Got Your Number

quarter-mile path, she half expected to find him lounging by the tree again, but he was gone. Had he retreated to watch her? To follow her? The police had come sniffing around the organization before, but usually to follow up on a missing-person report, not because the client was wanted for questioning.
    Filling her lungs with the perpetually fish-scented air of Biloxi, Roxann forced herself to slow down, to finish her five-mile run at her normal pace. Afterward she showered and launched Goldie on a winding route toward 255 Amberjack, Unit B, checking occasionally to make sure she wasn't being tailed by the cop—again.
    Few people knew her address since the duplex was leased through the agency's network. She had lived all over the southeast, although over the last five years she'd migrated back toward the Mississippi Valley—guilt over her father, she presumed, which was alleviated somewhat by being on the same page of the atlas.
    She received her mail through a post office box, and her phone was unlisted. She relied on pay phones to conduct most business with Rescue, whom to meet and where, setting up details of a relocation, arranging transport. The only people who knew the number for her cell phone were her father and her Rescue supervisor. In a desperate attempt to contact her, Melissa Cape had obtained the number from a friend who worked for the wireless company. Roxann hadn't recognized the number on the display, and should've known better than to answer, but she'd been afraid not to. Afraid something had happened to her father, afraid...
    She sighed. Maybe she would take this opportunity to visit her father. Try to reconnect. An outlandish notion, considering they'd never really connected in the first place. Disparate relatives, sharing a roof, both longing for a black-haired woman long gone.
    Perhaps her recent restlessness was rooted in the shakiness of the relationships with the people she should be closest to. Working odd jobs and operating covertly didn't lend itself to forging intimate liaisons. She thought she'd found a friend in Elise, who also worked for Rescue, but that had ended disastrously. Other facilitators in the organization who worked in tandem were often hundreds of miles apart, communicating in as streamlined a manner as possible. The women she helped she never saw again. It was the perfect pursuit for a loner.
    But lonely.
    Leaving town for a few days might throw Capistrano off her scent for a while. Or maybe it was time she moved again, although she rather liked Biloxi and had even fancied living here for a while. Make friends, look for a permanent job—something more challenging than waitressing or retail or temp work. She'd even painted her bedroom, a first. The thought of moving again put a stone in her stomach she'd never felt before. Loading all her worldly possessions onto a U-Haul trailer and looking for a new place to live had seemed so romantic in her twenties. Now she fretted about finding a new gynecologist and if the neighbors had a noisy pet.
    Wrestling with her decision to take a roadtrip, she stopped at her post office box to retrieve a week's worth of mail. Bills, junk mail, two Notre Dame University alumni newsletters, both dated and forwarded many times, and—she squinted at the thick ivory-colored envelope and held it up to the light. A wedding invitation?
    Very curious, considering most of the women she knew were trying to escape marriage.

Chapter Three

    THE INVITATION ORIGINALLY had been sent to her post office box in Atlanta, then forwarded to the one in Montgomery before being forwarded on to Biloxi. The return address, written in black slanting script by a calligrapher, read "Mr. and Mrs. Jackson Ryder, One Portobello Place, Baton Rouge, Louisiana." Her address, oddly, had been scribbled in blue ink in a different, and less princely, handwriting that seemed vaguely familiar.
    Roxann smirked. Her cousin Angora was finally getting married? It seemed likely since she was the only child of Jackson Ryder and Dixie Beadleman, Roxann's father's sister. Of course when Dixie had caught the eye of the Jackson Ryder, heir to the Ryder Hotel empire, she'd shortened her name to Dee. More fashionable, and more appropriate, considering all the wonderfully wicked D names Roxann had made up for her.
    She slid her nail under the flap of the grubby envelope—a little worse for the rounds—and pulled out the origami-like invitation. Impressive. Extensive. Expensive.
    Mr. and