It took fifteen minutes to get ahold of Rountree. We sat in the car while we called her and left messages. Karen came out only one more time, an umbrella opened over her perfectly coiffed short hair, and received a firm but polite brush-off from Amanda. When Rountree finally answered, and Amanda told her about the man at the back door not being Kyle Dornan, the detective promised she would come over to Karen and Bill’s house as soon as she could.
But as soon as she could might turn into an hour or more.
So we waited inside the house. While Henry slept, we sat around the dining room table, the remains of lunch long gone, and Amanda filled her parents in on the latest about Kyle Dornan, that he wasn’t the man who had come to the house looking for Blake and me.
Karen and Bill listened to the new information with their hands raised to their chests. While it didn’t take Amanda long to tell them, they both managed to gasp and exclaim three or four times as she spoke.
When she finished telling them, Karen asked, “Does that mean there’s another maniac on the loose? Could he have followed you here?”
“He’s not following us,” I said. Although I really didn’t know. I didn’t know anything for sure. “If he was following us around, he would have been here already. And you have different last names than we do, so how could he associate you with us?”
“It’s not hard to do,” Bill said. “You look someone up on the Internet, and you see all the people they’re connected to. He could do that.”
Bill sounded so practical. Just like his daughter. I’d hoped for words that would bring greater peace of mind. But those words weren’t coming.
“Okay,” I said with less confidence, “but he hasn’t yet. And the police are on their way.”
“Maybe we should go to a hotel,” Bill said. “We could take Amanda and Henry there, get them out of harm’s way. If the cops want to talk to them, they’ll have to call me, and I can tell them where we are.”
“Ryan,” Karen said, “why would this man want to come after you this way? Do you have any idea?”
Three sets of eyes turned to me. Had Henry been awake and bouncing in his seat, waiting for his next meal, his likely would have joined them.
“I really don’t know. I can’t think of who this man is.”
“Could it be someone from work?” Bill asked. “Someone you fired or someone who feels they got cheated out of something?”
The same thing had started racing through my mind when Amanda gave me the news out in the car, and it continued to run beneath my conscious thoughts like an underground stream. Given a moment to sit and think about it, even with my wife and in-laws present before me, I brought those thoughts to the surface of my mind. I scanned through the catalog of recent events at work and at the Pig, hoping, really, that something would jump out. A disgruntled employee or client I could blame. A vendor who had walked away from work feeling cheated or misused.
Dawn Steiner with a male friend?
“I can’t think of anything obvious. I work in PR, and I own a stake in a bar. The most anger I encounter or hear about there is someone thinking we charge too much for beer.”
Bill leaned forward, scratching his cheek thoughtfully. “But this guy who came to your house, the one who banged on the door and tried to get in after Amanda and Henry—he mentioned you and your friend Blake. The one you were talking about earlier. Is there someone who could have a beef with both of you?”
“Big enough that he wanted to come to the house and act that way,” Amanda said, her voice low. “Like a maniac.”
“We don’t work together. We don’t have any connections like that. We haven’t spent much time together lately.”
“Someone like Blake has probably pissed a lot of people off in his life,” Karen said. And all the eyes in the room swiveled to her. The word “pissed” coming out of her mouth struck us all as a bizarre breach of decorum for Karen, who usually peppered her speech with phrases like “Oh, heck” and “Cussy darn.” She looked right back at all of us. “Well, he did drop my grandson.”
“He didn’t drop him, Mom.”
“Well, whatever he did, I don’t like him. He drank a lot at your wedding.”
“What about the toast he made?” I asked. “Or the china he went out of his way to find after Amanda mentioned it?”
Karen hesitated for a moment. “Well, I don’t like this. I don’t like any harm coming to members of my family.”
But my mind quickly shifted, trailing off in a different direction. Karen was right—Blake had no doubt made a fair number of enemies in his time. If he’d been involved with Jennifer while he was on and off with Samantha, there was no telling how many other women he might have dated. And any one of them might have had a jealous boyfriend or husband. Any one might come trailing their own version of Kyle Dornan.
But how did that connect to me? Why would a jealous or bitter boyfriend or husband decide to come after me? And why say something about the girl getting killed?
“Excuse me,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to call him.”
“Good,” Karen said. “It sounds like he needs to be asked some tough questions.”
I ignored her and walked out to the living room, the line ringing and ringing as I moved.