Lover Beware

Patrick’s illness was that she’d concentrated so much on him that she’d neglected the girlfriend thing. They’d both lost touch with the friends they’d had when they’d lived in Auckland, and since moving to Tayler’s Creek, she somehow hadn’t ever moved past the acquaintanceship stage into friendship with anyone. She had plenty of people she could pass the time of day with in the street, but no actual friends.
    Zane followed her back to her house, and walked with her out to the river. She pointed out the spot where the ferns were flattened. He found a place along the river that had stepping stones, then walked upstream to examine the trampled area, taking notes. When they returned to her house, he walked through her house and checked her doors and windows. “Your doors are good, but you need bolts for the windows. And make sure you get that alarm installed.”
    He scribbled the name of a couple of reputable security firms on her telephone pad, both of which she had already tried to buy alarms from when she was in Winslow. As he set the pen down, his pager beeped.
    He checked the message, and blushed. “My girlfriend,” he mumbled, as he clipped the pager back on his belt and pulled his cell phone from his pocket.
    Jess thumped her tail on the verandah decking as Jane watched Zane drive away, still talking to his girlfriend. Jane absently stroked her head. “Well, that was the cavalry. So much for security.”
    As the dust cloud from Zane’s vehicle dissipated, she decided that she couldn’t wait the week it would take for a security system to be installed.
    She didn’t feel safe. In fact, she felt distinctly unsafe. There wasn’t a lot she could do to increase her security, but she had to try. Jess was her main alarm, but it was always possible that Jess could be harmed by an intruder—maybe even poisoned or shot.
    She had a gun. It wasn’t much of a gun, and it was possibly more of a hazard than a help because it could be taken away from her in a confrontation—but she wasn’t intending on using the weapon for anything other than warning off possible intruders.
    Collecting the key to the reinforced cupboard that Patrick had built in the mudroom, she unlocked first the padlock bolt that secured the door, then the steel bar that locked the gun against the back of the cupboard wall. The gun felt heavy and unwieldy as she set it down on the floor, then collected the bolt, a box of ammunition, and the two magazines that went with the rifle. On impulse, she grabbed a bottle of gun oil and a cloth—she supposed since the gun hadn’t been used for so long it would need a clean. She hadn’t touched the thing in years, not since Patrick had given her lessons on how to load and shoot it, and made her practice until she could hit a target with reasonable accuracy.
    She carried all the pieces out to the kitchen table and laid them down. The gun looked dark and lethal in her bright, sunny kitchen, and the smell of gun oil was pungent and faintly acrid, already overlaying the gentler scents of the garden floating in the open door. Lifting the weapon, she examined it, then began systematically dismantling and cleaning the ancient twenty-two, using the ritual to refamiliarize herself. When she was finished, she reassembled the weapon and fed shells into the two five-shot magazines.
    Minutes later, she walked out into the empty paddock nearest the bush line, with Jess at her heels, and placed a row of empty cans on fence posts. When she was satisfied she had enough targets, she fetched the gun, positioned herself twenty paces back from the tins, and took aim. She decided she didn’t have to be too far away from the target, because if anyone attacked her, it was going to be a close-quarters thing; she wouldn’t have time to do anything but bring the gun up and shoot, anyway. Apart from that eventuality, she wouldn’t be doing anything but firing into the air as a warning.
    The gun bucked gently against her shoulder, and the shot went wide. She altered her stance a little, to allow more flexibility when the recoil hit, and this time she managed to wing the tin. The third shot, she blew it off the post. Methodically, she hit two more tins, then changed the magazine. As she lined up the next target, she had a disorienting flash of the way she’d been ten years ago, before she’d hit Tayler’s Creek—with a wardrobe of pretty clothes, long nails, high heels, and enough makeup to fill a suitcase. Now she