Night Moves: Dream Man/After the Night (34 page)

Nor did she know what else to do, except keep asking questions. Sooner or later, someone would be stung to respond.

If she could keep busy enough, maybe she wouldn’t think about Gray.

The theory was proving difficult to put into practice. She had avoided thinking about him, purposefully pushing him from her mind after she had left him the afternoon before. She had ignored the unfulfilled ache in her body, and refused to think about what had almost happened between them. But for all her will, her subconscious had betrayed her, admitting him into her dreams so that she had awakened in the early morning to find herself reaching for him. The dream had been so vivid that she had cried out, in longing and disappointment.

She had no more resistance to him; she might as well admit it. If he hadn’t said what he had, she’d have given in to him there on the grass. Her morals and standards were useless when he took her in his arms, paper tigers that were vanquished by his first kiss.

As she eliminated each person from her list of suspects, the tower of motive leaned more and more toward Gray. Logically, she could see it. Emotionally, the idea met with total rejection. Not Gray.
Not Gray!
She couldn’t believe it; she wouldn’t believe it. The man she knew was capable of going to extraordinary lengths to protect those he loved, but cold-blooded murder wasn’t one of them.

Her mother knew who the killer was. Faith was as certain of that as she’d ever been of anything. Getting Renee to admit it, however, would take some doing, for that would mean trouble for herself. Renee wasn’t likely to act against her own self-interest, certainly not for such an abstract notion as justice. Faith knew her mother well; if she pushed too hard, Renee would run, partly from fear, but the biggest reason would be to avoid trouble for herself. After wringing the information about the summerhouse from her, Faith knew she would have to wait awhile before calling again.

•  •  •

The box was delivered the next day.

She returned home from a grocery-shopping expedition to the neighboring parish, and after carrying the groceries in and putting them away, went out to the mailbox to collect the day’s mail. When she opened the lid of the oversized box, there was the usual assortment of bills, magazines, and sales papers lying there, with a box deposited on top of
them. Curiously she picked it up; she hadn’t ordered anything, but the weight of the box was intriguing. The flaps had been sealed with shipping tape, and her name and address were scrawled across the top.

She carried everything in and placed it on the kitchen table. Taking a knife from the cabinet drawer, she slit the tape down the seam of the flap and opened the two halves, then parted the froth of tissue paper that had been used for packing.

After one horrified glance, she turned and vomited into the sink.

The cat wasn’t just dead, it had been mutilated. It was wrapped in plastic, probably to keep the smell from alerting anyone before the box was opened.

Faith didn’t think, she reacted instinctively. When the violent retching had stopped, she reached out blindly for the telephone.

She closed her eyes as the deep, smoky voice spoke in her ear, and she held on to the receiver as if it were a lifeline. “G-Gray,” she stammered, then fell silent as her mind went blank. What could she say to him?
Help, I’m scared, and I need you?
She had no claim on him. Their relationship was a volatile mixture of enmity and desire, and any weakness on her part would only give him another weapon. But she was both sickened and abruptly terrified, and he was the only person she could think of to call for help.

“Faith?” Something of her terror must have been evident in the one word she’d spoken, because his voice became very calm. “What is it?”

Turning her back on the obscenity on the table, she fought to regain control of her voice, but still it emerged as only a whisper. “There’s a . . . cat here,” she managed to say.

“A cat? Are you afraid of cats?”

She shook her head, then realized he couldn’t see her over the phone. Her silence must have made him think the answer was yes, though, because he said soothingly, “Just throw something at it; it’ll scat.”

She shook her head again, more violently this time. “No.” She took a deep breath. “Help.”

“All right.” Evidently deciding she was too terrified of cats to deal with it on her own, he assumed a brisk and reassuring tone. “I’ll be right there. Just sit someplace where you can’t see it, and I’ll take care of it when I get there.”

He hung up, and Faith took his advice. She couldn’t bear to be in the house with the thing, so she went outside on the porch and sat motionless in the swing, waiting numbly for him to arrive.

He was there in less than fifteen minutes, but those fifteen minutes seemed like an eternity. His tall form unfolded from the Jaguar, and he strolled up to the porch with his graceful, loose-hipped gait and a faint smile of masculine condescension on his lips, the hero arrived to save the helpless little woman from the ferocious beast. Faith didn’t take umbrage; he could think what he liked, if he would just get rid of that thing in her kitchen. She stared up at him, her face so bloodless that his smile faded.

“You’re really frightened, aren’t you?” he asked gently, hunkering down in front of her and taking one of her hands in his. Her fingers were icy, despite the steamy heat of the day. “Where is it?”

“In the kitchen,” she said, through stiff lips. “On the table.”

With a comforting pat to her hand, he stood and opened the screen door. Faith listened to his footsteps moving through the living room and into the kitchen.

“Goddamn fucking son of a bitch!” She heard the vicious curse, followed by a string of others. Then the back door slammed. She put her hands over her face. Oh, God, she should have warned him, she shouldn’t have given him the same shock she had received, but she simply hadn’t been able to say the right words.

A few minutes later he came around to the front of the house, and remounted the steps to the porch. His jaw was set, and his dark eyes were colder than she had ever seen them before, but this time his rage wasn’t turned on her.

“It’s all right,” he said, still in that gentle tone. “I got rid of it. Come inside, baby.” Putting his arm around her, he urged her up from the swing and into the house. He directed
her toward the kitchen; she stiffened and tried to pull back, but he was having none of it. “It’s okay,” he reassured her, and forced her into a chair. “You look a little shocky. What do you have to drink around here?”

“There’s tea and orange juice in the refrigerator,” she said, her voice faint.

“I meant the alcoholic variety. Do you have any wine?”

She shook her head. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

Despite the fury in his eyes, he gave her a little grin. “Puritan,” he said mildly. “Okay, orange juice it is.” He took a glass from the cabinet and filled it with orange juice, then thrust it into her hand. “Drink it. All of it, while I make a call.”

She sipped obediently, more because it gave her something to concentrate on than because she wanted it. Gray opened the phone book, ran his finger down the first page, then punched in the number. “Sheriff McFane, please.”

Faith lifted her head, suddenly more alert. Gray stared down at her, his expression daring her to protest. “Mike, this is Gray. Could you come out to Faith Hardy’s house? Yeah, it’s the old Cleburne place. She just got a real ugly surprise in her mail. A dead cat . . . Yeah, there’s one of those, too.”

He hung up, and Faith cleared her throat. “One of what, too?”

“A threatening letter. Didn’t you see it?”

She shook her head. “No. All I saw was the cat.” A shudder rippled through her body, making the glass tremble in her hand.

He began opening and closing doors. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

“The coffee. After the sugar to counteract shock, you need a shot of caffeine.”

“I keep it in the refrigerator. Top shelf.”

He got out the canister, and she directed him to the filters. He made coffee rather competently, for a rich man who probably never did it at home, she thought, and felt a ghost of amusement flicker inside.

Once the coffee was in the process of making, he drew up
another chair and sat facing her, so close that their legs touched, his on the outside of hers, warmly clasping. He didn’t ask her what had happened, knowing she would soon be going through that with the sheriff, and she was grateful for his tact. He just sat there, lending her his heat and the comfort of his nearness, those dark eyes sharp on her face as if he were debating pouring the orange juice down her, if she didn’t drink it as fast as he thought she should.

To forestall just such an action, she took a healthy swallow of juice, and actually felt a slight lessening of tension in his muscles. “Don’t you dare,” she muttered. “I’m trying my best not to throw up again.”

The grimness of his expression was lightened briefly by amusement. “How did you know what I was thinking?”

“The way you were staring at the glass, and then at me.” She took another swallow. “I thought Deese was the sheriff.”

“He retired.” Gray had the fleeting thought that her memory of Sheriff Deese wouldn’t be a pleasant one, and wondered if that was why she had looked at him with such alarm when he’d asked for the sheriff. “You’ll like Michael McFane. How’s that for a good Irish name? He’s young for the job, still interested in keeping up with new techniques.” Mike had also been at the shack that night, Gray remembered, but Faith wouldn’t know that, probably wouldn’t recognize him. In her shock, the deputies would have been faceless uniformed figures. Only he and the sheriff, standing off to the side, would have been locked in her memory.

The puzzling contradiction formed in his mind. She had been obviously reluctant to meet Sheriff Deese, but she had never revealed any such uneasiness in her dealings with himself. She’d been bold, provoking, maddening,
frustrating,
but she’d never shown the least hesitation about being in his company.

Nor was hesitation something that had troubled him. Why else, when he’d gotten her call, he thought to remove a pesky cat from the premises, had he promptly canceled a business meeting and driven here as fast as possible, with Monica’s enraged protests still ringing in his ears? Faith had
called him for help, and no matter how minor he thought the problem, he would help her if he could. As it turned out, the problem hadn’t been minor at all, and all his protective instincts had been outraged. He intended to find out who had done such a disgusting thing, and someone would catch hell. His fists ached with the need to pound them into the culprit’s face.

“Why didn’t you think I’d done it?” he asked softly, his attention locked on her face to catch every flicker of expression. “I’ve been trying to get you to leave town, so logically I should have been the person you’d suspect first.”

She was shaking her head before he’d finished speaking, the movement making the sleek bell of her hair swing about her face. “You wouldn’t do something like that,” she said with absolute conviction. “Any more than you would have left me the first note.”

He paused, distracted from the pleasure of her trust in him. “Note?” Sternness laced that one word.

“Yesterday. When I went out, there was a note in the front seat of the car.”

“Did you report it?”

She shook her head again. “It wasn’t a specific threat.”

“What did it say?”

The look she gave him now was slightly uneasy, and he wondered why. “To quote: Shut up if you know what’s good for you.”

The coffee was ready. He got up and poured a cup for both of them. “How do you drink yours?” he asked absently, his thoughts still on the note and the package, which this time had been accompanied by a more specific threat. The wings of cold, black fury beat upward within him, barely controlled.

“Black.”

He gave her the cup, and sat down again in his original position, close enough to touch. She was more adept than anyone else at reading his face, and something in his expression must have alarmed her, because she launched into one of those deflecting maneuvers of hers. “I used to drink coffee with loads of sugar, but Mr. Gresham is
diabetic. He said that it was easier to give up everything sweet than to fool with artificial sweeteners, so there wasn’t anything in the house to use. They would have bought it for me if I’d asked, but I didn’t want to impose—”

If she’d meant to distract him, he thought irritably, she’d succeeded. Even recognizing the maneuver didn’t blunt its effectiveness, because she used such interesting bait. “Who’s Mr. Gresham?” he asked, breaking into the flow of words. He felt the burn of jealousy, wondering if she was telling him about some guy she’d lived with before moving back to Prescott.

The slumberous green eyes blinked at him. “The Greshams were my foster parents.”

A foster home.
God. A cold fist clenched his stomach. He had imagined her life as continuing in much the same vein as before. Realistically, a good foster home would have been far preferable to the way she’d been living, but it was never easy for kids to lose their families, no matter how rotten, and be deposited with strangers. Finding a good home was a crapshoot, at best. A lot of kids were abused in foster homes, and for a young girl who looked like Faith . . .

The crunch of gravel signaled Mike’s arrival. “Stay here,” Gray growled, and went out the back door. He beckoned to Mike as the other man’s lanky form unfolded from the patrol car, and walked around to the back of the house where he had left the box.

Mike joined him, his freckled face tightening with disgust as he looked down at the carcass. “I see a lot of sick things in this job,” he said conversationally, squatting by the box, “but some things still turn my stomach. Why in hell would someone do this to a helpless animal? Have you handled the box much?”

“Just to carry it out. I was careful to touch only the front left corner, and the back right. I don’t know how much Faith handled it before she opened it. I used a pen to open the flaps wider,” he added. “There’s a message on one of them.”