“He’s been here all that time?”
She nodded furiously. “All day yesterday. All night. I woke up just a few minutes ago. He was gone. I don’t know what time he left.”
Her chest was hurting from breathing so hard. She pressed her fist against it.
Sensing her distress, Fred placed his hand on her shoulder. “All right, slow down. Catch your breath and tell me everything that happened.”
She swallowed, took several deep breaths. “Yesterday morning…” In stops and starts, she described Coburn’s arrival and the daylong ordeal. “Two sheriff’s deputies came by last night.” Breathlessly she recounted what had happened. “Maybe I should have tried to communicate to them that he was inside, but so was Emily. I was afraid he would—”
“You did the right thing,” he said, giving her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Is he injured? We found blood on the trail.”
She explained about his head wound. “It was a fairly deep gash, I think. He was scraped and scratched from going through brush, but otherwise he wasn’t hurt.”
“Armed?”
“He had a pistol. He threatened me with it. At one point last night, we fought over it. I had it, but he got it back.”
He dragged his hand down his weary face. “Jesus, you could have been killed.”
“I was so afraid, Fred. You have no idea.”
“I can guess. But the important thing is that he took shelter and then moved on without hurting you.”
“He didn’t come here for shelter. He knew who I was. He knew Eddie. At least he knew of Eddie. He came here for a reason.”
“What the hell? Was he somebody Eddie had arrested?”
“I don’t think so. He said he’d never met him. He said… He… he…” She couldn’t control her stuttering, and Fred sensed that.
“Okay. You’re all right now.” He muttered words of concern that were liberally sprinkled with profanities. He placed his arm around her shoulders and turned her toward the house. “I’ve got to call this in. Let’s go inside.”
Honor leaned against him heavily, relying on his support as they made their way up the slope. Now that the crisis was past and she and Emily were no longer in danger, she was trembling. With the arrival of help, the courage it had taken to protect herself and Emily abandoned her. As her friend had said, she could have been killed. She’d thought for sure she would be.
The full impact of how narrowly she had escaped death struck her and brought her close to tears. She’d heard of this phenomenon, of people acting with incredible valor during a crisis situation, then coming apart completely after surviving it.
“He ransacked the house,” she told Fred as they approached the porch. “He was insistent that Eddie died with something valuable in his possession.”
Fred snorted with incredulity. “Not the Eddie I knew.”
“I tried to tell him he was wrong. He refused to believe me. He ripped up my house for nothing.”
?
?What was he looking for? Money?”
“No. I don’t know. He didn’t know. Or so he said. But he insisted that this—whatever it is—was the reason Eddie had died.”
“He died in a car wreck.”
Stepping up onto the porch, she looked up at him and shrugged. “That didn’t sway Coburn.”
Fred drew up short when they entered the living room and he saw the damage Coburn had done. “Criminy. You weren’t kidding.”
“He stopped just short of tearing down the walls and pulling up the floors. He was dead certain that I had something that Eddie had died protecting.”
“Where’d he get that notion?”
She raised her hands to her sides, indicating to him that she was at a loss. “If you can find that out, maybe you’ll uncover his motive for killing those seven people.”