Whispers at Midnight (39 page)

Exciting. Explosive.

Block it out,
she ordered herself, grabbing the carton of premium orange juice. Pouring herself a glass, she swallowed a mouthful even as she returned the carton to the refrigerator. What she needed here was blood sugar. Then, maybe, she’d start to feel normal again.

The sooner her body stopped feeling like it had been flattened by a Mack truck, the sooner she could put Matt out of her mind.

“Sandra! I’m home,” she called, taking her glass with her as she walked determinedly toward the rear parlor. They used it as a sitting room, and she could hear the television. She needed a distraction, and Sandra and the TV were that, even if Sandra was going to immediately want to know every little detail of what had happened with Matt.

Sandra didn’t answer. She wasn’t in the rear parlor, although clearly she had been earlier. There was a magazine on the floor beside the chair she favored, and an open can of Diet Mountain Dew—Sandra’s new favorite tipple—on the table beside the chair. Carly turned off the TV and frowned. Hugo had vanished, and the house seemed quiet—almost too quiet. Annie would have been prancing at her feet about now, being cute and distracting. She missed the little dog, Carly realized, a truly enormous amount considering how brief a time Annie had been a part of her life. Whereas Hugo had a tendency
to do his own thing, Annie was a faithful companion. Impossible to believe that she’d somehow gotten into poison. Thank God she was going to be all right. Tomorrow, Carly told herself, she would start looking around to see if she could discover the source. Perhaps Miss Virgie had put out something to kill mice.

“Sandra?” Carly was walking toward the front parlor when she heard it: the rush and rattle of the plumbing. Immediately her brow cleared. The sound was unmistakable. Sandra was filling the tub. Of course, it was nearly eleven o’clock. Sandra, who usually showered in the mornings, must tonight have decided to have a bath before going to bed.

Swallowing another gulp of juice, Carly reflected that it was a good thing she’d already showered. The hot water heater was old—it was something else that needed to be replaced—and it had a limited output. Generally it didn’t stretch to two baths in a row.

Hugo was back again, weaving around her feet as Carly walked through the downstairs turning off the lights. Ever since she had surprised the burglar in the dining room she had tended to scuttle through it as quickly as she could whenever she had to go in there alone, and tonight was no exception. Even knowing that Sandra was upstairs didn’t erase the willies that plunging that particular room into darkness gave her. But electricity was expensive, and they couldn’t afford to leave the house lit up like a Christmas tree all night, every night, no matter how secretly chicken she might be. Which was why they had the security system, after all. Its comforting red eye told her that it was armed and on guard when she passed through the kitchen again on the way to turn off the last of the downstairs lights.

With the first floor now dark and full of shadows (and her heart now beating ridiculously fast in consequence), Carly hurried up the wide, old-fashioned staircase. Hugo swarmed up the polished oak treads in front of her, seeming as intent on reaching the second floor as she was. It wasn’t particularly bright up there, but the small lamp that hung at the top of the stairs was on, and the rear bathroom light was on too, of course, because Sandra was in there. And as soon as she
got to her bedroom, Carly reminded herself in an attempt to quiet the annoying little quiver of trepidation that just would not go away, she could shut and lock her door.

With her door locked, her windows nailed shut, and the security system on, her bedroom was about as safe as a bedroom could get.

It was silly, she knew, and she would never confess it to another living soul, but since returning to this house to live she had developed an increasingly intense fear of the night.

Carly sent that acknowledgment to the same mental perdition to which she had banished (okay, tried to banish) thoughts of Matt. Taking a deep breath and a restorative sip of juice and feeling better now that she was once again in the presence of light, she headed toward the back of the house and her jury-rigged sanctuary. Hugo, knowing the routine by now, led the way. The bathroom Sandra was using was located between their bedrooms. Light shone beneath the door, just as Carly had expected. Sandra’s bedroom door was closed. Hers was just as she’d left it, partially ajar. Both bedrooms were dark. Besides the hall light, and the bathroom light spilling out under the door, the whole house was dark.

And that was for no more sinister reason than that she herself, in preparation for bed, had just turned off the lights, she reminded herself firmly, and took another deep breath and another sip of juice.

“Sandra, I’m home!” she called again.

No answer. Probably Sandra couldn’t hear her over the rush of the water.

Hugo reached the bathroom door and stopped, looked back over his shoulder at her, and meowed. There was something about that meow …

Carly’s step slowed. The water had been running for a long time, more than long enough to fill the tub. Long enough that by now all the hot water should have run out…

“Sandra?”

Hugo pawed at the bathroom door. It opened a few inches, just far enough to let Carly see that the shower curtain had been pulled around the tub. It was an old-fashioned curtain of white canvas suspended from the ceiling on an oval rod that completely surrounded
the equally old-fashioned huge cast-iron claw-foot tub. The curtain didn’t quite meet at the edges. The gap was about an inch wide. Through it, Carly could see Sandra’s head lying back against the lip of the tub. There was no mistaking even such a narrow sliver of her close-cropped black hair.

Sandra was taking a bath with the water running and the shower curtain closed?

Hugo, no respecter of privacy, walked right up to the tub and meowed.

“Sandra?”

Sandra didn’t budge.

“Sandra?” Carly pushed the door wide. The sound of running water was suddenly loud as it echoed off the tile floor, tile walls. Steam clouded the bathroom mirror and hung in the air. Whatever the state of the hot water now, it was obvious that it had worked for some time.

“Sandra?”

Nothing. No movement. No response. Had Sandra fallen in the tub? Or—?

On that thought Carly rushed to the tub, jerked the curtain back, and froze, gasping. Her breathing suspended. Her heart skipped a beat. Sandra lay in the tub, all right. Fully clothed except for her shoes, she lay with her knees bent and her head lolling limply against the rolled cast-iron edge. Rope bound her ankles. Her hands were out of sight behind her back. From the position of her arms, Carly had no doubt that they were bound, too. She was soaking wet and there was blood everywhere, on her face, her neck, dripping down into the scarlet-tinged water that swirled ankle deep around her before disappearing down the open drain. A strip of silver duct tape covered her mouth.

Carly sucked in air with a horrified little squeak. Sandra’s eyes opened. They were blinking, unfocused.

“Sandra! Oh, my God, Sandra, what happened? Oh, my God, oh, my God.”

Carly was babbling, bending over the tub, reaching for the tape covering Sandra’s mouth, when Sandra’s eyes, which had been fixed
groggily on her face, moved beyond her and seemed to focus. Suddenly they widened and filled with terror.

Something—someone—was behind her. Carly knew it with the kind of icy certainty that left no room for doubt.

The hair rose on the back of her neck. Shooting upright, she whirled around.

28

C
ARLY
’
S HEARTBEAT EXPLODED
as a man, all in black with a hood of some sort pulled over his face, lunged toward her. He’d been behind the door when she had entered, watching her, waiting, Carly realized in that split second before she reacted.

She screamed, an earsplitting shriek that bounced off ceiling, walls and floor, and leaped away. Hugo skittered out of the way, disappearing under the tub. The glass she’d been holding hit the floor with a crash and shattered, sending orange juice and glass flying in every direction. His dead white hand snatched at her arm, missed by scant millimeters. Carly screamed again, stepping back, ducking behind the other end of the tub, barely eluding his grabbing arms, dodging the flying silver blade of the knife he clutched in one hand.

“Come back here.”

His voice was hoarse, raspy, muffled by the hood so that it came out as a hideous whisper barely audible over the rushing water and Carly’s own echoing screams. Sandra, horribly mute, eyes rolling, face shiny with water and blood, was flopping around in the tub like a landed fish. Sandra’s movements seemed to attract his attention; with a sound like a snarl he sent the knife plunging down toward her even as he came charging after Carly. Carly shrieked and leaped toward
him, shoving him with all her might. The knife missed its target, striking the porcelain with a terrible metallic ring just inches from Sandra’s shoulder. Caught by surprise, he took a step backward, almost falling on the slippery floor.

“Bitch.”

He recovered his balance and came after Carly before she had time to even so much as think about making a break for the door. Carly slipped behind the tub, for once thanking God for her small size as she was able to wedge through the few inches between the tub and the wall. He couldn’t, he was too big, thick muscular legs in black sweatpants, she saw as he tried. Thick arms and torso in a loose black coat, black executioner-style hood that looked homemade, not much more than medium height but
big,
huge, in fact, in this enclosed space, all of which she registered in the space of a panicked heartbeat as he lunged forward, bending at the waist, grabbing at her,
catching her.

Carly screamed like a banshee and hit at him as his fingers, weirdly plastic feeling fingers, dug hurtfully into her bare upper arm and yanked her toward him. No match for his strength, she almost catapulted headfirst into his grasp but managed to save herself at the last possible second by grabbing the lip of the tub. The forward impetus caused by his pull coupled with her resistance cost her her balance. She fell on top of Sandra, landing on her side then rolling willy-nilly onto her back. Sandra’s body gave beneath her and she felt the rush of tepid water on her hips and rear and the slipperiness of the tub beneath her fingers as she scrabbled uselessly at its sides, kicking and clawing as she tried to pull herself up and out.

He had lost his grip on her arm as she fell but it didn’t help her because, she realized with a surge of utter terror as she struggled to right herself, she was as helpless as a turtle on its back now. Kicking wildly, her hands sliding on the slick wet porcelain, she couldn’t seem to get a good enough grip to heave herself up and over in time to get out of the way. She could only stare up with a galloping pulse and a wildly pounding heart as he lifted the knife high and sent it plunging down toward her chest.

Shrieking, she tried to dodge, but it was a mighty heave of Sandra’s body that saved her. It sent her rolling over the side of the tub, tumbling, falling. The knife just missed, glancing off the porcelain again with another of those awful metallic screams, and Carly screamed again too as she hit the floor on hands and knees. Water sloshed out of the tub with her, turning the tile into a slimy, treacherous pool of water and orange juice and glass and blood. Carly realized that some of that blood was coming from her now because she was cut, cut by glass, she thought, one of the big sharp shards of glass that lay on the floor, or his knife. Blood poured from her left palm, she saw with a single terrified glance down, a lot of blood, but she hadn’t felt the cut and didn’t feel any pain.

Shock. She was in shock. She heard a hoarse cry. She glanced up to see him slip and almost fall on the wet tile.

She scrambled for the door—she was closer to it than he was now—but she couldn’t seem to make any headway, couldn’t seem to get any traction. Her hands and tennis shoes slipped and slithered on the slick tile. Carly could hear the wet squeak of his shoes, hear the harsh rasp of his breathing, hear the rustle of his clothes as he charged. She could smell orange juice and soap and her own fear and something else—a hideous sweetish something else that gave her a sensation almost of vertigo, making her stomach revolt and the room seem to tilt and her head spin. A cloth clamped against her cheek, cold, wet, permeated with the horrible sweetish smell. The smell…

Pure horror broke over her like a wave. Night threatened to swirl her away. The smell…

He was upon her, trying to clamp that horrible wet cloth over her nose and mouth. Batting it away, she threw herself to one side, falling onto her hip and shoulder on the hard tile, sliding through the sloshing mess on the floor and crunchy broken glass…

The cloth—white, nondescript, folded into a square—hit the tile in front of her face. The smell…

The water on the floor soaked through it immediately. The smell was gone.