Holly Grove Homecoming (8 page)

“You are so despicable,” she informed him, but she allowed him to keep his arms around her, supporting her in an embrace that added to her newfound feelings of warmth.

Then footsteps sounded on the dock above them, and when they looked up, Roy was grinning down at them. “Hate to interrupt your fun, but Karen sent me to tell you to get out of the water and come eat with us. She brought sandwiches and chips and so forth, and everybody’s getting ready to have a bite.”

“I, for one, am hungry,” Trooper said. “How about you, Carly?”

Carly wasn’t sure about intruding on a family picnic but didn’t see any way to gracefully excuse herself. “That sounds wonderful,” she said. “We’ll be right there.”

She turned her shoulders so she could face Trooper and nodded toward the dock. “After you.”

He raised his brows. “Ladies first.”

She grinned. “Age before beauty.”

“Oops. Guess I can’t argue with that.” He started swimming ahead of her around the dock, and she immediately realized that he could swim just as strongly as she could, in spite of his wound. “I owe you one,” she muttered beneath her breath, but she was smiling when she said it.

Carly was surprised to discover she’d worked up an appetite as a result of her and Trooper’s water acrobatics. She thoroughly enjoyed the tuna salad sandwich and chips that Karen placed in front of her when she took a seat beside Trooper at the long picnic table situated under the oak.

The various cousins and their families obviously shared a degree of fondness for each other. They chatted, teased, and laughed throughout the meal. They also, she noticed, gradually drew Trooper into their recollections about events they had shared in the past.

And while they were careful not to ignore Carly, neither did they interrogate her, for which she was thankful. She was usually ill at ease when questioned about her writing, trying to walk a line between outright lying and telling the truth. Fortunately, no one asked the questions that would have necessitated her telling either the truth or a lie.

Still, she wasn’t unhappy when the party began breaking up. Karen was the first to say she needed to leave, and the others quickly followed suit.

Because her bathing suit had dried, Carly slipped her shorts and shirt on over it and was dressed in short order. Trooper simply announced that he would wear his trunks and tee back home.

Carly and Trooper made it a point to look up his uncle Roy and thank him for allowing them to use the lake that afternoon.

“Now you come back any time,” he told Carly. “No need to wait for Trooper here to bring you, either. You just let me know to expect you so I can make sure the gator’s penned up before you get here. That old fellow’s getting real territorial.”

For a split second Carly thought he was serious, but the twinkle in his eyes gave him away. She grinned at him. “I see that Trooper has been telling tales on me.”

Roy laughed. “That boy created all them stories about snakes and gators years ago to aggravate his cousins. I reckon he succeeded for a long time, but they eventually caught on.”

Carly laughed. “I’m sure he must have been wildly popular with his cousins.”

“Oh, I suspect some of them got their revenge, didn’t they, Trooper?”

Trooper grinned. “I don’t know what they’ve told you, but I’m sure it was a pack of lies.”

Roy grinned back. “No doubt.” He turned to Carly. “Kidding aside, you come back anytime you want to.”

“Thanks, I will,” Carly replied, although she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to subject herself to that near-frigid lake water again anytime soon.

* * *

T
rooper couldn’t remember having had
such a relaxing afternoon in years, and he wasn’t eager for it to end. As soon as he pulled onto the highway, he glanced at Carly. “Are you in a hurry to get home?”

“Not especially. What did you have in mind?”

“I thought I’d drive around a little. I haven’t had time since I’ve been back in Holly Grove to take a look at whatever changes might have taken place in the last twenty years.”

“That sounds good. By the way, thanks for inviting me to your uncle’s this afternoon. I enjoyed meeting him and your cousins.”

“I’m glad. Sometimes when you get all of them together, they have a tendency to overwhelm people, but I noticed that you seemed at ease.”

“I was, pretty much.”

He glanced at her again. “Just pretty much? Did they get on your nerves?”

“Not really. But I’m always somewhat concerned that people will ask questions I’d prefer not to answer. I’m sure my presence in town has raised questions in people’s minds.”

“I’d say you’re right. Just out of curiosity, why the big secret about your identity as Marcie Malone?”

Her head whipped around and she stared at him for several seconds as though she was shocked that he’d asked the question.

“Looks as though I’ve broached a subject you’d prefer to leave alone. No problem. Just pretend I never mentioned your pseudonym.”

“Actually, I was just surprised that you seem to feel I’ve gone out of my way to hide my identity as a writer.”

“And you haven’t?”

“No.” She hesitated a minute, then said more forcefully, “No, I haven’t. I just haven’t gone out of my way to tell anyone. There’s a difference.”

Trooper wondered if his background had made him too suspicious but there was something about Carly’s attitude that tended to set off alarms on his suspicion meter. After all, he could count on one finger the number of people he’d met who used two aliases but were not of the criminal persuasion.

However, he couldn’t see any reason to ruin his and Carly’s afternoon by voicing his doubts. He would simply make a few phone calls and hopefully find out for sure that Carly wasn’t leaving anything out of her background that he or his family members would be better off knowing about.

He shot her a quick grin. “Consider the subject closed and changed. What part of the county are you familiar with?”

Carly’s expression changed slowly from verging on anger to verging on confusion. “To tell the truth, I haven’t explored much at all since I’ve been here. I know the downtown area pretty well, but that’s about it.”

Trooper glanced at her. “Then prepare yourself for one of the most boring tours of your life.”

She laughed and appeared to relax, which meant he, too, could relax, at least for a while. Somehow, he hadn’t expected the changes throughout the area to affect him as deeply as they did. What had he thought? That the county and town would stand still during the twenty years he was away? Obviously that hadn’t happened.

A huge discount store now stood in the spot where Mona Garrett’s country store had once stocked the essentials for local farmers and homemakers. Trooper supposed the discount store might meet current needs of the citizens, but he doubted it did so as gently and as colorfully as Miss Mona had.

He caught himself heaving a sigh and figured it hadn’t been his first when Carly spoke up. “You sound like I’m beginning to feel. The effects of our swim are starting to catch up with me and I can barely keep my eyes open. Would you mind too much if we went on home now?”

Trooper couldn’t believe how relieved he felt at the prospect of ending his tour and heading back to Sugar Maple Drive where any changes were slight and cosmetic. “Going back sounds like a great idea to me. Now that you mention it, I’m feeling tired myself.”

Carly’s smile looked far more sincere than any she’d shared with him since they’d left his uncle Roy’s farm. He returned her smile, then turned around in the parking lot of the new medical clinic that had been built on the site of the old skating rink and headed back to Sugar Maple Drive.

C
arly hadn’t been lying
to Trooper about being tired. She was looking forward to getting home and resting for a while. Fortunately, Trooper soon turned into her driveway. She thanked him for the afternoon and then, before he could kill the motor, she grabbed her damp towels and hurried to exit his car. He waited until she turned at her front door to wave goodbye before putting his car in reverse and backing out of her driveway.

Feeling more exhausted by the minute, she hurried upstairs to get out of her bathing suit and into the shower. After that, she dressed in baggy shorts and a tee and stretched out on her bed to rest.

She awoke some time later, completely disoriented. Night had fallen while she slept, and since she hadn’t turned any lights on, her bedroom was totally dark.

Grogginess lay like a heavy blanket over her senses, and she turned toward her bedside table so she could check the time on the digital clock. Almost 10:00 p.m.

“Darn it,” she muttered, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed and sitting up. She groped for the switch on the lamp, turned it on, and then closed her eyes to shut out the sudden bright light.

She swiped a hand across her face and groaned. Her throat was so dry that it was obvious she had been breathing through her mouth. She got up and stumbled into the bathroom where she downed two glasses of water before her throat began to feel somewhat normal again.

She glared at her image in the mirror. “Hello, Sleeping Beauty—Not,” she muttered. Sighing, she turned and made her way back into the bedroom where she plopped down on the bed. She almost decided to crawl under the covers and go back to sleep, but then her stomach growled.

Knowing she’d never go to sleep if she was hungry, Carly again forced herself to get up. This time she made her way to the kitchen. Finding nothing interesting in her refrigerator, she decided on a bowl of cereal, which she ate while watching the late news out of Knoxville.

“Nothing new on the news,” she grumbled to herself. “Continued heat wave for the next ten days. No big surprise there.”

She turned the TV off and rinsed her cereal bowl before placing it in the dishwasher. “I sure as heck can’t go back to sleep now, so I might as well write for a couple of hours,” she informed FluffBall, who’d followed her into the kitchen and now sat beside her feeding dish glaring at Carly. “But of course I’ll feed you first,” she muttered, “even though your dish is far from empty.”

After placating the cat, she went upstairs to her office and turned her computer on. While waiting for it to finish opening, she eased over to the window and looked across Sugar Maple Drive to Myrna’s house. There were no lights on downstairs that she could see, and only two upstairs windows at the front of the house were lit from within. Was that Trooper’s bedroom? More than likely, she decided. She recalled Myrna saying that she tended to go to bed early and get up early.

Thinking back on her afternoon with Trooper, Carly felt a smile lifting the corners of her lips. She’d thoroughly enjoyed his teasing her about the snakes and the gator in his uncle’s lake. In fact, she’d felt totally at ease with him until they’d taken their leave of his uncle and started driving around. Then somehow tension had slipped into the relationship.

Was it due to his question about her seeming secrecy? She hadn’t reacted well, of course, but the question had struck her as coming from out of left field, and she hadn’t really known how to answer.

Perhaps that had been the beginning of the unease between them, but she was convinced his mood had really gone south when he’d discovered that a couple of his old, beloved landmarks had been razed to make way for more modern buildings.

Surely he hadn’t expected everything in Holly Grove to be the same as it had been when he’d left twenty years ago.

Sighing, she forced herself to turn away from the window. There was no use in speculating about what had happened. It was just one of those things that could be a combination of factors. In the meantime, she needed to get back to work. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get behind schedule with her current book and have to write like crazy to catch up. Sometimes she did her best writing under that sort of pressure, but she didn’t like to depend on it.

Three and a half hours later, she pushed back from the computer. She’d had a good session, turning off quite a bit of work. Of course she’d need to let tonight’s pages sit for a few days and read over them then to be sure they weren’t crap. Sometimes when she wrote at a pace like she had tonight, she discovered later that she’d done some really horrible writing.

But most of the time it was good, and she had a feeling tonight’s would be also.

In the meantime, she was too exhausted to continue. Her back was tired, her eyes burned, and her wrists were beginning to ache—all sure signs that she had pushed herself too hard physically.

She saved her work, emailed it to herself so it would be stored on a remote server, and stood. After stretching and flexing her back for a few minutes, she again made her way over to the window and looked across the street.

Those two upstairs windows were still lit. Unfortunately, that told her nothing. If it was Trooper’s bedroom, he could be awake reading, or he could have gone to sleep with the lights on, or…or anything. No way she could know. “None of your business, girl,” she murmured aloud, then turned her own lights off and went to get ready for bed.

An hour later, Carly turned her head on the pillow so she could see the digital clock sitting on her bedside table. “Four o’clock in the morning,” she muttered. She’d tried everything to get to sleep. Reading in bed hadn’t worked. Counting sheep had just frustrated her and made her feel even more awake. She didn’t own any sleeping pills or she might have been tempted to take one. “That’s what you get for taking a nap,” she told herself.

Then she heard it.

The noise was so faint that, had she been asleep, it wouldn’t have awakened her, especially now that she slept with her windows closed.

A very steady, thumping noise sounded from somewhere outside. At least she thought it was from outside. She listened more closely, then eased out of bed. The faint glow of her nightlight enabled her to see well enough to walk over to her window. Being careful not to disturb the curtain too much, she unlocked the window and eased it up a fraction.

The noise was louder, reassuring Carly that it did, indeed, originate from somewhere outside.

But what was it? At first she thought the thumping might be controlled by some sort of engine, considering how steady it was. But then the cadence changed, first slower, then faster, as though whatever was creating the sound had grown tired for a minute, then renewed its effort.

The noise itself was not especially menacing, not in the way a growl or a scream or any manner of other sounds might have been. Still, there was something about it that sent chills dashing down Carly’s spine.

Fear pumped adrenaline into her system, and her heart rate increased to the point that the pounding in her ears almost drowned out the thumping noise from outside.

Had Trooper heard it too?

Thankful that she’d turned on nightlights in the hallway before she’d gone to bed, Carly made her way to her office and eased across the room until she could look out the window toward the house across the street. Every window was dark. “Dammit,” she muttered.

She’d hoped to see lights on in the bedroom that she suspected belonged to Trooper. Then she might have risked calling her neighbor’s house at four o’clock in the morning. But now she couldn’t. Not and risk waking Myrna over a noise that might have a perfectly logical explanation.

But Carly couldn’t convince herself there was anything logical about that noise. She decided the only way she could make herself feel any better was to turn on as many lights as possible.

That decided, she crossed the room to the light switch by the door leading in from the hallway, and flipped on the overhead lights. Next she slipped out into the hallway where the switches were located that controlled the floodlights on the four corners of her house. She turned those on before moving back to her bedroom and turning on the overhead lights there.

Almost immediately, her phone rang. Her heart half jumped into her throat before she could grab the receiver off her portable phone base and look at caller ID. It was a cellular number. Praying it was Trooper, she pressed the Talk button.

“Hello.” Her voice came out hoarse and weak, so she cleared her throat to try again. Trooper spoke before she could.

“Carly? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine except for feeling somewhat unnerved. Did that noise wake you?”

“Yeah. Then I saw all of your lights coming on. Do you want me to come over?”

“Do you mind?”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. Don’t open the door until you know it’s me.” He hung up before Carly could thank him.

She quickly pulled on a pair of shorts and a tee shirt before going downstairs to turn on the porch light. She stood beside the front door, watching through the sidelight for Trooper to appear. She could no longer hear the thumping noise and wasn’t sure whether to feel better about that or not.

Trooper arrived a couple of minutes later, striding up the walk with that long lope of his. He carried a large flashlight in his right hand, and the butt of a gun protruded from the waist of his jeans.

Carly gulped. She hadn’t counted on him bringing his gun, and the thought that he felt he might need it unnerved her more than she liked to admit. She watched him step up on her porch and then waited until he stood just outside the door before she turned the deadbolt, pulled the door open, and unlocked the screen.

“Come in.” She moved back to allow him to step inside. “The noise has stopped.”

“I noticed.” He wore dark jeans and a black, cotton, long-sleeved shirt that buttoned down the front. None of the buttons were fastened and a black tee showed underneath the gaping front. His face was shadowed with the beginnings of a beard, and his dark hair was tousled as though he’d run his hand through it in place of using a comb. “Did the noise wake you?”

“No,” she admitted. “I was awake anyway. I’d taken a nap when I got home and after I woke up from that, I couldn’t go back to sleep. How about you?”

“I’d gone to sleep around midnight but my windows were open and the noise sounded like it was coming from right under the side window. I dressed and slipped downstairs and outside to take a look around, but whatever it was had disappeared by then.”

So he’d gone outside to investigate. That explained his dark clothing and the gun. And the fact that he’d called her on his cell phone. “Thanks for calling to check on me.”

“When I saw all of your lights come on, I was afraid you were having some sort of trouble.”

She shuddered. “That noise really unnerved me for some reason. I know that this sounds fanciful, but I feel as though there’s a menacing air about it. What do you suppose it could be?”

“I don’t know. Yet.” He lifted his right shoulder in a half shrug. “Do you want us to take a look around the exterior of your house again?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary. As you said, whatever it was appears to be gone now.”

He nodded. “Okay. But let me give you my cell number before I leave. If you need to call me for any reason, use that. I’ll keep it turned on and beside my bed, and you won’t have to worry about waking Aunt Myrna if you call.”

“Does that thumping noise not wake her?”

“She’s always been a sound sleeper, so nothing much disturbs her.”

“Good. Just a second.” Carly stepped over to the small table sitting in her hallway and picked up the pad and pencil lying there. “I’m ready.”

He called out the numbers and she wrote them down. “Got it. Thanks so much, Trooper.”

He smiled. “Not a problem. Hope you can get some rest now.”

She returned his smile. “Same to you. See you later.”

“Bye. Lock up after me.”

Carly locked the screen, then shut the door and turned the deadbolt, but she peered through the door’s sidelight and watched Trooper until he faded into the darkness near the street.