House Of Secrets

Then she tripped.

Time slowed to a crawl as the ankle that had buckled earlier gave out once more. It was almost as if she were floating above her body, watching herself stumble, scream, fall. Watching her pursuer pull a Taser from the waistband of his grimy jeans. Watching herself scuttle backwards on her heels and elbows like a pathetically small and scared crab.

The moonlight glinted off the Taser above her. Attack. Immobilize. Isolate. The words of the self-defense instructor came back to her with stark clarity. The pavement cut into the palms of her hands. The sounds of cars whirring along the nearby streets and highways mingled with dance music and barking dogs. The breeze blew her hair into her eyes. And Emma waited, not moving, not blinking, for the man charging toward her to do all of the above.

His attack never came. He charged right past her, toward the squat trunk of the short, leafy palm tree in front of her home, several feet away. The darkness rippled again, and a second man erupted out of the tree’s shadow, chopping his hands so both thumbs hit either side of her would-be attacker’s wrist. The Taser flew into the air, landing harmlessly a few feet away from her. Emma scuttled sideways crab-style on her hands and heels until she could reach out and grasp it by its thick plastic handle. She wasn’t sure how to use it, but at least it was in her hand and not anyone else’s.

The two shadows circled each other slowly, one with his hands clenched into fists, and the other assuming a vague, martial arts-looking stance. The one with the fists—the Sinatra freak—swung wildly, and the other man curved his body into a bow, effectively dodging the blow. He followed defense with attack, delivering a well-controlled blow to the attacker’s temple with the back of his fist. A lightning-fast punch to the stomach, knee to the head and swirling roundhouse kick to the chest, and it was all over. Her former pursuer slumped to the ground, unconscious.

Emma zapped him with the Taser anyway. Or tried to. She thought she’d missed, but then the man’s body jerked upward and he went still. Whether he’d been intentionally following her or not, she had a great story for the next Take Back the Night rally on campus.

“Are you all right?” the other man asked her, his face obscured by the shadows. He held out a hand to her, and she grasped it, allowing him to pull her off the pavement to a standing position.

“I’m fine,” she gasped. “Thank you.” She glanced briefly at her pursuer, who lay spread-eagle on his back, groaning like a child.

“Get inside.”

Emma squinted into the darkness, wanting very much to get a look at the man who might have saved her. “Who are you?” she asked.

But all around her was darkness, and her rescuer was gone. A handful of dry leaves blew around her ankles in a crackling dance, and when she looked at the ground where her pursuer had fallen, she saw that he’d disappeared, too.

In the distance, she heard the sound of someone whistling, “Strangers in the Night.”

Chapter Two

“Both of them? Gone? Even after you’d zapped that guy?”

“Pretty much.” Emma pulled her reading glasses off her face and tossed them carelessly on one of the neatly stacked term paper monoliths on her desk.

“Creepy,” replied Celia Viramontes, St. Xavier University’s now off-duty head librarian. “But let’s go back to your mystery man. You never got a good look at his face?”

Emma shook her head. “He just swooped in, saved my life—sort of, I think, depending on the actual motives of the whistling man, which are, at the moment, a mystery—and then, poof.” She flicked her hands in the air to demonstrate said “poof.” “He’d disappeared.”

“Wow.” Celia swung her legs up and thunked her Betsey Johnson sandals on a rare clean corner of Emma’s tidy but always covered desk, tugging open one of the buttons on the wine-red jacket of her fall suit. “That’s amazing.”

Emma leaned back in her chair until the hinges squeaked and gave her best friend a look that had sent many a student cowering back to their dorm rooms. “I hate it when the freshmen start researching the Romantics. You get sappy.”

Impervious to “the look,” Celia ignored her. “And what were you doing walking alone at night with serial killers on the loose?”

That made Emma sit up. “Serial killers?”

Celia rolled her eyes. “Hijole, don’t even tell me you haven’t heard about what’s been going on in this country? There are approximately thirty-five to fifty serial killers at work across the nation at any given moment. Do you ever watch the news? Pop your addled professorial brain out of the 18th century every so often?”

“TV rots your brain.” She paused. “Except for reality shows, which are often very deep commentaries on human relationships in the 21st century.”

Celia snorted. “Riiiiiight. Pick up a newspaper, then?”

Emma shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Umm…”

“You know, living in the now for at least a few minutes a day can be good for your health. You can’t just completely close yourself off like this.” Celia reached forward and plucked Emma’s glasses off the stack of papers from which they were threatening to slide off. She produced a case from a nearby drawer and neatly stuffed the spectacles inside. “You see where that gets you,” she wagged the case at Emma. “Nearly assaulted in a dark alley by a psycho, that’s where. You’re going to be thirty-five tomorrow. You should know better.”

“I’m not closed—”

“You are so,” Celia interrupted, then threw her hands up in disgust. “It’s a good thing you weren’t shuffling around with your nose in a book down that alley as usual, or you’d have been toast.”

“I do not shuffle,” Emma objected.

Placing the glasses carefully on top of a short mahogany bookshelf, Celia rose from her chair and smacked her palms against the shiny wooden surface of Emma’s desk. “You, my dear, are Rut Girl to that guy’s Mystery Man,” she announced.

“Rut Girl!”

“You teach your classes and spend the rest of your time grading papers and watching out for your mom, all sprinkled in with the occasional need to risk your life running errands in the wee hours of the night. I mean, I know you’re sometimes restoring that old house of yours, which is cool, because you’ve got that Home & Garden thing going on and it’s good to have hobbies, but get a life!” Straightening up, Celia tugged on one of the tight black curls that swirled and bobbed about her head and surveyed the room. “I know things with your mom have been tough, but you need time for you, too. You know, it’s like Thoreau said: Live deliberately. Go into the woods. Suck marrow, et cetera, et cetera.”

Emma couldn’t help it. Celia had been the head librarian ever since Emma had earned her post teaching Restoration to 18th-century literature at St. Xavier’s. They’d been friends since the moment they’d met, despite marked personality differences, so Emma should have been used to her dramatic tirades by now. But the fact was, this one hurt her feelings a little. Maybe because the assessment was so dead-on and something she pondered every year when her birthday rolled around. “Mom needs me,” she said lamely.

“I know, hon, but even she’s said she wishes you’d get out more,” Celia said gently. She sat back down in the chair. “It’s been a year, Em. Maybe it’s time to let go a little.”

Emma chewed her bottom lip, trying to ignore the tightening in her stomach. It still hurt so much to think about what might have been, what still could be. “It’s been eleven months, Celia,” she said quietly, staring at the dark screen of her desktop computer monitor. “And you know as well as I do that we’re not in the clear until this year is up.”

She heard Celia swing her legs off the desk and then felt a pair of hands pulling hers out of her lap. “I know. I don’t mean to push, but your mom and I have been talking, and we’re worried. You can’t give everything to your job and then give it all over again to Jane.”

Emma’s eyes flicked to the photo of her and her mother on her bookshelves. Only someone who knew Jane Jensen Reese well could tell that she looked paler than usual, that there were new lines around her mouth and eyes, that her smart new hairstyle was a touch too shiny and perfect, in the photo and every day in real life. “I’m scared,” she whispered. She didn’t have to tell Celia of what.

Celia clutched her hands tightly. “I know. I can see what waiting for this horrible year to finish up is doing to you. I wish I could help.”

“You do, all the time.” Emma stood abruptly and grabbed her large bag, slinging the strap over her shoulder, which sank a little with the weight. “It’ll be fine. That’s what we have to believe, right?”

“Right.” Celia flashed her a smaller, less bright version of her wide grin. “Well, come on. I’ll buy you an early birthday dinner at Ca’Brea, and then you can drive me home in that snazzy new hybrid car of yours.”

AFTER DROPPING OFF Celia at her condo, Emma pulled the snub-nosed Toyota Prius into the garage behind her house. Thirty-five. She was going to be thirty-five years old, and she’d pretty much spent all of those years—with her rigid routines and carefully planned schedules—digging her own personal rut, not just the past one. Rut Girl. Celia might as well have called her Deeply Entrenched Chasm Girl, with or without her mother’s illness.

Thirty-five years old. As she tugged her overstuffed hemp satchel out of the car, the thought stopped Emma in her tracks. Tomorrow, she would officially be in her mid-thirties. Which meant that very soon, she’d be forty. Which meant it was high time she got out and broke the routines she’d been creating since she’d learned to walk and did something extraordinary.

But what?

To date, she’d achieved all of her goals. She’d earned her Ph.D. in literature ten years ago, gotten a teaching job and had risen through the ranks to become full professor of 18th-century literature at St. Xavier University, a small liberal arts college nestled in the palm-lined shadow of the University of Southern Caifornia in Los Angeles.

And now, her time was spent in a weekly routine that, as Celia had so bluntly pointed out, rarely varied, by day, hour or even minute. Could she possibly be any more boring?

Probably not. Even her name sounded like a stuffy old lady’s—Emma Jensen Reese. Hah. “Hello,” she mimicked herself aloud as she walked around her house toward the mailbox in front, “I’m Emma Jensen Reese, professor of stuffy literature at a stuffy university with a large rod stuffed firmly up my—”

Emma halted abruptly, the heels of her shoes sinking into the soft green grass.

The so-called Mystery Man was staring at her front door. And in the daylight, he was what her students would call a hottie.

He stood before the baby palms lining the small patch of grass and flowers she called a front yard, his hands shoved into the pockets of a brown mid-length suede jacket. His face was lean, long, with sharp cheekbones and a straight, prominent nose that gave him a dignified profile. He reached up and swiped a lock of glossy black hair off his forehead, his hard mouth twisting into an expression of confusion. She knew confusion—she didn’t have a reputation for creating St. X’s most diabolical exams for nothing.

But it wasn’t his questioning look that had caused her to pause in front of her home, dropping her chin to look over the tops of her sunglasses.

Emma, you and your stupid annual craving for adventure. This happened to her every time her Intro to Literature students reached the unit on the Romantics. Last year in October, she’d nearly thrown her entire hard-won career out the proverbial window to hike the Inca Trail and build solar showers and other ecotourism infrastructure with the Quechua in Peru. And now, in her Keats-addled mind, she’d turned a man who was probably canvassing for the Sierra Club into Indiana bloody Jones. Shifting the satchel to better balance it on her hip, Emma stepped forward, prepared to dispel this year’s birthday fantasy, courtesy of the mysterious stranger, once and for all. “Hello,” she said to the man. “May I help you?”

Emma’s breath caught as he turned to face her head-on. In profile, he was a hottie. But the full frontal assault of his face was singularly striking. He didn’t respond to her question—just stared at her with a pair of deep, startlingly light brown eyes set under sharply angled black eyebrows. Emma could only stare back.

A heartbeat later, it finally occurred to her that the man could be dangerous, and what she should do is fling her bag at him and run.

But she couldn’t stop looking at him.

“What do you want?” she finally managed, her mouth suddenly dry. Dark hair, prominent cheekbones, tan skin. He looked Latino. Maybe he didn’t speak English. She tried again, in Spanish this time. “Necesita ayuda?”

His eyebrows drew together, and he shook his head, stepping close enough to her that she should have stepped backward instinctively. But she didn’t. “I don’t know what I need,” he finally said.

Oh, great. Like turning thirty-five-which-is-almost-forty, wasn’t traumatic enough without having two close encounters with the mentally unstable in one twenty-four-hour period. Ignoring the fact that having a mysterious and rather Byronic stranger talking about his needs in the middle of your front yard ranked pretty high on the romantic meter, Emma shifted the satchel in her arms, readying herself for one good fling. She had no doubt that the number of research papers she carried with her would pack a wallop.

But she couldn’t. Heaven help her, his lost expression moved her.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Joe,” he said.

Then he blinked and shook his head, scrubbing a hand across his face. As she watched, the dream-like cast to his golden-brown eyes faded. His jaw tightened, his brow furrowed, until the man with the tough, uncompromising expression before her bore almost no resemblance to the one she’d been talking to mere seconds before.

“I’m sorry,” he said gruffly, turning his head away from her. “I don’t remember—I don’t know why I’m here.” With a sudden, quick movement, he moved across the lawn to the sidewalk. “I’m sorry,” she heard him mutter again. And then he was gone.

WHAT THE HELL was he doing here?

Joe stalked down the sidewalk, away from the giant Victorian house and the tall, pretty woman who lived there and now presumably thought he was completely deficient. “I don’t know what I need.” What the heck? His pickup lines were usually better than that.

The fact is, she’d scared him to death. Or, rather, that frilly Hansel and Gretel house of hers did, with the turret and brightly painted shutters and meticulously placed flowers and palms. Because both it and her entire goddamned neighborhood resonated somewhere deep inside him, in the darkest corners of his mind, where the secrets of his past had long lay dormant.

But she hadn’t recognized him. That much was clear. There had been one moment when Joe had looked into her green eyes and thought she had, but then it had quickly become apparent that it was just her fight-or-flight-or-scream-holy-murder mechanism kicking in.

Not that he would have blamed her for doing any of the above, the way he’d been lurking in her yard. And the thing was, he didn’t even know how he’d gotten there. One minute, he was getting into his rental car—a sweet Honda S2000 with a convertible top, a 6K VTEC engine that went from 0 to 60 in 5.2 seconds, and a roar like a topless rocket—and heading for the Convention Center; the next, he was standing in the yard of an old house doing his best impersonation of Rain Man and scaring some poor woman to death.

Maybe he needed a vacation.

Maybe he just needed to get away from that damned house.

As he approached the rental car, Joe fished his keys out of his pocket, then aimed the remote key chain in the Honda’s general direction. A shrill beep signaled that the doors were now unlocked, and he was only too happy to crawl inside and slink away. As much as one could slink inside a fire-engine-red sports car.

That was twice now that he’d been out for a drive, minding his own business, only to find himself several minutes later standing in front of that woman’s house.

That house. He’d dreamed about that house.

“Concentrate, Lopez,” he muttered to himself, whipping a right onto Figueroa, which would take him straight to the Holiday Inn he was staying at near the Convention Center. The last thing he needed was to slip into another driving coma and boomerang back to the house like some sort of Mexican lemming.

The drive back to the convention was a smooth one—light traffic, sunshine and warm breezes, and a killer ride, if he did say so himself. He parallel parked the Honda near the curb in record time, then cut off the engine and opened the car door. Maybe he’d have time to hit In-N-Out Burger before…

Holy Mexican lemming.

With one boot on the pavement and the rest of him still inside the Honda, Joe turned his head slowly, taking in his surroundings in what had to be the most surreal moment of his life.

He was back in front of that freakin’ house.

Chapter Three

“Look.” Emma yanked open the door of the flashy red sports car with such force, a few locks of her hair flipped forward into her face. With one no-nonsense flick of her neck, she sent them all flying back out of harm’s way. “I don’t know what you’re doing here—again—but you have exactly one minute to explain yourself.” As if barely escaping a violent attack and turning thirty-five-which-is-almost-forty, weren’t enough, now she apparently had a stalker on her hands. Or her house had a stalker. Either way, it was bloody uncomfortable finding some unforthcoming stranger in her personal space every time she stepped outside, and she was determined to find out what on earth it was he wanted, even if she had to keep him from driving off by taking a screwdriver to that flashy car of his. Which probably got terrible gas mileage and had a poor emissions record.

The man she knew only as “Joe” scrubbed a hand across the side of his face, pushing his glossy black hair briefly off his temple. Wearing what appeared to be his trademark dazed and confused expression, he rooted his attention firmly on the house. Even when she stepped directly into his line of vision, he gave the impression that he hadn’t noticed and was looking right through her. She wasn’t sure what was more unforgivable—his lack of manners or his lack of fear in the face of her anger. She scared the St. X football team into doing their homework, for heaven’s sake. Without Cliff’s Notes.

But still he refused to even look at her. His mouth had dropped open slightly, and for a moment he reminded her vaguely of that young guy Diane Lane had had an affair with in that Unfaithful DVD Celia had made her rent a while back.

Narrowing her eyes, Emma rattled the house keys she held in one hand. Just because he looked like a hedonistic foreign guy with a thing for older women stuck in ruts didn’t make him any less of a potential threat, but she was determined to get to the bottom of his behavior.

“Sir,” she said, “I am speaking to you. What are you doing here?”

He unfolded his tall, lean frame from the front seat of the sports car. She stepped back instinctively. “I don’t think I have an answer for you,” he said slowly, his gaze remaining on her mango-and-burnt-orange Victorian home.

Emma’s keys jangled as she looped the key ring around her forefinger. “Then perhaps you’d best concentrate until you come up with one.” She raised her hand until a small canister attached to the key chain dangled before his whiskey-colored eyes. “This is pepper spray—the kind with UV dye in it, which will brand you as a marauding psychotic while the police track you down,” she continued. “And if you don’t answer my question soon, I will spray the whole canister on your head, and then I will beat you with its empty metal shell.”

He blinked, then finally turned to look at her. For the second time that afternoon, his shuttered, cool facade snapped back into place, leaching the warmth and vulnerability out of his light eyes. “Look, lady,” he said. “There is no marauding. Do you see any marauding going on?”

Emma’s teeth clenched tightly with an audible click. She was just dying for an excuse to spray him.

“And furthermore—” He cut himself off, narrowing his eyes at the can of pepper spray she held. “You know, that’s not a good brand.”

She felt her anger slip a bit. “What?”

“That pepper spray. Sure, they say it doesn’t wash off for three days, but in field tests, they found that a little peroxide will do the trick in about five minutes.”

“But—”

“You want the good stuff, you really ought to order through the Spies-R-Us catalog.” He closed the car door behind him and leaned back against it. “That stuff lasts for a week. At least. Can’t even sandpaper it off.”

Feeling out of sorts, Emma double-checked the safety lock on the pepper spray to keep from shooting herself in the eye and stuffed it in the cargo pocket of her beige silk pants. What kind of stalker gave you self-defense tips? Maybe she should have been more patient. Maybe she should stop behaving like a paranoid jerk and figure out whether the man needed help. After all, if he’d wanted to harm her, he certainly could have done so last night, after he’d gone all Bruce Lee on her would-be attacker.

“Well,” she said with a sigh, “I apologize for threatening you with this inferior brand of pepper spray. Despite your penchant for skulking in my yard, you saved my life in that alley last night, for which I never got a chance to properly thank you. So. Thank you.”

“I don’t skulk,” he muttered under his breath.

“What are you looking for, Joe?” she asked quietly. He looked up then, and something vulnerable and hurting flashed across his face. Maybe her asking was a reckless move, but he looked like he so desperately needed…something.

“You!” a deep voice boomed behind them.

Both of them turned their heads simultaneously toward the sound. A few feet away stood her neighbor, Louis Bernard, known to the neighborhood kids as Crazy Louie.

“Louis.” Emma padded across the lush grass toward where Louis was half-hidden behind a spray of night-blooming jasmine. “Is everything okay?”

But he wouldn’t even look at her. His entire being was focused on Joe. Jeez, no one paid any attention to her anymore.

Louis drew his silver caterpillar eyebrows together and rocked back and forth on bare, eggshell-white feet, which poked out from the hems of his brown knit pants. He’d missed a button on his shirt, so the right side of his collar stuck upward a little higher than the left, giving him a slightly hunchbacked look. His fingers were curled into the pages of the latest L.A. Times, which he crumpled against his chest.

“You go home!” he yelled at Joe with a childlike emphasis on each word.

“Louis, it’s all right.” Emma put a hand on one of Louis’s bony arms, rubbing his thin bicep in a manner she hoped was soothing. “This is just Joe. He’s my friend.”

Louis swayed back and forth in time to music only he could hear, tufted locks of his silver and brown hair bobbing up and down with the movement. “Joe needs to go home,” he said, a little more softly.

“He’ll go home soon,” Emma replied. Louis was the only son of her elderly neighbor, Jasmine Bernard, and although he was fifty-something, Jasmine had told her he had the emotional maturity of a child. He was also usually a gentle soul, not prone at all to screaming at her guests. Not that Joe was a guest or anything.

“I know Joe. I know Joe. I know Joe,” Louis chanted.

Louis rocked and crumpled his newspaper, breathing as if he’d just sprinted to the ocean and back. At a loss, Emma continued rubbing his arm, until he finally started to calm beneath her touch. She glanced up briefly to find Joe staring intently at the two of them, as if trying to recall whether Louis really did know him. Obviously, Joe wasn’t going home any time soon—he’d barely even blinked in response to Louis’s rant.