Whispers at Midnight (27 page)

“L
ISTEN
, I
KNOW
what I saw, and what I saw was
hot.
” Sandra made a big production out of pretending to fan herself with her hand. “I practically melted where I stood.”

“Give it a rest, Sandra, will you please?” Carly asked tiredly.

“Then you went and kicked him. Honey, men in general don’t like that. Not unless they’re kinky, that is. Is that hunky sheriff kinky? ’Cause I want him if he is.”

“Sandra…”

Having been forced to listen to variations on the same theme from practically the moment Sandra had slid into the van beside her, Carly was deathly sick of the whole subject. She’d already had to endure the burning humiliation of walking past the madly gossiping group of Matt’s friends, relatives and supporters as soon as she had hit the sidewalk after escaping from Matt himself. They’d quit talking as soon as they had spotted her, of course; it didn’t take a genius to deduce what the subject of all that intense conversation was. To a self-conscious chorus of
Hi, Carly
’s she had managed to smile, and reply in kind. Then, thank you, God, she had had to turn the corner to reach her van. She’d never been so glad to be swallowed up by darkness in all her life.

Sandra, agog, had joined her in the van just about the time Carly
had been getting her mind around what had just occurred. It was unbelievable that, when she had finally let loose her newfound No More Ms. Nice Girl and told Matt exactly what she thought of him, thereby getting off her chest in masterly fashion—if she did say so herself—the hurt and anger that had been festering inside her for twelve years, to say nothing of the far more recent hurt and anger he had caused her, he had turned right around and kissed her, thus starting the whole blessed cycle up again. And she, of course, unprepared and unguarded and unable to control her inner slut, had reacted just like the old Carly had always reacted to any physical overture of Matt’s and practically liquefied right there in his arms, thus sending her attempts at achieving closure for herself where Matt was concerned all the way back to square one. Fortunately, the kiss had been interrupted.

In any case, she had taken advantage of one last opportunity to go for closure when she had kicked Matt in the leg and told him what she thought of him.

The ride home had been consumed by Sandra’s apparent inability to put the incident out of her head. Carly’s attempt to gloss things over by claiming that what Sandra had witnessed was really nothing more than a kiss between old friends had been met with loud skepticism, and worse, a blow-by-blow recital of everything Sandra had seen, and deduced from what she had seen.

“The thing I don’t get is, why’d you tell him you never wanted to see him again? If he was kissing me like that, the last thing I’d ever do is tell him I never wanted to see him again.” Sandra grinned, her teeth a pale flash in the darkness. “I’d get him into bed so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him, is what I’d do.”

The two of them were, just at that moment, trudging up the front lawn toward the house. The smell of fresh-cut grass was strong. The serenading tree frogs were loud. Carly’s level of annoyance was high, and getting higher by the moment.

“I don’t notice you getting Antonio into bed.” Desperate, Carly fell back on the old standby about the best defense being a good offense.

“Hey, give it time.” Sandra grinned again. “I don’t want him to think I’m easy.”

It was getting close to midnight, dark as pitch, humid as a greenhouse and buggy as a swamp. The van was parked behind them on the shoulder of the road; up ahead, every light in the house was on, as, in a mutual,
damn-the-electricity-bill
nod to the lingering trauma of their first night in Benton, they had decided that coming home to a dark house was not going to work for either of them. The security system was worth every penny it had cost; in fact, Carly didn’t think she would be able to sleep without knowing that it was standing silent guard over the windows and doors, but it didn’t do them much good when they were outside. As a result, they were both walking fast in the teeth of the incline and the heat, and Carly at least was casting furtive glances around her with every other step.

Loath as she was to admit it, she was half-afraid to be there, at what was now her very own house. At least, she was once day turned to night. Even with Sandra in the house with her, and Hugo and now Annie too, she would find herself waking, sometimes at two
A.M.
, sometimes at three, to lie with her heart pounding for no earthly reason that she could think of, just listening. For what? She didn’t know. She only knew that she was absolutely gripped by fear.

Night terrors. She remembered them. When she’d first come to live with her grandmother, she’d suffered from terrible screaming nightmares that had shaken the walls of the house. The pediatrician that her grandmother had taken her to for all her medical needs had called them night terrors, said they were fairly common in young children, nothing to worry about, and were, in Carly’s case, probably caused by the change in her living arrangements and the fact that she was still sorely missing her mother. They would go away, he promised.

It had taken a couple of years, during which their frequency had gradually decreased, but finally the night terrors had gone away. She hadn’t suffered from more than the occasional garden-variety bad dream in years—until that night in Matt’s bedroom. Until her first night back in Benton.

Carly shivered, just thinking about it. Were the night terrors coming back? Aside from that one nightmare in Matt’s house in which she’d been a little girl again, frightened and missing her mother and back in the Home, she couldn’t even remember dreaming on the nights when she woke up afraid. But maybe she was. Maybe what was waking her was a deeply experienced, forgotten-on-waking bad dream.

At least, she thought with a spurt of black humor, she didn’t still scream.

But whatever woke her, eventually her heartbeat would calm and her fright would recede and she would fall back asleep, and in the bright morning light her fear seemed far away and childish and even faintly ridiculous. Certainly she wasn’t going to tell anybody that she woke up in the middle of the night frightened half out of her wits. Anyway, who was there to tell? She didn’t want to spook Sandra any more than Sandra, a city girl through and through, was already spooked just by her new rural environment; the fear that Sandra might hightail it back to Chicago continued to lurk at the back of her mind. And until just a little while earlier she hadn’t seen Matt to confide in—not that she would have confided in him anyway.

Except, of course, he already knew about her bad dreams. But she wasn’t going to confide in him
again.
She’d stood up for herself at last, and that was the end of that. Finis. Closure. The past coming full circle in a final, neat, appropriate ending.

Only it wasn’t, because he had kissed her. And that kiss had seared its way down to her heart.

“Antonio was standing there on the sidewalk when I left the sheriff’s office. He walked me partway to the van. Know what he said about you and the sheriff?” Sandra chuckled as she followed Carly up onto the porch.
“Hubba-hubba.”
This she said in a deep and salacious voice, presumably mimicking Antonio.

Carly groaned. She really, truly, did not want to know.

Sandra continued in a more serious tone: “What I don’t understand is why you just don’t go ahead and sleep with the man. You know you want to.”

The porch light was on, wrapping them in a comforting yellow
glow that felt a whole lot safer than the shrouded darkness of the heavily treed yard. Still, the pervasive uneasiness that rarely left her when she was at home after dark meant that Carly was in such a hurry to get the key into the lock that she fumbled and almost dropped the entire key ring. It was stupid, she knew, and it was almost certainly all on account of that blasted burglar, but she couldn’t get over the feeling that there were eyes out there in the dark watching her every move.

“I do
not
want to sleep with Matt,” Carly said shortly as the key went home at last. “Believe me, he’s got issues.”

She got the door open and stepped into the hall with a feeling of relief. The tinny sound of the alarm system warning that whoever had opened the door had forty-five seconds to turn it off before it started shrieking was music to her ears. That meant there was nobody in the house.

“What kind of issues?” Sandra walked in behind her.

“He can’t get it up, okay?” Carly snapped. Sandra’s reaction made the spur-of-the-moment slander worth it. Round eyes, round mouth—and stilled tongue.

“You are lying in your teeth,” Sandra said, recovering.

Carly didn’t reply as she closed and locked the door. The smell of fresh paint—she’d already finished painting the front parlor and had gotten a good start on the rear one—made her wrinkle her nose. Hugo was sitting on the radiator cover, and he got up and stretched in greeting, then jumped to the floor, making a solid-sounding
thump
as he landed. Annie came flying in from the kitchen, toenails scrabbling over the hardwood, tail wagging madly.

Hugo jumped at this sudden onslaught of
dog,
spat, and shot off through the front parlor, while Annie, with a joyous yap, took off in hot and deliriously happy pursuit.

“Hugo! Annie! No! Stop that!”

Carly looked after them in defeat. Like that was going to work. The makers of mayhem didn’t even slow down. Carly listened to the two of them tearing through the downstairs with a weary sigh.

“Welcome to the Inn at Beadle Zoo,” Sandra said dryly. Carly shot her a look—Sandra had made her feelings concerning the addition
of Annie to their little household very clear—and then followed her ears as she went to Hugo’s rescue for the umpteenth time. Sandra, meanwhile, headed toward the kitchen.

“Annie, hush! Hugo, don’t be such a—” the word
pussy
came to mind, bringing with it an unwelcome memory of Matt using the exact same word for the exact same reason, but Carly dismissed both firmly “—baby.”

Rescuing Hugo from atop the tall mantel in the rear parlor, shushing Annie who danced deliriously beneath him, Carly carried the cat toward the kitchen, scolding both him and Annie, who didn’t yap anymore but looked longingly up at Hugo as she trotted at Carly’s heels. Like siblings, Carly thought, the two of them were simply going to have to learn to live together.

“You
are
lying, right?” Sandra asked as Carly entered the kitchen and set Hugo down on the counter.

“About what?”

“You know. The sheriff.”

Carly now dropped to one knee and Annie wagged her tail and put her front paws on Carly’s leg and licked her cheek.

“Carly…”

“Okay.” As much as Matt deserved the calumny, Carly found that she couldn’t utter such a whopper twice. So she shrugged. “You’re right. I am lying. Absolutely.”

Sandra frowned.

“Good girl,” Carly said to the dog. Picking up Annie, she hugged her warm body close and scratched behind her ears, which Annie loved. Annie expressed that love by opening her mouth in a doggy grin and panting in delight. Sandra, still with that thoughtful frown on her face, glanced at the two of them, then opened the refrigerator and reached inside, emerging with a piece of ham, which she tossed to Annie. Annie caught the treat in midair, gobbling it down with delight.

“See there,” Carly said. “You love her. You know you do.”

Sandra grimaced. “Let’s see, why didn’t I mention when we were talking about this bed-and-breakfast thing way back in Chicago that I don’t do dogs? Because nobody said anything to me about a dog. If
some
body,” she emphasized it pointedly, “had said, I want a dog, I would have said, I don’t do dogs. But nobody did. They—meaning you—just found us a dog.”

This was a continuation of a conversation they’d been having over the last few days. Sandra’s complaints would have carried more weight if she hadn’t then tossed another piece of ham to Annie, and then, with a quick look at her chief ally in the we-don’t-need-a-dog department, handed one off to Hugo, who’d been watching the feeding of his rival with at first astonishment and then tail-lashing disbelief.

“Now that was nice,” Carly said, her eyes twinkling. “See, you love Hugo too.”

Sandra turned back to the refrigerator with a grunt. Carly looked down at Annie, who was wagging her tail hopefully as she watched Sandra. The dog had still not totally adapted to her new life, but, of course, it was early days yet and Carly was confident that she would. She was still timid, shying away from unfamiliar people and slinking around on her belly if someone spoke to her in other than a loving tone, but she was gentle and affectionate (except with Hugo, of course) and, Carly was convinced, grateful to finally have been saved from her hard-knock life. Sandra pooh-poohed the whole notion that a dog could be grateful, but Carly was persuaded that grateful was exactly how Annie felt: grateful for the home, grateful for the food, but most of all grateful for the love. She had taken Annie to the vet, who had examined her, given her a slew of shots, and estimated her to be about five years old. He’d said that she had most likely been a stray for a long time, but that she had no real health problems beyond being malnourished, which regular meals would fix, and a fairly recent injury: a nasty cut to the stomach just behind her front legs that, fortunately, had scabbed over without getting infected and was already, thanks to her assiduous licking of it, well on its way to being healed. The dark substance matting her coat he had identified as Annie’s own blood, almost certainly from the healing cut. Carly had been horrified to think that the dog had bled so badly, but the blood had washed away easily enough, leaving her coat soft, black, and just slightly wavy, and the gash didn’t seem to bother her. Now bathed, brushed and defleaed, Annie was quite a different dog.

Almost, even, a pretty dog. Certainly a sweet one.

“What a good girl, Annie,” Carly said approvingly as, without letting loose with so much as a whine, Annie watched Hugo, who was more deliberate about these things, lick his piece of ham all over before consuming it in front of the dog’s envious eyes. When it was gone, the eyes of both animals immediately swung back to Sandra, who was still rooting through the refrigerator.