Whispers at Midnight (28 page)

Sandra straightened and shut the refrigerator door after extracting nothing more exciting than a soda.

Annie drooped with disappointment. Hugo swished his tail, sat down, and began to wash a paw.

Buoyed by the animals’ calm acceptance of each other’s consumption of the coveted ham, Carly decided to see if she couldn’t help the relationship stabilize on this new, tolerant plateau. She carried Annie over to visit Hugo.

“See?” she said to them both, reaching out to stroke Hugo (and also, subtly, hold him in place) while she brought Annie closer—but not quite so close that a strategic swipe could reach the dog’s moist black nose. “You two can be friends. You just—”

Annie yapped. Hugo hissed and bolted. Annie struggled, clearly eager to give chase, prevented only by the fact that Carly refused to let her go.

“You know, I don’t think we’re bonding here,” Sandra observed, heading out of the kitchen with her drink.

“They will,” Carly said.

By the time Carly finished bathing in the old-fashioned claw-footed tub that made up in sheer size for what it lacked in modern convenience, it was already close to one
A.M.
Pulling on her pajamas, trailed as usual by Annie, whose nails clicked on the hardwood floor with every step, she passed Sandra’s already closed door and went into her own bedroom. It had changed very little since she’d lived in it as a child. The lavender-sprigged wallpaper and airy white curtains she’d been allowed to choose as a fifteenth birthday present from her grandmother were the same, as was the pastel braided rug at the foot of her bed and even the bed itself, a brass double that had only been altered by the substitution of a white chenille spread for the lavender,
unicorn-strewn comforter of her teen years. As a child she’d always felt safe in this room. It bothered her that she no longer truly did. But tonight, with the security system on and Hugo curled up fast asleep on the bed and Annie, after a single longing glance at Hugo’s clearly superior spot, stretching out to snooze on the rug, Carly felt as secure as she had since she’d come back to Benton. It helped that she was dead tired, too tired, hopefully, for any kind of bad dream to disturb her rest. It also helped that the images that crowded into her mind as soon as she crawled into bed and turned off the light all had to do with Matt. Matt saying
nice hat
with that provocative drawl of his and Matt’s face after she had dumped what was left of her Lemon Crush on his head and Matt kissing her—

No, no, no. That wasn’t helping. She absolutely, positively refused to go down that road either. Or to think about anything at all to do with Matt.

Ironically enough, it was on that thought, which was accompanied by swirling visions of dozens of memories of Matt, each rejected one after the other so that the effect was almost like counting sheep, that Carly fell asleep.

And stayed asleep until something jolted her awake. Blinking groggily in the grayed darkness, Carly realized that the jolt had come from Hugo, who had used her body as a springboard to leap to the top of the tall wardrobe next to the bed. He crouched on it, tail swishing, eyes gleaming as he looked down at her.

Then Carly realized something else: the reason Hugo had decided to go trampolining in the middle of the night was because Annie was standing with her front paws on the sill of the long window that opened onto the roof of the back porch. Even as Carly spotted her, she started barking in frantic warning.

The curtains were thin, almost sheer, and didn’t quite meet in the middle. Even before Annie had parted them more with her body, Carly had been able to see a sliver of starlit night. Only now, she realized to her horror, she wasn’t seeing any stars.

Not a single one.

Something—some
one?
—was outside the window blocking her view of the night.

20

T
HE DOG
. The dog. The damned dog. It was there in the house.

The man ran lightly to the edge of the porch, squatted, grasped the edge and jumped over the side. It was a low porch, a one-story porch that covered only a portion of the back of the house. Earlier, he’d been about to leave the yard when he’d looked up and there she was, framed by a window: Carly, with her curly blond hair—funny he didn’t remember that about her, but then, he didn’t remember much about those days—wearing pajamas. He couldn’t see much through the barely parted curtains, just a slice of a lamplit room. But he could see enough to know that it was a bedroom. Her bedroom. She was going to bed.

One of the windows of her bedroom was directly over the small back porch.

There it was again, he’d thought: luck. Lately his had been almost all good.

She had turned off the light, and he hadn’t seen anything more of her. But still, he’d hung around. Maybe this was his chance. Maybe he could just creep in there and bring her out.

He knew how security systems worked. They were only wired to the windows on the ground floor.

Another stroke of luck: he had a glass cutter in his car.

He’d given her an hour to fall asleep. Then he had climbed up on the porch roof—the rain spout beside it made the feat ridiculously easy—and eased on over, checking for wires that might indicate that the security system had been installed up here after all. But there weren’t any; he checked the shutters, the window frame, the glass, growing increasingly confident that he was right. Through the parted curtain, he could just see a sliver of white that was the bed—her bed.

And a lump curving through the middle of that sliver of white that was
her.

The way his luck was going, he thought as he pulled the glass cutter out of his pocket, he would be able to get the whole thing taken care of tonight.

Then it would be,
Hello, brave new world.

He’d just been putting the glass cutter to the glass when the curtain had fluttered. Reflexively he’d glanced down—and there it was, looking at him through the window: the dog.

The damned, damned dog.

He was already running for the edge of the roof as it started to bark.

Yap, yap, yap. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.

21

H
UGO PRANCED
toward her in the afternoon sunlight like a highbred show horse, lifting each paw high and shaking it with disbelief before putting it back down and repeating the process. Carly had to smile. He gave the phrase
cat on a hot tin roof
a whole new meaning.

Because he was, literally, a cat on a hot tin roof.

“How did you get up here, anyway?” she asked him, crawling carefully to his rescue. Scooping him up, she scooted backward until she reached the patch of shade she’d been working in. When she set him back on his feet again he looked apprehensive until he realized that the surface beneath his feet was relatively cool. Then, with a twitch of his tail and a level look at her to make sure that she understood that, despite his recent brief lapse in temperature judgment his dignity was still very much intact, he sat down in the lee of the chimney and started giving himself a bath.

Carly wasn’t offended. She had realized long since that being a cat meant never having to say thank you.

She picked up her hammer and went back to work. It was late in the afternoon of July fifth, and she was up on top of the house repairing the red tin roof. The task involved nailing the loose parts of the roof down, then painting over the nails with a red-tinted, tar-like substance that would keep moisture from creeping down the holes.
The work was more tedious than difficult, and as long as she remembered where she was and didn’t back over the edge it wasn’t dangerous, but the suffocating heat rendered it fairly miserable. No fool, she had been working in the patch of shade cast by the huge walnut tree nearest the house, but at some point she was going to have to leave its protection and venture out into the broiling sun. She was hoping to time it so that the patch of shade moved with her. It was either that, or finish the repairs after the sun went down. And seeing as how at its peak the roof was some forty feet off the ground, working on it after dark was probably not a good idea. Falling might very well prove fatal.

Anyway, she wasn’t planning on doing
any
thing outside the house after dark anytime soon. Wild horses couldn’t drag her guilty secret from her, but she was now thoroughly scared of the place once night fell. That this might prove to be a problem at some point, she was well aware. Being afraid in one’s home after dark probably was not conducive to a peaceful life. Maybe it was just a matter of getting used to the rural setting again, after so many years spent living in big cities. Maybe the eyes she felt watching her through the dark belonged to nothing more terrifying than tree frogs. Maybe the cold feeling that sometimes stole over her when she looked into the shadowy recesses of the yard was simply a reaction to sweat drying on her skin.

Maybe. And maybe not.

Could the burglar still be hanging around, hoping for a second go?

Just thinking about the possibility sent cold chills racing up and down her spine.

Last night, when she had turned on the lamp beside her bed and peered, with heart-thumping bravado, outside her window, there had been nothing there. Just the silent trees, and the twinkling stars, and the night. Even as she had watched, with Annie quivering beside her, a cloud had blown across the sky, blocking the stars from view, taking the night from gray to black. Had it been nothing more than a cloud blowing past that had made her think someone stood in front of the window, blocking the sky? It was possible. It was even probable.

It was also possible that Annie had been roused by something like a raccoon or even a squirrel running across the porch roof. After all, she loved barking at Hugo; it was quite likely that another running animal would evoke a similar response. Or maybe she’d been startled by a falling limb.

Who knew? Certainly the return of the burglar was the least likely possibility.

Still, Carly hadn’t been able to go back to sleep. She’d spent the rest of the night huddled in a pitiful little ball in her bed while her eyes stayed trained on the window. A few times the window had indeed darkened, which she’d had no difficulty in ascribing to a passing cloud. But Annie and Hugo, both of whom had soon dozed off again, had not wakened. In fact, neither animal had stirred for the rest of the night.

In the morning, Carly had gone outside to discover that a branch had, indeed, fallen onto the roof of the back porch.

See there?
she told herself.
That’s what all the commotion was about.

The sound of it hitting probably freaked Annie out.

She knew it was almost certainly so. But still, when the electrician she’d hired to update the wiring to accommodate commercial appliances understood exactly what she wanted and had made a good start, which meant that she didn’t need to supervise him, and Sandra went into town for groceries, Carly had donned her oldest jeans, a faded green camp shirt and tied a bandanna around her head before pulling out her hammer and nails and making short work of her bedroom windows, security system or not.

If the burglar was still lurking around, he wasn’t getting in that way: she nailed the damned windows shut.

Not that she didn’t have confidence in the security system, of course. But as her grandmother had often said,
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

To which she now said,
Amen.

While she was at it, she nailed shut practically every window in the house. The only ones she didn’t touch were the ones downstairs. She was tempted, but the woodwork was too beautiful to mar by
driving nails through it. Anyway, there was always the security system. It was state of the art. It was reliable. It could be trusted to keep her—her and Sandra and Annie and Hugo—safe.

She had been counting the downstairs windows to see how many brooms she needed to buy so that she could saw off their heads and wedge the sticks in the tracks, thus thwarting any possible entry by any possible burglar without harming the wood, when Sandra came home with the groceries.