Paradise County (19 page)

T
hey’ll lock the door, won’t they?” Alex raised her voice to be heard over the rain as Joe tipped her onto her feet beside the car, which was some kind of dark-colored SUV. Being back outside in the storm reminded her of how afraid she’d been until he’d shown up to rescue her. Opening the door and then all but thrusting her inside, he didn’t answer. Alex waited until he was sliding into the driver’s seat beside her, tossing the dripping umbrella into the back and slamming his own door, before repeating the question.

“One of them probably will, but I wouldn’t worry about it either way: there’s no crime around here to speak of.” He started the car, turned on the lights, windshield wipers, and defrost, and put the engine into reverse. The headlights revealed shiny curtains of falling rain. The rumble of thunder overhead all but blocked out the sound of the wheels crunching down the gravel driveway. It was cold inside the vehicle, but sheltered from the rain, and surprisingly cozy.

“Oh, really? Let me remind you, there was someone in my bedroom tonight!” Alex’s voice was tart. Her head rested back against the leather seat, and she was once more pressing the washcloth to the wound.

“Sure you didn’t dream it?”

“I’m sure I didn’t dream getting hit over the head!”

“No, you didn’t dream that.”

They reached the road, and he glanced at her as he backed out and then put the car into drive. The faint glow from the instrument panel was the only illumination, making it difficult to discern more than his general outline. Alex hoped that he could see better than she could; except for the twin beams of light bouncing off the driving rain, the night around them was black as the inside of a coal mine.

“Head hurt much?” He glanced her way as he spoke.

“Some.”

“You know, the chances of somebody breaking into Whistledown are pretty remote, especially on a night like this. Even criminals like to stay dry.”

“If you can think of another expla …”

She broke off as a flash of lightning split the sky. They had almost reached Whistledown’s driveway. At the top of the hill, the house was lit up suddenly as if caught in a camera’s flash.
A dark form on the second-story porch stood out clearly against the white stone.
A human form. A man.

Alex’s eyes went huge. Her pulse raced. She sat bolt upright in the seat, riveted, gaping, as the lightning faded away and night dropped over the house once more like a magician’s scarf.

“Look! Did you see … ? Someone’s on the porch! There’s a man on the upstairs porch!” She grabbed at his arm, pointing.

The SUV veered sharply to the right, then recovered as Joe slammed on the brake and pulled his arm free.

“Damn it, Alex, don’t you know better than to grab someone’s arm when they’re driving?”

Alex didn’t even register that, or his use of her name. Her gaze was still fixed on the house. There had been someone on the porch. She was sure of it. She glanced at him almost wildly.

“Did you see him? He must have been the one who was in my bedroom—the one who hit me! He’s still in the house! We’ve got to get the police!”

He was looking at her narrow-eyed. “You really think you saw someone?”

“Yes! On the second-floor porch! I’m sure of it!”

“You are more trouble than anyone I ever met,” he growled under his breath, and put his foot on the accelerator. Seconds later he was turning the SUV up Whistledown’s driveway.

“What are you doing?” As they swooshed up the rain-washed asphalt her surprised gaze swung from the house to him.

“I’m going to take five minutes and check this out.”

“You can’t! We need the police! He might have a gun, or …”

“I doubt it,” he said dryly.

“You think I’m
imagining
this?” Alex’s voice was shrill with outrage.

“I think that, if you’d use just an ounce of common sense, you’d see that what you’re suggesting is almost impossible. This isn’t Philadelphia, you know: distances are pretty far out here. You’ve got to ask yourself, if there’s someone in the house, where did he come from? How did he get here? I don’t see a car, do you? Did he walk? From where? Simpsonville? It’s a good five miles away, and Simpsonville’s the nearest town. For God’s sake, Alex, use your brain: it’s been raining cats and dogs all night. Even wanna-be rapists have enough sense not to walk for miles in the pouring rain!”

They reached the top of the driveway, and he parked the car at the foot of the stone walk that led to Whistledown’s front door. With the lights still on and the engine still running, he leaned over and opened the glove compartment. Horrified, Alex watched as he withdrew a standardsize black flashlight. As far as weapons went, if he got close enough to club someone over the head with it it might raise a pretty good bump.

“Oh, no!” she said, grasping the back of the seat as she slewed around to look at him. A wave of dizziness assaulted her at the sudden movement, but she ignored it. “Don’t do this! Please don’t do this! Let’s go get the police! This is really stupid. I …”

But he was already opening the door. The interior light flicked on, allowing her to see the determined expression on his face. She supposed her appalled one was equally apparent to him. Their eyes met.

“Lock the doors and sit tight. I’ll be back as quick as I can. If you need me, honk the horn.”

“Oh, Joe,
please …”
she moaned.

He slammed the door behind him, and was gone, swallowed up by the night.

Alex hit the button that locked all the doors, then huddled in her seat, her gaze searching for him in vain. She was clutching the bloody washcloth in one hand, she discovered, and pressed it once again to her oozing head. The falling rain seemed suddenly very loud. It was a steady rushing sound, much like the roar of traffic on a busy highway. The headlights were twin swords of yellow slicing through the darkness directly ahead. The rain looked like dozens of falling icicles as it passed through the light. She debated turning off the lights, but the thought of sitting all alone in the darkness dissuaded her. Anyway, what would be the point? If the intruder had remained on the upstairs porch, he had certainly seen them coming up the driveway, and if he had stayed around to watch he would even have seen them park. But of course he hadn’t stayed around. If he had any sense at all, he would have left the house when he saw them approach, and was very likely outside right now. He could be right beside the car …

The skin on the back of Alex’s nape prickled as she glanced swiftly around. She could see nothing outside the windows except the rain falling through the twin shafts of light. She could hear nothing over the rain and the hum of the engine, either. She was alone with the darkness and relentless rain, effectively deaf and blind, her only defense against anyone who might choose to attack her the locked doors of the car.

Oh, God, if he had a hammer or something similar, he could smash right through the window.

Alex scrambled over into the driver’s seat, ignoring the resultant pain in her head and her subsequent dizziness, the better to have access to both the horn and the gear shift. Thunder crashed; if she was attacked now, Joe wouldn’t hear the window smash, wouldn’t hear the horn sound. Would she have time to slam the car into reverse and drive away?

Lightning forked toward the horizon. Glancing swiftly around, Alex saw nothing except translucent sheets of falling rain on every side.

A few minutes later, a sharp rap on the driver’s-side window made
her jump straight up in the air. Looking to her left, she saw a dark form, big but otherwise indeterminate as to shape, looming beside the car. Joe? Oh, please let it be Joe, she prayed, peering through the glass. Another rap, a glimpse of knuckles, and then a face looking in at her. She caught her breath instinctively, then recognized him.

Joe. Thank God.

She unlocked the door. Immediately he pulled it open, and a swirl of cold damp air hit her. Shivering, she clambered back over the console as he got in, then collapsed in the passenger seat, feeling shaky as a bowl of gelatin.

“Miss me?” he asked with the merest suggestion of a smile, after one look at what, from the feel of it, was her chalk-white face. Water ran from his poncho in streams to puddle on the floor. He had flipped back his hood. His hair was dry, but his face was glistening wet.

“Oh, God,” was her heartfelt reply as he leaned over to restore the flashlight to the glove box. “Did you … ? Was there … ?”

He reversed down the driveway. “There was no one in the house. There was no sign that anyone—any stranger—had been in the house. There was no sign of any fire anywhere. The front door was unlocked—I presume you left it that way?”

“Yes, but …”

He held up a hand to stop her. “Let me finish.” Reaching the road, he put the car into drive and headed in the direction in which they’d originally been traveling. “The back door was locked. I checked the upstairs porch. Not only was no one up there, but the door that opens onto it was locked from the inside. The bedroom doors were open, all of them—and a bronze statue of a woman about as tall as my forearm is long lay in the middle of the floor in the upstairs hall. I figure that’s what hit you.”

“He must have used it …”

“Alex, honey, there are two bronze statues, a pair, that stand on wooden brackets on either side of the mirror in the upstairs hall. If you tripped over the rug and fell forward, don’t you think it’s just possible that you knocked the statue off its perch and it clobbered you with no help from anyone at all?”

Alex stared at him. That drawled
honey,
coupled with the faintly patronizing note on which he finished up, told her that he had consigned the night’s events to a combination of accident and imagination.

“I am not nuts and I am not given to hysterical imaginings,” she said firmly. “Even if the statue fell on its own and hit me, what about the breathing that woke me up? And who was that on the upstairs porch just now?”

“Are you sure you saw anyone?” His voice was gentle. They had reached the highway by this time, and he turned left, accelerating along the deserted stretch of two-lane road to the accompaniment of the steady swish-swish of the windshield wipers. “You’ve had a pretty rough day today, haven’t you?”

That was the understatement of the year. Alex’s head throbbed as if giving its own answer, and getting hit over the head wasn’t even the worst of it. She’d had to fire the man beside her, who hadn’t even had the decency to stay fired; her fiancé had announced that he had married another woman; her sister had been expelled from school; and an intruder had been in her bedroom, waking her from a sound sleep. It didn’t get much better than that, she thought wryly. Making a face, she winced at the resultant pain, and pressed the washcloth more firmly to her head.

“So what’s your point?” Her response was truculent. They were reaching civilization: Alex could tell because of the glowing neon signs they passed. First, a Wal-Mart on the left, then, on the right, next to each other, a Thornton’s Gas Station and a motel called the Dixie Inn. Finally, a barrage of streetlights; clearly the town had electricity, even if the outlying areas did not. Or perhaps the electricity had been restored everywhere by now.

“Only that there was no one in the house when I checked it.” He smiled at her with a flash of genuine humor. “Now, don’t get mad. I’m perfectly willing to admit that whoever it was could have hidden from me, or run out the back door, locking it behind them of course, while I came in the front. Or something.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said irritably, as his point went home. But she
wasn’t mistaken about the man on the upstairs porch: she had seen him clearly. And she hadn’t dreamed up the breathing, either.

Had she?

There were only three possible explanations: some combination of the sleeping pill, stress, and possibly even, in the case of the man on the porch, the blow to her head, had caused her to suffer hallucinations; a real live intruder had been in her bedroom and, later, on the porch; or something paranormal was happening here, and what she had seen and heard was not of this earth.

“Joe,” she said hesitantly. “Do you believe in—ghosts?”

“Ah,” he said, and glanced at her. “Are we talking about your father’s ghost here?”

“Sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it?” It even sounded stupid to her own ears, when expressed aloud in so many words.

“Not really.” He glanced at her again. “My mother and sister were killed together in a car accident when I was twenty.” His voice was as matter-of-fact as if he were talking about the weather. He was looking straight ahead now, his attention on the road. The classic lines of his profile were illuminated by the rain-blurred glow of the streetlights. Only a slight twist at the corner of his mouth indicated that the subject might be painful for him. “For months after they died, I dreamed about them. They would come into my room almost every night, sometimes my mother, sometimes my sister Carol, sometimes both of them together, and they would talk to me, tell me that they were all right, that I shouldn’t grieve for them. Dream or not, it was one of the most real experiences I’ve ever had. Finally, I guess I got more able to handle their loss and they stopped coming. Looking back, I think it was my mind trying to come to terms with their deaths. I also think it’s a pretty universal experience.”

“Oh, Joe,” she said softly, touched that he would share something so personal with her. “I’m so sorry.”

He glanced at her. “It was a lot of years ago. I’ve been okay with it for a long time now. But I know how the first weeks and months after someone you love dies feel. Believe me, I’m the last person in the world to laugh at your ghost.”

He pulled off the road into a parking lot. “Here we are.”

Glancing around, Alex saw a glowing sign that said
TRI-COUNTY HOSPITAL
. Tall lights in the parking lot revealed the dark shape of a one-story building. Joe drove under a concrete carport at the far side and stopped the car. The sudden cessation of rain was startling. Security lights revealed that the building was of yellow brick, with double, steel-framed glass doors opening into a well-lit interior. A sign above the doors read
EMERGENCY ROOM
.