Marlow could see that Claire was worried. She sat on the sofa in the guesthouse, twisting her hands in her lap while telling Marlow everything that’d happened when she and Aida found Dutton walking on the side of the road not far from Seaclusion. “I’m sorry I got us into this mess,” she said as soon as she finished the story. “I should’ve known better than to keep in touch with him after everything he put you both through during the divorce. You tried to warn me.” She shot Aida, who was with them, a sheepish glance before returning her attention to Marlow. “Are you mad?”
After what she’d heard, Marlow could no longer remain sitting. She came to her feet and began to pace. “I am mad, but not at you. Dutton’s not going to start harassing us. Things are difficult enough without him.” And they knew why, since she’d finally been able to bring herself to explain what was going on with her mother.
“But...what can we do to stop him?” Aida asked. “You tried to get a restraining order against him before, and the judge wouldn’t grant it.”
“Dutton will be gone before we know it,” Claire said. “We won’t have time to get a restraining order. We just have to make sure he doesn’t do anything to hurt us in the next five days. Then he’ll be on the other side of the country, and hopefully, once we get back to California, he’ll be involved with someone else and won’t feel the need to torment us.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Aida said dryly. “He can hold a grudge like nobody’s business.”
“That tells you the kind of person he is right there,” Marlow muttered.
“He had no reason to be on this side of the island when we saw him,” Claire said. “He had to be looking for Seaclusion, trying to see where we’re staying. And he made it clear he didn’t care that we came across him.”
“He was glad we did,” Aida corrected. “He’s trying to intimidate us.”
“Everyone on the island is so busy getting prepared for the hurricane he probably feels he can do whatever he wants and no one will notice,” Marlow said. “Think about it. Once the wind and the rain start up in earnest, no one will even be outside.”
“What do you think he might do?” Claire asked.
“I could see him vandalizing the guesthouse or cutting up our clothes or something like that,” Aida said. “During the divorce, before I moved out, he took my makeup, dumped it into the sink and smeared it around the rest of the bathroom. It was so hard to clean up. And he wrote greedy bitch on the mirror with my lipstick.”
“He’s not going to get away with that kind of behavior here,” Marlow said. “We’re going to be ready for him.”
“How?” Claire asked.
Marlow scooped her phone off the coffee table. “Walker might have just what we need.”
Aida adjusted the hoop earring that’d gotten caught in her hair. “Yeah, maybe you should tell Walker what’s going on.”
“I don’t want to take his attention away from his job,” Marlow said. “Who knows how bad this storm will get. People might need him. We can handle Dutton.”
“We can?” Aida didn’t sound too convinced.
“You’ll see.” Marlow called Walker, and he answered on the first ring.
“You ready for the storm?” he asked without preamble.
“Yeah. We’ve been filling sandbags all day.”
“Is there anything you need me to do?”
“I could use one small favor.”
“Of course. What is it?”
“Do you have a stun gun I could borrow?”
There was a slight pause. Then he said, “Did you say stun gun?”
“Yeah.”
“Why would you need a stun gun?”
She explained what’d happened between Dutton and Claire. “I doubt he’ll try to harm us,” she said at the end. “He has too much to lose. But he likes to make us uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t put it past him to do something malicious if he thinks he can get away with it. So we’d like to be able to defend ourselves, just in case.”
“Malicious,” Walker repeated, and it was easy to tell he didn’t like the sound of that word. “Tell me this. On a scale of one to ten, how likely do you think it is that he’ll give you any serious trouble?”
It’d been unsettling, almost creepy, to have Dutton following her around in LA. But he hadn’t actually done anything he could be charged with, hadn’t crossed the line far enough that she could get a restraining order. “Maybe...a five?” she guessed.
“You’re saying there’s a fifty-fifty chance? Should I come stay with you?”
“No,” she replied. “There’re people who are counting on you. Seriously, we’ll be fine if I can just borrow a stun gun.”
Someone said something to Walker in the background, and his voice dimmed as he responded to whoever it was. “There is a lot going on,” he admitted when he came back on the line. “I remember one of my officers telling me he bought a stun gun off the internet for his wife when they were living in Miami. She had to work in a pretty rough neighborhood, and he wanted her to have it for self-defense. I’ll see if he’ll loan it to me. Then I’ll swing by and teach you how to use it.”
“Thank you.”
“Marlow?” he said before she could hang up.
“Yes?”
“Where is this asshole staying?”
Marlow promised to get the address of the rental from Claire and text it to him.
“I’ll swing by and have a little chat with him,” Walker said, “let him know that there’ll be hell to pay if he does anything to harm anyone. And you’ll have the stun gun as insurance.”
“Perfect. Thank you.”
“I can’t wait until this storm is over,” he said.
“I bet. You sound exhausted.”
“It’s not just sleep I’m missing.”
She smiled. “You’re missing me?”
“Damn right I am.”
“Let’s hope it’ll be over soon.”
The National Hurricane Center reclassified the storm as a Category 2 hurricane first thing in the morning, but they lowered it back down to a Category 1 before it reached the island, and even then it didn’t hit Teach straight on. Because it’d started to twist to the right and head farther up the coast, it delivered more of a glancing blow, but the sky was dark hours before sunset and the wind was so strong the palm tree out front was bending over like a maître d’.
Marlow and her friends traipsed across the yard in the rain to reach the main house so her mother wouldn’t have to wait out the storm alone. Eileen hadn’t spoken to Marlow since she’d stood up for Rosemary and taken what remained of her father’s pictures to the guesthouse. She could understand why Eileen might see that as a betrayal of sorts. But she hoped her mother would eventually heal enough to understand.
For now, however, Eileen was still mad. When they filed into the house, she pretended as though she wasn’t relieved to see them, as if it didn’t matter whether they were there or not. But Marlow could tell it was all an act. Eileen had to be at her lowest point. She had to be worried about the storm, too. For the first time in decades, she had no hired help to look after her, and she wasn’t as mobile as most people if it became necessary to evacuate.
Marlow made popcorn and put on a movie, hoping to distract everyone from the wind and the rain battering the island, but she remained conscious of the fact that this would be the perfect time to strike if Dutton wanted to cause a little mayhem. Walker and his officers were focused elsewhere, and depending on what Dutton did, he could make it difficult to determine whether he was to blame, it was someone else, or it was the hurricane. Although, if she had her guess, he’d want to do something subtle enough to create ambiguity, so he couldn’t be caught, yet personal enough to let her, Aida and Claire know he’d taken his revenge.
After the third time she got up to walk through the house—she couldn’t see out the windows; the storm shutters were closed and locked—Eileen finally deigned to ask her a question. Prior to that moment, her mother would only speak if someone directed a comment or question to her. “Why do you keep prowling around?”
“I’m just making sure the storm isn’t causing any damage,” Marlow responded. There was no reason to upset her mother by telling her about the situation with Dutton. There was nothing Eileen could do to help, anyway. As promised, Walker had provided Marlow with his officer’s wife’s stun gun, which was in her purse, but Dutton hadn’t been at the rental cottage when Walker stopped by. Walker had told her he’d try to get over there again, but he was so caught up with the hurricane that she knew he probably wouldn’t get the chance—not today. His last text indicated there was some flash flooding downtown. Trying to protect the businesses in that area was more important than stopping Aida’s vengeful ex-husband from ruining their makeup, keying one of the cars or cutting up their clothes.
They watched three movies before Aida and Claire said they were tired. It was getting late, but Marlow didn’t want to leave her mother alone. Most hurricanes lasted a day or two, so they had a while yet to go.
Before she could open her mouth to say she’d be staying at the main house, however, the power went out.
“There it goes,” Eileen said as if she’d been expecting it, and Marlow turned on the battery-powered lantern they had on hand while Aida and Claire lit several candles.
Losing power wasn’t unusual during such a big storm. Marlow got a flashlight so she could walk her friends over to the guesthouse—the stun gun in her hand—but when she carefully cracked open the door to check if the coast was clear, she noticed something odd: there were lights on in the guesthouse.
“Can the electricity go out over here but stay on in other parts of the property?” she asked her mother.
“I don’t see how,” her mother replied, “unless someone threw the circuit breaker on the outside panel of just this house. Why? Are the lights still working over there?”
“They are.” Marlow quickly closed and locked the door. If Dutton had cut their power, she wasn’t going to give him the opportunity to hurt someone. If he caused damage to their belongings or the property in general, they could deal with that in the morning.
But while they were telling her mother about Dutton, after all, she heard two men yelling outside. One said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
She knew she wasn’t the only one who heard snatches of that sentence above the keening wail of the wind when Aida and Claire covered their mouths as their eyes went wide.
“That doesn’t sound like Dutton,” Aida said.
The door reverberated as someone or something smashed into it. Then they heard more muffled voices and a curse. Silence fell—right before a male voice called her name. “Marlow, open the door!”
“Oh, my gosh!” Claire said. “That’s Reese, isn’t it?”
“Why would he be here?” Eileen asked.
Marlow had no idea, but she’d recognized Reese’s voice, too. Getting the stun gun ready just in case, she told Aida to open the door.
The wind grabbed the wooden panel out of Aida’s hand almost immediately and slammed it against the inside wall as the beam of Marlow’s flashlight landed on a soaked Reese, who had a trickle of blood coming from a busted lip. He had Dutton in a headlock, but Dutton was flailing around, doing everything he could to get loose, so Marlow used the stun gun to subdue him.
His body locked up, sending him crashing to the floor, and Reese let him go. “Wow. Nice work,” he said as he dragged a stunned and moaning Dutton inside.
“What happened? What are you doing here?” Marlow cried as Reese shoved Dutton’s legs out of the way so he could close the door.
“Walker asked me to look out for you. He told me you might have an unwelcome visitor tonight. And sure enough, I caught this dickhead lurking around. I waited to see what he was going to do, but when he cut the power, I decided to let him know he had company.”
Trying to stop him had obviously resulted in a fight, but it appeared that Dutton had gotten the worst of it. His eye was swelling, there was a cut on his cheek and he had a bloody nose—not that she cared about Dutton’s injuries.
“Are you okay?” Marlow asked Reese.
He wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Yeah. Dude freaked out when he realized I’d caught him. I wasn’t about to let him get away, but forcing him to the house was easier said than done.”
She readied her stun gun; Dutton was getting back up.
“Don’t shock me again,” he said, lifting a defensive hand. “I haven’t done anything.”
“You’re trespassing,” Marlow pointed out.
“So?” he said. “The police aren’t going to throw me in jail for turning off someone’s power.”
“What else were you planning to do?” Aida asked.
“Nothing!” he insisted. “I was just trying to scare you—I swear it.”
Reese gestured at a chair. “Sit your ass down where I can see you, because you’re not going anywhere until Walker gets here.”
“Who’s Walker?” Dutton asked.
“The chief of police who is going to throw your ass in jail, at least for the night.”
Dutton glowered at him. “And who the hell are you?”
Reese flung the wet hair out of his eyes and grinned as he jerked his head toward Marlow. “I’m her brother.”