Free Move the Sun (Signal Bend Series) by Susan Fanetti Page B

her. You’re thinking about her now. She was singing. She died happy. She died happy.”
    He knew it was true. It helped to know it was true.

CHAPTER FIVE

    Lilli pulled into the garage of her rented house. She’d had to go all the way to the little shopping center on the far outskirts of the St. Louis suburbs to find everything she needed. Besides the 7 Eleven, there wasn’t even a grocery in Signal Bend. But now, after spending several hours and several hundred dollars, she had a full stock of food and sundries. She had fresh linens for the bed and bath. She had the small appliances that the house had lacked—coffeemaker, toaster oven, things like that. And she had the supplies she needed adapt one of the small extra bedrooms to a room she could work in.
    She opened the trunk and started hauling her purchases into the house. She supposed she could have parked on the grass, closer to the house, for the unloading, but she hadn’t thought of it. She didn’t really have a country mindset.
    Once she had everything in the house, she spent an hour or so setting things up: getting the new linens in the wash (the rental thankfully had both washer and dryer), organizing the kitchen, trying to make the dreary little hut into something livable. Then she went into the smallest bedroom and started setting that up, too.
    It was furnished with a twin-size bed and a small dresser. She pushed both of these to the side and built the small, cheap desk she’d bought. When it was together, she carried one of the chairs from the dinette set in; it would serve fine as a desk chair. She wasn’t sure what to do with the trash she was making; she supposed she’d have to burn most of it, since it was unlikely the town had residential trash pickup. For now, though, she piled it all in the third bedroom. When the furniture was handled, she covered the windows with heavy black paper, then drew the drapes. She changed the doorknob to one that locked. It wasn’t a great security solution; the door itself was only a typical interior door and thus wouldn’t put up much resistance to someone determined to get in, but the lock would slow them down, anyway.
    That room set up the way she wanted, she put the linens in the dryer, grabbed the carton that had held the toaster oven, and went back out to the garage. She’d chosen this property for its seclusion, so the precautions she was taking were probably more than she needed. But she was a cautious woman, and sometimes more really was more. She went in the side door of the garage, so that she could leave the overhead closed. With no windows in the building, the garage was near pitch black, only the dim light rimming the doors to ease the gloom. Lilli turned on the overhead fluorescents and opened the trunk of the Camaro.
    It looked like the trunk was empty, but Lilli leaned in and pulled the vinyl backing away from the back seat. Instead of the innards of spring and padding one usually finds inside an upholstered seat, the Camaro held a small armory: An M16 assault rifle, an M25 sniper rifle, three semi-automatic handguns, and a small assortment of other types of weapons for melee and mayhem. There was also a satellite phone and a very special laptop hidden in the seat. Lilli collected the latter two items and put them in the toaster oven box. The weapons she left where they were; she had her favorite sidearm in the bedroom already, and she didn’t expect to need the rest for some time yet. She closed up the back of the seat, shut the trunk, and left the garage, turning off the lights and locking it behind her.
    When she got back into the house, she took the laptop and satellite phone into the office she’d just set up. She hooked the phone into the laptop, using the satellite connection to access the internet. It had been three days since she’d checked in. Her silence had been scheduled, but it still made her antsy to go so long.
    When she got through the labyrinth of security and logged on, she