Whispers at Midnight (25 page)

“Did I say you should hold it?” Carly suddenly felt so supportive of Sandra’s affliction that she just wanted to hug herself. “You definitely should not hold it. Holding it will probably do bad things to your bladder. And are you ever in luck. See, I just happen to know right where a bathroom is.”

“Where?” Mystified but eager, Sandra was looking all around even as Carly, plowing through the crowd with the ruthlessness of a baseball player headed for first, led the way across the street.

The local chamber of commerce had done its best to render the one-story brick building attractive. Flower-filled window boxes had been affixed to the one large picture window and the two smaller barred windows on either side of the gray metal door. The purple petunias and pink nasturtiums and trailing vines that crowded the boxes definitely added something to the building’s ambience. Carly just wasn’t certain what that something was. By the soft yellow light of ye olde corner streetlamp, Carly read the legend painted in black script on the door:
SCREVEN COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT
.

Carly smiled with satisfaction. Her heartbroken eighteen-year-old self might have thought she had no choice but to put up with Matt’s bad behavior. Her cool, calm, in control, mad as hell, not going to take it anymore thirty-year-old self knew differently: she could always go to Plan B.

As in, hunt the dirty rotten son of a bitch down.

“There’s a bathroom in here.” Giving Sandra a big, supportive smile, struggling to hang on to both cup and cooler handle at the same time, Carly nevertheless managed to get a good grip on the knob and pull open the Screven County Sheriff’s Department’s door.

17

“I
REALLY APPRECIATE THIS
, Matt,” Anson Jarboe said earnestly as Matt closed the cell door on him.

Matt looked at him standing on the other side of the long iron bars and shook his head. Bony, undersized, with untidy white hair and bloodshot blue eyes, Anson was wearing his usual attire of an undershirt and overalls. His face was its usual color too: a deep, flushed, boozy red.

“You ever thought it might be easier just to quit drinking?” Matt reattached the cuffs he’d used on Anson to his belt and headed for his desk, from which vantage point he could keep an eye on both his prisoner and the front door, and still check his messages. With everyone else out on crowd control, he and Anson were the only people in the office.

“I have quit. Ten, twenty times. It never took. Anyway, yelling at me gives Ida something to do.” He shook his head. “That woman sure can get mad. Sometimes she’s enough to put the fear of God right down deep inside me.”

“Like tonight.” Matt’s voice was dry. There were special-delivery packages on his desk, but not, he saw as he picked up the envelopes and looked through them, the particular one he’d been waiting for. Marsha Hughes had not turned up, alive and well or otherwise, and
he’d been doing some digging into both her and her boyfriend’s background. Marsha had two in-state ex-husbands and a sister in Tennessee, none of whom had so far responded to his phone messages. Kenan had previously lived in Clearwater, Florida. In the past there’d been some visits by the police to his residence there to check out reports of possible domestic violence. Kenan hadn’t been arrested, but Matt was interested anyway. He wanted to see what Clearwater had, and they’d promised to overnight him a copy of their file.

So far, it hadn’t come.

“It’s a national holiday! I was celebrating! Crazy old woman, she just wants me to sit around the house with her and watch TV.” Grumbling, Anson kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the bunk. There were three cells, side by side along the building’s east wall. Another cinder-block wall, painted off-white like the rest of the interior, stood between the cells and the front door and extended three-quarters of the way up the room, shielding the prisoners from the view of anyone coming into or leaving the building. “If you hadn’t been there, I don’t know what I would have done. Like I said, I sure appreciate you arresting me.”

“The jail isn’t a hotel.” Matt sat down behind his desk and started opening his mail. It was common knowledge around Benton that Anson and Ida Jarboe had been fighting for the entire forty-some years they’d been married. Usually it was over his drinking, but they were the type to fight over anything. The milder-tempered of the two, Anson usually got the worst of it. Lots of times when he’d been drinking he didn’t even bother to go home. He just stopped by the jail and got himself arrested. That way he didn’t have to face his wife until he’d slept it off.

“Makes a good one, though.” Anson chuckled, pulled the blanket over himself, and turned on his side. “Wake me up in time for breakfast, would you?”

Matt grunted by way of a reply. If ever there was a poster couple for not getting married, he thought, scanning an advertisement for Take ’Em Down, touted as a new,
professional-strength
pepper spray, Anson and Ida Jarboe were it.

The door opened. Matt glanced up.

Carly’s friend Sandra sort of backed in over the threshold. He frowned. He’d been hearing a lot about Sandra lately—Antonio kept raving about how the lady could cook—but he wouldn’t have expected to see her in the sheriff’s office, of all places, especially at this time of night. Then he saw that she was lugging a large cooler, or, rather, half a large cooler, and the other shoe dropped. Sure enough, hanging on to the south end of that cooler was Carly. Her head was down, her cute little backside was thrust out, and she was quickstepping as she played beat the door with the self-closing mechanism that always propelled it firmly shut.

Watching her, he had to smile.

Without warning she looked up and their gazes collided. The rush of familiarity, of homecoming, he experienced while his eyes were locked with those baby-doll blues almost shocked him, until he remembered that he’d looked into those eyes thousands of times before. They were part and parcel of his boyhood, of his wild, carefree, happily misspent youth, of his earliest forays into manhood. For the space of about a heartbeat, he was warmed by the sense of ease and comfort he took from her gaze, warmed enough to forget that he’d been keeping well away from her over the last four days for a reason, to forget that he couldn’t even take a shower now with the Irish Spring soap he’d been using for years because the smell conjured up instant, erotic visions of how she’d felt in his arms, to forget how close he had come to toppling into the tiger pit dug by the needs of a woman he cared about enough not to want to hurt.

Then he remembered, and his senses went on red alert. Quicker than a fly could dodge a swat, Matt realized that he was looking at trouble.

Carly smiled at him, sweet as sugar. “You don’t mind if Sandra uses your bathroom, do you?”

Make that trouble with a capital T. He knew Carly. The sweeter she smiled, the madder she was.

Shit. This he did not need.

“Help yourself. It’s right down there,” he said to Sandra, pointing to the hall on his right. There were rest rooms down there, and a break room, and the deputies’ cubicles. The evidence room and the
room where the guns were stored were down there too, kept locked up tight.

“Thanks,” Sandra said. She was indeed a big woman, Matt saw, reconfirming his previous impression, possibly bigger even than she appeared because of what his sisters had assured him were the slenderizing virtues of solid black, which she was wearing, but she was attractive nonetheless. He could see what Antonio saw in her. What he saw in her besides her cooking, that is, which, to Antonio at the moment, seemed to reign supreme. She and Carly set the cooler down just inside the door, then Sandra headed off toward the bathroom. Carly, on the other hand, headed toward him.

His first instinct was to stand up. She was a woman, after all, and his manners, having been drummed into him by a household full of women over the years, were relatively good where that kind of thing was concerned. But she was also Carly, his pal, and he wanted to keep it that way. If he started standing up when she walked into a room, then that put her in another category altogether, out of the friend column and into the other one, and he had already discovered that getting his columns mixed like that opened up a real can of worms. So he didn’t stand, settling back into his chair instead, stretching out his legs and linking his hands across his stomach in a deliberate assumption of ease as he watched her approach.

Pal or not, she had definitely grown up. She was small and curved in all the right places and her legs were tanned and slender beneath her mid-thigh-length shorts. Where most women of his acquaintance would have worn heels to make their legs look sexier, she wore tennis shoes—and her legs were plenty sexy enough to make his blood start to heat if he let himself think about them, which he didn’t. Her hips in the dark blue shorts were slim, her waist was narrow and her tomato red tee shirt did great things for her breasts. That soft wide mouth of hers that had been his downfall twice before was stretched into the extremely insincere sweet smile he’d previously noticed. Her cute little nose had been sunburned since he’d last seen her, and the color extended on out across her cheeks so that she looked all rosy and flushed. Her eyes, ordinarily a restful blue, a wide, baby-doll blue, were narrowed and glinting dangerously. Her outrageous
hair—he didn’t think he’d ever known anyone with such a crop of curls, or such an aversion to them—was tucked up beneath a denim baseball cap. But a number of spiraling tendrils had escaped to frame her face, and the result was—she looked pretty. Real pretty. She was blond now where she had been a soft light brown before, and stacked where she had been skinny. Maybe that accounted for the way he was having trouble keeping her firmly planted in his friend column. She looked like Carly, his pal, but better. Prettier. Sexier. In fact, way too sexy for his peace of mind.

To get his thoughts off just how much he’d like to take her to bed if only it wasn’t such a bad idea, he focused on the storm that was getting ready to break over his head. It was clear from her gait, from her smile, from the sparks in her eyes—hell, from everything about her—that she was meaning to tear a strip off his hide.

“Nice hat,” he said lazily, knowing that he was heaping coals on the fire but having too much fun watching her sizzle to be able to stop himself.

“Screw you.”

She had reached his desk and was marching around it. Since his chair had wheels, he rolled himself back a little so he had room to dodge if he had to, but kept the same relaxed posture because he could tell it annoyed the hell out of her.

“I hear you knocked down my mailbox.”

“I hear you called me a pain in the ass.”

She stopped in the general vicinity of his knees to glare at him. Still leaning back in his chair, Matt found that he was looking up into her face. This was a new position for them. He discovered that he kind of enjoyed it.

“Maybe you shouldn’t listen to gossip,” he said. She was so close to him now that her sexy bare leg brushed his thigh. If he wanted to, it would be the easiest thing in the world to reach out and grab her hipbones and pull her down so that she was straddling him and—

Jesus, what was he doing? No way did he want to go there even in his mind. Sleeping with Carly was the last thing he wanted to do. He knew she wasn’t the one-night-stand type. She wasn’t even the three-or
four-month, red-hot love affair type. She was the sex leads to commitment type, and that was dangerous to his plans.

“You,” she said, pointing an accusing finger at him even as she fixed him with those glinting blue eyes, “have issues. You have problems. You have hang-ups.”

“Don’t we all.”

“This thing you do—this kiss-and-run thing—it really doesn’t work for me.”

“You make it sound like we had a car accident.” A little humor to defuse the situation—now what was there in that to make her eyes flash so?

“You’ve been deliberately avoiding me.”

Obviously humor hadn’t worked as a defusing device.

“Just like you deliberately avoided me that entire summer after …” Here she hesitated. He knew where she was going; the only question was, how graphic was she going to be? “… after my prom.”

Not graphic at all. This was the Carly he knew, all right. Just blond and stacked and sexy as hell and all grown-up.

“Hey, give me a break. I apologized for that.” Which had turned out really well. So well, in fact, that they’d gone through pretty much the same rigmarole again, and she’d ended up here, chewing him out.

“The point I’m trying to make is that you might really want to think about working on your romantic technique.”

“Now, wait—” He’d never had any complaints. Except, now that he thought about it, about the tendency he’d exhibited over the years to, uh, kiss and run.

“Because it sucks. It really, truly sucks.”

Then, before he had any inkling of what she meant to do, she took her big plastic cup and upended it over his head.

The sheer iciness of it hit him first. “What the hell?” he roared, leaping to his feet and brushing his hands over his head. His hair was wet, cold, sticky. Frigid droplets flew everywhere, and a squeezed shapeless lemon half hit the floor. He looked at it in disbelief.