Mike’s first instinct was to shout at her to stay where she was, but he didn’t know who had come with her and might hear.
“Sara!” he hissed down at her.
She kept typing.
He couldn’t figure out how she’d entered the barn without being hit. Just in front of the doorway was a thin piece of nearly invisible nylon fishing line, and hovering about it, ready to fall, was an old horse collar made of wood, leather, and iron. Mike didn’t want to think what such a thing would do to pretty little Sara Shaw if it dropped on her.
“Sara!” he said again.
She hesitated on her keyboard, then, to his horror, she started walking out of the barn. She may have missed the trap on the way in, but she’d certainly trigger it on the way out.
Mike didn’t think about what he did. Many years of training had made him react without thought. He jumped up and leaped out the big window, clutching the rope as he flew past it. The rope, attached to the pole above, kept swinging. It burned Mike’s hands, but he slid down enough that when Sara stepped through the doorway, just as her foot was about to set down on the fishing line, Mike grabbed her with his right arm and kept swinging.
They landed on the grass at the side of the barn just as about fifty pounds of old horse harness came tumbling down in the exact spot where Sara had been.
She was lying on top of him, the breath half out of her, and her face inches from his. “We really must stop meeting like this.”
Mike didn’t laugh but rolled out from under her to stand up and bend over her. “What the hell are you doing here?! I told yo
u to stay away. I told you—”
“Actually, you didn’t tell me anything and I’m beginning to think that whatever you have told me is a lie.” She looked him up and down. “You’re a mess. Would you like to tell me the truth about what’s going on?”
Mike was torn between wanting to angrily shake her—or kiss her in relief that she wasn’t hurt. She was so pretty in her little yellow dress with the pink flowers on the big collar that he just sat down on the grass beside her. “You could have been killed.”
“I can see that,” she said as she looked at the pile of leather and wood. “I wonder where Mr. Lang found that and what century it came from?”
Mike’s mind was working at warp speed as he tried to figure out how much he could tell her and what had to be hidden.
“What’s going on here?” she repeated.
She was so calm that the last of Mike’s anger left him. “All I wanted to do was to look at the property my sister gave me.”
Sara looked from him to the barn and back again. “You didn’t want me to go with you because you thought there might be something like this here, didn’t you?”
Mike gave a half smile. He wasn’t going to be able to lie his way out of this. “Smart women are a real nuisance in my business.”
“So you are here in Edilean on a case?”
“You didn’t happen to bring any food, did you? I’m starving.”
“I did. A whole basket full of it.”
Mike stood and held out his hand to help her up, but she ignored it. She kept looking at the pile of horse harness. “I’m not going to let you stay in my apartment a minute longer if you don’t tell me what you’ve been doing here today.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“Fine. My mother has a spare room. If you think I’m a snoop, you haven’t experienced anything until you’ve spent a day around her. My dad says she can squeeze secrets out of a pineapple.”
Mike sat down again. Maybe it was better to tell her at least some of the truth. “A major criminal lives in or near this town.”
“Who?”
“If we knew that we’d arrest her, but we don’t even know what she looks like. The only picture we have of Mitzi Vandlo was taken in ’73 when she was sixteen years old.”
“So she’d be fifty-three now?”
“Right.” He admired her arithmetic abilities.