Seeing Red (8 page)
Authors: Susan Crandall
She picked up the phone.
She identified herself and explained to Mr. Breese that she’d seen someone “loitering” outside her condo. She received a pleasant, although decidedly
unalarmed
assurance that he would check it out.
Then she went back and looked out the sliding door again, keeping herself deep enough in the room so as not to be seen. After several minutes without seeing the orange glow, she decided whoever it was had left—or had extinguished the cigarette.
Headlights of the complex’s John Deere Gator came slowly around the corner, then stopped, its light shining in the direction of the old oak. The pavement beneath its wheels was still wet, black puddles gathering in the low places.
As Ellis watched the uniformed man climb out, it struck her as ludicrous that she was putting her faith in an aged security officer who drove something that looked more like a golf cart than a police vehicle, an officer who carried a radio and a flashlight instead of a weapon.
Ellis watched as the guard followed his flashlight beam, poking around under the tree. Then he walked deeper into the foliage, toward the marsh. She lost sight of the flashlight beam. Suddenly she was concerned for
his
safety.
Her phone rang and she nearly jumped back into last week.
With a dry throat, she picked it up.
“Ms. Greene,” the guard said, his speech as slow as a turtle in the sand. “I checked all round out here—” which came out as
he-ah
—“I don’t find a trace of nobody. Nobody been through the gates for hours. Musta been a resident.”
She looked out the window and saw the flashlight beam bobbing toward the Gator.
“Well, thank you for checking,” she said, feeling more than a little foolish.
“Happy to oblige, miss. You have a good night, now.”
“You too, Mr. Breese.”
She watched as he climbed onto the Gator’s bright yellow seat and then puttered away.
“It’s time to stop jumping at shadows, Ellis Greene.” She picked up her milk, which had warmed. She went to the kitchen and poured herself another glass. As she headed back to her bedroom, she looked out the sliding door once more.
She blinked, then squinted as she leaned closer. The orange dot faded and disappeared. But there was no doubt; whoever had been out there was back.
Returning to bed with her milk in one hand and the cordless phone in the other, she knew there would be no escape into sleep tonight.
If he hadn’t gotten his feet stuck in a mud bog when he’d had to move to better cover, he might have seen the humor in the old geezer with his flashlight bumbling around in the dark. Did Ellis really feel more secure now that the old guy had poked at a couple of bushes?
A sense of security could be a tenuous thing. He just had to make certain he used Ellis’s—or her lack thereof—to his advantage.
He rested his hip on one of the thick low branches of the oak and looked back up at her window. She thought she was being clever, staying away from the glass like that. But the moon reflected off her white T-shirt, giving her away.
When she’d first stepped to the glass and put her head against it, he’d had a good view of her long, naked legs. He’d imagined the air-conditioning blowing on her, making her nipples tight. He’d imagined his hands slipping between those legs.
Then the old guy had come along and ruined everything.
But this wasn’t the end. It was just the beginning.
J
odi sat alone at her kitchen table. She’d put on a Queen CD and cranked the stereo loud enough to vibrate the floor to mask the fact that she was sitting all alone in the middle of the night. Spread before her were the bits and pieces she and Marsha had picked up from the fireplace hearth.
With tweezers, Jodi sorted the fragments into piles. After that was done, she could decide if any of the figurines could be glued back together. She’d found almost all the parts to one of her favorites, a Hummel that was a little boy handing a fistful of wildflowers to a little girl. Greg had given it to her before they were married.
They’d been so happy. And it seemed so very long ago.
Chills ran over her arms as she recalled his fury when he’d come here this morning. If only he understood. But he hadn’t understood what it was like for her back then, and he didn’t now. Nothing had changed. They would never be like they once were—and now all hope of becoming something new was gone too.
She shoved all but the Hummel’s ceramic shards aside. Then she picked up her bottle of glue. With an intensity that blocked out all else, she began at the feet.
Two hours later, her back ached from hunching over the project, but she had all but the top of the little boy’s head more or less back together.
Rotating the paper on which she’d been assembling the figure, she studied it from all sides. Not too bad. A couple of the seams would show less after she’d touched them up with colored Sharpies.
She turned the figurine so the little girl’s face was toward her. A crack ran right down the middle of it; small splinters of ceramic were missing from the seam. That little girl’s face would never be the same. Never.
The little face blurred before her. She blinked.
It was ridiculous the way Greg wanted to dwell on what couldn’t be changed. It served no purpose. He certainly wasn’t any happier because of it. Couldn’t he see that the less they thought about the horror of what had happened to their daughter, the better off they were?
Couldn’t he see how tearing open that wound time after time only made it deeper?
Her vision distorted further.
Couldn’t he see . . . ?
With a vicious swipe, she knocked the Hummel off the table. The sharp sound of it hitting the wall and its pieces clattering onto the tile floor hit her heart like a hundred arrows.
As soon as it was light, Ellis was out of bed and dressed. Early rising was one of the few advantages to sleepless nights. She’d decided to go to the stables first thing this morning to check on poor Mr. J. The man didn’t have a spare ounce of flesh on him; she’d bet money he was black and blue today.
When she pulled out of her drive, she paused, looking across the street at the old oak. She put the gearshift in park and got out. Searching the ground beneath the oak, she didn’t find any cigarette butts. That settled her mind somewhat; whoever had been out here must have cared enough about the place to take his trash with him. It fit well with the comfortable theory of resident or guest.
She walked all the way back to the fence that separated the marsh from the complex. There were a couple globs of mud lodged in the chain link several inches off the ground—as if someone had climbed over.
“Dear Lord, stop making an erupting volcano out of a molehill!” she muttered. Caution was one thing, a wise thing, but paranoia was quite something else. Paranoia made you stupid.
She got back in her car, grateful that the shift had changed at the guardhouse and she didn’t have to see Mr. Breese.
Ten minutes later, she pulled into the lane at Belle Creek Stables. As she got out of the car, she looked around for Mr. J.
Something seemed different. Which was odd. The last time she’d been here, the lack of change had been remarkable. Pausing, she scanned all around her. What was it? Something subtle, something that niggled yet didn’t stand out.
She turned in a slow circle.
When her gaze landed on the plantation house, she saw it. The windows and French doors had been covered by blinds and heavy draperies before, sealing out the slightest ray of light. But today, the windows were uncovered and the French doors all stood wide open.
“Z’at you, Ellis?”
She turned. Mr. J headed her way from the stable door.
“Good morning,” she said, surreptitiously looking him over for bruises.
“What can I do f’r ya, Ellis Greene?” His voice was loud and not at all welcoming.
“I came to apologize again for—”
“Ah now, no need.” His gaze flickered toward the plantation house, then back to her. There was something standoffish in his eyes. He’d cut her off yesterday. Was he angry?
“Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked, unsure what else to say.
“Nah.” He swatted the air and started back toward the stable.
Unwilling to leave things like this, she grabbed blindly at a topic of conversation. “I see the house is open. Ms. Von der Embse making one of her rare visits?”
Rare
was an understatement. Ellis couldn’t remember the last time the woman had been to Belle Creek Plantation.
Mr. J turned to look at her. He licked his lips quickly, almost nervously, as if moistening them to pass a lie. “Nope. No Von der Embse here. Just time to air the place out.”
“Jake!” a man’s voice called from the river side of the house. “Need a hand here.”
Familiarity danced along Ellis’s nerve endings. She’d swear she knew that voice, but when and where remained hidden in the shadows of lost memory.
Mr. J stepped around her. “Thanks for comin’ by. Careful on your drive home.”
“Jake!” The timbre of that man’s voice thrummed along the pages of her past, teasing but never falling into place.
“Comin’, boss!”
Boss?
Mr. J moved with uncharacteristic quickness as he rounded the front corner of the house.
Ellis followed him.
When she rounded the front veranda, she saw Mr. J’s slight form in the front entrance, trying to help a much larger man steady a tall, four-foot-wide wooden door onto its hinges. The big guy stood just inside, his right shoulder wedged against the door edge, his face hidden from view.
“Can you reach the hinge pin and slide it in?” the larger man huffed. He lifted the door with a strap, keeping his shoulder tight on the edge.
“Dagnabbit. You always was the most stubborn . . . I told you to wait ‘til Sully come in this afternoon. Hangin’ this damn door is a three-man job.” Mr. J tried to keep pressure on the door while looking around on the entry floor, Ellis presumed for the hinge pin.
The top of the door started to move off center.
Ellis hurried up onto the veranda and put her hands on the door, adding just enough pressure to bring the door vertical again. “What can I do?”
“Hold it right where you are. Jake, let go nice ’n easy; walk ’round this side and put it in.”
Mr. J eased away.
The man said, “As I lift, guide the hinge into place. Jake can slide in the top pin.”
“We ain’t all giants,” Mr. J said testily. “I can’t reach the top ’un.”
Ellis heard the pin hit the foyer floor.
“What the . . . Them’s slicker ’n snot,” Mr. J complained.
The man said, “Just do the middle and bottom. I’ll get the top.”
After a couple of tries, the first pin slid home.
“Good thing you greased ’em, boss. I’d never got it through.”
The man grunted. “Hurry up.”
As soon as Mr. J had the second pin in place, the man said, “Ellis, move around here and hold up on these straps.” One at a time, she took them from his hands. He ended up behind her when the handoff was finished.
Ellis. He called me by name. I
must
know him.
“There!” The man stepped away from the door.
Ellis released her straps and stood back. She got her first clear look at the man. He had dark hair and a square jaw sporting a couple days’ stubble.
It was only when she looked into his gray eyes that she realized who he was.
He smiled. “Hello, Ellis. You’ve grown up.”
N
ate wasn’t prepared when Ellis threw herself into his arms. He managed to keep his balance by wrapping his arms around her and swinging her in a circle.
And suddenly it was as if the past sixteen years hadn’t been. He was seventeen, and they’d just spent a long night helping Mr. J deliver a foal. Ellis had always jumped into his arms the minute newly delivered babies successfully struggled onto their wobbly legs. Laura had been too squeamish to attend a birthing, but Ellis had been there every time, with her nose stuck right between Nate and Mr. J.
As he settled her feet back to the ground and looked into her eyes, he realized it wasn’t the same at all. There was nothing platonic about the way she felt against his chest, nothing brotherly in the way his heart raced as he looked into those incredible green eyes.
He quickly released her.
He wasn’t here to romance her. She wasn’t supposed to know he was here at all.
He dropped his hands to his sides and stepped a safe distance away, but her fragrance still lingered in his senses.
Exhaling strongly, he tried to rid himself of her scent as well as his inappropriate response to her closeness.
He quickly schooled his features and ordered his thoughts.