Whispers at Midnight (7 page)

Then she gave a hoot of derisive laughter. “That’s hilarious.”

As he returned the wallet to his pocket his lips compressed.

“Yeah, I guess it is. Just about as hilarious as you with boobs and blond hair. Anyway, I walked around the place and didn’t see anything. If I missed somebody and you happen to come across him, you can always have your friend here hold him at bay with her pan while you give me a call.” He handed Sandra the saucepan and turned as if to leave, then glanced back over his shoulder. “Oh, by the way, the electricity’s off. A wire’s down a couple miles up the road.”

There was something in his voice that told Carly he really enjoyed telling her that.

“Hey, hold on just a minute. You don’t want to go leaving us here all alone,” Sandra called after Matt with some alarm as he started to walk away. Carly looked daggers at Sandra. Even if she’d known for sure that an anemic Count Dracula was waiting for them up at the house, Carly would have been boiled in oil before she said a word to keep Matt from leaving. Sandra turned to Carly appealingly. “Maybe we should just go to a hotel or something and come back in the morning. I don’t
do
scary old houses with prowlers and no electricity. Not in the middle of the night, I don’t.”

“There is no hotel in Benton, remember?” Carly said through her teeth as Matt stopped walking and turned around, his body language making it as clear as a shout that in the war between personal inclination and professional duty, professional duty was winning out by just about a hair. She wasn’t particularly thrilled about braving the house under the circumstances either, but they didn’t have any other choice. The lack of a hotel in Benton was the whole point behind their business plan, which was to turn her grandmother’s house into a bed-and-breakfast. Located near what was becoming known in touristy circles as the antebellum trail, Benton was a growing community of some 3,800 souls with a burgeoning identity as a source for quality crafts and antiques. Boutique-like shops were springing up like dandelions throughout the small downtown area. There was ample opportunity for fishing and golf nearby, a new Honda plant not ten miles to the south drew visitors, and Savannah was little more than an hour’s drive away. There’d once been a run-down motel out
near the expressway turnoff, but it had gone out of business a number of years before. Thanks to the recent openings of McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, which Carly viewed as proof of her business plan’s workability, Benton now boasted a modest selection of restaurants, but there was currently no place for a visitor to spend the night. Their proposed bed-and-breakfast was meant to fill that need.

“Oh, yeah.” Sounding unhappy, Sandra clutched her pan to her chest like a scared child with a favorite teddy bear. “I knew that.”

“So it’s either the house, another hour or so on the road, or the U-Haul,” Carly said inexorably. “And I don’t know about you, but I refuse to drive any farther or sleep in the U-Haul. The air conditioner broke about the time we crossed the Georgia state line, remember? And there’s only the one seat. We’re better off in the house. At least we’ll have beds. Besides, the electricity will come back on, and if there really was somebody prowling around, you can bet your bottom dollar it was a couple of teenagers looking for a place to get up to no good or a drunk needing a place to sleep it off. That’s the only kind of prowler we ever get in Benton.”

“Uh-
huh,
” Sandra said, transparently unconvinced.

Exasperated, Carly glanced at Matt. The least he could do was corroborate what he knew was the truth.

“You came in a U-Haul?” Forget backing her up. Matt didn’t even seem to be listening. Instead, he was looking down the slope toward the road. Following his gaze, Carly saw that the blocky orange truck was just visible through the thick foliage. The sight of it seemed to answer his question, because he glanced at her without waiting for an answer. “You moving stuff in or out?”

“In.” And that was all he needed to know. She wasn’t about to share her plans with Matt. Her life was strictly not his business.

“We’re going to open a bed-and-breakfast,” Sandra volunteered. Carly cast her a shut up–or-die look that Sandra apparently missed completely, because she kept on talking. “We’re going to call it The Inn at Beadle Mansion.”

“The two of you?” Matt looked at Carly. “What about your rich lawyer husband? You leave him behind in Chicago?”

So he’d known where she was, that she was married and what John
did for a living. Carly was disgusted to feel a weird little flutter in the pit of her stomach. It must be a residual thing—she was
so
over Matt. The dirty rotten son of a bitch.

“I got a divorce,” she said shortly.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Carly said in a
you-want-to-make-something-of-it?
tone.

Matt folded his arms over his chest and studied her. “You know, Curls, you’ve developed an attitude since you’ve been gone. You really ought to think about losing it. It’s not attractive.”

“Drop dead,” Carly said. “And get lost. We don’t need your help. If you get your kicks playing big bad sheriff now, go do it somewhere else. I’m not impressed.”

She turned on her heel and started walking toward the house, calling Hugo as she went.

“Hey, babe, works for me.” Matt turned just as abruptly and headed in the opposite direction, his long strides eating up the ground.

“Shit,” Sandra said, and from the corner of her eye Carly saw that she was looking from one to the other of them as the distance between them rapidly widened. After a brief attack of apparent indecision, she hurried after Carly. Carly felt some of the tension in her shoulders ease. For a moment there she hadn’t been completely sure which combatant Sandra would follow.

The truth was, she really didn’t want to tackle the house alone right now.

“What did you go and do that for?” Sandra wailed as she caught up.

Carly cast her a sideways glance. “Because he’s a jerk. Pond scum. Human waste.
Hugo.
Here, kitty, kitty.”

It was a measure of her jazzed-up emotional state that she even bothered with the here, kitty, kitty bit. Hugo never answered to it. That was another thing he considered beneath his dignity.

“But he’s the sheriff. He has a gun. And your grandma’s house has me really creeped out now. Would it have killed you to have let him come up with us and check it out?”

“Yes,” Carly said, not mincing matters.
“Hugo!”

“So what do we do if we run into the prowler?”

Carly practically ground her teeth. “I already told you; we don’t get prowlers in Benton. Not real ones, anyway. This is a little town, not Chicago.”

Sandra snorted. “Can anyone here say, ‘famous last words’?”

“If you’re scared, why’d you come with me? You could have followed him back down to the road, and waited in the U-Haul. Or even gone with him. I’m sure he would have taken you anywhere you wanted to go, if for no other reason than just for the pleasure of aggravating me.”

“I thought about it,” Sandra admitted, sounding annoyingly guilt-free as she confessed to base thoughts of betrayal and desertion. “But there’s a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve gotta pee.”

Carly rolled her eyes. Traveling with Sandra, she had learned things about her that she had previously never known, or wanted to know. Such as the fact that she always had to pee. Of course, as the owner of the Treehouse restaurant, where Sandra had worked as a cook, she’d never thought to monitor her genius of the kitchen’s trips to the john. Sandra had to go approximately every fifteen minutes; if they’d missed a rest area between Chicago and Benton, it was only because Sandra hadn’t seen it.

“Oh, my God. You must have a bladder the size of a walnut.
Hugo!”

“You know what? You’re starting to sound just like my exhusband.”

Great. Now Sandra was getting huffy. Carly cast her eyes heavenward. “I apologize, okay? There’s a bathroom right inside the house. As soon as I get the front door open, it’s all yours.”

They were nearing the house now. Carly spied the box of cooking utensils Sandra had jettisoned earlier. “I’ll grab these,” she said, detouring to pick up the box. “Do you see your phone anywhere?”

“Nope. I dropped my purse, too.” Following her, Sandra, with a gathering frown, turned to look back the way they had come.

“We’ll find them in the morning.” No way was she up to launching
a major search and recovery effort now, not after all they’d been through. Her nerves were shot, her temper was roused, her cat was missing and she was so tired she felt like she could drop where she stood.

“Yeah.” Sandra apparently felt much the same way. Beyond giving a couple of futile kicks at the tall wet grass, she made no real effort to look for her lost belongings. “Stupid phones never ring when you want them to.”

“Ain’t it the truth.”

Conducting her own quick visual search of the area with no result, Carly spared a moment of regret for her lost flashlight. Looking for it was an option, but given the way the thing had rolled and how dark it was, the chance of success seemed remote. Besides, she knew the inside of her grandmother’s house like the back of her hand. Once she was inside, they’d have light in maybe five minutes tops. As power outages were a not infrequent problem in this largely rural part of Georgia, candles and matches always had been kept in the huge china cabinet in the dining room. It would be ridiculous to let herself be driven away by a little thing like no electricity after having traveled so far. Besides, it was starting to sprinkle, and they were a lot closer to the house than the U-Haul. All that was needed to make her night complete was to get soaked by the kind of sudden downpour that was a summer-in-Georgia staple.

And if by some chance Matt should be still hanging around, she’d be damned if she’d turn tail and give him reason to laugh at her expense.

She was
so
not afraid to go inside what was now her own house just because Matt claimed that there’d been a report of a prowler and it just happened to be after midnight and really, really dark.

A fat plop of water landed on her nose. Carly looked up, grimacing. It was official; her night was complete. Raindrops were definitely falling on her head. If she didn’t get inside soon, her carefully straightened hair would start to curl into its natural state again. Until she’d learned the fine art of combining straightening gel and the blow-dryer, she’d been the victim of fat sausage ringlets that had made her look like a skinny, way-less-cute Shirley Temple and had
led to Matt calling her Curls. In and of itself, she’d hated the nickname, but she had adored the boy who had bestowed it on her and thus had accepted it without protest. He’d used it teasingly, affectionately, throughout her girlhood, and she, who’d been starved for attention and affection, had hugged it to her nonexistent bosom as a sign that she was special to him.

He’d called her that on the night of the prom right before they had kissed for the first time and she had melted into a quivering bundle of crazy-in-love hormones in his arms. He’d called her that again, for the last time before their encounter tonight, on the morning after the prom, when he had walked her to the door of her grandmother’s house just as the sun had begun peeping over the horizon.

“See you later, Curls,” he’d said, cupping her face in his lean hands and dropping a quick but heart-stoppingly tender kiss on her mouth.

She had read all sorts of promises into that. But, mindful that her grandmother rose with the roosters and might well be marching militantly toward the porch in her housecoat at that very moment to send him on his way, she had merely smiled up at him.

“ ’Night, Matt,” she’d said. Then she’d turned away and gone inside the house.

Glowing. In love. Sure that he was The One, her soul mate, destined to be at her side for the rest of her life.

The no good dirty rotten son of a bitch.

Scowling at the memory, Carly thrust it forcefully from her mind and started walking again, a little faster this time, looking under bushes and up trees and behind clumps of drooping, rain-heavy flowers as she went. A pampered only pet, Hugo surely wouldn’t have gone far. Although being lost was actually no more than he deserved. She could still feel the imprint of his claws in her side.

“Hugo.
Damn it, get your furry buns over here. If you think I’m going to spend the rest of the night searching for you, you’re sadly mistaken.”

“I may have to pee a lot, but at least I don’t swear at my cat,” Sandra said, falling in beside her. “Anyway, there he is.”

Carly followed Sandra’s gaze to find Hugo sitting high and dry on the porch. His white coat made him easy to spot. Carly heaved a sigh
of relief. Losing Hugo would have fallen into the category of Too Much. Clearly unconcerned about having lost her, he was having a leisurely bath. Which, besides sleeping and eating, was basically how he spent most of his time. For cats as well as people, bright white outerwear required a lot of maintenance.

“Come on,” Carly said wearily, and led the way up the steps. Trimmed in peeling gingerbread and supported by half a dozen slender posts, the porch ran the entire length of the front of the house. Hugo, with a luxurious stretch, rose to greet her. Carly cast him a withering glance and walked on past. With Hugo as well as Sandra trailing her now, she set the box down on the wicker settee that had taken pride of place against the center of the white clapboard wall for as long as she could remember, opened the creaky screen door and fumbled to fit the key into the old-fashioned lock. Beyond the small, leaded glass insert set at eye level in the ornate oak door, the house looked dark as a cave. Turning the key, Carly opened the door. The scent of the house rushed out to greet her. Stuffy from being shut up for weeks with its window units off, it nonetheless smelled just as it always had: old, with a hint of lemon furniture polish and the faintest underlying note of mustiness. Stepping inside, she wrinkled her brow and thought,
Something’s missing.
Then she realized what it was: her grandmother had always kept sachets of dried verbena tucked away in every room. The smell of verbena was gone.