Heaven Preserve Us (3 page)

Mmmm.. .

"Sophie Mae! What are you doing?"

I looked down to where I was about to double dip into the peanut butter jar with the biggest spoon in the silverware drawer.

"Mmmph" I said. Which meant, "I have no idea how this happened, but I require milk this very instant."

I headed to the refrigerator, bending just a bit under Meghan's
look of mild reprimand.

"No drinking out of the carton."

I poured the milk into a tall glass and swigged it. Once again
able to talk, I said, "Jeez. One little faux pas with the peanut butter,
and you act like I'm going to start eating like a guy or something."

"Don't you dare," she said.

I grinned. "I'm off to bed. See you in the a.m."

"Uh huh. Don't forget the phone, `Honeybunch"'

"Shut up," I said and walked out, snagging the cordless phone
off the hall table as I passed by. Behind me, Meghan laughed.

"It was okay," I said, repeating what I had said to Meghan about
my evening of volunteer work to Barr Ambrose. "I'm not so sure I
like the kind of clientele you get to talk to, though."

"Hell, Sophie Mae, the point is to help people in trouble who
don't have anyplace else to turn. Those folks tend to be a tad less
refined than you or me."

"That's not what I mean. I talked to a couple of people who
probably fall a lot higher on the social scale than I do. But there
was a kind of scary guy this evening, and I bet he's only the first.
It's not because they're bad people or anything. It's just that desperation makes you do things you wouldn't otherwise do. Like I
did last October. And that's a little ... frightening."

He was silent for a moment, and I knew he was thinking about
the fact that I'd burned someone quite badly the previous fall, trying to keep Erin safe. That was okay, though: the silence. I liked
Barr's silences. Rather, I liked the silences that fell between us.
They felt full, not empty. Comfortable. I hadn't felt that with anyone since my husband had died five years before.

"What did the scary guy do?" he asked. Trust him to zero in on
the one thing I wished I hadn't mentioned. Barr was a detective,
make that the detective, on the Cadyville police force, and while
that was nice in many ways, he did have a way of blowing the idea
of me being in danger all out of proportion.

"It was nothing," I said.

"Sophie Mae."

"No, really. Just that desperation I was telling you about. Made
me a little uncomfortable. I'll get used to it. And I really like the idea of helping people out. Maybe I can make a difference in
somebody's life. You know, like in a big way."

"You're already making a big difference in somebody's life, just
by being your sweet self."

And that was why I took the phone to bed with me, whether
Meghan teased me about it or not. Because that was the kind of
thing I liked to hear right before going to sleep every night. Not
big statements, but the little bits of sugar he'd slip in now and
again. That and the fact that he really wanted to talk to me every
night when we were apart. Even when he was working. In his gentle, understated way he made me feel special.

"Aw," I said. "Ain't you sweet."

"Yes, I am. But I do have to go. I have at least two hours of paperwork to plod through before I can leave, and I'm working in
the morning."

All the overtime Barr had to put in wore him out and tried my
patience. "When are they going to hire another detective? Or at least
make the uniformed officers do more of the investigative work?"

"When they get the funding," he said. "The Chief is working on
it. And there's only so much the uniforms can do."

"I don't understand. How much crime is there in a little town
like Cadyville, anyway?"

"More than I'd like to tell you about. I spent most of this evening interviewing a woman who was attacked walking to her car
after work. It happened right downtown. I want you to be extra
careful, Sophie Mae. We haven't caught the guy yet."

"When you say attacked..."

"He didn't rape her. But he might have if some high school kids
hadn't cut through that alley and scared him off. He left her bruised
and shaken, but that's all."

"That's enough."

He murmured his agreement. "Just be careful. Goodnight."

"'Night. Sleep tight. You know, when you get a chance to sleep
at all."

We rang off, and I lay in bed thinking. We weren't to the Ilove-you stage of things yet. That was okay. We'd been seeing each
other for over three months, and I liked moving slowly after years
of relationship hiatus. Not that everything was moving that slowly,
mind you. But I got the feeling when Barr Ambrose said "I love
you," there would be a whole lot of strings attached. I was getting
to like the idea of those strings, but I was still a little gun-shy. He
knew that. I hoped that was why he was being so reticent. I sure
didn't want it to be because he didn't know how he felt about me.

The phone rang. I pushed the talk button quickly, afraid the
shrill sound would wake Erin and Meghan, both of whom had
turned out their bedside lights down the hall.

"Forget something?" I asked.

"Sophie Mae Reynolds."

Oops. Not Barr. "Yes?"

"Sophie Mae, Sophie Mae, Sophie Mae." The man on the other
end of the line softly sang my name.

All snug in my flannel pjs, under my mountain of down comforter, I suddenly felt very cold. "Who is this?"

"I found out your name after all, Sophie Mae. And that's not
all I found out."

"Allen?" I knew it wasn't his real name, but I didn't know what
else to call him. Correction: I knew what else I wanted to call him,
but that seemed like a bad idea at the moment.

"I'll call you again, soon. I'm looking forward to talking more."
And he hung up.

I beeped off the phone and lay there for a few moments, trying
to think. I could call Barr back. But what could he do? Just worry.
And I'd already caused him enough worry. I'd figure out how to
deal with this Allen jerk myself.

A GENTLE RAIN PATTERED gently on the roof the next morning.
Eventually, I got around to opening my eyes enough to peer at the
clock on my nightstand. Six fourteen a.m. and still dark as night
outside. My hand crept through the cool sheets to the other side
of the bed before I really thought about it, but no one was there.
Barr and I only spent a couple of nights a week together, always at
his place, but I loved waking up with his tall, lanky form wrapped
around me.

I missed it more than usual this morning.

Why was that?

Then I realized: waking up with Barr made me feel safe, and
the mysterious Allen had me thoroughly freaked out.

Well, thank heavens I'd remembered that, I thought as I let out
a whoosh of breath and threw back the covers. No more lollygagging around. I had work to do, and then I needed to find out from
Philip whether they'd ever had problems with callers suddenly taking it into their pea brains to stalk the volunteers at Heaven
House.

At nine o'clock, after mixing a batch of lemon verbena soap
and catching up on the wholesale invoicing for my handmade toiletry business, Winding Road Bath Products, I took a break and
drove the few blocks downtown. In the daylight, Heaven House
looked less than inviting. Just one block off the five-block length
of First Street, it was a large brick cube, as wide and high as it was
deep. Owned by the Heaven Foundation, for years the top floor
held an apartment and office space, and the ground floor had been
leased to a large antique "mall" where locals would bring their old
crap and sell it to tourists on consignment. As soon as the lease
expired, Philip Heaven had moved his personal brainchild into the
building.

One large room took up most of the main floor, with the big
cheap desk I'd been sitting at the night before located near the
front door. Along the back wall was a smaller room, empty so far,
and to the left a larger one we all referred to as the game room,
though it only had one game in it, and no furniture. The entrance
to the unisex bathroom was at the rear of the building, by the back
door. To the right were the stairs to the second floor. The whole
building was old, with layers of paint and a persistent odor of
musty mildew.

Philip was big on vision, but from what I could tell so far, not
so great with detail or implementation. Luckily, he had a full-time
assistant named Maryjake Dreggle. When I walked in she was sitting at the desk, peering at her computer monitor with a frown.
Beside her, the pungent smells of chili and garlic wafted from a
cardboard take-out container of Thai food.

Her pale brown eyes brightened when she saw me. "How'd it
go last night?"

"Okay, I guess. Hey, I've got a question for you."

"Yeah?"

"Ever have someone, you know, fixate on you before? A caller,
on the Helpline?"

"Fixate? Not really. I've had repeat callers. But mostly they just
needed someone to talk to." She shifted in her chair and put a
booted foot up on the desk, displaying a heavily muscled leg between the top of her wool sock and the hem of the hiking shorts
she insisted on wearing year round.

"Did you refer them?" I asked.

She pushed a chunk of her fuzzy dishwater-red hair behind
one ear. "Sure. There was one woman, though. She and I seemed
to connect, so I just let her spill her guts. I know it's not what we're
supposed to do, but it seemed to help, and I referred her to a therapy network, too. She was going through a horrible divorce, and
I've been there, too."

A completely different situation than the one I had with Allen.

"Philip up in his office?" I asked.

Her frown returned. "He was. Not feeling so hot, though, so he
may have given up on working, gone back into his apartment. But
take a look."

I crossed the large open area and climbed the narrow stairs to
Philip's office and the apartment he'd taken over with the rest of
the lease.

A short hallway at the top of the stairs revealed two doors, one
of them closed. I strode to the open doorway and stopped, looking into the small office. The high ceiling sported beautifully carved molding, but the plain white walls remained unadorned,
and fluorescent track lighting gave the space a stark quality. An
ashtray on the windowsill betrayed Philip's sneak smoking, and
the brisk tone in the air suggested he'd recently closed the window.
Unfortunately, the room still smelled of stale cigarette smoke ... and
something else. I wrinkled my nose.

Philip's heavy oak desk, situated at an oblique angle to the door,
completely dominated the room. Good feng shui, he'd told me. I
had no idea whether he was right, and furthermore didn't understand why anyone who ran a nonprofit organization funded entirely through a family foundation would care about situating his
office to make money. But what did I know? Maybe it was actually
more about success than money.

In which case he might have been holding his book on feng
shui upside down when he'd decided how to place the desk, because Heaven House didn't exactly qualify as a successful enterprise. The only thing that would solve that problem was a director
with more focus than Philip would ever possess.

I hesitated, not sure if I was interrupting his work, but after
several moments I realized he wasn't really reading anything on
the computer monitor in front of him so much as staring a hole in
it. The harsh light reflected from his scalp under the sparse sweep
of a bad comb-over. I cleared my throat and stepped into the
room. When he looked up, I was shocked.

Philip Heaven looked like hell.

"Hey, babe! How's it going? Just couldn't stay away until Friday,
huh?" The words fit his usual persona, but they slurred together as
if he were drunk. His eyes looked like two holes burned in a blanket, their muted hazel coloring eclipsed by red-rimmed lids. His nostrils flared over a two-day stubble, and his naturally pale complexion had taken on the moist appearance of newly risen bread
dough.