Noah chuckled. “It wasn’t too bad. I don’t get to run full out much, so I got to blow my car out a little on the way.” He flashed a smile at me as he said it. “You alright, Chloe?”
I nodded. “I’m good. Just a little shook up.”
“Show me what you found, alright?”
I took him outside, Brandon hovering at my back the whole time. He took pictures of the ring where it hung, the surrounding area, and then used tweezers to pull the ring from the branch and put it in a bag.
“You and I both know that this is going to come back with his prints on it, especially since you can ID the ring as something you wore once. I’ll do what I can, standard procedure and all, but there’s not much we can do with this unless we knew where he was. We’ve already been looking for him and you’ve got the CPO against him, which he’s already broken.” Noah looked apologetic.
“It’s okay, Noah. I know that and completely understand. I just wish that he’d be found so I don’t have to keep looking over my shoulder. I don’t know why I started feeling secure…I guess it was when they said they’d had reports of him in Texas.” I shrugged again, feeling helpless about the whole situation.
“Is this the first time you’ve been out here in a while?” Noah asked me.
“Since last weekend when we mowed and weed-eated. I didn’t get out here to pull weeds, though, so I couldn’t tell you when he put that there.” I paused, a thought crystalizing in my mind. “You know, that night that Emma went to the hospital when she was in labor with Everly, something happened that night. I mean, not really something, but definitely something. I took the dogs outside after Brandon called to tell me the baby was here. It was maybe, I don’t know, two or three a.m.? I could look on my phone and tell you exactly if I needed to. Anyway, Doug and the pups were here and Doug started acting weird, put his head down and growled at the fence, all the hair on his back up on end. The pups did it, too.”
That got Brandon’s attention. “And you’re just mentioning this now?” he asked me incredulously.
“I’m sorry, but it kind of slipped my mind with all the babies and everything.” I turned back to Noah. “I didn’t see anything. It was dark and the fence is six feet high, but…I don’t know. I had shivers go down my spine when the dogs growled because they acted like they knew something was wrong. It felt like something was wrong. I went in and locked everything down, set the alarm again, and checked the windows to see if I saw anything or anyone, but there was nothing.”
Noah jerked his chin towards the backyard. “Show me where the dogs were going crazy.”
I took him through the house and the screened in patio, showing him where I was standing and then where the dogs had been when they’d gone off. He checked around a bit and then asked to go around the back of the fence. Brandon took him back there, but he asked me to stay where the dogs were so he could line it up from the other side of the fence.
I heard their muffled footsteps on the backside of the fence and then the silence was broken by Brandon.
“Mother fucker!”
I heard Noah’s voice but I couldn’t make out his words. Then I heard Brandon again.
“Chloe, come out here, please.”
I swallowed hard as a frisson of fear sent chills over my skin, even in the summer heat. I unlocked the gate at the side of the house and rounded the fence to the back. The house butted up to a creek about fifty feet back, and then there were a bunch of trees. The neighbors’ yards on either side of the house weren’t fenced in, so there was easy access to the back of my property behind the fence.