Chapter 3 #3
Since he hadn’t heard anything at work related to his residential area—nor from any of his other neighbors—it was more of a double-check to confirm nothing was going on.
For her to have an intruder, when she’d only just arrived, would have been a fairly strange thing.
However, he lived in a world of strange things, so he wasn’t taking any chances.
And, if anybody found out that a single woman had just bought the property, it wouldn’t take much for some of the local sickos to realize she would be easy prey.
He also didn’t know if anybody realized the kids were there either because that was whole different story.
Being a cop, that tended to set his own nerves on edge.
Just too much going on in the world around them for him to be particularly happy about any of this, without even adding in the flat tire issue.
Finally, he headed back to his patio and turned on his barbecue.
He was doing up a steak tonight, just something to celebrate a case they had closed.
It had been a particularly tough case, both emotionally and physically, one that had taxed his abilities in many ways, abilities very few people knew about.
People at work joked that he had some psychic ability, but nobody really knew, not even his partner. Camden didn’t say or do anything to let anybody know for sure.
It was always better to keep them guessing. As long as he had evidential proof to back up anything that happened, the powers-that-be were more than happy to let him do his thing, so to speak. He kept closing cases, and that’s what they wanted.
He’d made detective a couple years ago, but most people didn’t even know what that meant. He usually just told people he was a cop because it seemed to help them identify what he did. Sometimes it just made life a little bit easier to deal with people.
He turned to the house next door. His new neighbor was unusual.
He wasn’t at all sure what to think of her.
She was slim, petite, attractive, and something was almost innocent about her.
And yet she also had stormy undercurrents.
However, realizing she’d taken on the children of a best friend was admirable and helped to explain her confused energy.
He could only hope that, with time, her confusion would settle down, because dealing with that particular energy would be exhausting for her in the long run.
She already looked as if she were running low on sleep.
Not the best state to be in but understandable, considering she had just moved.
So, at this point, he would park it and would give her a chance to reboot and to rebuild her energy.
He would check in on her later, see if she and the twins were doing okay.
The trouble was, having made a comment about an intruder and security, he couldn’t let it go.
He went back outside several times that evening, once the dark had settled in, to see if anybody was skulking around the backyards.
He hadn’t checked with anybody else in the neighborhood—and there were only a handful, the not-get-involved types, but most of them generally felt a lot more secure and safe just because he was there.
Having a cop in your backyard disturbed some people and made others feel safer.
For the most part, he got along with everybody here, and he had had no issues that would cause him not to.
He’d been here for over a decade—both in this house and in this small town—and had stayed out of everybody’s business as much as he could.
When he knew someone would get in trouble for something, he usually did a quiet little psychic knock, warning them what the infraction would be, should Camden have to see them about it.
He always encouraged them to deal with it straight-up, versus avoiding it or resisting, turning a relatively small issue into something else altogether.
So far, everybody had been extremely appreciative, and it had helped a lot in keeping the peace in Camas. Now, here he was, trying to figure out what the hell was going on with the new neighbor, and keeping the peace in the neighborhood was suddenly looking to be a whole lot more difficult.
If he could figure out if somebody were coming through her place, that would help, and he wouldn’t have to worry about her being in trouble so much, just potentially more nervous.
As he was about to go to bed that night, he stopped one more time to check his security cameras.
As he sat down to give it a quick look, he went to stand up again, and that’s when he saw it.
He sat back down with a hard thump, then watched as one of the local kids—and he called him a kid, but really he was in his twenties—headed over toward Devon’s house, moving in seriously.
And why the hell was that a thing? Camden watched carefully as the kid went up onto Devon’s front porch, then looked in the windows on either side of the front door.
Frowning at that and not liking anything about it, Camden was just about to go out his front door, hopefully to chase him away.
But the fact that he was even doing this was something that he would now have to keep an eye on because that wouldn’t allow him to sleep at night. As he watched, the kid slowly worked his way around the house, but now he went out of Camden’s view, which made Camden even more leery.
He got up and walked outside on the balcony, where he could take a better look into the backyard of her house. Once he stepped outside, he heard bushes rustling and then footsteps running off quickly. That was the good thing. The bad thing was that now he would have to go talk with him.
As to why he was in her backyard at all and what his intentions could possibly be were clear as mud at this point. The other question was, which one of the three people who lived in that house was the kid really after?