Whispers at Midnight (10 page)

“How would I know if anything’s missing?” She trailed him to the front parlor. “Unless he took a couch or something. All this is Gran’s furniture, but Miss Virgie’s bound to have had TVs and things of her own. That’s the kind of stuff a burglar would steal.”

She shivered as what had happened in the dining room replayed itself in her head. The man had been hiding there in the dark, silent and waiting. What would have happened if she’d returned to her grandmother’s house alone?

Just considering the possibilities scared her anew.

“I’m pretty sure she took everything like that with her when she moved out,” Matt said. “Anyway, Loren”—Loren Schuler, Miss Virgie’s niece and closest relative, was a former classmate of Carly’s
who now worked at the bank, as Carly had discovered when she had transferred her meager account to the Benton Savings and Loan in advance of her own arrival—“spent two weeks helping her go through all her stuff beforehand. What Miss Virgie didn’t want they got rid of in a yard sale.”

“Still…”

Matt reached the doorway and turned back to look at her. Carly kept her eyes carefully fixed on his face. Letting her gaze stray to all those sexy muscles was a bad idea.

“Just do your best, okay? Think your grandmother’s silver candlesticks and stuff.”

“Fine.” There was a welcome snap to her voice as she began to recover from the ignominy of the reversion of her hair. Hair did not equal life, she told herself firmly. Just because her hair had resumed its detested childhood form practically the second she hit Benton didn’t mean the rest of her had to follow suit. She was all grown up, damn it. Captain of her own ship. Master of her own fate. Her awkward teenage years were well behind her, as was her blind adoration of the man she was now deliberately scowling at. It was all history. Vanished.
Pfft.
And so he needed to understand. But if either her expression or tone even registered with him, Matt ignored them, wrapping a hand around her elbow as casually as if they were on good terms and propelling her in the direction he wanted her to go.

“Hey, wait for me,” Sandra said in alarm, pan still in hand as she made haste to bring up the rear.

Since she was decidedly
not
on good terms with him, Carly jerked her arm free. Then as Matt stood aside with an ironic expression she preceded him through the pocket doors and flipped the light switch that controlled the chandelier that was a smaller twin of the one in the hall. With the room thus illuminated, she looked around. The front parlor was one of six large, mostly rectangular rooms on the first floor. Dominated by a crimson-upholstered, intricately carved Victorian sofa, it boasted gorgeous stained-glass panels at the top of the windows, which, unfortunately, were hidden now by the heavy drapes, ornate molding, and a huge Italian marble fireplace. A rocker and a wing chair of similar vintage as the sofa, marble-topped tables,
fringed lamps, a faded Oriental rug and about a thousand gewgaws completed the furnishings.

“This is nice,” Sandra said from the doorway. Carly glanced over her shoulder to find Sandra looking around judiciously. Of course, Sandra was thinking in terms of their bed-and-breakfast. Carly’s only thought right at that moment was a slightly disbelieving,
I’m home.
She was suddenly overwhelmed with the sights, sounds, and smells of her childhood. The grandeur of faded velvet; the rattle of the pocket doors being rolled into the wall; the scent of peppermint. Her grandmother had always kept a crystal dish full of peppermints.

A quick glance told her that the dish was there, on the table by the sofa, and the peppermints, shiny in their cellophane wrappers, were, too. Not the same ones, of course. But still, the same thing. Here in Benton, in this house, it was always the same thing.

The dour-looking portrait of her great-grandfather that had hung above the fireplace for as long as she could remember caught her eye. Looking at it, she suddenly felt about eight years old again.

That’s how old she had been when she had first walked into this room and set eyes on the portrait. Her grandmother, a forbidding figure dressed all in black, had that very day fetched her away from the County Home for Innocents. Small and frightened, intimidated by the huge, silent house, the finery all around her, and most of all the grim old woman, Carly had stood in this very spot, listening to her grandmother lecture her on what, in future, she would be expected to do and how she would be expected to behave while she did it. She’d been told that she was
lucky,
and she’d known it was true.

Poor little unwanted child, lucky to be rescued.

“Well?”

Matt’s voice, welcome under the circumstances, broke in on the rush of memories to pull her back to the present.

Carly took a deep breath and focused on him. He had been prowling around the room. Now he stood to one side of the sofa, casually unwrapping a peppermint as he looked at her. Carly almost had to smile. Matt had always loved those peppermints too.

“There’s nothing missing that I can see,” she said. “Everything looks exactly the same as it always did.”

If she sounded faintly suffocated, it was because she was starting to feel that way. Her childhood seemed to be closing in on her from all sides. Maybe, she thought with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, coming back here hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Maybe she should have jettisoned the past entirely and tried to make a fresh start for herself somewhere new.

But having John leave her for a twenty-two-year-old law student had been the psychic equivalent of being flattened by an eighteen-wheeler. Discovering during the course of the divorce that he’d systematically had all their assets—their condominium, their cars, their bank accounts and investments, and, in fact, almost everything they owned except her most personal possessions—put into his company’s name, which effectively deprived her of any claim on them, had been, in the end, even worse.

Wounded, vulnerable, and nearly broke, she’d looked at the rubble of her life post-marriage and done what many a devastated woman had done before her: hightailed it for home.

Her grandmother, whom she had grown to love dearly despite her prickly ways, was gone now. But this huge old-fashioned house, this gossipy small town where everybody knew her and she knew everybody, and the threads that had been spun together to make her who she was were still here. Life might have knocked her down, but she’d be damned if she stayed there. She was a past master at picking herself up, dusting herself off, and starting all over again. Instead of bemoaning what she had lost, she was going to go forward with what she had left: herself, and this house, this town, these people. They, all of them, were her roots; with them to build on, she was going to forge ahead.

“Uh-oh,” Sandra said, having crossed the room to look through the doorway on the far side of the fireplace. “Unless the lady who was living here was one real bad housekeeper, we got trouble. Carly, Sheriff, you better take a look.”

Matt and Carly exchanged glances, then started forward as one. Carly reached Sandra’s side first. Looking past her into the back parlor, which her grandmother had used as her own personal sitting room, Carly gasped. Miss Virgie had apparently turned it into some
kind of home office; at least, a desk, a cheap oak rolltop model that looked out of place amid the original dark Victorian furniture, had been added. It had also been trashed. The rolltop had been ripped clean off the desk; it lay in one corner of the room, looking at first glance like a discarded sheet of corrugated cardboard. Drawers had been emptied onto the worn Oriental carpet. Piles of paper lay in front of the desk in an ankle-high jumble of letters, bills, receipts, catalogues and more. Coins and odds and ends such as paper clips and rubber bands and pencils were scattered everywhere. The drawers themselves had been flung across the room. Scars in the white plaster bore mute witness that the drawers had been discarded with sufficient force to smack into the walls before crashing to the floor. What remained of the desk was empty; even the old-fashioned rotary phone dangled from the desktop by its cord.

“Looks like somebody was looking for something: money, maybe. Or a checkbook,” Matt said from behind her. His hands closed around Carly’s upper arms. Even as she glanced back at him, he moved her aside almost absently and walked past her into the room. “Don’t touch anything.”

The warning was delivered over his shoulder.

“I thought you said you didn’t have burglars in Benton,” Sandra said, looking at Carly accusingly. “You said the most dangerous thing that ever happened in Benton was the fireworks on the Fourth of July.”

Carly shrugged. What could she say?

Matt had reached the pile of paper and was frowning down at it when an unexpected sound split the air. Carly jumped. She was, she realized, still just a
little
on edge. The shrill summons was repeated insistently.

“It’s not mine,” Sandra said, throwing up two empty hands as though to prove her words as Matt pulled a shrieking cell phone from his pocket, punched a button and put it to his ear.

“Matt Converse here.” Carly watched his expression turn patient. “No, Mrs. Naylor, there’s no need for that. I’m fine. Yes, there was a prowler, but he ran off. You really saved the day, and we sure appreciate you keeping your eyes open like that. The lights are on now because
Carly Linton’s moving back in. You remember Carly, Mrs. Linton’s granddaughter? She just got here a little later than she meant to, is all. There’ll probably be lights on in the house for a while yet. No, there’s nothing to worry about. You go on to bed. I’ll tell her. You take care now. Bye.”

He disconnected and his gaze met Carly’s as he stuck the phone back into his pocket. “Mrs. Naylor saw lights come on in the house and got worried all over again. She wants you to come over for coffee and cake tomorrow, by the way. She said to tell you the cake’s red velvet—your favorite.”

Carly sighed. “Does she still spend all her time looking out her windows? It’s the middle of the night, for heaven’s sake. She’s an old lady; she should be in bed.”

A widow whose children had long since grown and gone, Mrs. Naylor had to be, by Carly’s calculations, approximately older than dirt.

Matt’s mouth quirked in sudden amusement. “I should warn you: she’s gone high-tech. She’s got binoculars now.”

“Cripes.”

Unspoken between them lay the memory of the numerous times over the years that Mrs. Naylor had called Carly’s grandmother to report on various youthful transgressions she had observed from her windows. Like the time Carly had lain in wait on the roof of the porch to pour a bucket of paint on Matt’s head in revenge for some bit of boyish teasing that she no longer remembered; or the time he had climbed up to her bedroom window to bring her a paper bag with a ham sandwich and a Coke in it, on one of the many occasions when she had been sent to bed without supper; or the time he’d given her a ride to school on the back of his motorcycle, which she’d been strictly forbidden to so much as sit on, when she’d missed the bus and had been in dire danger of being late, which would have knocked one percentage point off her grade point average and ruined her chances of being the class valedictorian, which, in the end, she hadn’t been anyway.

Mrs. Naylor’s eagle eyes had seen all, her flapping tongue had told
all, and Carly had usually paid the price. That last peccadillo had ended up with her being grounded for three weeks.

Less than a month later, Matt had found her hunched in a little ball of misery out in the barn, crying her eyes out because the prom was two weeks away and no one had asked her. Coaxing the embarrassing secret out of her, he’d dried her eyes, chucked her under the chin, and casually offered to be her date.

Whoever had said that if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, had hit the nail on the head. She had been more thrilled at the prospect of having Matt as her prom date than Cinderella could possibly have been at the coming of the glass slipper–bearing prince. The next few weeks, right up until a couple of days after the prom when she had first begun to suspect that her dazzling daydreams might have been just a little wide of the mark, had been among the happiest and most exciting of her life.

Of course, that was before she had begun to grasp that Matt was, at his core, a no good dirty rotten son of a bitch.

Remembering, her spine stiffened until it had the flexibility of a steel rod.

“That desk didn’t belong to your grandmother.” Matt’s voice, seeking confirmation of something he already knew, drew her eyes to him.

“No.” The single word was cold, abrupt.

He looked at her. Their gazes met and held. His eyes narrowed.

The lights went out. Total darkness, just like that.

Taken by surprise, Carly squeaked. Sandra did her one better; she let loose with a full-blown shriek. When Carly’s nerves returned from orbit, she punched Sandra in the arm.

“Ow.” Carly could sense rather than see Sandra rubbing her arm. “What was that for?”

“Okay,” Matt said before Carly could reply. Unnerved by the sudden loss of light, she found herself reaching out for him instinctively even as his hand, reaching too, made contact with her arm and slid down to grip her wrist. “I’m going for the flashlight. You want to wait here or come with me?”

He was talking to her, Carly knew, although she couldn’t see him. Couldn’t, in fact, see anything. In reply, she made a sound that was the snorted equivalent of,
What do you think?

“Yeah,” Sandra said, clearly having no difficulty translating. “I hear that.”

“So we’ll all go.” If Matt sounded a tad long-suffering, Carly discovered that she was prepared to overlook it under the circumstances. “Sandra, grab hold of Carly.”

“You got it.” Sandra clutched at Carly’s hand.

On the other side, Matt’s hand slid down to hold hers. The total inability to see was making Carly edgy all over again. She might be mad at Matt, but he was the closest thing to a port in the storm on offer. Her fingers twined with his on contact. His hand was warm and strong and reassuring as he tightened his grip.