A Man for Clair: Secret of the Widow Mulvane (Mystery loves Romance Book 2)
Page 18
She typed hi and pressed send.
About five seconds later he flinched. There was thankfully no sound, but his phone must have buzzed.
He snuck a look at it, keeping it out of sight. He then turned and shot Clair a quizzical look. Then he turned back to his hidden phone and seemed to be typing, but Clair hadn’t silenced her phone, so she frantically got the menu up and was about to succeed when it beeped an incoming message, and she hit the green button before it went off jingling.
Whew!
David was looking back at her, and she glared at him as if he’d done something totally inappropriate by texting her at a wedding. The minister had finished his spiel, and they were about to do vows.
Clair clicked on the message button then open. The message read: ‘hey baby’.
She worked through the silencing process before replying: ‘baby? really!’.
He got that and turned back, nodding defiantly. He typed another message.
‘where you been? I missed ya’
Amanda was glaring back that time. Clair waved to her.
‘long story. i missed you too’
‘see you in a minute?’ came the next message.
Nell was looking down at Clair’s phone with absolute glee. “Tell him you love him,” she whispered.
That made Clair blush. It was actually closer to the truth than the Tarzan comment she was about to type. “I think I’ll save that one up,” she whispered to Nell. She met David’s eyes and smile and mouthed an okay to his request.
As soon as the bride was kissed he was beside her with Nell looking dreamily up at him and clinging to her arm.
“Hi, Nell… Mrs Mulvane,” David said. “Hi,” he said to Clair.
Clair stood and led him outside. “Sorry,” she said, turning to peer up at him and intertwining her fingers in both of his hands.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s fine…”
What was she supposed to say? She looked down at their shoes then back up at his face. “Can we talk some other time, like, later?”
“Of course? You’re with um—” he checked back for Susan and Nell.
“No, I mean we can talk now, or you know—whatever, but I mean can we talk about stuff later and just rewind to where we were for now?”
“Shit, yeah!” he said, grinning, and he kissed her softly.
“But just slow at first, okay?” she said, lifting to his ear and putting her arms around his neck. “Be gentle with me for a while, okay?”
His arms wrapped around her, firming as she melted into him. She waved to Nell, who was watching from outside the door of the church where her mother was talking with John Phillips. They were also holding hands, Clair noticed.
She relaxed into her man. There was much to work through, but she was not alone. She had real people all around her, and her life was no longer imaginary…….
Guy Stuart Bailey is an Australian author born 1963 in Mornington Victoria, raised Liverpool Sydney, and now resides in Dalby Queensland.
Email contact welcome: authorguybailey@gmail.com
Website: http://authorguybailey.com
November 1986
Noel Cornish watched the fat man walk to the post box in the brick fence of his exorbitant Melbourne city home. He had been waiting in the shrubs by the door for hours, needing his quarry to go to sleep so he could break into the house. This was an even better opportunity, and he simply slipped inside while the man’s back was turned.
Noel quickly found cover in a closed bedroom. There was an unmade bed. It appeared to be a guest room, as the fat man lived alone. Noel knew Hogue Mulvane lived alone. He knew the man quite well, but not well enough to know for certain he was a child molester and pornographer.
Noel waited another hour in that dark room until he was convinced the fat man was asleep. He then took his small bag and crept through the house to the door of a basement that he suspected might contain the proof he was looking for. His daughter Susan had been in the house before. She had instructed him to check the basement.
There was a padlock on the heavy wooden door that gave way to a snip from Noel’s bolt cutters. He pulled the door back and shone his flashlight on pegged rows of photographs. The basement was a darkroom. The pegged photos were all of naked children, boys and girls. He recognized someone else in some of the pictures. It was another man from Everly Cove.
“The Pastor,” Noel muttered under his breath.
The man known as The Pastor, Clive Petrov, was an ex-employee of Charles Mulvane at the fish market. He was no pastor, merely an itinerant worker who carried a Bible, and someone who had always made Noel’s skin crawl.
The guy had recently left town. Noel pocketed a couple of the damning shots. He would discretely get them to the Everly Cove police somehow.
There were timber cabinets with drawers containing more photographs in bundles with names on them. He quietly opened all of the drawers and sprayed everything with the lighter fluid he had in his small bag. He doused the entire room then opened another container of accelerant and squirted through the kitchen and around the living room. He used a third container to cover the hallway leading to the master bedroom.
The fat man was snoring. Noel soaked a handkerchief with chloroform and gripped it over the nose and mouth. He trussed the prone figure with fishing line and dragged him down into a garage where his Ford LTD was parked. The monster was huge, but Noel was a big man too, and he rolled the blubbery mass into the boot and slammed it shut.
Although the house was a brick structure, it went up in flames quickly. Noel waited across the road with the LTD’s engine running. He waited until he was satisfied the flames had taken hold then cruised out of the city and into the night.
It was an eight hour drive back to Everly Cove. The fat man had stirred. He had been thumping away for over an hour. Noel pulled up outside of town and opened the boot. He looked at the monster, smirked and gripped his mouth and nose with another serve of chloroform. There was nothing to be said.
The Everly Cove lighthouse had been decommissioned in 1982, but Noel still lived there. He kept the place up and opened it for tour groups on weekends. It was a Monday. There would be no tour groups for five days, and that was a part of Noel’s plan.
He rolled the fat man out of the boot of his LTD and dragged him into the lighthouse tower. There was a crawlspace beneath the staircase where the children used to play, but those children had been attacked by the blubbery monster he was pushing into the tiny hole in the wall. Those children wouldn’t be back to play again, so it was fitting that their attacker would get to spend his remaining hours or days locked in their playhouse, Noel reasoned.
The fat man came to later that morning and could be heard thumping the iron door. Noel could hear the sound from his quarters. As he approached and listened closely, he could also hear the moaning, but that stopped the next day, and the last sound Noel heard was several soft thuds against the metal door that afternoon while he was laying the bricks……..