Free Now You See It by Cáit Donnelly Page B

where I live. My nest. And now it’s not the same, because someone’s been there—” she broke off. “Okay. Okay. Brady. I can live with that, for a little while.”
    * * *
    Gemma could see the tops of the television vans before she was halfway around the corner from her house. Rats! Mike had been right about vultures swarming. Her front yard was overflowing with overdressed people staring earnestly at cameras as they babbled into microphones. A few were leaning desultorily against their cars or the network vans, and a cluster of three was taking advantage of the shade under the flowering cherry.
    They all came to their feet or turned toward her as she neared the edges of the crowd, for all the world like a school of predatory fish swiveling in unison toward a single prey. Following Mike’s advice, Gemma pretended she didn’t see them, but drove at a crawl through the crowd. When the first reporter neared the car, Nikki clearly decided she’d suffered all the importunities she was required to tolerate, and began snarling and doing her very best rottweiler imitation. As she was a sled dog, the result was a high, piercing bark that reverberated inside the car and threatened to crack the windshield. Gemma lowered the rear windows. Nikki rose to the challenge, and her barking grew louder, higher, more frantic.
    Gemma grinned as reporters and crews ditched their sound equipment and began to back away from the racket. Opening the garage door at the last possible minute, she flipped the crowd a happy little wave as she pulled inside and closed the door.
    When she was safely inside, she let out a long, relieved sigh and set her purse down on the countertop.
    “Home,” she breathed. Her own kitchen. Nikki headed straight to her dish and began a short, hopeful exploration.
    Immediately the doorbell started ringing. Someone—several someones, by the sound of it—knocked and pounded on the door and rapped on the living room windows.
    Nikki ran back and forth for a few minutes, barking occasionally, but gave up pretty quickly and dropped with a sigh onto the cool flagstone floor, her duty done.
    Gemma stooped for an ear-scratch, and then stood at the sink, looking at nothing in particular. “Okay, Nikk,” she said, grabbing a pitcher of orange juice and a big glass, “let’s get to work.” And let’s stop thinking about Tall, Dark and Yummy. A cop, eh?
    She needed to finish packing up the rest of Ned’s stuff, including all the Sub-Saharan art pieces neither of them had much cared for, but seemed to impress his friends. She supposed that was the point. Now she no longer had to worry about his bouts of rage and his spitefulness. She was free to get rid of them, and she had intended to do just that, as soon as she could. She’d looked forward to the special guilty pleasure of putting his junk into salvaged containers from the liquor store and the Safeway loading dock. Not even boxes printed with classy brand names such as Stolichnaya and Guinness —just some cartons with the names of toilet paper and the inexpensive wines he always sneered at. Now, though, the memories of her plans for petty revenge made her feel like cringing.
    The CDs would be a good place to start. When did he have time to listen to all of them, she wondered as she plunked down on the floor next to the CD shelves and pulled out as many as she could manage at one time. They didn’t seem to be in any particular order, which made her a little crazy.
    She kept her own section of the CD bookcase organized by genre and by artist. The classical ones were sorted by composer. Ned’s jumble of easy listening, acid jazz and show tunes—whatever his friends were into at the moment—had always made her itch to organize them, but he swore he knew where everything was.
    Well, she would know where they all were now—out of her house. Still, she couldn’t resist stacking them in the box in some sort of order.
    She was partway through the third shelf when one of