Whispers at Midnight (24 page)

Carly sucked in her breath.

“Oh, he did, did he?” Swelling with indignation, Carly glared in the direction of the sheriff’s office, a long, low brick building that was located beside the firehouse just on the other side of the square. Not that Matt was in it. He was here, somewhere in the crowd. She had already seen him once, at a distance, although she didn’t think he’d seen her. Yet. But he was going to.

Her inner No More Ms. Nice Girl was practically chomping at the bit.

Before her fleeting glimpse of him a little while earlier, she hadn’t set eyes on him since that night in his bedroom. While Antonio had been conspicuous by his presence, Matt had been conspicuous by his absence.

He hadn’t stopped by, called, or sent a message via Antonio, his sisters (all of whom had dropped in), or anyone or anything else, including the local florist, e-mail, or even that oldie but goodie, the United States Postal Service.

But that was okay.

Not.

Radio silence might be his modus operandi after a hot and heavy session such as the one they’d shared, but it just wasn’t working for her. Ever since he had closed the bedroom door in her disbelieving face, anger had been building inside her like pressure in a volcano. If she didn’t get a chance to vent soon, she was going to explode.

In fact, one very important side benefit she’d hoped to reap from attending Benton’s annual display of fireworks tonight was the opportunity to tell off her local sheriff.

Just thinking about it got her all excited.

But by the time the first firework rocketed into the sky, Carly wasn’t any closer to expressing her feelings to Matt than she had been when he’d left her high and dry in his bedroom. Oh, she could definitely see Matt. In full sheriff mode—khaki uniform, badge, holstered gun at his side—he was everywhere. Everywhere, that is, but near her. He and his deputies were working the crowd, which as far as Carly could tell consisted of pretty much everyone in Benton and the surrounding countryside. As brilliant explosions of red, white, and blue lit up the night, they wove through the islands of people sprawled on quilts and the thickets of people clustered in lawn chairs and the forests of people standing around the periphery of the crowd, all with their faces turned toward the sky, with systematic efficiency.

Besides Sandra, Carly’s particular quilt cluster included Mrs. Naylor, who had hailed Carly and Sandra on sight, her daughter, Martha, and Martha’s family, plus Loren Schuler and Bets Haskell, who was another friend from high school, and their families. Their group attracted more than its fair share of visitors as a good portion of the town, having heard that Carly was back and intending to open a bed-and-breakfast in her grandmother’s house, stopped by to welcome her home as well as give her their opinions on the viability of such a plan. Barry Hindley stopped by, making his interest in her very clear, and Carly once again thought what a shame it was that she couldn’t seem to get past being mad at Matt for long enough to focus on any other man. Hal Reynolds, another high school friend, also came over to renew old ties, but Carly couldn’t get excited about him either. Sandra had her own particular visitor in Antonio who, despite being
on duty, still managed to find time to grab a snack and stand around chatting with her for some time. Even after he was gone, Sandra glowed.

The good news was, at least one of them was well on her way to finding a replacement for her vibrator. The bad news was, the other wasn’t.

After Antonio left, it wasn’t long before the other deputies began heading their way. Singly and in pairs, every single deputy found time to stop by. That those visits were motivated to a large extent by the ample cooler full of goodies Sandra had packed, Carly had little doubt. Antonio had clearly spread the word among his fellow sheriff’s department employees as to where good eats could be found. That, plus the fact that Martha’s teenage daughter Heather was a friend of Lissa Converse, who, along with boyfriend Andy, had plopped down on a corner of Carly’s quilt and munched lemon cookies for a while, led Carly to expect that at some point during the evening their little group would be favored by a visit from the high-and-mighty sheriff himself—unless he was deliberately avoiding her, of course.

Which, it grew ever more apparent, was just what he was doing. Steaming, Carly found herself watching Matt more than the fireworks. The town’s onetime favorite candidate for Face Most Likely to Be Seen on a Wanted Poster now seemed to be respected by all, liked by most, and chased by quite a few—females, that is. The more he walked around, the more he seemed to trail women like a comet trailed dust. Not that Carly was surprised. For as long as she had known him, Matt had always had to fight girls off with a stick. The fact that he was now thirty-three, single, gainfully employed, and so damned handsome that he even managed to look hot in a sheriff’s uniform was bound to make him as attractive to the town’s distaff population as catnip was to Hugo.

It also served to kick her anger at him up a few more notches. A pain in the ass, was she? She’d show him pain in the ass.

He didn’t even have the grace to wave. Oh, he knew where she was sitting. The head honcho was bound to know, if the rest of his department knew, where to come for treats. He did the meet-and-greet, the backslap, the handshake, the frowning buddy-I-think-you’ve-had-too-much-beer
thing all over the whole blessed square. The only area he didn’t honor with his presence? The twenty or so square yards around where she sat.

Her opinion of that was,
coincidence? I think not.

It occurred to Carly then that the no good dirty rotten son of a bitch might actually think she
wanted
him. That she did, or had, was beside the point: it was his thinking that she did that made her want to kill him. The idea that he thought she wanted him when he didn’t want
her,
or at least not as anything but a
friend,
made her so mad she saw red—and not just because a brilliant scarlet starburst was exploding overhead just at that moment, either. It made her crazy to think that he imagined that she was as pathetically eager to be on the receiving end of his attentions as the rest of the single female population of Benton seemed to be. She watched one woman in a tiny pair of white shorts stand up as he passed and felt physically ill when he stopped to put an arm around her and bend his head close to talk to her. She was just registering the churning in her stomach when she realized that the woman was his sister Erin, and that what she was observing was a quick brother-sister conversation conducted in the teeth of the booming explosions overhead. But the churning didn’t even have a chance to subside before another woman in white shorts stood up to hug him even as Erin flopped back down on her blanket. More fireworks burst overhead, and by their light Carly saw that this woman was tall and thin with upswept blond hair—Shelby.

Who unlike Carly belonged to the category of girls he fucked.

Suddenly Carly wasn’t sick to her stomach any longer. Instead, visions of murder weapons danced in her head. Because it had just occurred to her that what she was experiencing at his hands was no more or less than déjà vu.

This was exactly how he had treated her in the days and weeks and months following her prom.

Her jaw clenched as suddenly the whole pattern became crystal clear.

He was dealing with his discomfort over the addition of a sexual component to their relationship by staying away from her—again. A neon sign flashing
Baby, I don’t want to know
over his head couldn’t
have made his feelings about what had happened between them the other night any clearer.

Just like the last time, he didn’t want to know that she had a jones for him.

Not that she did. At least, not when she was wide-awake and in full possession of her senses.

Anyway, he’d been hot as hell for her too. He could run as far and fast as he liked, he could deny it as much as he wanted, but she wasn’t a shy and besotted eighteen-year-old anymore. She was a thirty-year-old grown woman and she now knew one end of a hard-on from the other, thank you very much. And the bottom line was, he had wanted her, too.

Only he couldn’t handle it. Because, he said, he cared too much about her. He wanted them to be
friends.

In other words, think Bert and Ernie, rather than J. Lo and Ben.

That was so insulting that just picturing it made her hair curl—no, wait, it did that anyway. It made her
toes
curl.

At that moment, the fireworks climaxed in a spectacular display. Even Carly’s fuming meditation on the merits and methods of murdering Matt couldn’t compete against the huge, noisy spectacle. To the accompaniment of near-deafening booms and the Screven County High School marching band’s rousing rendition of “America the Beautiful,” the night sky was lit up by a glorious American flag. By the time it faded away, along with the appreciative clapping and yelling that followed, the scent of gunpowder-tinged smoke wafting over the assembly was almost as strong as the smell of beer.

Then the celebration was over. As people began to pack up their gear on all sides, Carly realized that any hope she’d harbored that Matt might be going to come her way was over too. He was the one who kept insisting they were
friends.
Well, for a friend, his behavior was mighty peculiar, to say the least. He hadn’t acknowledged her presence in any way. He hadn’t even waved.

She was perfectly willing to be friends. What she wasn’t perfectly willing to be was ignored.

“Oh, my, would you look at that.” Mrs. Naylor was standing, bracing herself on her daughter’s arm as she strained to see over the
crowd. Carly wasn’t sure whether it was because she had grown up or her neighbor had aged, but Mrs. Naylor seemed much less daunting now than when Carly had been a girl. But she was still plump and gray-haired, and as nosy as ever.

“Who is that?” Martha asked, craning her neck right along with her mother. She was a big, loose-limbed, handsome rather than pretty woman with short brown hair and a hearty laugh, who had been captain of the field hockey team in high school.

Carly couldn’t see anything except a wall of backs, although she looked in the same direction as everyone else. At her height, this was always a problem.

“The sheriff’s arresting somebody,” Sandra informed her from her superior vantage point, seeing Carly’s dilemma. She looked again, pretended to shiver, and glanced at Carly with a wicked little glint. “He sure is looking fine, too. Don’t you just love a man in uniform?”

Beyond casting Sandra a sour look, Carly ignored all but the first part of that. She knew when she was being teased. But she became bound and determined to see what was going on. A quick glance around provided the solution. She hopped up on the cooler, and from there she had a perfect view.

Matt was standing in the middle of the street. Since she had noticed that he did indeed look fine in his uniform much earlier in the evening, Carly saw no need to reacknowledge that fact even to herself. Instead, she focused on what was happening: seemingly unperturbed by the exiting crowd that was starting to stream around him, he was holding the arm of a scrawny little man who had his hands cuffed behind his back, and shaking his head warningly at an equally tiny woman who was practically vibrating with fury as she yelled at the man. Carly wasn’t close enough to hear what was being said, but Matt’s stance told her that the arrest was nothing serious. The man was more a nuisance than a threat.

“Oh, that’s just Anson Jarboe,” Mrs. Naylor said, seeming to lose interest once she had made the identification. “Probably drunk as usual. Ida’s right to give him what for.”

With nothing in the proceedings apparently deemed worth watching any longer, they all turned away and went back to gathering
up their belongings. All, that is, except Carly, who was so focused on Matt that she remained unaware of the others’ shift in attention. She didn’t stand there long, because it was just a matter of minutes before Matt propelled the offender across the street and into the sheriff’s office, at which time the door shut behind the two of them and there was nothing but the brick building itself to look at.

Carly blinked, looked around, and quickly stepped down from her perch, glad to see that no one else seemed to have noticed that she’d watched longer than the rest. Feeling conspicuous anyway, she looked around for something to do and snatched up the quilt they’d been sitting on. Shaking it out, folding it on top of the cooler, Carly was just bending over to retrieve the big plastic cup that held what was left of her Lemon Crush when Sandra caught her eye.

“You know,” she said, just loud enough for Carly to hear. “I’d take that hunky sheriff over a vibrator any day. Even if he had called me a pain in the ass.”

Obviously, Sandra had noticed her overlong observation of the incident—all right, of Matt—in the street. “Yeah, well,” she said, picking up her cup. “The thing about me is,
I
have standards.”

A few minutes later, she and Sandra were saying their good-byes as their little island of quilts broke up. With one of them on either side of the cooler, they headed down toward where their new van—well, their new used van, a ’98 Windstar Carly had purchased for three thousand dollars cash just after turning the U-Haul in—was parked behind the bank.

“Uh, Carly.”

“What?” Carly almost jumped. They were part of the crowd surging down the sidewalk, and at that precise moment they’d just happened to draw even with the sheriff’s office. Carly had just happened to be looking to see what she could see through the windows—which was precisely nothing because the blinds were drawn—when Sandra spoke.

“I’ve gotta pee.”

Carly looked at Sandra, and her step slowed. Her eyes widened as, for once in her life when she heard opportunity knock, she actually listened.

“No, I can’t hold it until we get home.” Sandra sounded testy, obviously in response to her interpretation of the expression on Carly’s face. The cooler bumped against Carly’s shin as Sandra, who’d gotten ahead of her when Carly had slowed, was jostled by a passerby. It was semi-painful, but Carly barely noticed. Having come to a full stop by now, she was too busy listening to the little devil that was whispering in her ear.