Whispers at Midnight (15 page)

“Oh, for God’s sake. Lighten up, will you please? I’m eighteen. I’ll be going off to college next month.” The girl swung her legs over the side of the couch and proceeded to button up her blouse while glaring at Matt. “Then you won’t know anything about what I choose to do.”

“Thank God,” Matt said devoutly. He turned on a lamp and the room got even brighter.

“Uh—bye, Lissa.” Andy bestowed a sickly little half smile on Carly and Sandra as he loped past them toward the door. Carly felt almost sorry for him. His face was beet red, his eyes kept darting nervously back at Matt, and his jeans kept threatening to fall down.

“See you tomorrow, Andy,” Lissa called as he made it to safety and the door closed behind him. Clearly she was not as impressed by Matt’s displeasure as Andy had been. Having finished with her blouse, she stood up, stretched provocatively under Matt’s censorious gaze, and yawned, covering her mouth with red-tipped fingers that she tapped against her cheeks in an exaggerated display of boredom.

“Carly, Sandra, meet my sister Melissa,” Matt said dryly. “Lissa, Carly Linton—you might remember Carly, she grew up here in Benton—and Sandra… Sandra …”

“Kaminski,” Sandra supplied. She was standing just behind Carly, watching the action wide-eyed.

“Kaminski,” Matt repeated.

“Hi,” Lissa offered, wiggling her fingers at them in an airy little wave.

“Hi,” they echoed in unison. Carly caught herself waving back, and felt like a fool. Luckily, no one else seemed to notice. Lissa’s eyes had already swung back to Matt. She was frowning. “What happened to your head? And your shirt?”

“I got hit and it got wet.” Matt disposed of her questions with curt efficiency. “I need you to look after Carly and Sandra for me. They’re going to be spending the night.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lissa looked interested. Her gaze returned to them, sharpened, and ran over Carly with particular care.

“Yeah.” Matt’s tone was as unencouraging as the look he gave her.

“Fine with me. I would never dream of saying anything about
your
private life.”

“Can it, Lissa,” he ordered. A horn honked from the driveway. Running both hands through his hair, Matt looked harassed. “I’ve got to go. Where’s Erin?”

“Out.”

“It’s almost one-thirty.”

Lissa shrugged.

“Dani?”

“Out.”

“Where? Everything’s clo—” Something in Lissa’s expression made him break off and shake his head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

The horn honked again.

“Damn, I need a shirt.” Matt moved swiftly past them into an adjoining room, turning on the light as he went. In less than a minute he was back, pulling on a rumpled-looking Georgia Bulldogs tee shirt as he came through the doorway. He shot Lissa an exasperated look. “Can’t somebody do the laundry?”

Lissa smiled. “Hello, somebody.”

“Give me a break here. I’ve been working my butt off this week.”

Lissa made a face at him. “Tell the truth: You just expect one of us to do the laundry because we’re girls.”

The horn sounded again. Matt swallowed whatever else he might have been going to say on the subject and turned to Carly. “Don’t leave the house.” He glanced at his sister. “Give one of them my room, and the other Erin’s. I doubt she’ll be back tonight, and when I come in, I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n.” Lissa saluted smartly. Matt shot her a narrow-eyed look.

The horn gave a double blast.

“Later,” Matt said, and took himself off.

“Be warned. He’s cute, but he’s bossy,” Lissa said.

Carly, who’d been watching the door close behind him, glanced guiltily around to discover Lissa looking her up and down.

“Now I remember you,” Lissa said suddenly, meeting her gaze. “You lived in the old Beadle Mansion and you always wore those really frilly dresses and you had like acres of curls. Didn’t you used to follow Matt around everywhere?”

Carly was momentarily taken aback, but she recovered quickly enough to keep her discomfort from becoming obvious, she hoped.

“Sometimes, I guess. He did odd jobs for my grandmother.” Time to take the ball into her opponent’s court before Matt’s baby sister dredged up any more embarrassing recollections. She hadn’t seen much of the three Converse girls—her grandmother had rarely permitted her to go to Matt’s house, or even to the “poor” sections of town where Matt and his family had lived—but hanging around Matt had inevitably exposed her to them from time to time. “As it happens, I remember you, too. You were little, and you wore flip-flops all the time because you couldn’t tie your shoes, and you always seemed to be crying about something. Once it was because one of the neighborhood boys had stuck bubblegum in your hair. You begged Matt to get it out. So he took out his pocketknife and sawed the whole hank of hair off. He thought that would make you feel better, but when you saw that hank of hair just laying there in his hand you really bawled. He was pretty disgusted about the whole thing.”

Lissa grinned. “That sounds like me—and Matt.”

“Uh, excuse me,” Sandra said, very polite as she shifted from one foot to the other in a way Carly knew only too well. “But would you mind if I used your bathroom?”

From the look she shot Carly, Carly realized that she was being dared to comment.

“Oh, sure. It’s through here.” Apparently put in a better humor by the exchange of reminiscences, Lissa started walking and beckoned them after her. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

They followed her into the kitchen, which was bright and cheerful with white cabinets and trellis-patterned wallpaper. A side-by-side bathroom and laundry room opened off the kitchen. The laundry room floor was piled with baskets of dirty clothes. Seeing them, Carly grinned. Somebody really did need to do the laundry.

“Do you live with Matt year-round? Or …” Carly had wondered if perhaps Matt’s three sisters were just visiting, but she broke off as Lissa nodded. The two of them were leaning against the kitchen wall waiting for Sandra to emerge from the bathroom.

“I do, but I’m the only one of us who still does. Or at least I do until next month. Then I’m headed for the University of Georgia. My sister Dani’s going to be a junior there, and Erin just graduated. Dani will be going back when I go, and Erin’s getting married. So as of the middle of next month, Matt will be on his own for the first time since he came home after Mama died.” Lissa grinned. “We’re trying to prepare him by not doing the laundry and things. We’re afraid being left on his own after having us to take care of him for so long is going to be kind of a shock.”

Sandra emerged then, and Lissa took them upstairs. After showing Sandra to Erin’s bedroom, a frilly affair in pink and white, Lissa took Carly along to Matt’s. The rest of the house was decidedly feminine, done up in pastels and floral prints and finished off with a variety of pictures, plants and knickknacks. In contrast, Matt’s room was starkly unadorned, with plain white walls, beige carpeting, the bare minimum of sturdy oak furniture, and another of those ugly recliners, this one sporting even more repairs than the one in the living room, situated for optimum viewing of a small TV.

“He won’t let us touch his room,” Lissa said semi-apologetically,
glancing around. “He says he likes it like this. But at least it has its own bathroom.” She pointed toward a door in the far wall. “It’s through there.”

Carly nodded as she put down her bag. By this time she was practically drooping with fatigue. The drive down from Chicago had left her exhausted. Her most pressing thought as she’d parked the U-Haul in front of her grandmother’s house and started lugging Hugo up the hill had been of showers and beds. The subsequent excitement had revived her—a series of major adrenaline rushes tended to do that to people, she’d heard—but the excitement was over now and she was once again fading fast. Not even her residual worry over Hugo’s fate could keep her from looking longingly at the bed.

“ ’Night.” Taking the hint, Lissa headed out the door, then paused with one hand on the jamb to glance back with a naughty grin.

“Wait till Shelby hears that Matt brought you home to spend the night. He
never
brings girls home. She’s gonna die.”

Carly’s eyes widened. Before she could even begin to explain the circumstances behind her overnight stay, the girl, still grinning, gave her another of those airy little waves and went out of the room. Left standing open-mouthed in the middle of Matt’s bedroom, there was nothing for Carly to do but contemplate Lissa’s words—and wonder, to her eternal self-disgust, just who Shelby was and what she was to Matt.

11

I
F THE DAMNED CAT
had belonged to anyone except Carly, Matt thought, he would have dropped it off at the pound. No, better yet, he would have left it in the tree where Toler had found it. Or fed it to the dog that, shooed off, had still lurked hopefully beneath a nearby bush, watching as he cursed out his deputies for cowardice and then, with both Toler and Antonio grinning in the background, ascended into the branches himself to bring the spitting, clawing spawn of a saber-toothed tiger down.

But he owed Carly. Big time. Enough so that he was prepared to overlook having his arms scratched all to hell and nearly falling out of the damned tree and providing his deputies with more laughs than a Monty Python festival. Stumbling across her tonight had taken him back twelve years, to the night when the curly-haired little misfit of a teenager that he’d considered a sort of fourth sister for most of his life had morphed into a woman. A beautiful woman with big blue eyes that had openly adored him and a soft, pink-lipsticked mouth that had trembled when he looked at it and a slim, firm body hugged by a slithery satin dress that had pressed up against him tighter than his own underwear every time he’d turned around. He’d been doing her a favor, a
favor,
damn it, by taking her to her prom, and like all good deeds that favor had turned around and bitten him in the ass.

He couldn’t even blame her for what had happened. She’d been a young eighteen, and she’d been so sheltered and guarded and hemmed in by her crusty old battle-ax of a grandmother that she’d never even had a date. For years he’d basked in the glow of her admiration, responding to her open hero worship like a plant to the sun, treating her in return with a careless affection that only occasionally had been jarred into real tenderness. Back then, most of the world had seen him as bad news, but not Carly. She’d thought he was wonderful, and he’d known it; had even, he saw now, been touched by it, and been motivated to be better than he actually was inclined to be because of it. When he’d stumbled across her crying because she didn’t have a date to the prom, making her happy again had been easy.

But she’d surprised him. That night, his sweet little odd duck of a pal had somehow turned into a swan, and when he’d first set eyes on her as she’d walked out onto her porch to greet him he’d scarcely been able to believe what his eyes were seeing. But he’d handled it, no problem, dancing with her in her crepe paper–hung gym and making her look good in front of the other girls and assiduously keeping her away from the rum-spiked punch, which he’d imbibed just enough of himself to be able to state positively what was in it. When he’d first started getting turned on by her, he couldn’t have said; but by the time they were ready to leave he’d been aroused enough to where taking her straight home no longer seemed like the only possible option.

She’d snuggled up next to him in his car, her head resting back against the top of the seat and her eyes all soft and dreamy on his face as she’d confided that most of her classmates had rented rooms in Benton’s one motel, where they meant to party for what was left of the night.

Forget that, he’d said, curt because he was tempted.

But on the way home she’d said she was thirsty, and he had thought she probably was because he hadn’t let her drink anything but a few sips of water from the fountain all night. So he’d stopped at the 7-Eleven to buy her a Coke and himself a beer. Then she’d begged so hard for a sip from his can that he’d finally pulled over into a graveled lay-by and let her have one. After the gulp she’d swallowed had
made it safely down, she’d coughed and wrinkled up her nose with distaste and gone “Ugh.” Then he’d laughed and said something like, “Curls, I don’t think you’re ready for beer yet.”

She’d sat up straight and looked at him and said, real serious, “I’m ready for more than you think,” and kissed him, hot and sweet as heavily sugared coffee, right on the mouth.

From there the situation, and his self-control with it, had gone straight to hell.

Afterward, after he’d taken her home and caught a few hours’ sleep and woken up to the realization of what he’d done, he’d been literally sick to his stomach. He could hardly look at himself in the mirror. He certainly couldn’t face Carly.

What could he say? I’m sorry, it was a mistake, I feel like I’ve fucked my sister?

Matt grimaced, remembering. In retrospect, he should have said it, or if not exactly that—surely he could have come up with something a shade more tactful—at least
something.
Avoiding her for the rest of the summer out of shame had been, as Lissa would put it, way less than cool.