by Rachel Lee
After Del locked the front door, they hurried across the yard and the driveway and into his house. In the moments just before they climbed his steps, he watched a brilliant fork of lightning shoot down, and it almost seemed to him to outline a woman’s profile.
The voice of the storm? Imagination? Merely his brain constructing something familiar from lines, as brains were wont to do? Sometimes straddling worlds was a bitch.
The thought brought a faint smile of amusement to his lips as he opened his door for Del. An awkward time to feel amusement, but this was just plain an awkward time anyway. Here he was, doing what he’d vowed never to do again: get involved with a white woman.
The universe had a wicked sense of humor.
Inside he turned on enough lights to make her feel comfortable, then settled her in his living room. One of those rooms he had furnished straight out of a store, as inexpensively as he could, because he simply didn’t have the patience to do anything else, or the desire to waste time. It was comfortable enough for his needs, and he supposed the fact that all the pieces matched might mean something to someone. For himself, he didn’t much care.
The cocoa was instant, requiring nothing more than heating the water and adding a dollop of half-and-half for richness. He carried the mugs back to the living room and found Del curled up tightly on herself on one end of the couch.
“Feeling that bad?” he asked as he passed her a mug. She accepted it with both hands.
“No. Not exactly. I’m still a little cold. And I’m angry.”
“Angry why?” He took an upholstered chair facing her.
“Because this is scaring Colleen. Because it scared me and I know better.”
“Better than what?”
She arched her brow at him. “It’s got to be an animal in the wall. What else could it be?”
He didn’t answer, mainly because he was pretty sure she wouldn’t like the kind of answer his uncle would have given her, and that was the only thing that would spring to his mind right now.
“Yeah, it sounded weird,” she went on. “Strange. But who knows what kind of effect all that lath and plaster has on sounds from inside the walls? I’ve never had it happen before, so how would I recognize the sound? I usually renovate one room at a time, but maybe this time I just ought to go through the whole place and strip all the walls down to the lath. If there’s something there, it’ll show up or leave.”
“True.” As long as it was an animal.
She sipped her cocoa. “This is good.”
“Just instant.”
“More than instant. I know, I make instant all the time.”
“Well, I probably just hardened your arteries by adding some cream.”
At that a faint smile curved her lips. “That’s okay. Once never killed anybody unless jumping off tall buildings.”
He admired the way she found humor, even when she was obviously stressed. “Tell me about Colleen,” he said. “She impresses me every time I see her.”
“She’s an impressive kid. I honestly wouldn’t have expected her to handle this mess so well.”
“You mean being confined to a chair?”
“That and losing her dad at the same time. But yes, I guess most especially that.” She sighed, sipped more cocoa and then unfolded enough to put her cup on a coaster on the end table. “Getting over her dad’s death seemed to be the hardest part for her. Sometimes she still mentions how much she misses him.”
“What happened?”
“Car accident. They’d gone together for a day of skiing. I had to stay home to work on a rush project. Anyway, on the way back it turned really cold and the wet pavement started to ice over. A car zipped around them as they were descending from the Eisenhower Tunnel, skidded and spun out. Don didn’t have a chance to avoid it.”
“I’m sorry.” Inadequate words, but all words were.
“One of those things.” She sighed, looking sad for a few moments. “You know, when you said my house feels sad, maybe it’s me you’re picking up on.”
He started to shake his head, then let it lie. This was not the time to tell her the truth. “You and Colleen actually seem to have adjusted very well.”
“Yeah. And sometimes it worries me. I keep waiting for Colleen to crash. She seems to have adjusted too well, if you know what I mean.”
“It may happen from time to time,” he agreed. “But some of us are born to be more philosophical about things than others. Some people just take it on the chin and move on with a smile. I’ve known a few.”
“Are you one?”
“Unfortunately, no.” He felt a rueful smile form on his lips. “I’m more the once-burned-twice-shy kind.”
She nodded, and a soft smile eased her own expression a bit. “Most people are, I think. I know I am. Maybe I’m being ridiculous, but with Colleen I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, if you know what I mean. Bad things happen. And when they happen to you, you no longer feel immune. So when she started hearing these noises, I actually—I think I told you this? I can’t remember—I actually started wondering about her mental state, if things might finally be catching up with her.”
“Apparently you don’t need to worry about that anymore.”
“Apparently not. And that’s a great relief, from that perspective. But now I know why the sound unnerves her so much, and I’ve got to get to the root of it. I heard it and had to get out of that house.”
“I’ll help you every way I can.” He mentally kicked his own butt as soon as the words were out, but his nature required no less than that he help. And leaving her to deal with it alone—which he was sure she would do because trying to explain it to someone who hadn’t heard the sounds would be impossible—went against everything he believed about community. “I’ll help,” he said again. “I may not know much about renovation, but I’m sure I can rip out walls.”
That garnered a sigh from her, and she seemed to relax a bit. “That’s the fun part. But if I’m going to do all that, I’ll need to ask my aunt to take care of Colleen.”
“You sound reluctant.”
“Well, she’s getting up there. Physically she couldn’t do much to help if Colleen needed to be lifted.”
“How far away does she live? Because she and Colleen could stay here in my house until we clear out enough of the mess.”
Her eyes widened, and for an instant he almost thought tears moistened her eyes. “You’re a very kind man, Mike Windwalker.”
Yeah, right. And it was a damn good thing he had his legs crossed so she couldn’t see the more selfish feelings on parade.
He let her comment pass because he really couldn’t answer it.
Any way he looked at it, dawn couldn’t arrive quick enough.
Curled up on Mike Windwalker’s couch, Del felt more comfortable than she had in days, maybe since Colleen had started complaining about the noises in her room. They would get started at dawn, and she wasn’t going to stop until she found the sources of those noises. For now she was out of the house, unable to worry needlessly until she could act, and Mike had made her feel that she wasn’t alone.
Not that anyone was truly alone in Conard County. Neighbors were always quick to help, but they had to know you needed help, and it had to be something they could actually do. So far she hadn’t told anyone but Mike about the noises, mainly because she feared for Colleen’s mental state.
But now Mike had heard the noises, too, so she could rest about Colleen, and she would even have help getting at the root of the problem.
Having heard the sounds that plagued Colleen, she was more disturbed than before. When she’d been busy dismissing them as vermin in the attic or walls, it had been straightforward, ordinary. Now that she’d heard the sound herself, it didn’t seem ordinary at all.
Because for some reason the only mental image that had come to her mind when she heard the noise was that of a hand, a weakening hand, scratching helplessly for escape.
And that went from beyond imagina
tive to downright creepy.
Still, she was a practical woman, inclined to deal with problems in pragmatic ways. The ghastly horror-movie mental image had undoubtedly arisen from a mind still half-asleep and the fact that it was dark and the house was empty.
Even pragmatic people could occasionally suffer from imagination.
She sipped more cocoa and looked around, for the first time noting that she was in a living room that appeared as if it had been put together by a decorator. Few, if any, living rooms around these parts looked like that.
“Did you actually buy all your furniture to match?” she asked.
He seemed a little surprised, then laughed. “It happened that way. Not exactly a plan.”
“How so?”
“Well, I’d been living here a couple of months when I realized I no longer wanted to live like a college student, sleeping on a sleeping bag and eating standing at my kitchen counter. I even had the amazing desire to be able to sit down.”
“And?”
“And then I realized I had neither the time nor the patience to furnish the place piece by piece. So I headed out to one of those big furniture stores in Casper, whipped out my plastic and said I’d take this room, that room…whatever suited me that wasn’t too expensive.”
She laughed. “Have you caught up with the plastic?”
“Ages ago. I was impatient, not profligate. Even so, it ran so counter to my upbringing that I felt a bit disgusted with myself for a while. But…it saved time, I can relax now, and…there’s even a chance the furniture will survive until the warranty runs out.”
“It looks in pretty good condition to me.”
“One man doesn’t put much wear on most of it. I use so little of it, actually, unless I have guests. But at least I feel like I’m walking into a home. You don’t have much at your place, do you?”
She shrugged. “Honestly? With the renovations, that’s the last thing I’m worried about. Back in Denver there’s a storage room full of furniture. Most of it stuff Don and I inherited from our families. We used it and often talked about how we liked antiques.”
He had just sipped his own cocoa and now peered over his mug at her. She felt a trickle of something she didn’t want to name, for fear of where it might lead her. But damn, he was attractive, and those dark eyes of his seemed to hold entire universes in them.
“Why,” he asked, “do I get the feeling that saying you liked antiques wasn’t exactly true?”
“Well, it’s not that I don’t like antiques. It’s just that we had such a hodgepodge, and I was always spending time refinishing and mending, and back then the only time I had for that was when I was already tired. I think sometimes I resented it. And nothing, but nothing, was exactly right for where it was.”
“What do you mean?”
“I took some design classes while I was getting my degree. You could say it permanently affected my eye. I’d look around our place and think, oh that piece is too big for that corner, or looks too small on that wall or, or, or. I couldn’t quite get it all into an arrangement that satisfied me. So Don used to tease me that I was always moving furniture. And I was. And sometimes I seriously considered moving it all onto the street and replacing it completely.”
He chuckled. “But now? When you finish this house? You said you might live in it. Will it fit there?”
“Some pieces will. The rest I may leave in storage for Colleen. The truth is, we’re not talking priceless antiques here. Antiques, yes, priceless no. Well-worn hand-me-downs is more like it. So the question is really whether I feel some emotional attachment to a piece. Other than that…” She shrugged.
Having a conversation like this in the middle of the night seemed about as sane as running out of her house because of a noise. She stifled a yawn, feeling her eyes tear up, and realized that Mike had calmed her enough to sleep. Even the worsening storm seemed only to provide a soothing background.
Dimly she was aware of him spreading a blanket over her. The couch was so comfy, she just snuggled in a bit more.
Sleep, it seemed, had caught her between one breath and the next.
Chapter 5
S he opened her eyes to the deep rumble of thunder, a rolling sound that seemed to come from afar, pass through the house and move on. Dim, gray light filtered through the curtains, hardly bright enough to be called day.
But she could smell the aromas of cooking bacon and coffee, and after she rubbed her eyes, she sat up and prepared to face a new day.
Her dreams, remembered only vaguely, had been troubled somehow, but they left little in their wake except uneasiness. Meaningless, and probably the result of sleeping in a strange house on someone’s couch rather than in her own bed. Or even the remnants of what now seemed like a silly fear because she had heard an odd sound in her house.
When had she become afraid of sounds?
Sighing, she guessed her way to the bathroom. It wasn’t as if there was any place to get lost in a house with the shotgun floor plan. Somewhere between the front door and kitchen, a bathroom would open off the hallway. Or it would open off the kitchen. It was not as if she needed a marked trail.
Someone had evidently renovated at some point because just after she passed what appeared to be Mike’s bedroom, she found the bathroom, a clearly recent addition from sometime in the past fifteen or twenty years. She did what she could with fingers, a washcloth and a bar of soap, then continued down the hall to emerge in a large kitchen with so many windows she would have bet that at one time it had actually been a porch. But that was the way these houses grew.
Mike stood at the stove, holding a fork, as bacon sizzled. This morning he wore some very old jeans, ragged at the cuffs and almost worn through at the seat, and a black T-shirt. When he heard her, he turned with a smile and she saw the yellow-and-red pattern on the front of his T-shirt, a spiral with a hand imprint on it and the words beneath it: The Sacred Circle of Life.
“Oh, I like that,” she said.
He looked down. “It’s from my high school. I buy a lot of my tees and sweatshirts from them because it helps support the school.”
“I’ll have to look into it. Colleen would probably love a shirt like that. Well, maybe a hoodie. Those seem to be her favorites.”
“I don’t recall if they have hoodies, but they also have other designs to choose from. How’d you sleep?” He turned back to the pan and began forking the strips of bacon onto a paper towel.
“I must have keeled over like a felled tree. The last thing I really remember was talking to you.” And him spreading a blanket over her. That little act of caring seemed hugely important somehow. Which was probably a measure of how little caring she’d been feeling in her life.
“You did kind of drop out practically mid-sentence. Grab a chair. Coffee?”
“Thanks. But first I need to check my cell.” She hurried back to the living room to get the phone from her purse and came back while scanning it. No calls.
“I don’t think I heard it ring,” Mike remarked as he started cracking eggs into the pan.
A fresh mug of coffee sat on the table and Del sat before it, lifting it with pleasure. “Mmm, this smells so good. No, I didn’t have any calls. But with Colleen, I’m almost compulsive about checking.”
“I would be, too. Actually, I am. You never know when there might be an emergency.”
“Do you get many?”
“Too many. Well, too many in the sense that some animal is hurt or suffering. Not too many to handle.”
“So you’re on call all the time?”
He smiled over his shoulder. “Where’s the other vet?”
“Seems like the last one moved on five years ago or so.”
“Seems like. This kind of practice isn’t for everyone. For me, though, it just feels like a continuation of what I’ve been doing since I was knee-high to a grasshopper.”
Del hardly tasted breakfast, although she tried to show her appreciation for it by eating an amount that wouldn’t ins
ult him. But her stomach was tightening, and anxiety was beginning to push at her.
She needed to arrange for Aunt Sally to look after Colleen. And then she had to get to work tearing out those walls because she wanted that noise gone. Bad enough it had unnerved her, but she didn’t want it to bother Colleen any longer. Now that she had heard it herself, she was more than ever convinced that a creature of some sort lived in her walls.
Mike picked up on her uneasiness before they even finished. “You don’t have to sit here on the edge of your chair,” he said kindly.
She felt her cheeks heat. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be rude.”
“I know. You’re worried. And I meant what I said last night. If you want, Colleen and your aunt can stay here today so she’s close and you don’t have to worry.”
“That’s very generous of you.” But still she thought she heard a note of reluctance in his voice. “I don’t want to put you out. I…” Then she hesitated. How could she draw attention to a mere feeling she got about him without insulting him? Especially when he’d been nothing but helpful and understanding.
But Mike wouldn’t let her go to her corner. “But? I hear a but there. Would you rather your daughter not stay in a redskin’s house?”
Del gasped. She felt as if he had just punched her in the solar plexus. An eon passed before she could find the breath to whisper, “That thought never crossed my mind. What in the world…?”
He looked down at his plate. She could see his jaw work as if he were clenching his teeth. She didn’t know whether to be furious or concerned. Everything inside her felt as if she’d been blindsided by a truck.
“Mike?”
He glanced to the side, away from her, then finally brought his dark gaze back. “I am,” he said with an edge, “leaping to an all-too-familiar conclusion.”
Then she knew exactly what to feel: sickened. She balled her paper napkin and threw it on the plate. “How dare you judge me? I’m no bigot.” Then she shoved back her chair and marched down the hall to the front door.