Conard County Marine (13 page)

“What I need,” she said, “is someone to read me a story. I’m like a kid who can’t settle for the night.”

A quiet sound of amusement escaped him. “I know that feeling. Let me think a moment. Maybe I can find a story to share.”

She hoped he would because it would be nice to learn something more about him. He was fairly closemouthed about himself, probably with good reason, but surely during all those years in the marines he’d had experiences he could share.

“Well, there was the time we were in formation with fixed bayonets, and the idiot behind me sliced my scalp pretty good.”

“Oh, no! What happened?”

“I stayed in formation and finished my evolutions with blood pouring down the back of my uniform.”

“They didn’t pull you out?”

“Why would they? If I couldn’t handle that, I couldn’t handle the rest of what was in store. Anyway, ten staples fixed me up, and the idiot did a lot of punishment detail. I was fine.”

She couldn’t imagine it. “If I’d been there, I would have stopped everything.”

“Of course. You’re a nurse. Big difference.”

Obviously. She sighed and let her head once again return to the comfort of his shoulder. “That’s just amazing to me.”

“Well, not everything that happened involved bleeding. It was just the first memory that popped to mind.”

After his own personal self-censorship, she surmised, but didn’t say so.

“Then there’s the ghost story.”

“Ghost story? For real?”

His hand squeezed her arm gently. “For real. A lot of them come out of war zones, believe it or not. People can get really skittish, even experienced veterans, when they’re stationed in a place where there’s been a fight and people have died. Hell, to be fair, I can get uneasy myself. It’s like something stains the ground or the air. I don’t know a better way to describe it.”

She nodded slowly. “I guess I can see that. Why wouldn’t some awful tragedy leave a mark behind, a mark that might reach through time?”

“Maybe so. I could never explain it. Just a feeling I did my best to ignore. Anyway, a squad was stationed at one forward base, maybe ten of them. They weren’t the first ones to occupy it, but apparently it had a history stretching back to Alexander the Great. One fort built on top of another, creating kind of a huge hill. The second night they were there, they had a guy up on the roof as a sentry. He got so scared up there he came running down and demanded that someone stand watch with him. So one of the other guys agreed to go up with him.”

She waited while he paused, watched him shake his head a little. “Then there were more shook-up marines. They swore a black figure was standing watch with them. After that, they always put two men on watch up there. One guy refused completely and nutted out enough that they thought it best to send him back to the main base. He said he heard a voice whisper in his ear. I guess a number of them saw strange lights in the nightscopes that they couldn’t see with the naked eye, or heard screams. Anyway, the black figure may have been too much for that one guy.”

“Wow. A black figure?”

“That’s how they described it. Anyway, I’m not sure how much the story got embellished over time, but I’ve had some feelings myself from time to time, so I won’t dismiss them.”

She shivered a little as she thought about it.

“I’m sorry, did I frighten you with that?”

“No...no. I was just thinking about the black figure. He, it, was standing watch, too. It doesn’t matter if he was one of ours or someone else’s. Russian, Afghani, Roman...what disturbs me is thinking that he’s dead and stuck there doing his duty.”

“Still standing post,” he murmured. “You’re right, that is sad.”

“Were there other stories?”

“Ghosts, you mean? A few. It didn’t happen to everyone and didn’t happen everywhere. But every so often I’d hear about another one.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if battlefields were haunted.”

“Frankly, neither would I.”

She said nothing more, trying to give him space to back out of his war experiences if that was what he wanted to do. Some things deserved the respect of silence.

“Anyway,” he said presently, moving them away from Afghanistan, “when I was younger my dad used to like to take trips to Civil War battlefields. Everyone swears Gettysburg is haunted, but I didn’t feel it. To me it feels incredibly peaceful there. But Antietam was a different story. That was the first time I ever felt like the ground was crying out. I shook it off, but I still remember the way I felt at first. As if the very earth had been scarred.”

“Oh, man,” she whispered.

“And I don’t suppose you were looking for ghost stories to help you sleep.”

She managed to tip her head and give him a faint smile. “I needed a distraction. I got it.”

“I need to think of something more cheerful to tell you about.”

A thought occurred to her. “Do you have that dress blue uniform? Does everyone?”

“We only get them if we need them for an assignment unless we buy them ourselves. But yeah, I had an assignment once that required it when I was in DC, and yes, I have the uniform.”

“I’d love to see you in it.”

“Everyone loves those uniforms,” he said lightly. Then he shifted a little and pulled out his wallet from his hip pocket. Flipping it open with one hand, he passed it to her so she could see the photo of him in dress blues.

“You can tell I’m not so young anymore.”

“You look fantastic,” she said sincerely. “And you don’t look that much older, either. What were you doing?”

“I was selected for the unit that does the Friday night parade at the barracks in DC. And that ramrod straightness owes a lot to duct tape.”

“What?” The word came out on a laugh.

“Seriously. When you need to be perfectly straight and still for hours on end, you apply a little help. Duct tape to the torso.”

“I never would have guessed.”

“Good.” He laughed. “Inside secret. The human back doesn’t take kindly to that treatment for long.”

She giggled. “I’m glad you told me. I used to think it was superhuman.”

“Nothing superhuman about it.”

Suddenly he grew still. “Shh.” He waited a moment, then leaned toward her. “I think I heard something. Stay here.”

Her chest tightened instantly and her heart began to race until she felt she couldn’t suck in enough air. Probably nothing, she told herself. Probably nothing at all. She was safe here with Coop.

Then why didn’t she believe it?

*

Todd drove one of his old cars to town and parked it a couple of blocks away from the Brewer house. Standing on the sidewalk, he could see through the sheers that covered the front window. Those two were looking entirely too cozy, he thought. Kylie had never let him put his arm around her like that. Never.

But this guy she hardly knew? It must be the marine thing. She was being sucked in by a freaking uniform.

The burn deep within him that seldom quit anymore grew stronger. Infuriated, he looked down at the ground and found a pebble.

When he straightened, he watched Kylie laugh up into that guy’s face.

Fury gripped him. Without another thought, he threw that pebble against the side of the house. At once the Coop guy froze.

Good.

But then he stood up to walk around. Todd shrank back into the shadows and hid behind a bush a few houses down.

Maybe he’d add Coop to the list he wanted to take care of. But no, Kylie first.

He’d been waiting a long time to teach her a lesson.

*

Coop had been seriously uneasy since the news about the black rose. Not that he’d been totally sanguine about Kylie’s fears before, but that rose... She was being stalked.

And while he might put on a casual face to keep her calm about all of this, it remained that he was on high alert, and wasn’t about to relax it.

He heard something hit the side of the house. Maybe nothing. He hated those sheers on the living room window and was going to have to do something about them. It was like living in a cloudy fishbowl.

As he left Kylie to walk around the house, he knew the sound had come from outside. But first he was going to make sure every single door and window was properly secured. Then he could walk the perimeter outdoors.

Once he was certain they were buttoned up, he returned to the living room. Kylie had paled again, her hazel eyes too big for her face. “Everything’s locked up tighter than a drum,” he assured her. “No one is inside.”

She managed a jerky nod.

“Now I need to check the outside.”

At once he saw terror pass over her face. She croaked his name.

He squatted in front of her. “I’m going to go out there and you’re going to lock the door behind me. Can you do that?”

Another nod as she gnawed her lip.

“And if there’s any way to cover the front window of this place, find it. Those sheers don’t give enough privacy. Can you work on that?”

Again she nodded.

Then he took her hands and gave them a quick squeeze. “Come with me. Lock the door behind me.”

God, he hated to do this to her, but he
had
to check outside. If there was a lurker, he might have left some sign of his presence. He’d be derelict if he failed to look.

“I won’t be long,” he promised before he stepped out the door. He heard the dead bolt thud home as she locked up.

The night was quiet, only the usual sounds of cars on other streets, an open window that released the sounds of someone’s TV. Nobody walking about.

But someone was watching. That preternatural instinct warned him. He wanted to search the whole street, but figured if the guy saw him coming he’d just pull away farther. So for now, just around this house and yard.

His skin crawled with awareness of the eyes on him. The stalker was nearby. The sound? He didn’t know what that had been, but it had sounded as if it had hit the front of the house. The siding. Maybe he could find out what it was.

But first he had to make sure no one was hiding in the yard anywhere. He scanned the front near the house, then started around the corner. Immediately the sense of being watched disappeared.

Well, that gave him a direction for the stalker, but he didn’t dare risk there being some kind of threat out here. A bomb, a booby trap, something. He scanned carefully, moving as quickly as he could, determined to get back to the front of the house and see if he could localize whoever was watching.

He saw nothing on the ground, now slightly damp with dew, that betrayed the passage of anything except a dog. The animal’s paw prints appeared dark where they had wiped away the dew. Around to the far side, approach the street but not too quickly. And unfortunately, the dew hadn’t fallen nearer to the warmer street. None in the front yard or on the pavement.

He felt just an instant, one instant, of those eyes on him again, and then they vanished. Someone had been watching the front of the house, but now had turned away. Possibly meaningless, but he wasn’t going to trust in that.

As he reached the porch, he paused. Was that a pebble?

He searched his memory rapidly and couldn’t remember anything like that on the porch. Glenda swept it every time she cleaned. Hell, he’d swept it for her just a couple of days ago because of some leaves leftover from autumn.

So the pebble was probably what had hit the house. No accident. He looked toward the sidewalk. The watching eyes were still gone, but he could easily imagine a man standing out there watching.

Slowly he approached the sidewalk and turned to face the house. Entirely too much was visible through those sheers. Like watching a fuzzy TV. Glancing down he could see the grass had been partially flattened. No dew to suggest a direction to look.

Hating it, but knowing there was no more he could do tonight without leaving Kylie alone, he climbed the porch steps, leaving the pebble in place and knocked. “Kylie, it’s me.”

The door opened swiftly and he stepped inside. God, she looked rattled. As soon as the door was closed behind him and once again locked, he pulled her into his arms and hugged her tightly as if he could squeeze the fear from her.

What he would have liked to have done was wring someone’s throat.

But instead he held this lovely, frightened woman and wished he could make her feel safe again. Whoever had sent that rose was cruel beyond belief. Taunting his victim, terrifying her, keeping the nightmare alive.

Yeah, he could have strangled the guy with his bare hands.

He stroked Kylie’s hair, feeling a shudder run through her as he held her. “It’s okay,” he said.

“Nobody?”

“Not now, anyway. We have to deal with that front window, though. Anybody walking by can see in. Did you think about that?”

Lame way to try to pull her back from the precipice of her fears, but sometimes thinking about a problem could be the only way.

“Yeah. There are heavy curtains for the winter. The rod is still up. We just need to hang them.”

“Then as soon as you feel ready, we’re going to do exactly that.”

Then she amazed him. She seemed to shake herself a little, and leaned back within his embrace. “I’m sorry. I didn’t use to be such a wimp. And I’m not going to be a wimp now. I think I know where Glenda keeps the curtains.”

She was dealing with the immediate problem, an excellent sign. He followed her down the hallway to the linen closet and held out his arms to receive the heavy folded curtains she passed to him.

“They’ll have creases in them,” she remarked.

“I don’t care as long as they shutter the fishbowl.”

She paused as she pulled out the last stack. “Is that what it feels like to you?”

“Right now it does.”

Her movements slowed just a bit. “I never really thought about it.”

“No reason you should have. These streets are usually safe for you, aren’t they?”

“They used to be.”

He thought that acknowledgment sounded terribly sad, and he made up his mind he was going to make those streets safe for her again.

As he carried the armload of curtains out to the living room, she asked, “Should we call the police?”

“They wouldn’t find any more than I did, and it wasn’t much. Someone threw a pebble against the side of the house. I couldn’t track him. He’s probably long gone by now.”