Blind Pursuit

11

Harold Gund drove slowly through Tucson’s dark streets, seeking a mailbox.

Best to get Erin’s letter in the mail as soon as possible. Once Annie received it, her fears would be allayed, and any preliminary police investigation into her sister’s disappearance would be terminated.

Still, mail delivery was slow. It might take three days for the letter to reach Annie’s residence. A lot could happen in three days.

Unless he delivered it personally.

There was no particular risk in doing so. Annie would simply assume that Erin herself had delivered the letter in the middle of the night, avoiding the pain of a phone call or a face-to-face encounter, before departing on her mysterious sabbatical. Unusual behavior, but not implausible under the circumstances.

All right, then. Do it.

In less than twenty minutes he reached the Catalina foothills. He guided the van into a townhouse community off Pontatoc Road.

Dangerous to park in the open. He pulled behind an unfinished row of townhouses near the entrance, killed the headlights and engine, and pulled on his gloves before handling the letter again.

On foot he walked along a curving street, illuminated only by low-wattage bulbs above the mailboxes at the head of each driveway.

The development, like most places in the foothills, had no sidewalks. His shoes crackled on scattered dirt at the side of the road.

Annie’s place was just ahead, a single-story home with a red tile roof and desert landscaping, which shared walls with the units on either side. Gund slowed his steps.

Abruptly it occurred to him that if anybody happened to see him here, he could be linked to the letter and thus to Erin’s disappearance.

Then he shook his head. Ridiculous. No one would see him. It was nearly four-thirty in the morning. Everybody in the complex was asleep.

Annie lay on her living room sofa, staring into the dark.

For the past couple of hours she’d snatched brief intervals of slumber, never quite finding the perfect zone of dreamless oblivion that would have lasted until first light. Every random noise woke her-the creak of the house settling, the rustle of mesquite branches outside her windows, the coyotes’ shrill, distant cries.

She wondered what was really keeping her up, what obscure worry nagged her just below the threshold of awareness.

You’re getting to be like Lydia, she chided herself half seriously, remembering her aunt’s nervous disposition, her medicine chest stocked with antacids and headache remedies and sleeping pills. Before you know it, you ‘II be pacing the floor all night long…

Through the living room windows, a sudden orange glow.

The porch light had snapped on.

Annie sat up, blinking.

The light was wired to an electric eye beamed at the driveway. It was a system installed by the townhouse’s previous owners; personally she’d never felt much need for such protection in this part of town.

What would make the light come on now?

An intruder seemed unlikely. In the three years she had lived in this neighborhood, there had never been a break-in.

A coyote was more probable. Or a band of javelinas. The hairy desert peccaries sometimes ventured out of the dry washes in search of food.

She swung off the sofa and pulled aside the curtains, peering out at the driveway and the front walk.

Nothing was there. The light shone on her mailbox and the tangled clump of cholla at its base. The cholla’s needles glowed like moonlit fur.

If there had been an animal, perhaps it had continued down the street. She walked to the door, intending to look, then paused.

Suppose it wasn’t an animal. Safe as this neighborhood was, a trespasser was always possible.

Her nose wrinkled in irritation. She was scared of her own shadow tonight.

Decisively, in defiance of her fears, she opened the door and stepped outside.

Faintly she heard the crunch of gravel. Footsteps, retreating fast.

Coyote. Had to be. Scared off by the light.

They were timid creatures, despite their unwarranted reputation for aggressiveness. To her knowledge, none had attacked an adult human being.

She padded along the driveway, slippers scuffing the macadam, and peered down the street in the direction of the noise.

Nothing. And the footsteps were no longer audible.

Must have just missed him. Too bad. Encounters with desert animals were among her prime reasons for living on the outskirts of town.

Oh, well. Next time.

She returned to the house. As she was about to shut the door, another sound reached her. The rumble of an engine.

At first she thought it belonged to some passing vehicle on Pontatoc Road. But no, the source was closer than that. Within the townhouse complex.

She listened as the noise diminished, the vehicle-a truck or a van, it sounded like-speeding off into the night.

Maybe what she’d heard hadn’t been a coyote, after all. Maybe it had been the vehicle’s driver, taking a brisk predawn walk before heading to work. Nothing unusual about that.

So why was she afraid?

She couldn’t say. She knew only that the muscles of her shoulders and back were flinching under the caress of a sudden chill.

Erin, she thought abruptly. Please be all right. I’m scared for you… for both of us… and I don’t know why.