Protecting Melody Read Online Free

her?”  
    “So she’s being stalked?”  
    “Fuck.”  
    Tex heard the disgust in Amy’s voice. She hadn’t meant to confirm anything. “Look. . .” Tex paused and thought about what he could say to try to reassure Melody’s friend. “I know she’s scared. She admitted as much to me. She talked about you when I asked about her friends. She said she misses you. Amy, I need your help. I need you to tell me everything you can about where you think she is. She’s obviously in trouble and she needs help. I can help her.”  
    “Give me your name. I’ll check you out. If I think you’re legit, I’ll call you back.”  
    Tex didn’t hesitate. “John Keegan. I was medically retired a few years ago from the Navy. Do you need a reference?”  
    “No. I’ll find you if you’re telling me the truth. I have my own connections.”  
    Tex put the phone down. Amy had hung up without saying goodbye once again. He didn’t care. All that mattered was Melody. Now that he knew he had the right Amy, Tex bent over his computer again. He could find out a lot of information now that he verified where Melody was from.  
    Thirty minutes later, Tex’s phone rang. Impatiently he picked it up and answered the call, figuring it would be Amy. She obviously did have some good contacts if she was already calling him back and had checked him out this quickly.  
    Amy didn’t bother saying hello. “My friend, Melody, was the nicest person you could ever meet. She was the type of person who would come over and watch my kids for free, and, in fact, beg me to be able to do it. She babysat my kids all the time and they loved her. She worked hard at what she did and she was good at it. She didn’t bad mouth others and was way nicer than she should’ve been to people.”  
    “Why are you talking about her in the past tense?” It shouldn’t have struck Tex as so wrong to hear Amy talking about Melody as if she was no longer alive, but it did.  
    Amy’s voice softened for the first time. “I didn’t even realize I was doing it.”  
    “How long has she been gone?” Tex tried to ease up on his take-charge attitude. Amy was obviously hurting too.  
    “About seven or so months.”  
    “Have you talked to her much since she’s been gone?”  
    “Not really, and it sucks. I miss her. My kids miss her. Her parents miss her. Hell, her dog misses her.”  
    “Her dog?” Tex didn’t remember Melody ever talking about owning a dog in any of their past conversations.  
    “Yeah. She asked if I would dogsit one day because she had to run some errands in Pittsburgh. So I took Baby for the day and Melody never came back.”  
    “Her dog’s name is Baby?” Tex could hear that Amy was getting emotional and he wanted to have her concentrate on something else for a moment before she continued telling him about Melody.  
    “Yeah. Baby is a fifty pound coonhound. Melody adores that dog. Every time I’ve spoken with her since she left, which isn’t very often, she’s asked about her dog. Baby misses her too. It’s uncanny. She lays on the floor each night and keeps her eyes on the door. She knows. Even after all these months, Baby knows her mom is missing and is still waiting for her to walk back through the door.”  
    “What happened? Why did Melody go? What’s she told you?” Tex knew he sounded gruff, but he couldn’t help it. He needed all the information he could get from Amy to help him find Melody. And the thought of Mel’s dog pining for her made his stomach clench and hurt him more than if Amy had described how much she herself missed her friend.  
    “I don’t know all the details because Melody won’t tell me, but from what I can gather, she’d been receiving weird notes for a while. Not necessarily threatening, but not friendly either. Then they changed. The messages got mean. Melody didn’t tell me exactly what they said, but I think they started threatening her parents and even Baby. She told me