Stranded by Alice Sharpe Page A

ways to be alone and one of the most disturbing ways was to be in a crowd of people you didn’t know.
    Think about Billy’s mother, stop thinking about yourself .
    Maybe it was because she was in the process of creating a child that the thought of losing one made Jessica so sick inside. But there was also the fact that Billy had been a generous companion with no agenda of his own except to help her. He’d made her world more beautiful, certainly physically with his gardening, but also figuratively by offering undemanding friendship at a time in her life when that was about all she could handle. And now he was gone.
    There was that feeling again. Once more she scanned the immediate vicinity, her eyes peeled for tall, tanned bald men in particular. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she whispered to herself as none materialized, but that wasn’t entirely true. The FBI don’t warn people for nothing.
    Where was all her bravado now? Was someone in this sea of cars staring at her through binoculars?
    The inside of the car felt like a real sanctuary and she locked her doors, glad no one could see her acting like a scaredy-cat. All this talk she’d given Alex about not being afraid and here she was frightened of absolutely nothing. She picked up her phone to call him and then remembered what he was doing with his day and put the phone down.
    Okay. She would not drive directly home. She would drive the opposite direction to make sure she wasn’t being followed. With a plan in mind, she took off, checking her rearview mirror frequently. At first there was the usual crush of traffic on the road leading to and from the mall, but the cars quickly thinned out. At the second red light, a station wagon roared up behind her. She could see inside the car. The two teenage girls in the front seat nodded their heads in time with the radio whose music was loud enough to permeate Jessica’s closed windows.
    No threat there.
    The station wagon turned after a few minutes. Jessica veered off into a fancy neighborhood with narrow streets and little traffic. She meandered around until she realized that not only did she feel totally alone and decidedly unwatched, but that she was behaving like an idiot. She headed home.
    A half hour later, she let herself inside the house, dumping her briefcase and purse on the chair. With a sigh, she slipped off her shoes and walked across the room to set the alarm. She stopped suddenly as something caught her peripheral vision. Turning, she gasped, covering her mouth with her hands, unable to move.
    * * *
    A LEX DECIDED THE best chance of engaging Lynda Summers in a candid conversation was to arrive unannounced. After all, the day before, she’d told him she never left the house.
    She didn’t answer her door and a quick turn of the knob revealed it was locked.
    He walked around the yard again just to make sure she wasn’t outside somewhere and ended up in back. The big trees stopped most of the rain from falling on his shoulders but it did nothing to stem the stench from the garbage in the lean-to. Once again, the lock on the shed door drew his attention.
    Was it possible Lynda Summers had something worth stealing back here?
    He walked around the shed, looking for a window and found himself facing a wall of ivy. When he got closer, he could see a window behind the plants and spread the branches a little, getting close enough to peer through the glass while keeping his feet out of the mud in case there were other footprints to be found later.
    He could barely make out part of a small room. Shading his eyes from what little glare there was on the glass, the most obvious distinction about the space was how clutter-free it was.
    Closest to the window a large model of a red-and-white biplane hung suspended from the ceiling. More or less under that sat a small round table on top of which rested a lamp with a striped black-and-yellow base that brought to mind a bumblebee. A stack of index cards sat next to