Sketch Me If You Can by Sharon Pape Page B

kind of people who could afford a house like this would have replaced the entire floor if so much as a speck of a stain had remained.
    She started up the stairs, her shoes sinking into plush beige carpeting. Even though the scene had been processed by the CSI team, she’d promised Jeremy that she would go over everything herself, so she stopped on each step to check the wall for blood residue or other evidence that a life had ended there, but the ecru silk wallpaper was pristine. She checked the banister and the railings as well, with the same results.
    As she made her way up the steps in this halting fashion, she saw a young man coming toward her along the upper hallway. His head was down, and he had a knapsack slung over his arm. He was moving fast, as if he wanted to get out of there and the sooner the better. He didn’t even seem to notice her until he was brushing by her on the stairs. Then his head came up, and for an instant his eyes met hers. There was something troubling about his expression. The furtiveness of guilt? She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She wondered what he was doing at the open house. Unless he was a successful rock star or one of the new dot-com millionaires, he wasn’t likely to be a prospective buyer. In fact, the odds were that he was the owner of the old Chevy parked outside.
    By the time she reached the upper hallway and turned to look back down the staircase, the young man was out of sight. She made a mental note to talk to the real estate agent about him, just in case anything went missing. Then she turned her thoughts back to Gail and the ME’s report. She’d more or less memorized it after the third reading. In the absence of any evidence that Gail had been struck with a heavy object, and given the cushioning effect of the carpeting, he’d concluded that the injury to Gail’s head had come from landing on the unforgiving stone floor. So far Rory agreed with his assessment. She was still standing there, thinking that this view from the top of the stairway was the last thing Gail Oberlin ever saw, when someone grabbed her shoulder.

Chapter 6
    W hen Rory felt the hand closing on her shoulder, she instinctively jerked away. She realized too late that she’d compromised her balance. Her left foot skimmed the edge of the top step without finding purchase. Panicked, she grabbed for the banister but only chase. Panicked, she grabbed for the banister but only managed to rake her nails across the polished wood before losing contact with it completely. An image of herself, like Gail, lying broken on the marble floor below, shot through her mind in the frantic moment before she was pulled back from the edge.
    “Hey, honey, take it easy; you looking to break your neck?”
    Rory couldn’t manage a reply. The adrenalin that had surged through her body at the prospect of death was now sluicing out of her; she was left gasping for air as if she’d just been rescued from drowning. Her legs were wobbly and making no promises to keep her upright. She leaned back against the wall, thankful for the solid feel of it.
    “Are you all right?” her rescuer asked, eyeing her warily, as if she might have suicide on her mind.
    He was only a few inches taller than she was, but broad shouldered and lean muscled, with intense blue eyes and the sun-streaked hair of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. He was wearing a gray polo shirt tucked into faded jeans and Docksiders without socks. He looked more like a surfer than a real estate agent, Rory thought, taking stock of him. She didn’t know whether she should be angry with him for sneaking up behind her or grateful to him for saving her life. Anger won out.
    “What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded once her heart had stopped pounding in her ears. “You should never sneak up on someone like that, especially at the top of a staircase.”
    “I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you at all,” he replied, clearly bewildered by her