Mistletoe & Kisses (31 page)

“What happened?”

She let out a heavy sigh as we pulled up a couple of chairs.  “Well, you know I wanted some Starbucks, so I came up here.  It took me a little while to find it, because I couldn’t remember where it was, but I saw a bunch of cool little shops and also a lot of places where it looks like there are a lot of other shops if you’re willing to explore a bunch of nooks and crannies.  So after I got my latte, I started doing that.  Just next door, there’s one of those long outside hallways, and I thought it was pretty cool.

“Anyway, I noticed this guy was following me.  I didn’t think much about it at first, but I got a little paranoid, especially since you told us to pay attention, so I decided no more unpopulated hallways.  I got back out in the open air and decided to be where people were, and I started looking at outdoor shops again.  A lot of them aren’t open yet, but I was doing some window shopping.  After a while, I wasn’t paying attention again, looking at stuff, and I was looking through the window of one of the shops at a pretty sweater.  It was then that I noticed someone behind me—I don’t know if I sensed him or heard him or saw his reflection in the window first, but he said
hi
and asked if I was here with anyone.  He was a real creeper, and when I turned around and saw him, I was freaked out.  I told him I was here with family and that I had to go, and I walked as fast as I could back here.  I needed to be around people.”

“Did he follow you here?”

“I don’t know.”

I noticed that Chuck had been glancing out the windows throughout Gracie’s story, but now he got up and looked out them again and then returned to the table.  I didn’t know if he’d done it just to allay Gracie’s fears or if he’d thought it would do any good.  “Did the guys at the counter see this guy?”

“I don’t think so.  I think he quit following me at some point…before I got here.”

“I need you to describe this guy for me.”

Gracie blinked twice and swallowed, then seemed to try to get her wits about her.  She took a deep breath.  “Oh, I don’t know.  He, uh…he was a big guy.  Huge.  Like a football player, you know?  Dark hair, dark skin—”

Chuck interrupted her.  “Dark skin as in tanned or ethnic?”

“Oh, uh…I’m not sure, actually.  It was too fast.”  Chuck nodded.  “Just really scary.  Kind of tall.”

“About how tall?”

“I don’t know.  I’m not good with measurements.”  Chuck stood.  He was a fairly tall guy himself—not towering, but tall enough.  If he’d asked
me
, I would have said Chuck was about six-foot-two.  “Compared to me?”

Gracie looked up at him.  “I don’t know.  Maybe about the same height?”

I guessed that Chuck was getting frustrated and with good reason, but I could also understand why Gracie was rattled…and that reminded me of my own little brush with creepiness when she’d called.  Perfect timing.  Chuck was letting out a sigh, but I thought maybe he was done questioning her.  He looked out the window again.  He was scanning the activity outside, but everything out there looked normal to me—rich tourists who didn’t want to ski decided to hit all the little shops in the village.  None of them were in a hurry to get anywhere in particular, although some of them wanted out of the cold.

“Maybe now isn’t the best time, but I think you should know.”  Chuck looked at me, his eyebrows raised.  It might have been my tone of voice that caught his attention, but he was tuned in.  “I got a weird text from my stalker—
I think
—but it happened when Gracie called, so I didn’t have a chance to show you.”

“So show me now.”  I entered the passcode into my phone and then touched the
Messages
icon so I could pull up the texts I’d received.  There it was, the one on top, and it was only a phone number, one I’d never seen before.  I touched it and then handed the phone to Chuck.  I wanted to add
Kinda creepy
but thought that would sound melodramatic and over the top, especially after the shit Gracie had just had to endure.

She was glancing over at Chuck and my phone but didn’t seem too interested.  In fact, she seemed to be over her earlier shock and fear and was settling nicely into the warmth of the shop and her coffee.  As Chuck studied the text (looking for what, I didn’t know), I tried in my mind to lock in the description Gracie gave of her pursuer…that way, if I saw the guy on the street, I might know it before I got myself into a situation I couldn’t get out of…but as my mind tried to catalog the details, I realized Gracie’s description had been pretty generic—there was nothing outstanding about her pursuer’s features.  In fact, the guy sounded like dozens of men I already knew.  “Hey, Gracie, was there anything strange about the guy who was chasing you around?  You know, tattoos or…I don’t know.  Anything that would make him stand out?”

The girl shrugged.  “I can’t think of anything, Val.  He was wearing a coat and knitted cap.  I’m lucky I could tell what color hair he had.”

Chuck looked up from my phone.  “What
was
he wearing?  I can go out looking for the guy after I have you two back at the hotel safe.”

Gracie had a look on her face like that of a deer in headlights.  “I don’t know.”

“Just try to remember.”

She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her forehead.  “I really can’t remember.  It’s not like I stopped and thought,
Gee, I need to remember what he’s wearing so I can tell everyone
.”

Chuck took a deep breath.  I could tell he was losing his patience with her, much as I was starting to feel.  His voice, however, was calm and cool.  “You can’t even remember the color of his coat?  Just…try.”

Gracie frowned and looked from Chuck to me and then back to Chuck again.  Then her eyes fell to the tabletop and she appeared to be thinking.  She finally glanced back up at Chuck.  “I think it was navy blue.  Or black.  It might have been black.”

He nodded.  “Okay.  That’s a start.  Something dark.  Granted, everyone around here is probably wearing something like that, except for the occasional gray or red, but at least we can eliminate those folks.”  Chuck’s eyes wandered over to mine.  “I can’t figure out this guy’s game.  Why would he text you that picture while he’s chasing Gracie around?  What’s up with that?  I get
why
he sent it—he wants you to know he’s watching you and he knows where you are.”

If
that
wasn’t fucking creepy and kind of scary, I didn’t know what was.

Chapter Eight

WE WERE QUIET on our walk back to the hotel, and part of me was nervous about telling Brad.  He might choose to cut our vacation short, just when I was beginning to really love it here.  I felt safer with Chuck too, so I wasn’t as worried as I had been when I’d first picked up that newspaper the second day we were here.

In fact, my mind was going in a completely different place after spending time with Chuck and Gracie at Starbucks…but until I felt more certain about my theory, I didn’t know if it was something I should share with the bodyguard.

Maybe it was my overactive imagination, but I was beginning to wonder if Gracie either
knew
my stalker…or if she
was
my stalker.  No, she wouldn’t have been actually stalking me (at least, I didn’t think so), but what if, for some weird reason, she was doing all the stalker things?  We’d never actually
seen
anyone.  But Gracie’s story didn’t add up, and the fact that this person was supposedly texting me while simultaneously threatening her in the flesh didn’t make sense.

Maybe she just wanted some attention.

By the time we got back to the hotel, I decided not to say a word—not yet, anyway.  Instead, I decided to keep a close eye on Gracie until I felt more confident.

But my kids…if she was someone with a screw loose and I hadn’t caught it before now, did I really want her alone with my children?  The potential for danger was there and I couldn’t risk my kids, knowing that Gracie was potentially unstable.

I needed to chill and not give away my suspicions, but by the time the three of us walked in the door of the suite, I was convinced—absolutely positive that Gracie was involved somehow.  Brad knew something was wrong, so Chuck, Gracie, and I sat at the table to bring him up to speed.  Both kids wandered in and out of the kitchen area, and Hayley sat on my lap more than once.  I kissed her on top of her head, wondering if, in my efforts to be a good mother, I’d actually been the opposite by exposing her to Gracie.  No, I couldn’t think that way.  I’d been the best parent I could be, and we’d believed Gracie was a good candidate for the job—her references had checked out, and nothing she’d said or done had set off any alarm bells.

Until now.

And I knew that, until I had solid evidence, I didn’t dare point a finger at her.  Brad would think I’d lost my mind.  Instead, I’d do my best to be diligent, and I’d keep my kids from spending time alone with her from this point on.

But how or where could I look for evidence to support my belief?

To start with, I was going to watch her closely.  If she picked up her phone, I was going to (as surreptitiously as possible) keep my eyes on her.  If she needed to leave for any suspicious reason, I was going to note it.  If she said something that seemed to not make sense, I was going to analyze it.

That wasn’t all, though.  I also planned to go back through the stuff I had on my laptop and see if any of it corroborated my new theory.  I believed that if she
was
guilty, there would be no way to hide it.

I just had to start looking and put the pieces together.

Brad reacted just as I’d thought he would.  He now perceived the danger to be greater than any benefits we might get from staying there.  But Chuck and I managed to persuade him to stay at least another day.  I grabbed Brad’s hand.  “I won’t take any more walks.  Okay?”  He frowned but said nothing.  “Let’s just have our pretend Christmas and then head over to the western slope to visit your family like we planned, okay?”

Brad exhaled, still not saying a word, but he turned his gaze to Chuck.  Chuck seemed to assess the situation before our very eyes and, with a move that was almost imperceptible, he nodded his head.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  Now that I was pretty sure Gracie was behind it all, I was less nervous overall…but I wondered what she was up to.  What was she getting out of all of it?  I hoped to find out soon.

* * *

We had one of my favorite cold-weather lunches—chili and crackers.  Then we curled up and watched a couple of Christmas movies, and Hayley fell asleep in my arms after crawling up on my lap.  After the second movie was over and Chris decided he wanted to play a videogame, I got up and lay Hayley down on one of the beds in my room.  Brad came in and sat on the other bed with his guitar.  He gave me a look and said, his voice quiet, “Why aren’t you laying her down in Gracie’s room?”

I didn’t want to make him jumpy and paranoid either, so I just smiled and shrugged.  I wasn’t even going to try to explain the thoughts in my head, especially without any kind of evidence to back them up.  He shook his head, smiling back, and began to softly strum his guitar.  He was playing it quietly enough that I was sure it wouldn’t bother Hayley.  The child didn’t even stir.  I walked over to Brad and leaned over, planning to kiss him on the cheek, but he moved his head so his lips met mine.  “I’m gonna go do some computer stuff.”

He nodded.  I knew he thought I was going to check in with my social media, maybe post a little something to keep my new fans excited about the upcoming tour.  I supposed I probably
should
have been doing that, but I had other things on my mind.

Oh, I was going to be dealing with my social media, all right, but I was going to be looking instead at my “stalkers” and see if any of them seemed real or made up.  I’d already seen enough episodes of
Catfish:  The TV Show
to know that people online didn’t always present their real selves.  Quite often, people presented only their “best” selves or, worse, they would misrepresent themselves entirely.  It seemed as though some people did it because they felt insecure about who they were, but in the case of stalkers, I was sure their reasons were instead sinister.  They were hiding themselves to possibly escape detection.

So I sat down at my computer with a cup of hot tea.  Gracie was dosing on the sofa and Chuck was standing over by the window looking out.  Chris was playing a videogame, but he’d look over at Chuck once in a while and, when the man would wink at Chris, Chris would grin and turn back to the game.

Yeah…for supposedly being worried earlier, Gracie certainly didn’t seem too concerned now.  I started feeling a little angry that I’d managed to be duped.  Goddammit.  Once more, I proved that you can take the naïve small town girl out of the town, but the naiveté managed to linger.  That irritated me more than you can imagine.  Fooled once again.

Well, I supposed then that I shouldn’t feel too stupid.  After all, Brad didn’t seem to suspect her either…nor did Chuck, a guy who was probably more an expert at this kind of thing than either me or my husband.  I sighed.  It was up to me to find out for certain.

I’d just been looking at all this stuff the day before with Chuck, but now I was going to see it with new eyes.  I had a different agenda now.

I went to Twitter first.  That was where my French guy had found me.  He was probably not likely to be my local stalker—that was, if he was who he seemed to be on the surface.  His Twitter profile didn’t say where he was from, but his tweets sometimes identified a location, some place in France I’d never heard of.  I tended to trust the locations Twitter gave, considering they were pretty spot on when I tweeted and I didn’t even notice half the time until later.  His name was Etienne, and he wasn’t bad looking…but the guy had to be at least twenty years older than I
and
when he first started following me and tweeted to me, he spoke in French.  I shouldn’t have tried to be nice, but I tried to interact with my fans from time to time, and I thought it might be a good idea to let him know I couldn’t understand most of his words.  I typed a tweet back at him that said
Je ne parle pas français
(thanks, Google Translate) and figured that would be the end of it.

But
no
.  Instead, he tweeted me multiple times that same day, and I didn’t bother translating them.  I got the gist of what he was saying.  He was telling me that he didn’t know English but that he’d love talking with me and oh!  Wasn’t I beautiful?

It was at that point that I was very grateful that I hadn’t followed him back.  Just the one tweet I’d sent him had encouraged him more than it should have.  Every day, he’d tweet me at least once and then he started sending pictures—most of them half naked—chest shots, fortunately—nothing below the belt.  But he was feeling creepier by the day. I made the decision to figure out how to block him, but then he quit tweeting me.

Now, though, I wanted to make sure I could eliminate him from my list of suspects.  As I started looking through his profile and pictures, I became convinced that he was a real guy.  There were too many pictures of him and it was obviously the same guy in every photo.  So, creepy, yes.  Stalker, yeah.  Here in Beaver Creek watching my every move?  Probably not.  The last time he’d contacted me had been over a month ago.  I was pretty sure he was still somewhere in France.

I got up and stretched and moved to the stovetop to make another cup of tea.  Chris came over and asked, “Mommy, can I have some cocoa?”

“Sure, honey.”  I glanced over at Gracie again.  She was out like a light on the couch in a deep sleep.  I began wondering why she was so tired, because there had been no partying the night before like there had been before we headed to Beaver Creek.  Besides, she’d had some Starbucks coffee.  Was she maybe engaging in online activities once everyone else was asleep?

Well, now I was just inventing trouble.  I took a deep breath and asked Chris about his videogame while waiting for the water to warm up.  We had a sweet conversation and, even though I didn’t like him playing a lot of videogames, it
was
a vacation, and Brad and I had agreed beforehand that we’d let Chris play to his heart’s content while we were away.  Once we got back home, it would be back to his limit of one hour a day.

I made his cocoa before the water hit a full boil and then added a couple spoonfuls of cool water so it wouldn’t be too hot, and then I made my tea.  Once I sat back down at the computer, I knew the bigger task was at hand—to analyze my three stalker types on Facebook.

Wait…I’d forgotten about the bossy bastard on Instagram.  That was what I called him (or
her
maybe).  It hadn’t taken me long to get close to one thousand followers there and suddenly people were liking and commenting on my pictures, whether it was the album cover or just a picture of something cool, like my guitar.  I’d never clicked through to see if the person was a woman or a man, but the user ID was
falover77
.  At first, he was just posting cute little emoticons, but then he started commenting and asking questions—
personal
questions that I wasn’t comfortable answering.  Sorry, dude, but it’s none of your damn business if I wear Victoria’s Secret.  The guy took to shouting at me…
internet
shouting, leaving comments like
ANSWER ME AND FOLLOW ME BACK
.  He would sometimes follow it up with
Please?
and add a little smiley emoticon.  Just like the Twitter guy, I felt creeped out and started posting less and less.  My so-called fans were making sure the internet was not a fun place for me anymore.

I had a few Facebook stalkers, too, but most of the time, their interest would dwindle if I didn’t respond to their antics.  I’d discovered that they thrived on attention, whether positive or negative.  I wanted to look at all of them anyway just to see if I could learn anything.  All three of the Facebook guys had friended me and then tried to start private messaging me.  When my new band first exploded, I decided that I wouldn’t decline any friend requests, because those people were likely fans (oh, except for the fake people who just wanted to post sunglasses ads on my timeline).  And I have always tended to respond to friendliness, so at first when people would send me a message saying “Hi” and ask me for advice or to share info, I didn’t guard myself.  What a sucker that made me.  It wasn’t long before a so-called friendly conversation would become a full-blown proposition.  Most of those guys were easy enough to send on their way, but my main stalker guy denied having any underhanded intentions.

Two of them seemed to harass all kinds of women, not just me.  They seemed like the same type of guy.  When I checked out both their profiles, they were both older guys—one was retired military and the other also seemed retired, but I couldn’t tell from glancing what his profession had been.  Both had attempted to engage me in private conversation and both, it seemed, simply wanted to find an internet girlfriend.  Neither of them seemed to really know who I was—they just must have liked my profile picture.  But when I checked out their friends’ lists, it was pretty evident that I was the odd woman out.  I might have, at one time, shown some skin (and I wasn’t against it now either), but the women on both of those guys’ friends’ lists seemed enhanced and they had no problems showing it all off.  In fact, of all the friend profiles that popped up on their pages, I was shocked at how many were women wearing bikinis…and there wasn’t a C cup in sight.

I was out of my league.  My boobs would never become honeydew melon size, but all those women appeared to be well endowed.  What I found strangest was that both of those guys seemed similar—motive-wise anyway.

By the time I got to the third guy, I expected to find the same damn thing…but I didn’t.  This guy had only one profile pic, and it was a fuzzy side shot.  There were no pictures of him with friends or even by himself.  In fact, there was hardly any information of him at all.