Whispers at Midnight (21 page)

As she pulled in behind the car, the deputies got out and started walking toward the U-Haul. Broad as the back side of a barn, dark-skinned and blunt-featured, Antonio was squinting at the truck as if something pained him. Mike had one hand raised to keep the sun out of his eyes. Well-built and actually quite handsome aside from the awful russet crew cut, Mike was staring at the truck too.

“Is it just my imagination, or do they not look too happy?” Carly asked, shifting into park.

“Maybe they know about the mailbox.” Sandra sounded uneasy as she watched them approach.

“How could they—” Carly began, only to break off with a yelp as Sandra opened the door. But it was too late. Glimpsing freedom, Hugo went for it, streaking for blue skies with the deadly accuracy of a missile.

Carly grabbed for him, missed, and slumped in defeat.

“Sorry,” Sandra said, grimacing apologetically as she got out of the truck.

Carly straightened and took a deep breath. “No big deal.”

As long as there was no demon dog to give chase, Hugo would probably be fine.

“Was that that cat?” Mike asked in a tone of deep foreboding.

“Yep,” Sandra said, rolling her eyes.

“Oh, man, I remember that thing.” Mike started to grin. “You should have seen Matt—”

He broke off abruptly as Antonio elbowed him in the side. Clutching his ribs, he cast Antonio a reproachful look. Then his grin came back.

“You want us to try to catch it?” Antonio asked, looking in at Carly. Mike’s grin vanished. The expression that took its place was pure alarm. Although why that should be so, Carly had no clue.

She sighed. “No, he should be fine.”

After all, Hugo was in much the same boat as she was herself, Carly thought. Life as he had known it before was over. He was going to have to adapt to this new one as best he could.

“Just so you know, there’s a speed limit of twenty-five going through town,” Antonio said, his tone carefully neutral now. “We figured you didn’t see the signs.”

Sandra made an indecipherable sound.

“No, I didn’t.” Carly was being perfectly truthful. One unfortunate side effect of complete and utter aggravation was that it had a tendency to blind one to little things like road signs, as she had just discovered.

Antonio nodded and switched his attention to Sandra. Carly slid out of the truck.

Running her fingers through her hair, lifting the clingy little tendrils up off her face and neck for a moment in the hope that it might make her feel cooler, Carly walked around the front of the cab. She couldn’t help but look for Hugo. He was nowhere in sight. This time yesterday that would have made her anxious; she was still anxious, she realized, but also resigned. She and Hugo had been thrown into the deep end; now it was time to see if they could swim. Although the drastic alteration in their circumstances certainly wasn’t anything she would have wished for, the change was probably going to be good for both of them. If nothing else, it was sure to be one of those growth experiences they were always talking about on the TV talk shows she’d had way too much time to watch since the Treehouse had closed down.

Grimacing, Carly allowed herself a little personal pity time to acknowledge that she missed her restaurant, she missed her condominium, she missed her car, and she really missed her bank accounts. But as she thought about it she realized with some surprise that she didn’t miss John, or their life together. Not one bit. With the clarity of hindsight, she saw that her life with John had at its center boiled down to the two of them endlessly striving to get ahead. It had been all about achieving security, success, and status rather than love or any real sense of being a couple, of belonging together. Her life without him? She lifted her chin and straightened her spine as she made a promise to herself: her life without him was going to be about being the person she had always wanted to be.

The possibilities suddenly seemed endless, and fascinating.

Carly rounded the cab just in time to hear Sandra say to the men, “That sure is nice of you. How about you bring your wives around to dinner sometime this week as a sort of thank-you?”

Listening to Sandra’s uncharacteristically molasses-coated tone, it was all Carly could do not to roll her eyes.

“I’m not married,” Mike said. “But I could sure do with dinner.”

“Me neither,” Antonio said. “I mean, me too. I mean, I’m a widower, but I’d sure appreciate coming to dinner. You sure are one fine cook.”

“Thank you.” Sandra beamed at him, and flashed Carly, who’d
just walked up beside her, a glinting look that was the eye-contact equivalent of a thumbs-up. Carly had to hand it to Sandra; she knew what she wanted, and she was going after it.

“These nice men,” Sandra said to her, all but batting her lashes at Antonio, “are going to help us unload the truck.”

“That
is
nice,” Carly said, then glanced from one to the other of the deputies. “But should you? I mean, I don’t want you to get into trouble. If you’re supposed to be working…”

Her voice trailed off. Not that their help wouldn’t be welcome, but she thought there was probably some kind of rule about people on public payrolls performing any but public duties while they were on the clock.

“We’re off duty,” Mike assured her. “Anyway, Matt said we should help you unload.”

Carly’s eyes narrowed.

“Which it is our pleasure to do,” Antonio added with some haste, clearly misinterpreting the reason for her souring expression. “By the way, speaking of Matt, he was just on the radio asking if we knew anything about his mailbox being knocked down. Seems one of his neighbors called him to say it was lying in his yard, broken clean in half. It was still standing when we left his house, I’m pretty sure. At least, I think we would have noticed if it was lying in his yard. You don’t happen to remember seeing it when you were pulling out, do you? It was standing right up beside his driveway.”

Sandra looked as if she’d swallowed a bug.

“I’m sure we would have noticed if it had been knocked down,” Carly said, sliding her hand around Sandra’s elbow and smiling innocently as her fingers tightened in a warning squeeze. It was always a good feeling to know one was telling the truth, she reflected. When Matt’s mailbox was knocked down, she and Sandra certainly
had
noticed, no doubt about it. She just wasn’t admitting to doing it, on the theory that anything that added an extra dollop of grief to Matt’s life was a small price for him to pay in exchange for the truly enormous amount of aggravation he had dumped in hers.

“That’s what I think, too.” Antonio shrugged. “If you want to unlock the back, we can start unloading.”

Carly took a breath, ready to reject any help that had been prompted by Matt no matter how welcome it might be, only to have Sandra step on her foot.

“Ow!” Carly jerked her poor injured toes out of harm’s way.

“Oh, sorry.” That was so blatantly insincere that Carly couldn’t believe it. Sandra took the keys from Carly and handed them to Antonio with another of those melting smiles. “We really appreciate this. Thanks so much.”

“Sure.” Keys jingling, Antonio and Mike headed around to the back of the truck.

“Are you crazy? Don’t you dare tell them we don’t need any help,” Sandra hissed at Carly the moment they were alone. “It’s hotter than a pizza oven out here and that’s one big hill. You want to go around cutting off your nose to spite your face, that’s fine with me, but only as long as you leave me out of it. What did that sheriff do to you to make you so mad at him, anyway?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, right.” Sandra turned away, reaching into the cab and dragging out Carly’s overnight bag, her own overnight bag, and the pan she’d wielded for most of the previous night. “Come on, let’s get going with this before they figure out how hot it is and take off.”

Carly grimaced but had to admit Sandra had a point as she picked up her bag. It still felt like it was loaded down with an anvil or two. With Sandra right behind her and Mike, juggling an armload of brooms and mops along with a vacuum cleaner, and Antonio, carrying a stack of boxes, following, she began staggering up the hill.

Besides being hot, the day was already so humid that the earth itself seemed to be sweating. As she trudged upward, Carly could practically feel drops of moisture hanging in the air. The sky was a fresh-washed, cloudless blue. Birds sang, crickets chirped, cicadas whirred, and mosquitoes launched their assaults in waves. The dense canopy of trees kept the worst of the sun’s rays at bay, and the deep shade it provided was welcome for that reason, but it also kept the heat and the bugs and the residual moisture from the previous day’s rain down close to the ground. By the time Carly was within spitting distance of the porch she would have traded the whole somnolent
Southern summer for a single breath of one of Lake Michigan’s brisk breezes. She’d forgotten just how hot July in Georgia could be.

She’d forgotten just how itchy July in Georgia could be.

“Found my phone,” Sandra announced triumphantly. Carly glanced around to see Sandra holding up her cell phone. Her bright plastic tote, already recovered, hung from her arm, and as Carly watched, Sandra slid the phone inside it. Huffing and puffing like the little engine that could, glistening with sweat, surrounded by a cloud of gnats, Sandra looked as happy as Carly had ever seen her. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why: Antonio had picked up the pace until he was walking beside her.

Lust was a many-splendored thing.

“Yay,” Carly said. Pretending she was waiting for the others to catch up to her, she put her leaden bag down and stretched her back as unobtrusively as possible, looking up at the house. With its peaked roof and octagonal turret, its wide front porch and shuttered windows, it had a nineteenth-century charm that should translate beautifully into a bed-and-breakfast. But the paint was peeling, several of the shutters hung at drunken angles, and the porch roof sagged at one end. Remembering the
plop, plop
she had heard inside the house last night, Carly had little doubt that the roof needed attention too. To say nothing of the plumbing, and the electricity, and…

An explosion of barking rent the air. Even as Carly watched in jaw-dropping dismay, Hugo tore out from under the porch with the demon dog on his tail. Hugo swarmed up the steps to the porch. The dog leaped after him. After a single frozen moment, Carly whirled. Snatching a broom from Mike, who was slow on the uptake, she emitted a war whoop that would have done credit to Geronimo at his finest and charged to the defense of her cat.

“Hugo!”

Brandishing the broom, she reached the top of the steps in time to see Hugo racing toward her across the back of the settee. The dog, unable to attain such a lofty perch, yipped and yapped and leaped as it gave chase from the floor. Its nails skittered and slid on the wood. Its high-pitched battle cry echoed from the rafters.

“Bad dog,” Carly cried, and plunged forward, bringing the broom
down with a resounding
slap
on the floor in front of the dog. It yelped and Hugo leaped, rocketing through the air toward her like a football with a grudge. The broom went flying as the cat hit her in the shoulder in what was clearly a misguided attempt to seek safety in her arms. Staggering backward, she tried to catch him, to steady him—and went down. The stairs, to be precise.

Tumbling head over heels like laundry in a dryer, she got a brief, kaleidoscopic glimpse of what the world looked like to a soccer ball before she fetched up with a thud in the thick grass at the base of the steps. For a moment she lay there, flat on her back, watching as stars and little birdies twirled in a gossamer cloud of dislodged cat hair overhead.

Then she felt something warm and wet on her cheek. Casting her gaze sideways, she found herself eyeball to eyeball with the demon dog.

15

I
T WAS LICKING HER
. Carly registered that, registered anxious dark eyes in a small, triangular face and big pointed ears and a body so thin she could see its ribs through its coarse black coat. Then it turned tail and ran, and as Carly tuned in to the whole wide world around her again she understood why.

“Carly!”

Having jettisoned their cargo, Sandra and Antonio and Mike were rushing toward her like stampeding cattle, shouting her name. If she’d been capable of moving more than her eyeballs, Carly would have scrambled to safety, too.

“Are you okay?” Sandra stopped just short of trampling her. Antonio and Mike were right behind her. All three were breathing hard, their faces creased with concern as they looked down at her.

Carly looked up, up past the trio of frowning faces, up at the soothing vista of gnarled limbs and sun-dappled leaves and soft blue sky, and breathed, slowly and experimentally. She smelled damp earth, damp grass and damp shoes. The fall had knocked the wind out of her, she realized. But her lungs worked now, and as they filled with air she tried an experimental wiggle of her fingers and toes. They worked too, and so did her arms and legs and even her neck.