Whispers at Midnight (20 page)

“I met Antonio last night,” Carly said, not mentioning that Antonio had practically scared her to death. Antonio nodded at her. With his contented expression and bulging stomach, today he looked about as scary as Santa Claus. Carly smiled at Mike Toler, who murmured
Pleased to meet you.
Then she said to Collin, “I
think
I remember you.”

“Don’t feel bad if you don’t,” Collin said. “I’m seven years younger than Shelby, actually, so…”

“If we’re going to make it to church on time, we’d better be on our way,” Shelby trilled, shooting her brother a silencing look as she got to her feet. Interpreting that look to mean that Shelby didn’t care to have everyone reminded of her age, and remembering that she herself was two years younger than Shelby, Carly smiled. It was good to know that there was at least one area in which she had Miss Queen of Everything bested.

There was a chorus of agreement to Shelby’s reminder. Suddenly everyone was standing, moving about, bustling as they got ready to leave. In the midst of the quick kitchen cleanup that ensued, Carly noted that Shelby was tall and thin, even thinner than she’d been in high school, and elegant in the simple black skirt and heels she’d paired with her white blouse. This eliminated any last lingering remnant of her earlier spurt of pleasure at her own two-year age advantage. In fact, she found it more than mildly annoying, although she refused to acknowledge the feeling even to herself. After all, she told herself, if Matt chose to keep company with a tall, thin woman who looked like she’d cornered the market on hair spray, it was certainly no concern of hers.

To know that her own small and curvy self had about as much chance of looking elegant on a typical day as Hugo did of sprouting wings and flying did not, however, make Carly feel any less annoyed. By the time she schlepped down the stairs with Hugo tucked under one arm and her heavy-as-lead bag practically dragging the floor in her other hand, her annoyance had grown too pronounced to deny. She was many things, she was forced to acknowledge, but elegant wasn’t one of them.

Elegant was Shelby.

The thought irritated her so much that it was all she could do to wave a polite good-bye as, after clambering less than gracefully into the driver’s seat of the U-Haul, blocking Hugo’s attempted panicked exit with a (loving) swat, and waiting with a fixed smile and sweat pouring down her face while Sandra finished a low-voiced conversation with Antonio through the window, she finally was able to start the damned truck and back down the driveway. It didn’t help at all that, while she was waving cheerily at the three lissome and lovely Converse sisters, chic Shelby and her handsome brother as the quintet piled into an imposing black sedan, she cut her exit from the driveway too close and clipped Matt’s mailbox.

All right, she didn’t clip it, she knocked it down.

“Christ,” Sandra said as the metal cylinder scraped noisily along the side of the truck before the wooden pole it was mounted on surrendered to
force majeure
with a dismal crack and toppled to the ground. “You can’t drive.”

“Well, neither can you,” Carly snapped, relieved to no longer have to pretend that everything in her life was just all hunky-dory. “And you can just keep quiet about the mailbox, okay?”

A quick glance in her side and rearview mirrors told Carly that neither the church party in the black sedan, which had pulled out and was heading down the street, or the two deputies, who’d insisted on accompanying them back to Carly’s grandmother’s house and were waiting ahead of them in their official sheriff’s department car, had seen her little oopsy because the U-Haul’s bulk was blocking their view of it. Had the mailbox belonged to anyone but Matt, Carly would have gone looking for the homeowner to confess all and offer to pay for the mailbox’s repair. At the very least, she would have left a note with her name and address. Since the mailbox was Matt’s, she didn’t do either of those things. Instead, as she pulled on down the street leaving the broken mailbox in her wake, she decided that if she’d had two free hands she would have given herself a high five.

14

“I
THINK THAT
’
S
called leaving the scene of an accident,” Sandra said uneasily. “And that’s the
sheriff’s
mailbox, too. Killing the sheriff’s mailbox like that and then just driving away is probably a bad thing.”

“Screw the sheriff,” Carly said, continuing to drive away.

“Woo-ee, did somebody get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning or what?” Sandra gave her a sideways look. “Or does somebody have the hots for that hunky sheriff?”

The fact that Sandra then had to grab on to the overhead strap as the truck bounced and jounced out of the subdivision and onto the main road at about twice the speed it should have was purely coincidental. It in no way reflected Carly’s reaction to the question.

“I thought you were heading back to Chicago this morning. What happened to,
I don’t do spooky old houses
and
forget Nowheresville, U.S.A.?”
Carly’s voice held more than a suggestion of bite.

“I decided to give Benton one more chance.” Sandra’s expression was innocent. Her tone was demure. And Carly believed her like she believed Publishers’ Clearinghouse was going to show up on her doorstep with her big sweepstakes win the next time they came through town.

Carly snorted. “Or could it be that somebody has the hots for that
hunky
deputy?”

With Sandra hanging on to the strap and Hugo hunkered down behind Carly’s head, his claws digging into the vinyl for all he was worth, Carly sent the U-Haul careening into Benton’s small downtown, which, luckily for all concerned, was deserted, with everybody either being at church or pretending to be at church.

Instead of getting annoyed in turn, Sandra grinned. “You mean
hungry
deputy, don’t you? Hey, I’m not proud. We each got to go with what works. You chase after the hunky ones, I’ll chase after the hungry ones, and maybe we’ll both bag somebody.”

“I don’t want to
bag
anybody.”

“Well, I do. Whoa, can anybody say
stop?”

The warning was unnecessary. Carly was already stomping on the brake. She would have done it sooner, but she had only realized that Benton had added a new stoplight at the last minute, and then only because the deputies’ car was sitting beneath it, waiting in blissful ignorance of what was speeding up behind it.

“Are you in bad mood or what?” Sandra’s eyes widened with alarm as the U-Haul plowed to a quivering halt just inches from the car’s bumper. “You know, there’s not any traffic, and it’s not raining, and it’s not dark. Maybe I should drive.”

“Next time I have a death wish I’ll think about letting you. And I am not in a bad mood. I’m just really, really ready to get out of this damned truck.”

It wasn’t even a lie. With the air conditioner broken and the bright sunlight pouring in, it was swelteringly hot in the cab. Unable to open the windows more than a few inches because of Hugo’s clear intention to exit the truck at the first opportunity, Carly was already sweating like an ice cube in July. It didn’t help that Hugo, unhappy and agitated and
shedding,
kept swiping his hairy tail across her damp face.

“I hear you.”

The light changed, and the deputies’ car proceeded onward as if it had no clue that only minutes ago disaster had stopped inches short of its back bumper. It took Carly a beat or so to follow suit.

“You know, that cat sheds. You don’t think…” Sandra said as the U-Haul bounced through the green light and picked up speed again.

“No.” Carly cut her off before she could finish. They’d had this discussion before, when they’d been making their plans for the bed-and-breakfast. Sandra had an aversion to cats. Carly had a cat. On that point, Carly wasn’t giving an inch. Sandra just had to deal.

“Fine. But just so you know, you’re the one who’s going to be doing the vacuuming.”

“Fine.”

The First Baptist Church was coming up on the left. It was a small brick building with a tall steeple and a parking lot large enough to accommodate most sports stadiums. The parking lot was full. As Carly passed it, she had a sudden mental vision of little devils coming after her with pitchforks because she wasn’t inside. She stepped on the gas.

“You ever want to get married again, that cat might be a problem. A lot of men don’t like cats.”

“Too bad. The way I feel about it is, love me, love my cat.” Carly paused to bat Hugo’s tail away from her lips. “Anyway, I don’t want to get married again. Ever. Been there, done that.”

“Yeah.”

Sandra’s gloomy agreement stemmed from her own late, unlamented marriage, Carly knew. Sandra had been Carly’s first hire when she’d opened the Treehouse four years before. Thirty-two at the time, in the process of getting a divorce, Sandra had been bad-humored, beaten down, and broke. Carly had hired her to wait tables. Sandra had been the waitress from hell, prone to such public-relations no-no’s as telling a customer who complained about a sauce smelling a little off that the only thing that smelled
off
in the Treehouse was him, and if he left and went home and took a shower, then nothing would smell
off.
Carly had been on the verge of firing her when her ruinously expensive, cordon bleu–trained chef threw a hissy fit in the kitchen one hectic Saturday night and walked out. Doing her best to rally the remainder of the kitchen staff, all of whom had seemed to be in various stages of meltdown too, Carly had been frantically trying to fill the remaining orders when Sandra, repulsed by a plate of Stroganoff that she said looked like dog barf, had thrown down her pad and pencil, elbowed the overwhelmed
sous-
chef aside, and proceeded to cook like an angel from heaven. Open-mouthed,
Carly had observed plate after plate of scrumptious food served up to table after table of satisfied diners, and had realized that she was in the presence of a true culinary genius. At the end of the evening, she’d put Sandra in charge of the kitchen. Since then, she’d nursed Sandra through a divorce, Sandra had nursed her through a divorce, they’d operated a restaurant together, lost their livelihoods together, and set their feet on a whole new path together. Two days ago, Carly had moved out of the dumpy little apartment she’d moved into when her plush condominium had been sold out from under her as a result of the divorce, Sandra had moved out of the dumpy little house she’d been sharing with an aunt and a cousin for the last three years, and, along with Hugo and all their worldly goods, they’d loaded up the U-Haul and headed for Benton, Georgia.

Now Carly was getting the feeling that they were going to rival Oscar and Felix in the I-love-my-roommate department.

Sandra continued after a moment’s rumination, “Okay, so maybe we don’t want to get married. That doesn’t mean we have to swear off men. Men are fun. At least, they’re more fun than vibrators.”

“Says who?”

“You ever have a vibrator give you a present? Or massage your feet? Anyway, don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to play patty-cake with that sheriff. I saw the way you were looking at him.”

“Damn it, Sandra—” Realizing that outright denial would be useless, Carly took a deep breath and opted for semi-truth. “All right, so he’s cute. So I noticed. So what? In his case, looks are deceiving. Believe me, I know.”

“Whatever.” Clearly unconvinced, Sandra grabbed hold of the strap again as the U-Haul rocked around a bend. “Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, men are like shoes. It’s not all that easy to find a good fit. When you do, I say, grab ’em quick before somebody else does.”

“Good philosophy.” If men were shoes, then Matt was a pair of six-inch stilettos, great-looking and sexy as all get-out but murder on the feet. Not that Matt had come to mind because she was thinking about him as a possible good fit, because she wasn’t. Ever again.

“Now, Antonio, he’s a Leo. I asked him. Pisces and Leo together—
that combination’s supposed to generate sparks. I don’t know about you, but I could sure use some sparks.” Sandra glanced sideways at Carly. “You know the sheriff’s birthday?”

Of course Carly did. November 16. For years, what present to get him had been one of the major concerns of her life.

“Nope,” she said. “By the way, while you were asking Antonio his birth date, did you by any chance bother to ask him if he was married?”

Sandra’s jaw dropped. “I forgot to ask him that. I can’t believe I forgot to ask him that.”

“Great. Nice sense of priorities.”

The U-Haul made it around another bend, and all of a sudden, up there on the hill to her right, was her grandmother’s house—no,
her
house; Carly could see she was going to have trouble remembering that. With the brilliant sunshine banishing all but the most inviting of shadows, the big white house in its setting of leafy old trees looked picturesque and homey rather than spooky. Carly had a troubling moment as she remembered the burglar and how frightened she had actually been the previous night, but then she saw the deputies’ car pulling over at the base of the hill and reminded herself that Matt and his department had investigated and apparently had found nothing particularly alarming to report. Whatever faults he might have, and she wasn’t even going to go there because if she did she’d be there for the rest of the day and on into the night, Matt would let her know in a heartbeat if he thought there was any reason at all why she wouldn’t be safe in the house. As things stood, she certainly wasn’t going to let having been the victim of a garden-variety break-in stand in the way of her and her new life.