Whispers at Midnight (16 page)

So tonight he had rescued her killer cat, and was bringing it to her as a kind of penance. And he guessed that, sometime over the course of the next few days, he was going to have to work himself up to presenting her with a full-blown, heartfelt apology.

Which in her newly belligerent incarnation she would probably tell him to stuff right up there where the sun don’t shine.

Smiling a little ruefully at the picture this conjured up, Matt let himself into his dark house—meeting with no unwelcome surprises this time, thank God—and started up the stairs, the razor-clawed behemoth crouched silently at the bottom of a canvas duffel bag (courtesy of Toler), which he carried out in front of him as carefully as if it held a bomb.

It was now just after four
A.M.
Carly’s grandmother’s house had been searched, photographed, and dusted for fingerprints. The grounds and outbuildings had been searched. The damned cat had been rescued. Just as he’d been battling to bag the beast, his phone had rung. On the other end had been Cindy Nichols, reporting
ghostly knockings in her bedroom that were scaring her to death. As Mrs. Nichols had been growing increasingly paranoid about the supposed poltergeist in her house, and he’d already personally made several calls to check it out, he didn’t feel obliged to answer this one. Instead, after ascertaining the woman’s location—she’d locked herself in her bedroom closet and was whispering to him on her cell phone so as not to alert the poltergeist to her location—he’d dispatched Antonio, who’d been laughing so hard over his superior’s struggles with the cat that he’d had to sit down on the ground, to do the honors.

His only hope was that this time the poltergeist was ready, willing and able to terrorize someone besides Mrs. Nichols. Antonio, for example.

Then he’d called it a day and, complete with his bagged peace offering, headed for home. He’d been on the job since seven that—no, make it the previous—morning, and he was dead beat. The county council was either going to have to break down and cough up the funds for an additional deputy or two, or they were going to have to start pulling shifts themselves.

Reaching the top of the stairs, he paused, recollected that he wasn’t sure where Carly was sleeping, and mentally shrugged. Whatever choice he made—his room or Erin’s—he had a fifty percent chance of being right. In any case, as long as
he
didn’t have to sleep within claws’ reach of the cat from hell, it didn’t matter. He knew for a fact that his room had a strong door and a sturdy latch, which were all that the situation required. He’d shut his prisoner in good and tight, check to make sure Dani was home, and if she was, head downstairs to sleep. If she wasn’t …

Hell, she was twenty years old. Nine months out of the year she was away at college and he had no idea how she spent her nights. If she wasn’t in her bedroom he would head downstairs and collapse on the couch and go to sleep anyway.

He opened the door to his bedroom quietly, not wanting to wake whoever was sleeping inside. Blocking the exit with his body so the damned cat couldn’t get past him, being as quiet as possible, he upended the duffel bag and shook the monster out—not without a certain
degree of satisfaction as it landed with a
thump,
then stayed put, lashing its tail but looking dazed. He was still looking down at the cat when he realized that he could actually
see
it, that the visibility in his bedroom was significantly better than in the rest of the dark house. Glancing up, he saw why: the light had been left on in his bathroom. The door was open no more than a crack, but it was enough. He looked at the bed, curious to know if it was occupied by Carly or her friend. His brow knit as he realized that it was empty. The pillows were in disarray, the covers had been thrown back, but nobody was in it.

He was just making the obvious connection—whoever had been in his bed was now in the bathroom—when his gaze, for some obscure reason that was forever lost to him, was drawn to the far corner of the room. There, in his comfy old BarcaLounger, sat Carly. She was huddled in a little ball with her knees drawn up to her chin, looking impossibly small and lost.

She was looking at him. Shrouded in shadows, dwarfed by his chair, sitting silent and motionless in what he guessed was the hope that he wouldn’t notice her, she was watching his every move. For the space of a couple of heartbeats he felt an unfamiliar combination of nervous and guilty as he recollected his lack of tender loving care in connection with the delivery of her pet.

Then he realized something else. With a fist pressed against her mouth, she was fighting to hold back sobs, and doing a piss-poor job of it, too.

Shit. He didn’t want to know. He really didn’t. For the past seven years he’d been drowning in a sea of pink. Ever since his mother’s death when he’d turned his back on a promising career in the Marine Corps to come home and raise his young sisters, he’d been dealing on a daily basis with a whole spectrum of generally incomprehensible female emotions. Now, when he was finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel, did he want to add yet another freak-out prone female to his problem pool?

No. Hell, no. No way.

But this was Carly. He’d been looking out for her since she was eight years old. To his own disgust, he was discovering that his protective
instincts where she was concerned were still strong. Their friendship might have hit kind of a pothole there in the backseat of his car, but the infrastructure was still intact. He was beginning to realize that a long-standing relationship like theirs was kind of like riding a bicycle—once you’d learned how it worked, it was forever imprinted in your brain. He couldn’t just walk away and leave her sitting there all alone in the dark, crying.

Damn it to hell and back anyway.

“Hey,” he said, striving for a light note. “What’s up?”

“Go away.” There was a detectable thickness to her voice—from bitter experience he extrapolated from it that she’d been crying for a good little while—but her tone was definitely hostile.

Good, he told himself. She didn’t want him around. He was off the hook. He could just turn tail and…

She sniffed. Not a delicate little sniff, either. A good, solid, haul-it-all-back-up-inside-there sniff.

“Damn,” he muttered, resigning himself to his fate as he stepped inside his bedroom and closed the door behind him. The cat, no friend, hissed at him as he moved toward it and scrambled away to hide under the bed. Matt paid scant attention. Crossing the room to Carly’s side, cursing the luck that had caused him to open her door at just that moment, he stopped in front of the chair to look down at her. Sliding his hands into his pockets and rocking back on his heels, he considered her silently through the wealth of shadows that shrouded the chair. Her eyes rose to meet his, gleaming as they reflected the light from his bathroom back at him.

If anything, he thought, she looked even smaller and more vulnerable than before from this angle, with her body as closely wound together as a paper clip and her head full of curls thrown back to expose the pale column of her throat. She was wearing long pajama pants and a tiny little knit top that exposed part of her midriff, and her feet were bare. Except for the change in hair color and the newly womanly curves that he couldn’t help but notice, she looked exactly as he remembered her from when she was about sixteen years old.

Shit.

“I found your cat.”

If that was her problem, he was in luck; it was already solved.

“Yippee. Thanks a lot. Now go away.”

So when had his luck ever been that good? Besides being thick, her voice had a noticeable catch in it. From her tone it was clear that he had not saved the day. Knowing women, she could be crying over anything. But whatever had turned on her faucets, she’d clearly been going at it pretty hard. With her face tilted up to his he had no problem telling that her eyes were swollen and her nose was red. Her cheeks were marred by tear tracks so wet they were shiny, too.

Shit.

“Okay, Curls, give it up. What’s the problem?” So he was not exactly coming off like Sympathy Central. He was practically out on his feet and a weeping woman—any weeping woman—was the last thing in the world he wanted to deal with at the moment. But he was dealing, which in his opinion counted for a lot.

Her eyes narrowed at him.

“Exactly what part of
go away
did you not understand?”

Her antagonism had exactly the opposite effect to what she apparently intended. It touched him. The thing about Carly was, she was about as big as a mosquito and as girly-looking as she could be with her big blue eyes and head full of curls, but she’d always had plenty of fight. Even more than he had, she’d experienced a world full of hurt in her life, and yet here she was, still coming out swinging. He admired that in a person, male or female.

“Right now I’ll take a pass on the whole concept. I want to know why you’re crying, and I’m not going to go away until you tell me.”

“So stand there all night and see if I care.”

Matt sighed. At this rate he wasn’t going to be hitting the sack anytime soon. “You know you’re being childish as hell, right?”

“So what? You’re being nosy as hell, so I’d say that makes us even. Anyway, it’s none of your damned business why I’m crying.”

“Sure it’s my business. Hey, I’m practically your oldest friend.” Sometimes, with women, cajolery worked. As late as it was, and as tired as he was, anything was worth a try.

“Here’s a news flash for you: We’re not friends. We don’t even know each other anymore.”

So much for cajolery. She sniffed again, as disgustingly as before. Matt mentally abandoned all hope of catching any sleep before dawn and dropped into a crouch in front of her.

“What’s the matter, baby?” There was so much tenderness in his voice that it even surprised him.

She glared at him. It would have been a real good glare except her lips trembled at the same time.

“I had a bad dream, okay? It woke me up, but I’m fine now. Or at least, I would be if you’d run along and mind your own business and leave me to mind mine.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“No.”

“Was it about your mother?” Her mother had been a neglectful, man-loving drunk who’d left her only child in the care of neighbors for days at a time while she went off somewhere to party. Finally, one day, she simply hadn’t come back; later Carly had found out that she’d lit out for California and a new life with her latest boyfriend. After a while, when the neighbor caring for Carly realized that she’d been left holding the bag, she had called social workers to come and get the child. They did, and Carly had ended up in an institution for what the state called children in crisis. And there she had stayed until her grandmother, whom Carly had never before in her life even met, had come to fetch her away. All this Matt knew because everybody in Benton knew it. That for years afterward she’d had nightmares about her mother’s abandonment of her was his own private piece of information. He knew it because Carly had told him about the nightmares herself, whimpering like a little wounded animal in his awkward and reluctant arms. In his experience, recalling her mother was the only thing that had ever made Carly cry.

“No!” There was outrage in her face now. Clearly she didn’t like being reminded that he knew what pushed her buttons.

“It wasn’t?”

“No! It was about the Home, okay?”

“Ah.” The Home, he knew, referred to the institution where the state had parked her before her grandmother had shown up. “It must have been pretty bad, to make you cry.”

“It was—horrible.” Her voice trembled, and he realized that she was talking about the experience itself rather than the dream. It occurred to him that she’d never really said anything before about the time she’d spent there. She hadn’t been there long—not more than a week or two, he was pretty sure. Too brief an interlude to have made much of an impression, he’d thought until now. Anyway, one of her grandmother’s favorite expressions had been, no use crying over spilled milk. Carly hadn’t gotten much encouragement to dwell on past hurts from that stern old woman.

“So tell me.”

“I haven’t even thought about it in years,” she said, her voice so low and husky that he had to strain to hear. “I don’t know what made me … Tonight, for some reason, I dreamed I was back there. There were—these old iron bunk beds that creaked every time you moved. In the dream, I heard one of them creak.” She paused, took a deep breath. “I was so scared.”

Her voice shook. Pressing her fist to her mouth again as though she was determined not to cry, she looked at him over it as if daring him to comment. Then all that courage was undermined by physiology as tears overflowed her eyes to gush down her cheeks.

Those tears hit him like a blow to the heart.

“Hey,” he said, and stood up. She didn’t even try to resist when he scooped her up as easily as if she’d still been a little girl and sat down in his chair with her on his lap. Instead, she wrapped her arms around his neck and burrowed her face into his shoulder and wept out what seemed like a whole ocean’s worth of tears there in his arms. He didn’t say much beyond murmuring
shh
and
it’s okay
at appropriate intervals, but he held her close and listened to her largely incomprehensible murmurings and was simply there, which he had figured out by trial and error over the years was pretty much all that occasions like this called for.

Eventually she got herself all cried out. She lay limp and spent against his chest, her arms curled around his neck still but slackened off some from the stranglehold she had first put on him. Her breathing was ragged—he could feel the uneven rise and fall of her chest—but the sobs had ceased.

“Better?” He smoothed her hair away from the ear closest to his mouth. The springy curls wrapped around his fingers, cool and faintly coarse, just as they had always done whenever he’d touched them. His cheek brushed hers as he spoke. Her skin was damp. And silky soft. She smelled faintly, familiarly of Irish Spring—he realized she must have taken a shower with
his
soap—and some kind of fruity shampoo.