Whispers at Midnight (41 page)

He’d heard the friend come in—Sandra, he’d learned her name was—along with her deputy boyfriend. Knowing that he was hidden away upstairs while an armed officer of the law lounged around downstairs all unsuspecting had provided him with considerable amusement. Then the deputy had left—from an upstairs window, he’d watched him walk down the front lawn to his car—and he and Sandra had been alone in the house.

For the next hour or so he had camped out in an unused upstairs bedroom. Later, because of the lock he had discovered on her bedroom door that might make getting to her more of a hassle than he cared to deal with, his plan was to slide under Carly’s bed and wait there until she was asleep. But that was a position he’d rather not assume until he had to; it would grow uncomfortable if he was forced to stay under there for any length of time. The closet—more comfortable than beneath the bed but not exactly where he would choose to spend a number of hours—he had ruled out after a cursory inspection. It was small and, anyway, who knew if she was neat? She might hang up her clothes at night.

Saying
boo
when she opened her closet door might be fun, but chasing her down would be a lot of trouble, and the probability of something going wrong was greatly increased if she actually got a chance to scream and run.

He’d been right about that, he reflected sourly now as he reached his truck. Wincing as he pulled himself up inside it, he stretched his leg out on the seat in front of him and rooted around in his bag for something he could use to stop the bleeding until he got home. A brief shine of a flashlight over the bag’s contents—he didn’t want to risk anything more than a few seconds of light in case it should bring his pursuers down on him—told him that the hole was every bit as deep and ugly as he’d first thought. His pants leg was already soaked with blood. More blood welled from the wound.

It was all the fault of that damned cat.

He’d been on his way back to his hidey-hole after a quiet reconnoiter of the back bedrooms just to make sure that Carly had not somehow managed to sneak home on him without him being aware of it when he had heard Sandra coming up the stairs. She’d been talking to someone—the cat, he figured out later—and he had melted away quickly, ducking back into Carly’s bedroom, hiding behind the door because the stairs came up in the middle of the hall and he never could have made it back to the front bedroom without her seeing him. He’d trusted to luck that Sandra was headed for her bedroom, or maybe the bathroom, but just in case, he’d zipped up the coat he always wore for this kind of thing and pulled his hood down over his
head on the off-chance she should spot him and somehow manage to get away. Not that he was really worried. There was no reason for her to come into Carly’s room that he could see, and she wouldn’t have—except for the cat.

It had walked in and stared at him concealed behind the door and twitched its tail and meowed.

“What are you looking at, cat?” he’d heard Sandra say, and then there she’d been, just as quick as that, standing behind the cat, staring right at him, her eyes widening with horror.

He hadn’t come to kill her, didn’t have a thing against her in the world except she kept interfering in his plans for Carly, but there she was, staring at him. What could he do?

Take care of her, too, of course.

He’d been in the midst of doing just that when he’d heard Carly calling to her and realized that she was coming up the stairs.

Then there’d been that damned cat again, pushing open the door, walking into the room, bringing Carly with it.

He was beginning to think there was something about him and animals, some kind of karma, something weird. They kept messing up his perfectly good life.

He’d gotten to where he hated the damned things.

Now, binding his bleeding leg up with duct tape because he didn’t have anything else, he wished vainly that he’d had the foresight to do something about the cat.

Then he realized something, and froze in the act of slicing through the duct tape with his knife.

His handkerchief, his neat white handkerchief that he’d pressed into use tonight because it had been in his pocket and handy when he’d needed to chloroform Sandra into submission, was missing. A quick check of his pockets and bag confirmed it: the handkerchief was gone.

Now that he thought about it, he remembered trying to use it on the bitch and then dropping it when she pushed his hand away.

Just an ordinary handkerchief, not a big loss—except that it had his initials embroidered on it.

30

H
OSPITALS WERE DEFINITELY
not
Carly’s favorite places in the world. Not even when Matt slept in the chair beside her bed with his arms crossed over his chest and his feet propped up on her mattress. Not even when he awoke grumpy and unshaven, and growled at everybody who crossed his path while eating her breakfast.

Not even when he showed every indication that he planned to follow her into the bathroom.

“Look, give me a break here. I’m going to take a shower,” she said, shutting the door firmly in his face.

His evident devotion
did
act as a balm of sorts for her bruised and battered heart, until she reflected that, as one of his responsibilities, she could probably expect no less of him. She had no doubt that he would look after one of his sisters in the exact same way if they’d been attacked and hospitalized.

Which was really kind of depressing.

When she emerged he was out in the hall talking to Antonio, who looked just about as tired and bent out of shape as Matt did. She was wearing fresh clothes—gingham shorts and a pale blue tee shirt—which someone had fetched from the house during the night along with her purse, which meant she’d also had access to some makeup and a brush. She had three stitches in her shoulder and a bandage
around her left hand, and except for a little stinging and burning at the sites of the cuts she essentially felt normal.

As long as she didn’t think about the black-hooded monster. Last night, after the doctor had finished stitching her up, she’d had an attack of what felt almost like vertigo, dizziness and nausea and sweating, and it had caused the doctor to insist that she be kept overnight and watched for shock.

So she blocked the monster out, just blocked him out as she had learned long ago to do to unpleasant things, which seemed to work. The problem was that the only thoughts strong enough to keep the horror-movie images at bay were connected with Matt. Considering the state of her heart, he probably wasn’t too safe to think about either, but anything, even the specter of a thoroughly stomped heart, was preferable to a single mental glimpse of that black-hooded face, or that flashing knife….

So she thought about Matt, about the sex, which had been great, and the no strings, which had been pretty much a disaster, and about how her heart had clutched in those few seconds after he’d first asked her to marry him and she hadn’t had time to think it through, when she’d thought maybe he meant it.

And about how absolutely heart-stoppingly irresistible he’d looked proposing on bended knee.

Or at least, how absolutely heart-stoppingly irresistible she would have thought he looked if she hadn’t known she was on the receiving end of one of the world’s first pity proposals.

Which was approximately where her thoughts had been last night when the doctor had finished examining her.

Then they’d given her a shot, and she’d slept dreamlessly until she’d been awakened around nine
A.M.
by the nurse popping a thermometer into her mouth and Matt snoring in the chair beside the bed.

She hadn’t known he snored, and she hadn’t known he was grumpy in the mornings, and she hadn’t known he liked ketchup on his (her) eggs. Actually, that last bit of knowledge she could have done without.

Unfortunately, even those three bits of negative information did
not seem to change the fact that she was as crazy in love with him when she woke up as she had been last night when the doctor had conked her out. But at least the deep, dreamless hours of drugged sleep had given her her common sense back.

She was not going to pine for a man who loved her like a friend or a sister, a man who liked sleeping with her but felt uneasy about it, a man who hated the very idea of spending forever with her but proposed anyway out of guilt.

Not even if that man was Matt.

She was many things, but not a masochist. She loved him; he “cared” about her. She wasn’t taking another step down that path. Real heartbreak lay that way.

“Where are you going?” Matt asked her as she stepped into the hall, breaking off his conversation with Antonio. Both men wore sleep-rumpled uniforms. Antonio simply looked tired and rumpled. Matt—blast him—looked tired and rumpled and sexy and macho and good enough to eat.

“To talk to Sandra,” she said shortly. Matt nodded. She could feel his eyes following her as she went.

West County Hospital was a three-story brick building with two wings, gray linoleum, pastel walls and most of the basics, such as X-ray capabilities and an emergency room. For anything major, patients were sent to Atlanta. The fact that both she and Sandra had been admitted here was a silent testament to their injuries’ relative lack of seriousness. She’d needed stitches, a bandage, treatment for shock, and a night’s dreamless sleep. Sandra had fared worse. She had a concussion, a stab wound in the thigh, and possible bruised ribs.

Like her own, Sandra’s room was a tiny gray cubicle, a dozen or so of which opened off the nurses’ station like spokes extending out from a wheel. Clad in the same kind of unflattering green hospital gown that Carly had just discarded, Sandra had her bed raised so that she was in a semisitting position. A white bandage formed a turban around her head, an IV was in her arm, and her leg, the thigh wrapped in a thick layer of bandages, was outside the blue blanket
and elevated. She had the remote in one hand, and she was flipping channels on the TV.

“Hi,” Carly greeted her. They’d spoken the night before, in the hall of the house when Sandra had been brought down and in the ambulance and the emergency room. In those disjointed, emotional conversations they’d relived the horror of the attack for each other and for Matt and his deputies as well, who had also taken official statements from them. Last night they’d been variously shocked, scared, shaken and weepy. This morning, aside from the bandages and hospital gown, Sandra looked almost back to normal.

“Aren’t you looking better? Are you outta here?” Sandra turned the TV off.

“Soon. Do you want me to bring you anything?”

“Decent food. Those eggs were
nasty.
A decent nightgown—this thing’s not fit to be seen in. I had to ask Antonio to leave the room before I could get up and go to the bathroom. No point in flashing the poor guy at this point. A sight like that could scare him off. Oh, and a
TV Guide.
”

“Will do.” Carly came and sat down beside the bed. “How are you feeling?”

Sandra shrugged and winced. “Like I got hit over the head and stabbed and drugged with something and beat up. Otherwise not so bad.”

Carly grinned. During their respective divorces, she and Sandra had both learned the value of the old saying,
might as well laugh as cry.
Crying served no earthly purpose except to stop up your nose. At least if you laughed you felt better.

“Hey, I can relate. You know, I think you saved my life last night. Remember when I fell on you in the tub? If you hadn’t thrown me back out, I think I would have been toast. Or hamburger. That knife was coming down at me.”

“ ’Course I threw you off. You landed on my cracked ribs. Think that didn’t hurt?” Sandra winced, rubbed her ribs and grinned. “You’re not that much of a lightweight, you know. Anyway, you saved mine first. I couldn’t believe you shoved that Darth Vader–looking
dude like that but I’m sure glad you did. He almost skewered me in the throat that time.”

Suddenly the memories were impossible to hold at bay. Carly saw that black-hooded face, that white, plastic-looking hand, the flashing knife slamming into the side of the tub just inches from Sandra…

Her stomach churned. Her blood ran cold. Her—

“Time to change your IV,” the nurse said, interrupting. Carly struggled to push the horrible images away as the nurse switched one bag of IV fluids for another. By the time the nurse left, the vivid mental pictures were once again banished to the murky realm of things she refused to remember.

“I’m so sorry you had to go through all this. I get sick thinking of you in the house all alone with that monster,” Carly said quietly, suddenly serious. “I feel responsible in a weird kind of way, because you wouldn’t even be here in Benton if it wasn’t for me.”

“No, I’d still be a waitress with a bad attitude in Chicago.” Sandra gave her a wry little smile, then shuddered. “Let’s not talk about it, okay? It gives me the willies. I don’t ever want to think about last night again if I don’t have to.” Her mouth trembled, and she instantly firmed it up by pressing her lips together. She drew a deep breath in through her nose and fixed Carly with a reprimanding look. “Next time I tell you I don’t
do
spooky old houses and want to go home to the big city where it’s safe, maybe you’ll listen.”