by Carly Bishop
“That’s great, Jess. Thanks for handling it.” They’d reached the underground train station back to the main terminal and stood waiting for the next train. “Cy, I think I will ride to the site with Jess, if you don’t mind.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Amy squared off. “Cy, the police are going to be there. Did you get that?”
“Amy, the place was vandalized within hours of your brother making some lame-assed excuse for determining your whereabouts. I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think you should come home with me tonight.” Embarrassed by their clearly personal confrontation, Jessie began looking everywhere but at the two of them. The train came. They crowded on. “I’ll call the cops and square it for tomorrow.”
“I don’t need you to ‘square it.’” She looked at him. “Whatever Brent was thinking, he obviously changed his mind. I need to take care of my business. I’ve been doing that for a long time now. And I’d like a little time with Jessie.” He could see she was trying to compromise with him. “Cy, please. This is what I do. It has nothing to do with anything else. What if I drive up to your place after? Would that be okay?”
The train stopped at the A terminal and then the main one. He wasn’t going to argue with her. He couldn’t stop her risking her reckless little neck, but if she was going, he was going, even if he had to sneak around behind her back to do it.
“Yeah. It’ll have to be, won’t it?”
She gave him a brilliant smile. She thought she’d gotten her way. She trusted him.
He trusted no one, and he wasn’t going to back off to save himself her anger.
“I’ll just draw you a map.”
“AMY, ARE YOU SURE you should stay here alone?” Jess began to worry after the police took one last look around the house and drove off. “I don’t mind staying. I really don’t.”
“I’ll only be here a couple of hours,” she signed. “I promised Cy I would come. I can’t be too long, or he’ll call out the National Guard.”
“I know, but I’d—”
“Jess,” she signed, standing in the deep-freeze temperatures with her friend, depending on the light of the street lamp for each of them to see the other’s hands. “Vandals strike when no one is around. I’m not staying, I’m just going to take care of the windows. The police have been through the house twice, the place is lit up like a Christmas tree and the new lock has a triple bolt. I’ll be fine.”
“All the same, call me when you get home?”
“I don’t need a keeper, Jessie.”
Jess frowned. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Sorry. Just tired of being looked after twenty-four-seven.”
“Mr. McQuaid?” Jess’s breath made tiny clouds in the bitter cold.
Amy nodded.
“Part of his job, don’t you think?”
“Self-appointed keeper of the deaf girl?”
“Don’t,” Jess snapped. “Don’t even start with me. He’s got a right to be worried. It wouldn’t matter if you were deaf or not.”
“Wouldn’t it, Jess?”
“No. He’s in love with you. Don’t tell me you don’t know that.”
Amy swallowed hard. Her face, her breasts flushed with heat. She had every reason to know Cy was crazy in love with her. But somehow she’d thought a man who loved her, no matter how reluctantly, would also know her well enough to understand the thing she needed as much as his love was his respect.
To be treated as if she were a competent woman.
An equal, damn it. Not a willful child in a deaf woman’s body, in need of constant supervision.
Brent hadn’t shown up, his excuse was lame and he had surely been lying about any intention to meet her flight in the first place, but to make the necessary leap in logic that all of that meant he intended her any harm just didn’t fly.
“If you ask me, Amy, you’re scared and looking for any excuse. From my point of view, Cy McQuaid is treating you as if you were priceless to him. If you don’t knock it off, he won’t have any choice but to walk away from you—and it won’t be his fault.”
Jessie jerked open her car door and sank into the driver’s seat, looking at Amy as if she had been personally insulted.
“Jess, don’t go away mad,” she signed, pleading, her fingers stiff with cold, her eyes watering. “I am scared.”
She started the engine. “Let me tell you something, Amy. I’d give anything to be scared like that.”
She swallowed. Life was so hard. Jess deserved to be scared like that. A little thrill, a little danger, hope and a good man causing it all. “Thanks for arranging all this. And I will call you.”
Jess smiled, then rolled up her window and backed out of the drive.
Amy turned and dashed across the crunchy layer of snow for the front door. The space heater probably had the living area up to fifty-five degrees, but compared to the outside it felt like a sauna.
And looked like hell. Spray-painted graffiti now defaced nearly every wall in the living area, but what concerned her were the clerestory windows. They looked as if they’d been damaged with a pea-shooter or slingshot, and in the extreme cold, which was expected to snap in the morning, the windows would fall apart, dropping glass, and in the worst case, letting melted snow seep down onto the ceiling. If the water got far enough, the expensive antique molding she’d just put up would be ruined.
She had to seal off those windows, and she wanted to be done with it before Cy got antsy.
She half-rolled, half-dragged her scaffolding to the center of the room, then heaved the four-foot roll of heavy construction-grade plastic up one level, then the next. She put on her tool belt and climbed up onto the scaffolding.
When she was done she’d go home, throw a few things together and drive up to Cy’s place. Maybe on the way she’d think of a way to fend off her fear that Cy wouldn’t ever quite believe that she needed to take care of herself. Or that she could.
DAMN NEAR NINE-THIRTY. And thirty below with the wind chill. Huddled in the space between the outside door of the root cellar and the half door leading into the cramped basement, Brent still felt every freaking degree.
For a minute he’d worried Amy was going to leave when the cops left. But she must have only walked the dim bulb Verdell woman out to her car, because she’d come back inside.
Alone.
His luck was holding.
The cops had been all through the place, even rattled his cage door from the inside, then decided it hadn’t been opened in fifty years. He imagined she felt safe now. Pissed, no doubt, at the vandalism, but safe.
She was wrong.
He felt around his coat pocket for what he needed and began prying open the root cellar door, not giving a crap when it groaned. Amy wasn’t going to hear it.
The eeriness of it began to get to him. The place was dead silent. No TV blaring, no voices, no radio, no CDs, nothing but the scrape of things being dragged across the floor.
He thought he knew exactly what she was doing.
He avoided thinking, in the bigger picture, what the hell it was he was doing. She was his kid sister. He never meant for her to get hurt, but if it wasn’t for her his mom would have left Byron Reeves. She would have packed up their stuff and taken Brent and gone back to California, and then none of this would have ever happened.
He’d wished a million times he hadn’t hurt his mom, hadn’t killed her, hadn’t gotten so angry he couldn’t see straight because she was dead now, and Amy was like a dog with a bone she wasn’t going to give up.
He didn’t think they’d ever get him for murder one, but even if they got him on involuntary, the suck-ups would make sure the kid who killed Judge Reeves’s wife spent the maximum time in the slammer, even if he was her son.
But Amy wasn’t going to leave it alone and he didn’t have a choice.
Crouching in the dark, freezing cold basement he imagined could hear the hiss of gas fueling the space hea
ter on the main floor. In any case, cold as it was, he knew she would long since have turned it on. All that was left for him to do was to dissolve the seal and loosen the fitting on the furnace.
The gas would rise up through the house at a pretty good clip. She might even smell the nasty sulfur scent the gas company added to natural gas to warn of exactly such a leak. But by the time it penetrated her clever little brain that the gas she was smelling wasn’t the gas powering the space heater, he would be safely removed. The concentration of gas would reach an incendiary level. The pilot flame on the safe, innocuous space heater would ignite and the place would blow, lighting up the blistering-cold night sky. And it would all be the fault of the brand-new furnace installers.
Chapter Fourteen
By nine-thirty Cy began to think he’d overreacted to a nonexistent threat. He’d parked on the street at the side of the house and observed every movement for the last ninety minutes. The cops went in, the cops went out, the house was obviously secured to their satisfaction. Then Jess left without Amy, which settled it. He wasn’t leaving, he didn’t care how lamebrained it felt. At this point, he could just show up. She wouldn’t ever know he’d been watching over her the whole time.
He gave her till ten, then got out of his truck and made his way across the street when a movement in the dark alley behind the old Victorian house caught his eye. He jerked open his down coat, drew his sidearm from the shoulder holster and flattened himself against the eight-foot fence to the side of the house across the alley.
Tentative footsteps at first, then a more jaunty pace coming toward him, then whistling. Goddamned whistling. He knew the chances this was an innocent stroll down the alley by a citizen were about nil. Which meant this was anything but innocent. He cocked his gun and held it out, his arm straight out from the shoulder and tight to the fence.
When Brent Reeves moved into his line of sight, it was all Cy could do to prevent himself cracking the guy’s head open with the butt of his gun. Instead, very deliberately, he disarmed and replaced the safety on the gun and then moved in behind Amy’s brother and jammed the piece into the base of his skull.
“Anybody ever tell you it isn’t nice to stalk your little sister,” he snarled. “Now move it. Nice and easy across the street.”
Brent stuck his hands in the air like he was bored. “You’re outta your skull, McQuaid. I was just checking to see she was—”
He never got the word out, or if he did Cy didn’t hear it for the explosion that ripped through the house and the hail of debris. The sound deafened him, the impact threw him onto the ground on top of Reeves. He roared in his own uncontained anger, and in a split second he had cracked his gun over Brent’s head and lit out at a dead run for what had been the front of the house.
In some surrealistic slow motion, he saw the metal scaffolding Amy had been standing on, flying upside down, then crashing into the sudden flames. He screamed for her without thinking she wouldn’t hear him. The air had to be hundreds of degrees and he began to choke through his screams when he saw Amy, shielded by the open trunk of her car, standing in the only place she could possibly have survived the horrific force of the outward blast.
A heavy beam had landed on the roof of her car, crushing it and several smaller pieces skidded into and burned in the V made by the open trunk.
In shock so deep she couldn’t look away from the flames, she didn’t even see him till he lifted her off her feet and carried her to his truck through a gaggle of neighbors and the screams of fire-engine sirens.
HE TOOK HER HOME with him. The danger to her was over. Brent had been apprehended and hauled off to jail within an hour of the explosion and wouldn’t see bail. But though Amy came willingly with him and let him hold her for what remained of the night, Cy was scared.
He didn’t want her gratitude. He didn’t want to play hero to her vastly unwilling damsel in distress. He didn’t even want to say he’d told her so, although he had.
Somehow, all that weaseled into her feelings anyway. It had to do with his being there at all when the explosion tore into her certainty and proved her wrong about her ability to survive on her own terms. No survival instinct, not even the vaguest sense of discomfort had sent her out of the house, only the need of a pair of shears when her knife blade broke.
So Cy was right and she was wrong, but instead of leading her to trust his instincts, it only made her doubt her own, and he was turning into the cause of her doubting herself.
They sat at his kitchen table over coffee. He made the case for himself that these were extreme circumstances, that she might never again be in the kind of danger he’d foreseen and she hadn’t. That in ordinary times, the rest of their lives, she wouldn’t feel smothered and manipulated and her instincts discounted.
But he knew she was right when she pointed out that it was the extreme circumstances that laid them both bare, that put into stark relief the truth of their feelings about each other when they couldn’t be gussied up with flowery words.
He hated it. Goddamn hated it. But the world was filled with marriage vows made and then broken, because people wouldn’t look at things between them that sorely needed looking at first.
She dressed warmly and went with him soon after the sun rose to take care of his critters. Outside the barn he broke up the two-inch-thick layer of ice on the water trough. Inside, she curled up on a bale of hay with the mouser, a pearly-gray little cat he called Smoky. He shoveled dung out the stable door and onto a flatbed in a few deft strokes, then doled out oats and such to Charlie and the others.
Amy banged a foot on the rough wooden floor to get his attention. “Your horses are beautiful, Cy. What are their names?”
“This clown,” he said, jerking fondly on the gray mane, “is Knight to King’s X. I call him Charlie. The little sorrel mare is Molly. That’s Sassy, Lightning and Dandy.” He came around the backside of his stallion, his hand trailing over Charlie’s rump. He couldn’t believe Smoke was sitting still for her. Or, he supposed, he could. He would.
Her eyes filled suddenly with tears. “This is all over but the shouting, isn’t it? He’s gotten away with it, and I’ll never know what I heard or...what I said.”
His heart slammed hard against the wall of his chest. He had to do something, say something. “I have a friend, Amy. She does work with cancer kids. Hypnosis.” He didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell that it’d work. He saw she wasn’t pinning any fresh new hopes on what amounted to one last-ditch effort, but she agreed.
“Nothing much left to lose,” she signed, “is there?”
He nodded. “I have a meeting that ought to be over by five. I’ll call Marcee and see if we can meet at her place after supper.”
“Where does she live?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to look it up. But I’ll come get you.”
“I’ll drive myself, Cy.”
“Fine.” It wasn’t, but it would have to do. “I’m done here.”
She looked at him. Her chin angled higher. “I was hoping you’d show me the loft.”
He couldn’t mistake, by her body language, what she meant to be shown in the loft. His mouth went dry as dust. “That happens in the summertime, Amy. It’s freaking cold out here.”
“But...” She shoved Smoke out of her lap and began unbuttoning her coat, then her sweater, beneath which she was bare. “I want it.”
He thought what she wanted was not to have to think too much about what would happen after they left the barn. It was all too clear to them both that they’d reached a stalemate, a place between them where things weren’t quite right, and there might never be another time.
He turned around, aroused just looking at her bare breasts, her nipples puckering tight in the cold, grabbed a pitchfork and climbed the ladder to the loft.
She watched him break up a couple of bales of hay and spread them around. He jammed the pitchfork into a third bale, away from the bed he’d made for her, then began to open his clothes.<
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His sheepskin coat. His shirt. His button-down fly.
She stood.
He wanted to warn her not even to take that first step up if she thought this amounted to a farewell, but he couldn’t even shape the words.
MARCEE BLEIGH looked skeptical.
“Cy, Amy. I understand what you’re after, and why. It may have been something you said, some inadvertent repetition of something you heard, that set your mother off—but I have don’t have the foggiest idea—”
“C’mon, Marcee. You do this all the time. Use a little imagination. Give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, we haven’t lost anything. If it does...” Cy shrugged. “We might get lucky.”
Her sharp, homely features softened. “Do you mean you might get lucky, Cy?”
He didn’t mistake her comment for crudity, but he didn’t know how to answer her either.
Amy looked stricken, and signed, “Are you thinking if I could only hear what I heard that night that my hearing will suddenly come back? Is that what you’re thinking?”
Marcee looked back and forth between them. The air seemed thick with tension. “To be fair, Amy, I don’t think Cy brought you here with that agenda in mind. Or that—” she broke off, looking down at her hands a moment. When she looked back up, she gave a pained, somehow bittersweet smile and spoke only to Amy. “You’re a very lucky woman, do you know that? Because this big lug loves you. I would have snapped him up in a heartbeat. And for whatever it’s worth, I don’t believe he won’t still love you when your hearing doesn’t miraculously return.”
“Marcee—”
She looked up at him. “It’s all right, Cy. I raised the question of your motives. I thought Amy was entitled to know what I think of you.” She said to Amy, “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot, either, about Cy. I guess I just want to make doubly sure you even want to try hypnosis. You’re talking about a pretty awful time to try and tap into. I’m not convinced you understand the power of your subconscious mind to defend against your messing with your psychological defenses. Your... well, I’ll just say it. Your deafness.”