOs. So sometimes there’s a delay.”

  Will frequently complained about the county commissioners, who expected him to provide twenty-first-century protection to their small rural county but refused to give him a budget that would allow him to upgrade his twentieth-century equipment.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “This doesn’t say anything about stalking.”

  Okay, that irked me. “When will law enforcement start taking stalking seriously?”

  “Don’t get worked up. If the BOLO says the guy is dangerous, then the deputy definitely noted the stalking. The sheriff probably forgot to put that in his email. Hey, didn’t Rainey say her sister thought it was her ex-boyfriend she saw?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So she does know who he is.”

  “Crapola,” I said. “Yeah, she does.”

  “Get her to tell you his name.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “What does that mean?” Will asked.

  “Um, you’d have to know Rainey to understand.”

  Rainey Bryant was very likeable, most of the time, but she could also be frustrating.

  After her meltdown and all the hoopla with the deputy, she had brightened and insisted she wanted to take me out to lunch.

  The first thing that flashed through my mind was how could a woman who needs a scholarship be so loose with money? But of course, I couldn’t say that, since I wasn’t supposed to know that she’d qualified for a scholarship.

  And this woman supposedly had agoraphobia, which usually meant house-bound.

  She must have read the skepticism on my face. “I’m okay if I’m with somebody else. It’s going out alone that I mostly can’t handle.” She glanced down at Lacy, who was panting quietly and looking from one to the other of the human faces above her. “Is it okay to go out in public with Lacy at this point?”

  Part of me wanted to get on with our interrupted training, but maybe a little break here would be good, to let Rainey recuperate from the whole stalking/flashback/police thing. My stomach rumbled, voting for lunch now instead of later. “Yeah, but she’ll still be oriented to me as her handler.”

  Rainey nodded, a little too vigorously. “Sure, that’s okay.”

  Even though restaurants are required to allow service dogs to enter with their owners, I preferred to find places with outdoor seating, especially this time of year when the weather’s so nice.

  Rainey knew of a Mexican place not far from her house.

  We went in my small SUV, since I had the dog safety strap hooked up in the backseat. “You’ll need to get one of these,” I said as I clipped it onto the ring on Lacy’s vest.

  I pulled my head out of the backseat to find Rainey staring into space. I cleared my throat. “Did you get a crate for her yet?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah. Sunny found one at a yard sale.”

  “Sunny?” I opened my door and slid into the driver’s seat.

  Rainey got in on the passenger’s side. “My sister. Her name’s Sunshine.”

  My eyebrows arched up before I could catch myself. I’d never heard the sister’s name before. She’d been introduced and referred to only as “my sister.”

  “She changed it legally awhile back,” Rainey said.

  Since I’d rarely seen her sister smile, the snarky part of me wanted to say that she should’ve changed her name to Cloudy, but I kept that thought to myself.

  At the restaurant, I braced for the usual dance I have to do with hostesses and business owners. I pointed to Lacy’s red vest, with service animal printed on it in big black letters, and opened my mouth.

  The hostess flashed a bright smile. “No problemo.” She led us to a table in one corner of the café’s patio.

  We settled in, Lacy at my feet.

  “It’s not always that easy,” I said. “Usually you’ll get resistance to letting the dog in. People cannot legally ask you what your disability is, but they can ask what services the dog performs. You’ll want to give some thought to how much you’re willing to share with strangers.”

  “Oh, I don’t care what people know about me.”

  That didn’t surprise me. Rainey tended to err in the direction of TMI.

  Except with the police, that is. There she was a little too free with other people’s information.

  “Still, you’ll want a short answer ready or you’ll spend your life explaining about service dogs. Something like, ‘she alerts me to the approach of strangers’ or ‘she helps me with anxiety issues.’ That one tends to stop the questions. People don’t want to hear about other people’s anxi–”

  “I don’t have anxiety issues.” She sounded mildly offended.

  I kept my mouth from dropping open, barely. This from the woman who was trembling and hiding under the back steps a little over an hour ago.

  Denial is not a river in Egypt.

  But I let the subject drop. It wasn’t my place to probe into her mental health problems.

  We ordered our food and chatted while waiting for it. Rainey was a good conversationalist and she’d led an interesting life. But she tended to talk loudly and gesture a bit flamboyantly at times.

  I found myself glancing at the other diners on the patio, some of whom seemed to be ignoring us a little too studiously. Heat crept up my cheeks, but fortunately at that moment, our food arrived.

  I dug into mine, which turned out to be the best shrimp quesadillas I’d ever had.

  Rainey ate a couple of bites of her burrito, then picked up the conversation again. Somehow she wandered into the details about the sexual assault. Not the assault itself, thank heaven, but the before and after.

  I arranged my face into what I hoped was a sympathetic expression. I’d never been assaulted so I could only begin to imagine her feelings.

  She was barely eating now, just taking a bite now and then. I glanced longingly at my remaining quesadilla, now growing cold on my plate. I picked up my knife and blindly cut it up while keeping my eyes on Rainey’s face and nodding occasionally to show I was listening.

  And I was. The story she told was too appalling to ignore. I even forgot to be embarrassed when nearby diners shot her sharp looks.

  Rainey paused to take a bite of food and I slipped a shrimp and some tortilla into my own mouth. I chewed slowly, struggling not to moan. Even room temperature, it was delicious.

  “I tried to ignore what was happening to me,” Rainey said, “but I was getting so little sleep, because of the nightmares and all.” She broke eye contact and gazed down at her plate. “I almost killed a man.”

  I choked a little on the shrimp I was in the process of swallowing. Putting down my fork, I waved at the waitress, pointed to my plate and used my hands to indicate the sides of an invisible box.

  She nodded and disappeared inside the restaurant.

  “I gave him the wrong medicine. Thank heavens my supervisor caught it.”

  The rest of the story was short and not so sweet. Her commanding officer had packed her off back to the States, and she’d received a medical discharge she hadn’t wanted.

  Again she dropped her gaze to her plate. “Some people don’t believe me when I tell them about all this. Or they make excuses for the Army...” Her voice trailed off.

  Sadly I believed her and I told her so. I love my country and have all kinds of respect for the leaders of the armed forces who defend it. But military leaders are people and as susceptible to human flaws as the rest of us, including sexism and expediency. I could easily believe that a commanding officer in a combat situation would choose to believe the man over the woman and ship her off, in order to keep things under control. Even if he secretly believed that she had been raped, he’d justify the decision as necessary. He and his troops needed to be focused on the enemy, not on some internal investigation that might divide the soldiers into opposing camps, those who believed the woman and those who believed the man.

  It wasn’t the morally right train of thought, but I could see how a commanding officer’s mind might go there. I wasn’t about to say any of that to Rainey though. It might sound like I was defending the Army. Which I wasn’t. They had let the victim suffer the punishment, and the perpetrator of the crime had gotten off scot-free.

  “At least the medical discharge made it easier to get disability benefits,” she was saying. “I tried working at the local hospital when I first got back, but I was a wreck.”

  She changed the subject back to Lacy and the training, as the waitress arrived with a plastic box and a bag.

  I boxed up my food and answered her questions.

  Then she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. While she was gone, the waitress brought the check.

  Lunch had been her idea so I slid the black faux leather folder over next to her plate.

  She didn’t bat an eye when she returned to the table. “So glad we had this chance to become besties,” she said, as she signed the credit card slip.

  Besties? That made me a tad uncomfortable. But I let it slide, knowing our relationship would end in a few weeks when her training was completed.

  She hooked her arm through mine as we strolled back toward my car, which made me more than a tad uncomfortable. But I didn’t pull away.

  I had to fight the urge to look around, to see if anyone was watching this way-too-public display of affection.

  She must have sensed my discomfort. She dropped her arm to her side. “You worried about people thinking you’re a lesbian?”

  I almost stopped in my tracks. How did one answer such a question?

  I opted for a simple, “No.”

  Suddenly, Rainey stopped in her tracks, her eyes wide, her mouth a small o.

  My head swiveled around, trying to locate whatever had caused such a reaction. I looked back at Rainey.

  She was staring at my car—my brand new SUV wannabe that had replaced the sedan I’d totaled a few weeks ago. It now had a jagged scratch in the pale blue paint, all along the passenger side.

  Someone had keyed my car.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You didn’t tell me your car getting keyed had to do with some stalker,” Will said.

  “I didn’t think it did at the time.” Anger surged in my chest all over again at the thought that someone had defiled my new baby. It was the first new car I’d bought solely on my own. I vowed to have the side repainted as soon as I got paid for training Lacy.

  “And now?” Will asked.

  “Now I’m not so sure.”

  I’d tried to reassure Rainey as I drove back to her house. “It’s just a coincidence.”

  She kept insisting it had to be her stalker, that he was following her. She begged me to leave Lacy with her for the night.

  No way, José, as my mother would say. Lacy hardly knew her and there was a lot Rainey needed to learn before she’d be ready to partner with a service dog.

  These dogs aren’t watch dogs. Indeed, their natural territorial tendencies are stifled a good bit during the training. They need to stay calm and focused on their handlers when they encounter strangers out in public. And even at home, they can’t be barking their heads off whenever the doorbell rings or a squirrel runs by the front window. PTSD sufferers are often sensitive to sudden, loud noises.

  “I can’t do that,” I told her. “You need at least two weeks of training before I can leave Lacy with you.”

  She turned in the passenger seat to face me, her eyes haunted. “Why?”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. The answer was because an untrained handler could ruin a well-trained dog, or at least undo some of their training. And I wouldn’t get any extra payment for the time it would take to fix that damage.

  “It’s one of Mattie’s rules.”

  Sorry, Mattie.

  I’d barely pulled the car to a stop in front of Rainey’s house when she undid her seatbelt and jumped out. She stomped up the walk.

  “Okay, that went well,” I muttered to myself. Childlike innocence was losing its appeal.

  I gave her a few minutes while I got Lacy out of the car and strolled toward the backyard. I was now officially in a bad mood, thanks to the key job on my car and Rainey’s antics.

  When she didn’t come back out of the house, I called her cell number.

  “What?” she snapped into the phone.

  “You need to come out so we can do this,” I said in a firm voice. “If I take this dog home now, I’m going to tell Mattie you’re not ready for a service dog.”

  Actually, I was going to tell Mattie this woman was too unstable, which would be hard to explain, since by definition our clients are less than mentally stable. But a client who’s too volatile could become abusive, and one who wasn’t willing to take on the responsibilities of caring properly for a dog, that was a deal breaker too.

 

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