He had on jeans and boots, but not the cowboy kind. The oddest thing was his jacket. It was nowhere near cold enough to wear a bulky denim jacket with fleece lining. He was definitely hiding something.
From this distance, she’d call his hair brown, and she couldn’t see his eyes.
She squinted as if that would help her see better, but she still couldn’t get any more distinguishing features. She’d left her phone next to her uneaten salad, and she wished she had it to snap a quick picture. She wanted one of the man and his truck, and she frantically searched for his license plate as he opened the door and got behind the wheel.
There was no license plate on the front bumper. He backed out and turned, and Emma noticed a logo on the side of the truck. A large grasshopper.
She started to relax; he was the pest control guy, and he’d probably wanted to drop off the bill before he left. They did knock on the door after a treatment. The blue truck trundled down the lane, and Emma did see a license plate on the back bumper.
She only caught a couple of letters, and she recited them to herself as she hurried to retrieve her phone.
She’d just typed them into her notes program when the back door opened and a couple of male voices filled the house. “…it’ll be thirty seconds,” Nate said, appearing from around the corner. He sounded slightly annoyed, but when he saw her, he brightened. “Hey, Emma. Ginger sent me over to get her pregnancy notebook?” He shifted his feet and cleared his throat. “She said you’d know what that meant.”
“It’s where she keeps track of all the births on the ranch,” she said, starting to move her hand to pocket her phone as Ted came around the corner too. She dropped her phone then, because she seemed to forget how to be human when he was around.
The device clattered to the floor, a terrible snapping sound filling the air. She gasped and looked down, the jagged crack in her screen obvious. “Oh, no.”
“We’re going to get Ted a phone,” Nate said. “You could come along.”
“No,” she said, though she did desperately want to. She bent to pick up the phone, thinking she’d just use it as it was until she could get to town. She had a screen protector; everything would be fine.
She tried to swipe and pain sliced through her fingertip. She cried out and looked up at Nate. “Yeah, okay. I’ll come with you. Can you give me a minute?”
“If you get me that notebook, I’ll take it to Ginger, and then we’ll swing by here again to grab you.” he looked at Ted. “It’ll be another ten seconds. Emma will literally jump in the truck as we’re moving.”
Ted nodded, and Emma deduced he must be in a hurry to get to town. She didn’t blame him. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, and he didn’t even have a phone.
“Give me a second.” She set her ruined phone on the counter beside her lunch and went into the office. Ginger kept meticulous records of the horse births on the ranch, and she loved the leather-bound notebook with a decade’s worth of data in it. Emma took it to Nate and said, “This is like her most prized possession. Don’t lose it.”
“I’m literally taking it from here to the stables,” Nate said dryly. “I think I can manage.” He nodded to Ted. “Let’s go.”
“I need to use the restroom,” he said. “Can I stay here, and you can pick both of us up on the way back by?’
“I don’t know,” Nate said. “Can you run fast enough to leap into a moving truck?” He laughed and went out the back door, leaving Emma alone with Ted. She stared at him, wishing he wasn’t quite so tall or quite so handsome. She wondered if he even knew what he did to a woman’s pulse.
“I swear I’ve seen you before,” he said. “Did you grow up in Laredo?”
“No,” she said, her pulse positively ricocheting now. No, she hadn’t grown up in Laredo. But she’d gone to college there. She wasn’t about to tell him that, though. She’d run with a rough crowd during college, and the only reason she hadn’t ended up in jail herself was because she’d gotten the teaching job in Sweet Water Falls.
“Okay.” He headed toward the hall and the bathroom where he’d changed yesterday. Emma let out the breath she’d been holding, wondering what Ted had done before he’d gone to prison. Ginger had a whole file on him, and Emma could easily read it. In fact, it sat on the corner of her desk right now.
She picked up her ruined phone and plucked her purse from the hook by the back door. She was just about to go outside to wait for Nate—Ted could find his own way—when the doorbell rang again.
Adrenaline spiked through her, and she turned toward the door but didn’t move.
“I’ll get it,” Ted called, and Emma let him. She heard him say something to whoever was at the door, and then his footsteps came down the hall and into the kitchen. He joined her in the small hallway off the back door, a paper in his hand.
“It was the pest control guy. He dropped off this receipt.”
Emma stared at it, her eyes wide. Everything raced now. She grabbed it from him and flew outside, desperate to see the man and the pest control truck. Thankfully, no one ever closed the garage doors, and she could see all the way to the dirt lane.
A white truck—not blue—still sat there, and it had a license plate on the front bumper. She strode out into the sunshine, lifting the paper as she went. “Hey,” she called, and the guy looked up.
She went all the way to his door, where he rolled down his window. “You just did this?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“You don’t drive a blue truck?”
Confusion furrowed his brows. “No.”
“Have you ever driven a blue truck?”
“Not for Eradicate,” he said. “Always white.” He tapped the door. “With the ridiculous ants on the side?”
She looked down at the side of his truck, which did have several semi-ridiculous cartoon ants painted there. “Not grasshoppers?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.” He shook his head. “Is everything okay?”
Ted had followed her, and he leaned his elbows on the top rung of the wooden fence that separated the dirt and gravel from the grass.
“Yes,” she said, the word barely ghosting out of her mouth. Because it was really a no. No, everything was not okay.
The man who’d been here in the blue truck was not the pest control. She spun toward the left corner of the house, her fist crunching the receipt. She went through the rungs in the fence while Ted asked, “What’s wrong, Emma?”
She didn’t answer him as she marched across the grass. All this striding had really gotten her heart rate up, and sweat beaded along her hairline. She arrived at the side of the house, desperately scanning.
There were no meters.
“Emma?” Ted asked again, gently. “What’s going on?”
“There are no meters here,” she said, looking wildly from him to the smooth siding on the house.
“No,” he said slowly. “There aren’t.”
“There was a guy here,” she said. “He had a clipboard and a meter thingy, and he was driving a blue truck with a grasshopper on the side.” She couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “He rang the doorbell and then disappeared.”