Playing Dead in Dixie (7 page)

"It's probably nothing," he murmured as they waited for his father to answer.

But there was only silence.

Muttering a soft oath, Wes tried the door.  It rattled uselessly in his hand, locked.

"I thought you people left your doors open around here."

Wes cut his eyes at her.  "You've been watching too many 'Andy Griffith Show' reruns."   He pulled his keys from his pocket and unlocked the door.

The front door opened directly into a neat, if slightly shabby, living room.  An old leather sofa, a large coffee table that looked like it had a few years on it, and a television took up most of the small room, the television casting flickering light on the far wall.  But the room was otherwise empty.

A flutter of foreboding bloomed in Carly's belly.

Wes pressed the off button on the television and it went silent.  He listened for a moment, then called out, "J.B.?"

A muttered litany of curses answered him, coming from somewhere a few rooms away.

Wes hurried toward the sound, Carly on his heels.  He skidded to a stop in the entrance to the kitchen, too fast for Carly to slow her own momentum.  She slammed face-first into his back, hard enough that she saw stars before her vision cleared and she got a look at what had brought Wes up short.

A lean, fragile-looking man in his sixties lay in the middle of the kitchen floor, propped up on one elbow amid broken crockery, a shattered salt shaker and a ruptured bag of microwave popcorn, the debris scattered from one end of the kitchen to the other.

"I just wanted some popcorn," the man said.

Chapter Four

His heart in his throat, Wes crouched by his father's side, his gaze moving over J.B.'s thin body in search of injuries.  He saw no obvious wounds, no unnaturally-twisted limbs.  "Do you hurt anywhere, Daddy?"

J.B. glared up at him, humiliation and rage saturating every inch of his too-thin body.  He spoke in a voice raspy and tight with tortured pride.  "No, I ain't hurt.  Would you just help me get my feet up under me?"

"Let me call Doctor Allen."

"Hell and damnation, boy, I don't need no doctor!  I just need to get my feet under me!"  J.B.'s gaze shifted beyond him, color rising up his neck and into his cheeks.  "Who the blazes are you?"

Wes glanced over his shoulder.  Carly stood behind him, her expression shuttered.  She stepped forward and held out her hand.  "Carly Devlin.  I was a friend of your nephew Steve."

J.B. looked at her outstretched hand as if she'd lost her mind.  "You ain't from around here, are you?"

Carly laughed softly and crouched next to J.B.  "How'd you  ever guess that?"  She took his good arm.  "Let me help you up."

Wes took his father's other arm and helped her get J.B. to his feet.  Wes dusted the salt and glass chips from his father's back.  "You sure nothing's hurt?"

J.B. shrugged off Wes's hand.  "I'm positive.  I just tripped over my old bad foot and took a tumble.  I couldn't get any traction to get up what with that mess on the floor."

Carly leaned in toward him, tucking her arm through his.  "Try doing it in high heels, mister," she quipped.

The look of puzzlement on J.B.'s face nearly made Wes laugh aloud.  "You were a friend of Steve's?"

"Sort of.  I met him on the bus right before it crashed, but you know Steve.  He was a real easy guy to like."  Carly walked J.B. to the table.  She glanced back at Wes, nodding her her head toward the mess in the floor before sitting beside J.B.

Wes stared at the two of them for a moment, his anxiety-fogged brain slow to realize that he'd just been relegated to mop-up duty.  Biting back a grumble, he found a broom and dustpan in a closet off the kitchen and started sweeping up the mess, keeping his ears open for the conversation at the table.

"My grandmother, God rest her soul, had a stroke when she was only forty-five years old," Carly told J.B.  "She lost use of her right hand, too.  After the stroke, she concentrated on working on her legs, on walking.  She sorta gave up on her hand, because it wouldn't anything she wanted it to do."  Carly chuckled softly.  "She called it her 'dearly departed hand.'  Mind if I take a look?"

Wes looked over his shoulder and found Carly reaching for his father's crippled hand.  He almost called out a warning to her—J.B. could be like a dog with a bone about his claw—but to his surprise, his father let Carly take the bad hand in her own.

"Oh, yeah, you've definitely got a hand problem here."

"What are you, some kind of therapist?"  J.B. shot Wes a suspicious look.

Carly shook her head.  "Not me.  I'm just an accountant like you.  Floyd tells me you did his books for him."

"Used to.  Now I can't write."

"Nope, not with this hand," Carly agreed.  "Too bad you couldn't get it working for you again."

Wes emptied the dustpan into a garbage sack and put it aside, crossing to the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, where Carly and his father sat.  Carly was gently massaging J.B.'s hand, her touch so light that Wes wasn't sure his father realized what it was she was doing.

Carly looked up at him, her expression growing wary when she caught him watching her.  He offered an encouraging smile, and she relaxed, a smile forming on her pretty pink lips.

"Did you realize you use your hands for walking?  You swing your arms while walking to keep a steady gait, or put out your hand to steady yourself if you start to lose balance.  If your hand's not working right, your legs have to learn a whole new way to walk.  When my grandmother finally figured that out, she started putting as much effort into improving the function of her hand as she did her legs.  Soon, she was walking better and using that hand in ways she never thought she would again."

J.B. pulled his hand away from her.  "If my hand was ever going to be worth a damn again, it would've happened already."

"How hard did you try to get it working again?"

J.B. whirled around to glare at his son.  "You been talkin' about me?"

Wes shrugged.  "I haven't told her anything."

Carly stood up, holding up her hands.  "Sorry if I stepped on your toes or something."  She didn't sound very apologetic, Wes noted.  "I was just telling you about my grandmother, God rest her soul, and how she dealt with her stroke.  If you don't want to be able to write again with that claw you got there, fine with me.  Not my problem.  Floyd seems happy enough with Sherry Clayton doing his books for him."

J.B. made a rude snorting sound.

Wes had to bite back another laugh.  Everyone tried to coddle J.B., encourage him, tiptoe around his cranky moods and bitter self-pity.  Wes should have known a woman like Carly Devlin wouldn't put up with J.B.'s crap for long.

"I ain't ever gonna write with this hand again," J.B. muttered.

Carly fixed him with a pointed, green-eyed gaze that oozed a mixture of pity and disappointment.  "No.  I guess you won't."

J.B. stared up at her.  To Wes's surprise, his father's gaze was as full of admiration as consternation.  "You're a mouthy little thing, ain't you?"

Her lips curved.  "So I've been told."  She gave a nod toward the kitchen.  "Now that we've settled that I have a big mouth and you have a bad hand, you still hungry?  I could pop another bag of popcorn, or heat up something from the fridge."

"I ain't hungry."

"Well, obviously, you are, or you wouldn't have gone skating in the salted popcorn."  Carly strode toward the doorway where Wes stood.  He quickly moved out of her way.

While Carly looked through J.B.'s refrigerator, Wes turned back to find his father glaring at him.

"Why'd you bring her here?" J.B. asked.

"I was taking her back to Aunt Bonnie's house after delivering some of the extra food out to Shannon Burgess when I saw the light from your TV was still on in the living room."

"I could've been watching a late movie or something."

"But you weren't, and it's good I checked, wasn't it?"

"You could've left her outside."

"I can hear you, you know," Carly called from the refrigerator.

J.B.'s lips twitched slightly.  "I always heard they made 'em pushy up north," he called back.

Wes saw Carly grin in response.  She pulled a covered dish out of the refrigerator and placed it on the counter by the stove, pulling back the aluminum foil.  She paused, frowning slightly as she tried to figure out what was in the pan.  "What
is
this?"

Wes crossed to her side and looked down at the casserole dish.  "Homemade chicken pot pie."

She prodded the biscuit lying atop the creamy chicken and vegetable stew beneath.  "Is this the pie part?"

Wes pulled a plate from one of the cabinets.  "Just put it in the microwave for about a minute," he told her, reaching for the cabinet where his father kept the drinking glasses.  "You want milk or tea?" he called to J.B.

"I want everybody out of my house," J.B. shot back.

"Okay, milk it is."  Wes opened the refrigerator and pulled out a plastic half-gallon milk container.  He screwed off the top and gave a sniff.  Still smelled okay.  His father was bad about letting the milk go sour and not letting Wes know so that he could go pick up some fresh.

After pouring a glass of milk, Wes grabbed a couple of paper towels from the rack on the wall and a fork from a nearby drawer.  He handed them to Carly. "Here, take these to J.B.  And don't get too close.  He might bite."

"Not if I bite first."  Carly carried the glass, the fork and the towels to the table.

"You're still here?" J.B. muttered.

"Gotta love that Southern hospitality," Carly replied.  "No wonder everybody raves about it."

The microwave beeped, and Wes carefully carried the hot plate to the table.  He placed it in front of his father.  "There you go.  You need anything else?"

"Just to be left alone."

"Lucky you.  We're about to leave."  Wes looked at Carly.  "Go on out to the truck, if you will.  I'll be out in a second."

She gave a little nod and left the dining room.  A couple of seconds later, he heard the front door open and close.

"You could have been a little nicer to her, J.B.  She was only trying to help you."

"She was trying to handle me," J.B. retorted.  But his voice softened a little when he added, "She's pretty good at it, ain't she?"

Wes laughed.  "I don't much know what to make of her, to tell you the truth."

"She's got a mouth on her."

Yes, she did, Wes thought, thinking about her full pink lips, ripe for a thorough kissing.  "She does tend to say whatever she's thinking."

J.B. picked up his fork and poked around at the chicken and vegetables on his plate.  "No, she tells you what she wants you to think she's thinking."

Wes realized his father was probably closer to the truth.  Carly was like an iceberg, in-your-face on the surface but hiding a whole a lot more in the dark waters underneath.

That's what made her so damned dangerous.

CARLY HAD THOUGHT WES would drop her off in front of the Strickland's house.  She was surprised when he parked the truck and got out to walk her to the house.

He cleared his throat when they reached the porch.  "Thanks for trying to help with my father.  I'm sorry he was so rude."

"He was a pussycat compared to my grandma," Carly assured him.

"He needs to quit blaming the world for how things have gone wrong for him.  He's mad at me and everyone else because his body doesn't work like it used to, but when the rehab people tried to teach him exercises to get back his motor functions, he dug in his heels and fought them like a tiger."

"The stroke changed who he is.  How he thinks.  What might make sense to you or me—how sticking your hand down in a can of warm rice and working it helps to stimulate the nerves and muscles of a stroke-injured hand—doesn't make any sense to your father at all."  Carly leaned against the door frame, gazing up at Wes.  "All he knows is that he used to have a hand that worked, and now he doesn't, and he can't see how a pile of warm rice is going to change that."

"Your grandmother had to do that, too?"

Carly nodded.  "Yeah.  And she hated it.  It took a long time for her to see that the crazy things the therapist was telling her to do really did work."

"How long did it take to convince her?"

"Three years."

Wes sighed, leaning against the door frame.  "Dad's been that way for almost ten.  Even if he changed his mind now and tried some of the things they're suggesting, how much control of his arm and hand could he get back?"

"I don't know," Carly admitted.  "But it would have to be more than he has now, right?"

"I should probably check on him on my way home."

"No."  Impulsively, she caught his hand.   "He'll be all right now, I think, and it'll make him feel worse if you turn back up tonight.  Just make an excuse to phone him when you get home if you're still worried."

Wes squeezed her hand.  "J.B. may not be glad you were there tonight, but I am."

Warmth spread up her arm from the spot where their palms met.  "You take care of everybody around here, don't you?  Your dad, your aunt and uncle, this whole town—"

"You give me too much credit."  He released her hand and took a step back.  "It's late.  I'd better go."

She curled her tingling fingers into a fist and pressed it against her stomach, trying to ignore the little voice inside that urged her to make him stay.  "Thanks for taking me to meet Shannon.  She's nice."

"You'll find most folks around here are."  He looked as if he wanted to give her a warning as he turned to leave, but he settled for a brief nod as he headed to his truck.

As he drove away, Carly lingered on the porch, sitting in the rocking chair by the door and gazing out at the darkness beyond the yellow glow cast by the porch light above.

The evening had been remarkably short on tension between them, despite the events at his father's house.  She'd felt like a teammate, helping him deal with his difficult father.  And although she knew he'd soon be back to playing suspicious cop to her secretive outsider, she was glad they'd ended this night, at least, as allies instead of enemies.