Seeing Red by Susan Crandall Page B

ground.
    “Hey, there. This is a pleasant surprise,” he said, smiling.
    “So was the rose.”
    “What rose?” Something flashed in his eyes, something that made Ellis uneasy.
    “The one you left on my car while I was teaching class.”
    With a shake of his head, he said, “I got here at five-thirty this morning.”
    “Oh.” She waved a hand in the air. “It must have been Daniel. I had him help with my demonstration today.”
    “Doesn’t sound like Daniel; he never even gives his girlfriends flowers—says they’re a waste of money.” There was just a hint of jealous challenge in Rory’s expression.
    “Hmm. Must have been Dad,” she lied. That note didn’t contain something her dad would say.
    Rory looked at her for a long moment with disapproval in his eyes and a frown on his face. Then he said, in the tone he would use with a student suspected of cheating on a test, “Is there anything you want to tell me?”
    “No.” Like she’d come prancing over here telling him about getting a rose from an anonymous gifter if she was seeing someone else. She turned and started toward her car.
    Stopping and turning back to him, she said, “On second thought, there is something I want to say to you. We’re taking a break. As in,
not dating.
If I’m getting flowers from some other guy, it’s really nothing for you to disapprove of.” She hurried on toward her car.
    “Ellis!”
    She ignored him. As she drove away, he was still standing there staring at her with his hands on his hips.
    It took the entire drive home for her to stop grinding her teeth.
    She picked up the rose off the passenger seat and stared at the card.
    Some things are worth waiting for.
It was typed, not handwritten.
    Nate? No. Not after the way they’d parted yesterday.
    Maybe Rory was messing with her.
    “
I got here at five-thirty this morning.
”
    He hadn’t said he hadn’t left. That had been her own mental leap.
    When she’d first told him she wanted them to stop seeing each other, Rory’s first assumption was that she’d found someone else. Although she’d always been truthful with him, he didn’t look convinced when she assured him he was wrong. Was he so suspicious of her that he was trying to trick her into confessing to seeing someone else?
    As much as she didn’t want to believe it, she couldn’t think of any other explanation.
    She stopped at the trash can and dropped the rose inside before she headed up to her condo.
    Greg slumped low in the seat of his Corvette, even though the windows were tinted far too dark for anyone to see him from across the street in the daylight. He’d been sitting outside the big old house on St. Phillip Street—the halfway house that was Hollis Alexander’s new, no doubt tax-dollar subsidized, home—since four a.m.
    Greg was thankful that Bill and Marsha had delayed his coming to Charleston. He’d been so blinded by rage that he would likely have ended up in jail. Now he felt calm—like the green sky before a tornado.
    He’d cast out the possibility of forcing Alexander to do something to break parole. The way the system worked, the man would be back out in no time.
    Lorne Buckley hadn’t said it, but Greg could tell by the look in the prosecutor’s eyes that he thought Alexander would attack another girl. It was only a matter of when. Someone had to take matters in hand and prevent that from happening.
    Over the past few hours, Greg’s thoughts had turned to thinking of ways to do Alexander in, ways that would appear accidental. But all of his dreamed-up scenarios were flawed.
    He decided the best thing to do was study the man and his habits. Then maybe he could figure out a way for Hollis Alexander to simply disappear. Parolees took off all the time in order to resume feeding their sick need for violence.
    The front door of the house opened. A figure emerged from the shadow of the porch.
    Alexander climbed into an old blue cargo minivan.
    When Alexander pulled away from the curb,