Within Range. Janice Kay Johnson

me repeat that I’m here to help, if you need it. You’re worried about something. I wish you’d tell me what.”

      He might as well not have bothered to speak. She’d shuttered her expression and only waited. He’d go, but needed to be sure she’d taken seriously his concern about her security.

      “Have you spoken to your landlord?”

      “I left a message at the property management company, but I also called a locksmith. He’s supposed to be here at four to change the locks.”

      “Good,” Seth said softly. He nodded and left.

      * * *

      HELEN LOCKED THE door then slumped against it, feeling so much she couldn’t identify.

      Had any man ever looked at her like that?

      Yes, the last time she was attracted to one. Richard.

      His burning gaze had convinced her he wanted her desperately, loved her. She’d been such a fool, let herself be manipulated, controlled. Never again, she’d vowed. Not a vow she could afford to forget. So why was she getting weak in the knees because Seth Renner had implied he thought she was beautiful, had claimed she could depend on him?

      Oh, the answer was simple enough. She had needs, but unlike women who allowed themselves to be deluded over and over again, Helen wouldn’t dare succumb to temptation. Her fierce need to protect Jacob would keep her from being that dumb. Even if she met a wonderful man who truly was everything he seemed to be, she’d have to lie to him, and what kind of relationship would that be? Lies corroded. Lies kept her from making friends, even.

      For Jacob, she’d do anything.

      While he napped, she’d make a plan instead of letting her thoughts run in panicked circles.

      Helen went back to the kitchen, dumped out both mugs of barely touched coffee, and fetched a pen, notepad and her last bank statement. She had never done online banking. That took another kind of trust.

      Would Seth... No, no, no. Would Detective Renner think to flag her bank account? Ask the bank, maybe, to inform him if she closed out the account, or withdrew a substantial amount of the balance? Could he do that legally?

      Sure he could. All he’d have to do was get a warrant.

      Well then, she’d assume he had. If she dared take at least a few days, even a week, she could stop by an ATM daily. She had to believe that Richard wouldn’t be an immediate threat. Even he might have been shaken to discover he’d killed the wrong woman.

      What if he thought he’d been pursuing the wrong woman? That Andrea lived in this house—she’d had a key, after all—that there’d been a mistake made and his ex-wife wasn’t actually in the vicinity? Hope shimmered briefly as Helen wondered if Richard had gone back to Seattle to berate his private detective for being wrong?

      The hope was shortlived. He would have checked the ID in Andrea’s purse. The license plate on her car. Neither would match the name of the woman who rented this house, the one the private detective had identified as her.

      Still, he’d back off, surely, until the investigation petered out and a cop wasn’t coming by the house daily.

      She hadn’t checked him out online in at least a week, and obviously that had been a mistake. Helen opened her laptop and entered his name.

      He popped up immediately in a Seattle Times article about a political event held yesterday evening. She kept searching, found mention of a dinner he was to host this coming Saturday to raise money for a congressional candidate launching a primary assault on an incumbent who had probably infuriated Richard by ignoring his advice.

      Helen sat thinking. Saturday was two days away. Portland wasn’t that long a drive from Seattle. Still, he’d want to be careful. When he first began hitting her, she’d thought he was losing his temper, that he lacked self-control but was genuinely shocked and sorry. Over months she came to understand that he was never careless in a way that might come back to reflect on him. No, his sense of self-preservation was finely tuned.

      She’d have until Sunday or even Monday, she decided. She could mostly empty her bank account with three-to five-hundred-dollar withdrawals, followed by a bigger one on her way out of town. And, of course, she had the emergency cash she kept stashed in the to-go bags tucked behind some junk in the garage.

      That would give her time this weekend to prowl a cemetery or two in Portland—or better yet, across the river in Vancouver, Washington. Surely, she could find the grave of a girl child who, if she’d lived, would be close to Helen’s age. Once she and Jacob were a safe distance away, she’d request a birth certificate.

      Tomorrow, she’d better go back to work. She needed to live as unremarkably as possible until she was ready to go.