Whispers at Midnight (22 page)

Okay, so maybe she was going to live.

To a chorus of
be careful
s and
you might want to take it easy for a few minutes,
Carly slowly sat up. The broom she’d commandeered for the abortive rescue attempt lay nearby. More brooms and mops and the vacuum cleaner and assorted boxes and bags littered the spot from which she had launched her ill-fated invasion of the porch. A quick scan of her surroundings revealed that neither Hugo nor the dog were anywhere in sight. She didn’t hear any barking either. Clearly the dog had abandoned the chase.

Poor little dog, it had looked half-starved.

Of course, that didn’t excuse it for trying to eat her cat.

“Did you see where Hugo went?” Deciding to go for it, she struggled to her feet. Hands grabbed her arms and helped her get safely upright. She wasn’t hurt, but she was grateful for the support. She was, she discovered, just a little unsteady on her feet. Good thing it had been so long since the yard had seen a lawn mower. The long grass had cushioned her fall.

“He’s up there.” Antonio’s voice was dry as he jerked his head toward the huge birch. Carly looked up, way up, way, way up, into the tree’s leafy dome and sure enough there was Hugo, crouched on a branch, staring down at her.

“Hugo! Come down here!”

Hugo’s tail twitched disdainfully. It was the only sign he gave of having heard.

“Damned cat,” Carly muttered under her breath.

“Amen to that,” Sandra said.

Carly shot her a dirty look.

“Listen, how about if we wait a little bit to see if your cat comes down on its own?” Mike asked, having just finished exchanging alarmed glances with Antonio.

Carly frowned. Something in the atmosphere told her that the men really, truly didn’t want to go up that tree after Hugo. But then, there really wasn’t any need for them to. Unlike last night, she knew where he was, and he was hardly likely to come to harm in a tree. If he didn’t come down by himself within a reasonable period of time,
then
she would worry. After all, Hugo’s days of lazily surveying the world through a high-rise apartment’s picture window were over. The good
news was, now he got to live life rather than just watch it. The bad news was the same as the good news.

“Yes, fine, I—”

She broke off as the front door opened. Carly caught the movement from the corner of her eye, and then her head turned and she watched with surprise as a white-haired, sixtyish man stepped out onto the porch. He was neatly dressed in a blue short-sleeved shirt and dark pants. A leather tool belt was buckled around his waist. A moment later he was joined by a younger man, fair-haired, stockily built and dressed in jeans.

Carly stared at them in surprise. Who were they, and what were they doing in her house?

“Almost done,” the older man called to them with a cheery wave, then crouched down and started doing something to her front door. Steadying the door, the younger man lifted a hand in greeting, too.

“Hey, Walter, Barry.” Antonio waved back. He glanced at Carly. “Why don’t you go on inside and sit down? That was some fall you took.”

“I’m okay,” Carly said, although she could already feel a few twinges that told her she was going to have some aches and pains later. “Walter and Barry?”

“Walter and Barry Hindley,” Antonio said, as he and Sandra and Mike shepherded her up the stairs.

Walter and Barry Hindley,
Carly thought. She remembered them both. Walter owned—or at least he used to own—Hindley’s Hardware Store in town. Besides selling nails and hammers and all that other good hardware stuff, he had also sold candy and comic books. Every kid in town had been a regular in Mr. Hindley’s store. Barry was the Hindleys’ only son. He’d been a year ahead of Carly in high school. A jock, he hadn’t been anyone she’d known well. She’d never been on any of the high school boys’ lists of top ten hot chicks.

Once she was close enough, she recognized them both.

“Hello, Mr. Hindley, Barry,” she said, conscious of a few more twinges as she crossed the porch. The
who
had been answered, but she still had to find out what they were doing in her house.

“Carly? Hi,” Barry said, looking her up and down with transparent
surprise as she stopped beside him. He’d put on a little weight, but otherwise had hardly changed at all.

“Well, hello there, Carly.” Mr. Hindley glanced up with a smile. Beyond adding a few pounds and a few wrinkles, he had not, she thought, changed much at all either, except that today he held a screwdriver in one hand and in the other her dismembered doorknob. “Good to have you back home.”

“It’s good to be back home.” She smiled at them both, but could contain her curiosity no longer. “What are you guys doing?”

Barry looked surprised. “Didn’t Matt tell you? He asked us to come around today and change your locks. He said you needed some new ones bad.”

“I would’ve waited till later, but Ellen and I’ve got the grandkids coming this afternoon,” Mr. Hindley said. “So I just decided to go ahead and miss church and drag Barry over here with me and get it done.”

“No, Matt didn’t tell me.” Since Barry was holding the door open, Carly went on ahead and stepped inside. Somebody had turned on the window units, she was glad to notice. The air inside the house was twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. “But I sure appreciate your missing church.” She looked at Barry. “And I appreciate you taking time away from your family.”

He shook his head and smiled slowly at her. “I’m not married. The grandkids Dad’s talking about belong to my sister.”

“Oh,” Carly said. From his smile, she had little doubt that Barry had a reason for telling her that. But she had zero interest in him. And the reason for her lack of interest, she realized with chagrin, stood about six-one, with black hair.

“Put you on some nice deadbolts,” Mr. Hindley said. “And fixed your windows so nobody’s going to be coming in that way. Ron Graves’ll be by later to put your security system in for you. Once that’s done, I don’t see how old Harry Houdini himself could get in your house.”

“Security system?” Carly asked, annoyed with herself for
not
being interested in Barry. Her three nursemaids were in the hall with
her now, making the area around the door feel a little crowded. “What security system?”

Mr. Hindley adjusted the position of the door and gripped it with his knees. Eyeballing a pencil mark he’d apparently made earlier, he scored it into the wood with the screwdriver. Barry handed him a drill.

“The one Matt said you had to have installed today so you’d feel safe tonight sleeping in your granny’s house,” Barry said.

Mr. Hindley added, “He called Ron early this morning and asked him to do it. On account of the break-in. Matt said it was urgent, so Ron said he would.”

Matt said.
As far as Carly was concerned, the too-often repeated words were by now the verbal equivalent of waving a red flag at a bull. She looked at Barry with determinedly fresh eyes. He was a perfectly nice guy, as far as she could recall. It was good to know that Benton’s eligible males did not begin and end with Matt. But any chance Carly might have had to offer verbal encouragement to Barry was drowned out as Mr. Hindley turned on the drill. Then Barry winked at her.

Okay, he might be a perfectly nice guy but she wasn’t feeling it at the moment, she decided. Probably because she was still so mad at Matt.

“If you don’t want the security system, I guess you could call Ron Graves and tell him not to come,” Antonio said doubtfully after taking one look at Carly’s face. His voice was raised to be heard over the sound of the drill. “Matt said you’d want it, though.”

“We want it,” Sandra said before Carly could reply. Giving her a
don’t-you-dare
look, Sandra dragged Carly away.

It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want the system, Carly reflected indignantly, although paying for it was certainly an issue. But
Matt said
didn’t mean
Matt got.
Not with her it didn’t. Not anymore. Anyway, it was his sheer high-handedness in arranging to have the thing installed without bothering to so much as mention it to her first that annoyed the stuffing out of her. Same thing with the new locks. And with asking his deputies to help her move in. It was her house, they
were her doors and it was her move. And none of them were any of Matt’s business. Her
life
was none of Matt’s business, and so she meant to make clear to him the minute she laid eyes on him again. And when that was taken care of, then maybe she’d be ready to start taking advantage of Benton’s singles scene.

In the process of being towed into the parlor, Carly caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the radiator. Her gaze was already moving on when she did a double-take and stopped dead, dislodging Sandra’s hand from her arm in the process.

In the teeth of her best efforts, her years of blow-dryer expertise, and the wonders of modern chemistry, her curls were back. Just like nearly everything else in her life since she had returned to Benton, her hair seemed determined to turn back the clock.

“No,” she whispered despairingly as she stared at her reflection in disbelief. Twisting spirals of hair clustered on her forehead, around her ears, down her neck.

“Uh, we’ll just get back to unloading that truck,” Antonio called over the whirr of the drill.

“That would be great,” Sandra replied, her tone artificially bright. “I’ll be right out to help. Just let me get Carly settled.”

“No rush on that.” Antonio waved a hand dismissively. “You take your time.”

The deputies went back out the door, which was still open as Barry and Mr. Hindley worked. As soon as they were out of sight, Sandra grabbed Carly’s arm again and hauled her bodily into the front parlor.

“Don’t even
think
about telling somebody not to put in that security system,” Sandra said, crossing her arms over her chest and fixing Carly with a forbidding stare as, sapped of her last bit of strength by the horror in the mirror, Carly sank bonelessly down on the sofa. “I don’t care what that hunky sheriff did to make you mad, I want that security system. You get to have a cat, I get to have a security system.”

Visions of her culinary better half cutting and running back to Chicago trumped Carly’s determination to symbolically thumb her nose at Matt. Sandra in a snit was nothing to mess with. Sandra
scared and in a snit—the havoc that could result was too much to contemplate.

“Fine,” Carly said, crossing her arms too and glaring at Sandra even as she tried to make herself comfortable on the sofa. Even if she hadn’t had a bruised tailbone and achy muscles it would have been impossible, as she should have remembered from childhood. The thing was stuffed with horsehair and, despite its magnificent velvet upholstery, hard as a rock. Pair the unforgiving piece of furniture with her banged-up body, and comfort wasn’t even a possibility.

“Damn right, fine,” Sandra said with satisfaction, then turned to smile meltingly at Antonio as he carried the boxes he’d dropped earlier into the house.

Carly stuck her tongue out at Sandra’s back. Then, in the interests of doing what she could to soothe her battered body, mind, and soul, she reached instinctively for the elixir that had never failed to make her feel better as a little girl in this house: she picked up a peppermint, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth.

By the time suppertime rolled around, the truck was unloaded. Boxes in various stages of being emptied were strewn all over the house. Clothes were tucked away in chests and closets. Towels, soap and various assorted toiletries were in the bathrooms. With the worst of her discomfort eased by megadoses of Tylenol, Carly was feeling almost as good as new. She had unpacked most of her belongings and had even made up the bed in her childhood bedroom, which she had elected to keep as her own. The practical reason for her choice was that it was one of the smaller rear bedrooms, and the larger front bedrooms would better please paying guests. The real reason for her choice was, it just felt right. Sandra had settled on another of the smaller rooms—not coincidentally the one right next to Carly’s—which left four bedchambers that they could rent out. She had reacquainted herself with the house, which, besides the six downstairs rooms plus bath, consisted of six bedrooms plus two baths on the second floor and the entire third floor, which was basically one huge room. At some point, Carly hoped that the business would be doing well enough so that it became both necessary and desirable to turn
the third floor into additional guest quarters. For now, it was going to be all their budget could handle just to refurbish the two lower floors. The mess the burglar had made of the back parlor had been cleaned up as well as possible, but the dents in the plaster walls would require repair. Other than that, the downstairs was in decent shape. With a good scrubbing and a couple of coats of fresh paint, the front and back parlors, the music room, which was directly across the hall from the front parlor, the dining room, which adjoined the music room, and the kitchen and breakfast room, which adjoined the dining room, were good to go. New, commercial grade appliances would have to be purchased for the kitchen, of course, but most of the available money would have to go to refurbishing the newly designated guest rooms and such essentials as upgrading the wiring.

The house, which had felt dark and closed-in for as long as Carly could remember, was already starting to take on a whole new ambience. To Carly it felt like it was waking up after a long sleep. She wasn’t sure how it had happened, exactly, but by suppertime it was bursting to the seams with people, all of whom seemed to be intent on one thing: food. Sandra’s food, to be precise. Never happier than when she had a crowd to cook for, Sandra was at the stove, concocting a delectable-smelling shrimp scampi out of ingredients she had scavenged from the pantry and deep freeze. Carly herself was standing at one of the long counters making a salad, which was one of the few cooking-related tasks Sandra was willing to delegate to her. The salad consisted of tomatoes and onions donated by Mrs. Naylor, who, along with her daughter, Martha Highcamp, and an elderly friend had stepped across the road at around four
P.M.
to bring Carly a welcome-home present of her famous Red Velvet cake. By some process that escaped Carly, the three had ended up deciding to stay for dinner, with Mrs. Naylor’s garden’s bounty having been placed at Sandra’s disposal and her cake as the prospective dessert. Antonio and Mike were still there, obviously tired but hanging on in the lipsmacking expectation of eating soon. Ron Graves, having just finished wrapping up the installation of the security system, had made a number of appreciative comments about the aroma and had accepted with alacrity the subsequent invitation to stay and eat. Loren
Schuler had dropped in to see about removing her aunt’s damaged desk, gotten into a discussion with Martha Highcamp about a Fourth of July committee they were both on, and decided that she could eat, too. Rounding out the party, Matt’s sister Erin had stopped by to return an earring Sandra had left behind. She was still there, perched on a kitchen counter shooting the breeze, giving no indication that she meant to go anywhere else anytime soon. Observing her laughing with Mike, Carly concluded that she was hanging around largely because he was present. Certainly Sandra’s food did not appear to be the motivating force for her that it was for the others. Given that Erin was engaged to Collin Holcomb, her apparent pleasure in the deputy’s company set off little warning bells in Carly’s mind. But Erin’s doings were none of her business, Carly reminded herself, deliberately focusing her attention instead on slicing the onions thin enough to suit Sandra’s requirements. Just because everybody in this little town continually meddled in the affairs of everyone else, did not mean that she had to follow suit. She might have returned to Benton, but she had not been repossessed by it.