Hollywood Hills

Chapter Forty-Seven

The drive north wasn't the burden it once had been for her. She was going home and was soon lost in her thoughts about that day and the last weeks.

She hadn't told Eli everything that'd transpired recently, as much as she didn't like feeling she was keeping things from him. Early in December, Kate had purchased a shotgun to deal with varmints around her home and for personal security. Eli had come down for three days soon after—it'd been their last lengthy visit—and had taken her into the meadow for a series of long, grueling lessons. She afterward was confident she knew how to wield the weapon as it was intended and kept it locked in a narrow gun safe when not using it.

It was one purchase she'd swiftly come to realize was a prudent one.

Five days after Eli's last visit, Kate once again had met an unwelcome visitor at her home. On this occasion, she'd exited the barn mid-morning to encounter a thickset, hairy man in a tee shirt and cut-off jeans who was walking up the driveway from a white car parked near the bend in the drive seventy or so yards away. It'd reminded her so much of her encounter with Ted Phelps that she'd come to an instant halt.

For just a moment, the man, who'd been looking around carefully before catching sight of her, had registered the same surprise. But he quickly had adopted an unlikely story about having car trouble and hoping to use the phone. The hairs on the back of Kate's neck had stood straight up. The man's smile notwithstanding, there was something about him she'd instantly recognized wasn't right, and as he'd ambled toward her, speaking in a low and friendly tone and ignoring her repeated requests that he leave, the image of a handler attempting to gentle a horse for saddling had entered her mind.

The stranger's arrival had been so abrupt and alarming that she hadn't had the wits to react, and by the time she'd thought to retrieve her shotgun from the apartment, he was only twenty or twenty-five feet away. But as she'd bunched her muscles to race for the barn door, before she'd even moved, the lunkheaded hound had come bouncing out of the tall grass with its usual happy-go-lucky step. However, instead of blessing the guest with one of its overly intimate sniffs and slobbering hellos, the hound promptly had sunk its teeth into the back of the intruder's left thigh.

The interloper's scream had been like a starter's pistol for Kate, and she'd dashed inside, retrieved the weapon, and reemerged to see the trespasser, blood now flowing freely down his injured leg, cussing and lobbing hastily procured stones at the bobbing and weaving hound, who'd appeared to be laughing at the man's impotent tosses. It was then that Kate had realized she too was laughing.

Anyone ever having heard the sound of a 12-gauge shotgun shell being chambered mistakes that sound for nothing, so Kate's unwanted guest had high-tailed it to his car without looking back in her direction.

She'd called the police immediately, but then had turned to interrogate the pooch.

"So, it's you who's been my guardian-demon all along," she'd teased the harebrained hound as it stood, tail wagging and tongue lolling, cocking its head at her as it sometimes did. A brief analysis of the animal's vacuous eyes as she'd bent to chuck him under the chin dispelled that notion. "No. You're too stupid to keep from falling face-first into a hole .... But you're getting a steak anyway."

That was also the moment at which she'd realized she owned a dog.

Two days later, based largely on Kate's description of the man and his car, sheriff's deputies arrested the interloper for a series of rural burglaries. The decision not to share those facts with Eli had been easy to rationalize—it would have alarmed him for no reason—but there was something else of course, that nagging little doubt that some evil might befall the silly wretch who'd trespassed on her land.