A Stillness of Chimes (26 page)

“Not a problem. She’s pretty darned normal most of the time. Come on over, anytime.”

“Thanks. Maybe I’ll bring some of my mom’s papers to sort through.”

“Good idea. Bring enough busywork so my mom won’t draft you to help with her eternal scrapping.” Cassie yawned. “We’ll have a sleepover tonight. I’ll see ya when you show up.”

“I’ll be there soon.” Laura closed her phone, pleased with herself for having told the truth but not the whole truth. Cassie didn’t need to know about the man at the window. Not yet.

Throwing off the remnants of sleep, Sean raised his head and frowned at the quilt on his chest. He couldn’t comprehend how it got there.

Something poked his side. “Rise and shine, bodyguard. You’ve been sleeping on the job.”

He blinked. Laura came into focus, sitting on the couch with her big toe prodding his ribs. She’d changed to jeans and a sleeveless white shirt. The outfit reminded him of long, hot days, fishing on Hamlin Lake before it had become the scene of a tragedy. Before she’d moved to Denver, where she turned pale in the wintertime. He wanted her to move back, to go fishing with him and get her fisherman’s tan back—except she’d insist on sunscreen for both of them.

He seized her foot. “Sorry, but that’s the kind of service a client gets when she doesn’t pay her bodyguard one red cent.”

Her foot escaped his grasp. “The coffee’s free, though. You want some?”

“Yeah. I’ll make it.”

“Why do you always insist on making it?”

“You make it too strong.”

“Wimp,” she said.

Her smile wasn’t quite genuine. And no wonder, after the bomb she’d dropped on him in the middle of the night. But if she didn’t want to talk anymore about her mom and Gibby, neither did Sean. He’d rather not even think about it.

He rose, dropped the quilt on the couch, then picked up his gun and placed it on top of Jess’s tall, thirty-year-old television cabinet that hadn’t held a TV in years. In the kitchen, he pulled the coffee out of the cupboard. He filled the lid of the coffee grinder with beans and dumped them into the hopper. But the grinder was obstinate.

He picked it up and shook it. “This thing has a short in it somewhere.” He pressed the button again, and it decided to work.

He faced Laura, his mind swimming with ideas about security lights, alarms, peepholes in the doors. “We need a plan.”

“I’ve got one. Part of one, anyway. I’ll spend the day at the Brights’ house. The night too. Then you won’t feel like you have to baby-sit me.”

The knot of tension inside him began to unwind. “Good idea.”

“I’m already packed, and Cassie’s expecting me. She says we’ll have a sleepover. I guess she’ll want to watch movies and eat junk food.”

“Excellent,” he said, already starting to tune out the rest.

As the coffee brewed, he made his plans. With Laura safe and sound at the Brights’ place, he’d be free to take care of business.

She poured coffee for both of them, putting hers in a travel mug, and regarded him with a solemn expression. “While I’m gone,” she said softly, “if anybody shows up, whether it’s my dad or someone else, I don’t want any guns. Understand?”

Sean hesitated, picturing himself face to face with an intruder. Keith had learned in the service that if somebody’s aiming at you, you don’t mess around.
“It ain’t Hollywood,”
Keith said.
“Aim to kill—or be killed.”

“The guy at the window probably wasn’t your dad, Laura. Understand?”

“You have no way of knowing that. But here’s the bottom line. My dad’s safety is my top concern. Don’t be trigger-happy, just in case it’s him. Do
you
understand?”

Sean was silent. As far as he knew, Elliott had never hurt anybody except the time he blew up at Gary and the time he decked Dale. Maybe the fact that Gibby lived in Nashville had saved him.

Laura took a step closer. “Sean, I know you’re safety conscious, but accidents happen. You don’t want to accidentally shoot Dale either, do you?”

He chuckled. “Now that you mention it …”

“That’s not funny. Promise me. No guns.”

“No guns while you’re gone,” he said with a sigh.

“You mean it?”

“I mean it.” But when she came back, that was a different story.

“And don’t go around telling people what happened last night. Remember, I don’t want the sheriff’s department to get involved. I can’t tell law enforcement ‘no guns.’ ”

Sean considered her request. He was willing to get the law involved if Laura’s safety was at stake, but not just to track down rumors. She’d be perfectly safe at the Brights’ house. And he would find a way to make her stay longer than overnight.

“You’re right,” he said. “I won’t tell anybody.”

“Okay, then. I’m off. And don’t you dare baby-sit the house all day.”

She tapped his chest with her forefinger. “Sean Michael Halloran, up-and-coming luthier, doesn’t have time to moonlight as a house-sitter. The festival starts on Friday.”

“Friday’s just the warmup, remember? I won’t open my booth until Saturday morning.”

“And Saturday will be here before you know it. Go home and get to work.”

He was already making a mental list of the tools he’d pick up. His phone too. He couldn’t live without his phone.

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

Finally, she smiled. “Good boy.” She picked up Mikey and kissed the top of his head. “You be a good boy too. Don’t run off.”

Sean moved closer. “I should stick my head between you and the cat so you’ll kiss me by accident. You might even like it. I promise I don’t have fleas.”

“Neither does Mikey—and he never bosses me around.” She rubbed her face against Mikey’s and set him on the floor.

“But I’m a better kisser than Mikey,” Sean said. “I have real lips. I’m sure you remember them. Like I remember yours.”

Her cheeks turned pink, but she didn’t answer. She slung the handles of a small overnight bag over her shoulder and crouched to pick up a cardboard file box that looked a little too heavy for her.

“Let me get it, whatever it is.”

“It’s Mom’s papers to sort through,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone that belied the blush on her face. “It’ll give me something to do while I listen to Ardelle’s chitchat.”

“Good luck with that.” He nudged her out of the way and took charge of the box.

She headed toward her mom’s SUV instead of her own car. She’d already put For Sale signs in the windows. He followed, hobbling barefoot across the sharp gravel.

While Laura climbed behind the wheel, he put the box in the back of the SUV and shut the door. The vehicle had been kept in the garage since shortly after Jess died, and old, dried marks from the wiper blade still made a gray peacock’s fan on the dirty glass of the rear window. The last time she drove to town, it must have been a rainy day. Her last day to run errands.

“Bye,” Laura called, using that matter-of-fact tone again.

“Bye. Be good.”

“You too.” She started the engine and then leaned her head out the window. “Thanks for staying with me.”

“I’m glad you called.”

Picking his way back over the gravel, Sean remembered finding that secondhand SUV for Jess. She’d wanted something reliable to last ten years or so. He’d kidded her about ditching her old minivan because she was tired
of the soccer mom image that came with it. She’d joked about wanting to be a soccer grandma one day.

He pictured three or four redheads playing soccer. Riding their bikes. Bouncing on a trampoline, screaming, having a ball. Maybe one of them would be a little girl dragging a doll along everywhere she went.

Lord willing, someday he’d be the kind of father who would teach a kid how to fly a kite or swing a hammer or play a guitar. The kind of father who gave hugs. The kind of father who couldn’t make a kid cower in a corner just by looking at him.

On the steps, he brushed gravel from the soles of his feet and looked up in time to see the SUV disappear around the bend. He blew out a long sigh of relief. Laura was safe.

He wondered what he would do if their trespasser had a gun. Especially if he proved to be Elliott after all.

Sean couldn’t imagine firing at a broken-down wreck of a man, but he couldn’t picture Elliott that way. He’d always been a lithe, strong outdoors-man with a quick smile. He’d had a simple tattoo on one muscular forearm, the lettering vaguely Celtic in style. The two words looked as if they’d been lifted from the middle of a sentence because they weren’t capitalized:
life everlasting
, with the tail of the
g
curving into the purple vein on his wrist.

Elliott had never volunteered anything about the significance of the tattoo, and Sean had never asked.

Slowly, he walked inside. Life everlasting was all well and good, but he had to focus on the here and now. He’d start with a trip to the hardware store.

Laura was about to lower the file box to the Brights’ doorstep so she’d have a hand free to use the shiny brass door knocker, but the door swung open. Cassie stood there in a tank top and cutoffs, her hair turbaned in a pale yellow towel. She took the box, leaving Laura with nothing to carry but her purse and the overnight bag.

“Come on in,” Cassie said. “Let’s go back to my room. Well, it’s the guest room. I don’t exactly have my own room here.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“On the phone with Tig.”

Laura followed Cassie across travertine tiles to the living room, where the funeral plants were still clustered around the fireplace, then down the hall to the plush white carpet of a sunny bedroom. The walls were an even softer shade of the towel’s yellow. The bed linens and the curtains were tastefully subdued but almost too well coordinated with each other.

“Very nice,” Laura said, taking it in. “Just like the rest of the house. I feel like I’ve stepped into a decorating magazine.”

“Yeah, it makes me feel like a peon. We live in the tiniest, ugliest apartment ever. You’ll have to come see us sometime so you can feel superior. Aw, rats. Here comes my mom already.”

Ardelle stuck her head in. “Is that Laura I hear? Hey, honey. It’s so good to see you. Are you doing all right?”

“Most of the time.”

“Oh, I know it’s hard. Your mom was the sweetest soul. She and your dad loved each other so much.” Ardelle came closer, twisting her hands together. “We’ll never know what he went through in the war, but she was so good to him even when he had his moods. She never even looked at another man after he drowned.”

Laura only nodded, keeping her expression neutral, although her heart felt like a battlefield.

“It’d be such a shame if it’s true that he’s alive, now that it’s too late because she’s dead—”

“Mom,” Cassie scolded. “Don’t be insensitive. You’re about to make Laura cry.”

“But wouldn’t it be wonderful if he’s alive? Tig says old Mrs. Gustafson is spreading stories about seeing him on the road by their house.”

Laura’s heart thumped. “When?”

Ardelle waved the question away with her plump hand. “Oh, I didn’t ask for details. You know I don’t like to meddle in other folks’ business.”

“Mother dear,” Cassie said firmly, “you are the biggest meddler and gossip I know.”

“I am not.”

“You let yourself into Laura’s house a few days ago without permission, didn’t you?”

Laura put her hand on Cassie’s arm. “Stop, Cassie. Let it go.”

But Cassie was on a roll. “And you let the cat get out, Mom. He could have been hit by a car.”

Ardelle hung her head. “I was only trying to help.”

“It’s called breaking and entering,” Cassie snapped.

“Jess gave me a key! I was her most trusted friend.” Ardelle’s eyes filled with tears. “Laura, you asked me to feed the cat and all, and now you’re calling me a thief?”

“No,” Laura said gently. “Nobody’s calling you a thief. It’s just that I don’t need your help anymore, now that I’m in town.”

“Well, I never! You
asked
for my help.” Ardelle’s chin quivered. “If you don’t want me in your mother’s home, I don’t want you in mine.” She flounced out of the room.

Laura stared at the empty doorway. What had happened to warm-hearted, fun-loving Ardelle?

“I don’t believe it,” Cassie said. “The drama mama is kicking you out.”