Love Me If You Must (9 page)

 
13

Pain shot up my leg.

Brad lifted me to a sitting position. “I would’ve caught you, but that funky little spin threw me off.”

“Why’d you say my name like that? I thought the boogeyman was behind me.” I tried for a smile, but flinched instead.

“I was worried you were going to pass out. Your face was all white.”

I held my ankle, rocking and rubbing the twisted joint. It finally registered that the little squeaky sounds I’d been hearing came from my own efforts not to cry.

“Here. Let me take a look,” Brad said.

He manipulated my ankle, sending me into star-punctuated spasms.

“Okay. That’s enough,” I squealed.

This couldn’t be happening. I needed all my limbs intact. There was no time for debilitating injuries or whacky hallucinations. I had to get the job done and move to the next project, before I fell in love with Rawlings . . . or whomever.

“Help me up.” I held out my hand and Brad pulled me to my good foot. Spirals of color flared in my side vision. There had to be a broken bone in there somewhere. Sprains didn’t hurt like this.

I gritted my teeth. “I think I can walk.”

Brad guarded my back as I hobbled up the stairs using one foot and the handrails. I crawled across the kitchen floor, content to lean against the cupboards for lack of a chair. It was one of the few times I regretted traveling light through life. A big, soft, sink-down-in-fluff-up-to-my-chin love seat would really fit the bill about now.

Brad stood above me in the empty room.

“Well,” I croaked, “you’ll have to investigate on your own. It might be awhile before I can make that trip again.”

“I’d feel better if we got that looked at,” Brad said. “There’s a walk-in clinic just north of town. Tell me where your keys are and we’ll take a drive.”

My foot hurt too bad to argue with him.

A somber display of bare forest and gray fields rolled past as we drove. Brad’s easy chatter about area history and childhood escapades kept my mind above the ankle.

He pulled into the circle drive of a brick-and-vinyl-sided building, popped Deucey into park, and set out for a wheelchair.

With Brad as my entertainment committee, the wait in the lobby flew by. A nurse wearing a smock smattered with coconuts and palm trees ushered us into an exam room. A few minutes later a man in his late fifties entered.

“I’m Dr. Phillips.” He smoothed down the back of his long white cover-up and sat on a stool. He wheeled over to my place on the table and took my dangling bare foot in both hands. “A little swelling. Some discoloration. Most likely gave your sciatic nerve a good twang. That’ll cause a buzz in your leg that could take a few weeks to settle down. I’ll write you a prescription that should help calm things.”

“How soon before I can walk on it?” I asked.

“I’d give it a few days.” He squinted at my foot and craned for a closer look. “Let’s have you remove your other shoe.”

Brad helped do the honors.

The doctor compared the soles of my feet. “There’s some discoloration on your good foot as well. Where do you live, Patricia?”

“Almost right downtown Rawlings. And please call me Tish.”

“You may have been more bruised from your fall than you realize. Or . . .” His brow wrinkled. “No, it couldn’t be.”

I gave him a questioning look.

“I served as a missionary doctor near Bangladesh a good number of years ago. Saw a fair number of people suffering from arsenic poisoning, from water right out of the village wells.”

My eyes widened.

“I’m not saying that’s what this is. You may want to consider a water filter system, just to be safe. If the bruising doesn’t clear up in the next week or two, come back in for testing.”

I gave a laugh of relief. “I’m sure it’s not arsenic poisoning. I only drink bottled water. I read all about the township wells before I moved to the area.”

“Like I said, just keep an eye on things.” Dr. Phillips wrote the prescription.

Brad and I rode back to my house in near silence, stopping at Goodman’s Grocery to fill the prescription.

Brad helped me into the house. I downed a pill with a glass of purified water the moment we walked in the door.

“Let me get you situated,” Brad said. “Then I’ll go downstairs and check out that window.”

He saw that I made it to my humble portable bed.

When he left, I lay on my cot taking short little gasping breaths, waiting for the drug to do its job. I wondered all the while what Brad would find in the cistern.

Why would someone prop open my basement window, anyway? There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the house, no valuable electronics, not a dime in cash lying around. The most anyone could hope for was the thrill of sneaking in and out of a “haunted house.” But after the strange crew of trick-or-treaters I’d gotten the other night, it wouldn’t surprise me if a couple of them had become daring.

I leaned up on one elbow and stared out the big front window. Across the street, the neighbor lady was at it again, raking, clipping, and sprucing up her lawn. I had a big job ahead if I was going to compete with her neat-freak yard.

I gave a little chuckle despite my pain.

Just wait ’til spring. The woman wouldn’t know what hit her. She might be the reigning queen of the block when it came to fine flora, but I’d unseat her in a heartbeat with my guaranteed curb-appeal strategy.

That is, if my injury didn’t put me back too far. To stay on track, I had to get the upstairs finished by Christmas. Then I could get to work on the first floor. And if Lloyd & Sons ever got back on board, their portion of the basement renovation should be completed by Valentine’s Day. That would leave me three months to finish up the cellar plus do the exterior. By the time June rolled around, I could get the furniture in and be ready for the first buyers of the season.

I groaned and lay back down on the cot. Unfortunately, the way I felt, there was no chance that would happen.

The pain seemed to come in waves, starting at my ankle and washing up to my hip. I transported my mind elsewhere and joined Jan Hershel on the beach in Cancun, or wherever she was healing from her marriage-gone-sour. I reclined on the wooden lounger next to hers and listened to the crashing surf. The sun beat down on my gimpy leg, heating it through, soothing the pain.

Total relaxation.

The ocean breeze kicked up. A puff of white dust landed on my baby-oiled skin. I looked over to see where it had come from. Jan was covered in the white stuff. She scraped at it and beat at it, but it stuck to her like . . . concrete.

I jerked upright on my cot, grateful for the sharp pain that snapped me back to the gloomy Michigan afternoon.

Hold it together, Tish, I chided. Jan Hershel is not buried in your cistern.

In fact, nobody was buried in my cistern. And why my line of thinking kept heading in the body-in-the-basement direction was beginning to be a source of concern. If I weren’t in such a rush to get out of Rawlings, I’d consider taking a full-time job to keep my mind off the past, present, and future.

But I’d come to the realization awhile back that I was completely unemployable. Three years of forced menial labor had cured me of the job market forever. And when I’d finally collected my two-bedroom inheritance and enough money to pay my attorney bills, I’d leveraged my way from that first broken-down house in Walled Lake to this veritable mansion in Rawlings.

The windows rattled and I knew Brad was making his way up the basement steps.

He stopped in the doorway of my future master suite.

I gave him an arched-eyebrow look that demanded he tell me everything.

“Probably just kids looking for thrills,” he said. “There was no damage, so I locked up. You’re good to go.”

I found it interesting that whenever somebody said something I didn’t want to hear, I got this chokey little ball in my throat. Right now, Brad was lucky I couldn’t go after him on two feet.

I swung my legs over and gripped the edge of my cot. “What do you mean, I’m ‘good to go’?”

In my book, a stick in the window was as close to a break-in as they come. Brad had better track down the offenders, or I’d contact his superiors and let them know that Officer Walters was a dud.

“Look.” Brad crouched down to my level. “There was a stick. That’s all. There was no sign of an actual entry. I’ll make sure the department steps up its drive-bys on this corner.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

Incredible. And not acceptable.

I leaned close enough to detect toothpaste on his breath. “Run some prints. Do whatever detective stuff you guys do. I want to know who was monkeying with that window.”

“Tish,” he said, tapping his thumbs together, “Rawlings is a small town. All that detective stuff costs money. If there had been a murder or grand theft or something, I’d consider it. But there hasn’t even been a crime committed other than possible trespassing. The latch on the window isn’t even damaged. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought the stick was put there from the inside.”

His voice was gentle and soft. Mesmerizing. Convincing. It made me want to forget that Brad was the last one in the basement . . . the only one who could have put the stick in the window from the inside.

 
14

I didn’t want it to be true. A big part of me wanted to believe that Brad was the one good cop I knew, the one Uniform that was also a decent human being. We’d spent such an enjoyable afternoon together, despite my injury. But as I met his steady gaze and followed the faint creases that lined his eyes, I realized I really knew nothing about the man, other than the fact that he went to church on Sundays and could tell a good story.

Any motive he might have for entering my basement through that window was beyond me. A dark, paranoid imagination might suppose that he wanted access to the body in the cistern, maybe to do a better job of hiding it. But a realistic, facts-only look at the situation concurred with Brad’s take on things: the perpetrators were just naughty, nasty, rotten, stinky kids looking for a thrill.

Besides, if Brad were the murderer, who was the victim?

Brad must have caught me squinting at him. He pulled back and stood up, staring at me for a few seconds with an expressionless face. Then with a slow blink, he said goodbye.

I listened as he left the house through the back door. A squeak of the screen, the crunch of metal as the door slammed shut, then all was silent.

Except my brain.

As long as shock waves continued rippling up my leg, I had nothing better to do than lie on my cot and replay the Brad-as-murderer theme while I waited for the prescription to kick in. But please, Brad just wasn’t that kind of guy. Look at his tidy yard and neat gray shutters. That was the sign of a sane, well-organized mind. Of course, there was the cracked concrete on his front porch . . .

I sat up. I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d been lying here idle for ten minutes, and my mind had taken a bizarre digression. Clearly, having a leg injury was bad for my mental health. I had to get up or I’d drive myself crazy thinking about a murder that never happened.

Sighing, I recalled Brad’s gentle features. A pleasant-looking guy like that with those straight, serious lips could only be taken at face value—at least for now.

In any case, the burden of proof was on me. And I had no intention of proving anything about anybody. All I wanted to do was finish the job at hand and move on to whatever vacant, decrepit building was in store for me next.

Still, as long as I was disabled, it wouldn’t hurt to hobble across the street and meet the neighborhood watchdog. It would be my first, long-overdue step in moving from a Silas Marner way of thinking to an Emma frame of mind. And if the old gossip gave me any local scoop, so much the better.

I held on to the wall as I put weight on both feet, standing inch by inch. Each jolt of pain reminded me that I was indeed alive. And that was better than some people.

I slid carefully into my jean jacket, clenching my teeth to stay focused. By the time I reached the front porch, I was out of breath. And despite fall’s sharp bite, beads of shock-induced sweat broke out on my forehead.

Maybe now wasn’t the right time to pick my neighbor’s brain.

I collapsed to the top porch step. I rested my head on one knee, listening to a swirl of noises. The far-off beep of a car horn. The distant slam of a screen door. The rumble of a truck over on Maple Street. A faint whistle, foretelling the train to come.

I groaned. The doctor’s assurance that my leg would only hurt for a few weeks seemed shortsighted. The way I felt, a year was probably more accurate. Which meant that Friday night’s date with David wasn’t going to be the perfect romantic evening I’d had my heart set on, not with me gritting my teeth between every bite.

On the bright side, if I couldn’t work, I couldn’t lose any more fake fingernails. But on the downside, I think I’d been counting on them all falling off before Friday. Could I truly go out in public with Flamingo Pink anywhere on my body?

I pity-partied the whole time the train blew past, wallowing in the bone-jarring vibrations, holding fast to the revolting but undeniably authentic sound of my reality.

At the last ding of the warning bells, I lifted my head. And there she was, staring at me, right at the foot of my front porch. The neighbor lady, Ms. Watchdog.

At close range her gray hair was more like wisps of pure black mixed with chunks of pure white. In between were pale patches of bare scalp. Her face seemed almost blue from the labyrinth of veins showing, with skin pulled tightly over a bone-thin nose. Her lips withdrew into her mouth, and I wondered if she’d remembered to pop in her dentures that morning.

“Looks like you’re in some pain,” she said in a soft, surprisingly youthful voice. I had expected the cackle of an old hag.

“I twisted my ankle going to the basement.” I paused to catch my breath.

“Not surprised. Those steps are too narrow to be safe.”

“Oh? You’ve been down there?”

“Plenty of times. My son, Jack, helped with the foundation repair after the flooding. When was that . . . about a year or so ago?”

I wanted to jump for joy. Brad wasn’t the killer—Jack was. Jack had access to the basement and even worked with the concrete.

“Mind if I sit a minute?” The woman climbed to the top step and settled in, leaning against the crackled-paint siding.

“Be my guest. I’m Tish Amble, by the way.” I offered my hand, but pulled back at the electric twang ripping through my nerves.

“Dorothy Fitch. You stay put.” Dorothy adjusted her bulky quilted jacket. “Takes a little more to stay warm these days.”

I waited for her to say more, but she simply looked at me in silence. Flustered, I glanced across the street at the Fitch residence.

“So, have you lived in the neighborhood long?” I asked.

“All my life,” she replied. “Grew up in that little house next to the church a couple blocks down. My husband grew up in that house right there.” She pointed to her story-and-a-half, early-1900s home. “We moved in with his mother and raised four kids in three bedrooms. Hate to say it, but the best day of my life was the day his mother died. She was a miserable, sickly woman. Only lived to torture me.”

“Oh.” I swallowed hard at the callous comment. “Must’ve been some flood last year, huh?” I said, hoping she’d move back to a less irreverent topic.

“Never saw such a downpour. Water was seeping through every crack. Rick and Jan had it worst of all.” Dorothy patted the tongue-in-groove of the porch floor. “Looked like sprinklers going off from every wall of the basement.”

“You were down there when it happened?”

“Jan called right away. It was the last straw for her. She hadn’t wanted to buy the place to begin with.” Dorothy shrugged. “Rick wasn’t about to give up his baby.”

I thought about Rick Hershel, almost in tears at the closing table. His scruffy beard and mustache barely hid his emotion as he penned his signature on the dotted lines. At the time, I thought he was distraught about the divorce. Now I wondered if he wasn’t more heartbroken over having to sell his true love.

For a second, I hoped Jan really was lying in my basement. Some people had no understanding of the connection between flesh and bone, and plaster and wood. Renovating an old home was more than just a project. It was a labor of love, almost certainly more gratifying than giving birth. Unlike a child, a house didn’t have a mind of its own that came with destructive self-will. Every effort applied toward its four walls remained constant, and only powers greater than the house could change it. Time, elements, a new owner.

A gust of air rattled the windows. The cold blast brought to mind the image of perpetual suffering frozen in the cistern, and along with it came a wave of empathy. In her misunderstanding of Rick’s passion for the house, Jan might have become a permanent part of it.

Or not.

I reminded myself that there was no body in the basement.

“So Jan must be happily living in a brand-new home somewhere, huh?” I said.

“Haven’t heard. Thought she’d drop a note now and then, but some people are bad that way. Probably hurts too much to think about the old neighborhood.”

I clasped my hands against a rearing stomach. “What about Rick? Has he stayed in touch?”

Dorothy nodded. “In a manner of speaking. I see his car drive by every so often. Probably just curious to see what you’re doing to the place. Never stops in, though.”

Not exactly comforting to learn that a possible murderer was casing my house. I thought about the stick in the basement window, and wondered if Rick had conveniently kept a key so he could let himself in later, prop open the basement window, then take his time patching up his lousy burial job.

Forgetting my audience, I shook my head and rolled my eyes, determined not to give valuable brain space to a ridiculous notion.

“Where’d you wander off to?” Dorothy asked.

I gave her a questioning look. “Pardon me?”

“Looked like your mind was a million miles away.”

I hesitated. Spilling my guts about imaginary bodies somehow didn’t seem like good Welcome Wagon conversation.

Still, for the sake of sound sleep, I took a chance.

“Just thinking about the trick-or-treaters that came through last week. A couple of them said my house was haunted.” I gave an embarrassed smile and rubbed the back of my neck.

I’d hoped she’d laugh and reassure me that it wasn’t true. Instead, a look of alarm flashed across her face. Her hands fidgeted in her lap.

“Oh, kids these days.” She waved off their comments. “No such thing as ghosts.”

I wrapped my jacket tighter to keep the frigid wind at bay and stared vacantly at Dorothy’s house across the street. The curtain in the downstairs window moved to one side. I jerked upright in my perch on the top step. A zing of pain knifed down my leg.

I tried not to waggle my primped-up finger too exuberantly as I pointed.

“Who’s that in the window?” I asked. I’d been going on the assumption that Dorothy was the busybody of the ’hood, but it seemed I was wrong.

Dorothy looked toward home. The curtain fell back into place.

Her lips pursed up, giving the illusion she had teeth.

“Just my Jack,” she said. Her thumbs twirled together in slow circles. “Bet he’ll like you just fine. Sure liked Jan when she used to live here.”

A buzz of apprehension crept over my shoulders and up the back of my neck. Somehow I didn’t want anything in common with cold, dead Jan.

Especially not interest from Dorothy’s eccentric son.