She could feel Jake behind her, half-sitting as she was.
Then she saw it, the box. The box from Ray. End over end, tumbling toward her. Moving on its own. But it couldn’t move on its own. Another aftershock, another aftershock was coming—
A scream rose in her throat.
The box rolled over a pile of broken boards and stopped, a hand’s reach away.
Stopped, just stopped. Her mind reeled, panic and confusion. No aftershock. Nothing. Just the box had moved, nothing but the box. And now it had stopped.
A steel ladder dropped, settled roughly in the debris. Boots came down after.
Jake moved, nudged her back.
“Go.”
She got to her knees, dressed, thank God, and ready to crawl out from under the table, toward rescue. She grabbed the box. The rescue equipment must have dislodged it. Somehow. She looked back at Jake. It was morning, had to be. Time seemed elastic, stretching back and forth in her mind from the shock of the quake to the shock of what they’d done after, and hazy from sleep and the surreal comprehension that they’d survived, after all.
In a moment of high stress, they’d shared a bond. It was over now. A mindless little fantasy.
But dammit, she wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of girl and was she crazy or had that been the most explosive sex ever? Maybe it was just the emotional thing, the fear and the drama of their circumstances that had heightened her awareness. Yes, that made sense. She needed something to make sense.
“Are we just going to…pretend this didn’t happen?” she whispered. Oh, God, what did she even want him to say?
His unreadable gaze was tight on hers. “Is that what you want?”
She didn’t know what she wanted. What did he want? “It was just a one-night stand. Right?” She needed him to clarify it for her. She needed him to say it then she’d be fine with it. “I mean, I’ve had them before. It’s no big deal.”
Oh, jeez, she’d just made herself sound like a slut. And it wasn’t even true.
“Keely Schiffer?” The rescuer called her again.
“Go. Go find your family.” Jake pushed her gently toward the light. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
She nodded, couldn’t speak, wasn’t sure what she’d say if she did. That she was so grateful that he’d been there for her in the frightening darkness? That she was embarrassed and could he possibly just forget it ever happened because that uninhibited woman who’d all but begged him to make love to her was as much of a stranger to her as he was? That she wanted to know if she’d ever see him again?
That last question was more frightening than the others combined. That grip she needed to get was troublingly elusive.
“Keely Schiffer?”
She turned to the rescue worker, his booted feet now planted firmly on the precarious debris.
“Anyone hurt?”
She shook her head.
“How many do you have down here?” the man asked, his flashlight beaming into the dark corners of the cellar even as with his other arm he took hold of her.
“Just one other person was in the house,” she answered. “Jake Malloy.” Already, Jake was crawling out from beneath the table, carefully rising to a stand on the debris beside her.
Another rescuer came down the ladder, grabbed for Keely’s hand, and the first rescuer handed her over. The ladder shifted as she climbed, sending ripples of remembered shock through her, fear of another quake speeding her feet.
Everything happened quickly after that. The smashed remains of her house blurred across her vision as she rose from the huge pile that was left of her house. She tried to focus on the devastation, but her head reeled at the sight of it even as powerful arms reached out, helping her cross the debris to firm ground.
The world was all wrong.
There were the two maples that stood in front of her house and yet now they stood alone, towering over nothing but debris. She thought she should cry but no tears came. The early morning air was chilly and dew sparkled across the meadow behind the farmhouse.
Correction, she thought numbly, the meadow that used to be behind the farmhouse. Now the meadow was just…There. The woods beyond, hills rising above, remained. It all seemed so strange. She saw birds flit in the trees along the creek. The light over the hills glowed pink and gold. It was a pretty sunrise….
People swarmed toward her. Neighbors, relieved faces, arms reaching for her, embracing her, asking a thousand questions that rolled past her.
“We were so worried—”
“We drove by and saw your house and called—”
“My family…” she kept asking.
Nobody’d talked to her family—phones were out all over the place, but they told her the town was okay, shaken, no deaths reported, no buildings down. She couldn’t believe it. She had to see for herself. The need to get there, right now, right this minute, burned through her.
A paramedic broke through, descended on her. She made light of her cuts and scrapes. There was an angry-looking scratch on her arm that she hadn’t even realized was there.
“I’m fine,” she said for the fourth time.
Her eyes caught Jake’s briefly from a distance. A paramedic was checking him over, too. He looked different in the new day. Still dangerously sexy, maybe more so, even with grime from the contact with debris covering his clothes. Her heart gave a peculiar wrench and she struggled to keep her perspective. Get a grip, she reminded herself.
Then her mind swerved. The skull in the rose garden…
The thought of what she’d found, just before Jake Malloy and everything else that seemed so unreal about yesterday had hit, tumbled over her. The box still in her hand seemed oddly hot.
“Keely!”
Oh, God, her mom.
Keely wheeled in time to see her mother all but flying across the dew-laden grass, her father beyond her still getting out of their car where they’d pulled over on the side of the road between emergency vehicles.
In seconds, her mother’s arms were around her. Her parents were okay. Her sister was okay, she found out quickly, as were her brothers and their families. Everyone was okay.
“But are you okay?” her mother repeated. “Are you really okay? To be trapped there, under the house, all that time and we didn’t know—We couldn’t call and the road was closed. There was a rock fall blocking the highway, no one could get through last night and after they cleared it they weren’t letting anyone but emergency vehicles come through till just a little while ago.”
Her parents had been in their own hell worrying about her just as she had about them. Her mother held her face in her hands now, looking up to her because she was smaller than Keely. Roxie Bennett’s petite body, still slim despite her sixty-two years, had always been the one Keely had wished she’d inherited instead of her father’s taller bone structure. Howard Bennett stood behind her mother now, watching her with the identical anxious look as in her mother’s eyes.
“I’m okay, I promise.” She hugged both of them again. “I wasn’t alone, though. I had help.” She turned, searched the faces of people still milling around the devastated property. “But I need to talk to the police. I need to—”
She couldn’t see Jake Malloy anywhere.
An emergency triage had been set up at the community center in town. They’d taken a look at the cuts on his back, cleaned them out and applied some salve. Jake was in and out in under an hour. There was a serious amount of media attention, reporters roaming all over the parking lot and throughout the small center.
He hadn’t said goodbye to Keely and that bothered him even when he knew it was for the best. They’d helped each other through a bad night. He’d done what he could to keep her safe, and even if he hadn’t kept her safe from him, he could remedy things now, do the right thing, stay away from her.
She was with her family now. She didn’t need him. He’d taken the trip into town with the paramedics just to save any awkwardness. She’d have probably offered him a r
ide with her family. No sense dragging things out that way, though he realized now he’d left so quickly he hadn’t stopped to retrieve any of his luggage out of his smashed car. He’d have to find a way back later, see if he could pry a door open and get into the trunk.
The image of her in that bright yellow T-shirt when she’d opened the door of her farmhouse to him the evening before wormed its way into his mind. He knew what was under that T-shirt and those worn jeans now and her perfect body was forever branded on his mind. How she looked, how she smelled, how she felt beneath his hands…
She’d trusted him. Despite everything, she’d trusted him.
Don’t go there, don’t go there, don’t go there.
Ruthlessly, he cut off all thoughts of Keely Schiffer. He didn’t have time for a relationship. Or the desire for one. He was hanging out in this one-horse town for a month, if he could stand it that long, and that was it. He didn’t want to leave a broken heart behind, and no matter what Keely said about not planning to get married again, she wasn’t the type to fool around without risking her heart. She was soft and sweet under that fragile shell of hers.
He was hard and bitter and she didn’t need him in her life.
The community center was maybe a half mile from the house he’d rented across from the Foodway. He skirted a reporter with a cameraman interviewing a woman clutching a small boy in her arms. She was wearing jeans and a ripped shirt with no shoes.
“He was outside playing in the creek when the quake hit,” he heard the woman saying. “I went out looking for him and I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t find him all night.” She started crying. “We found him wandering up the road this morning. He told me he was in a cloud of light, a red cloud of light.”
“A number of residents called in reporting fire in the hollows. Do you think he was near a fire?”
“I don’t know,” the mother said. “I’m just glad my baby’s safe. I didn’t see any fire.”
The journalist turned to face the camera.
“Despite numerous reports of fires and reddish lights or haze across the county throughout the evening hours, so far emergency personnel have yet to locate any fires. In this tiny rural county of fifteen thousand that was the epicenter of the four-point-three quake, the news is good with damage consisting chiefly of fallen chimneys, broken windows and rattled dishes. Ninety-eight people have reported for treatment at the temporary triage here at the Haven Community Center and over a hundred more have been treated at the local hospital. No deaths have been—”
The heavy door of the community center slammed shut behind him, cutting off the reporter’s final words. He headed for the rental house, about a quarter of a mile up the road.
He hadn’t paid much attention to the town of Haven the day before driving in. He’d been in a hurry. Why, he had no idea. He had nothing to do but twiddle his damn thumbs here. He was in the middle of nowhere and the city seemed far, far away. Haven was surrounded by thick woods full of oak and hickory and walnut, broken by the sloped pastures and quaint farmhouses of the Appalachian mountains. The town itself wasn’t much more than a restored town square with a beautiful courthouse. Antique-style lampposts stood like sentinels along the cobbled sidewalks lined with businesses—a dress shop, a clock repair shop, lawyer offices, a craft and consignment retailer and a diner called Almost Heaven. A few side streets held a mix of Victorian-era homes. Another set of side streets held more modern brick businesses. A sign indicated a school up another road.
The reporter seemed correct in his statements about the damage in Haven. Main Street on the square led him back out to the quiet two-lane highway. After the demolishment of Keely’s farmhouse he’d witnessed firsthand, he’d expected more devastation in town, but he saw little evidence of it.
What he saw as he reached the steps of the rental house was Keely, her slender, sexy, stop-traffic body unfolding from the passenger seat of a small sedan in front of the little grocery store across the narrow highway. He jammed his fingers into his front pocket, pulled out the house key he’d gotten from Keely what seemed like an eternity ago before all hell broke loose at the farmhouse.
He strode up the scuffed wooden steps of the house and onto the narrow front porch, refusing to look Keely’s way. He had his own problems; she had hers. They’d had one night together, born of desperation and survival, and it was over.
And just because he could still taste her, feel her, smell her in his memory, didn’t mean he’d get to ever do it again in reality.
Move on. Detach and focus.
It was three hours later when he managed to track down a car rental place within walking distance. He was able to rent a car there and he drove back to Keely’s farm. The Jag was right where he’d left it—smashed under a tree. He’d saved and saved to buy the damn thing. Now it was toast.
The passenger side door was usable, so he pulled his bag of toiletries from the back then got the trunk open to get his suitcase and laptop. He stashed his things in the rental car.
The farm was quiet, deserted now after all the activity that morning. Even the equipment the rescuers had used had been moved off, no doubt needed elsewhere, as were the emergency workers. Despite what good shape the town appeared to be in, contrasting with the utter destruction of Keely’s home, he’d been told by the car rental clerk that a number of roads were closed due to fallen rocks and trees.
There was a wooden sign swinging from a chain on a post near the road. Sugar Run Farm, Est. 1882.
Keely wasn’t going to get over the loss of her house as quick as he’d gotten over his car, not considering the family history here. An old well house, looking like something out of a photograph, stood to one side of the ruined farmhouse, covered with ivy. The ground to one side was plowed, ready for a big vegetable garden. An empty chicken coop proclaimed this had been a real working farm in days gone by.
It was almost impossible for him to imagine the family history in this place. His father had taken off when he was nine, and after that, his mother had scraped by the best she could. He’d started working when he was fourteen. By the time he could really help her, she’d died of cancer. Extended family on either side was virtually nonexistent. Despite the rural nature of the state, he’d spent little time outside the city limits unless it was to go white-water rafting on one of West Virginia’s wild rivers. He’d always headed straight back for the city afterward. He was comfortable there, with the traffic, the noise, the people who surrounded him but left him alone.
He’d just about always gone solo, so things weren’t much different now. Keely was living in a whole different world. He didn’t belong in it, but he felt an odd, edgy tightness as he thought of her with her family after they’d been rescued. The country was quiet, and his mind didn’t know what to do with it. If he was supposed to find peace here, it wasn’t working so far.
Restless, he walked toward the house, circling the pile of rubble. There was a barn beyond the house, and a meadow bottom leading down to a creek with woods beyond. Picturesque, despite the devastation, with spring wildflowers waving in the light air. Cows dotted a hillside in another distant direction. The breeze kicked up and carried the sound of a moo.
There was fresh-turned dirt in a small garden that lay just to the rear of the house, too, the soil still moist despite the bright sunshine. There was, in fact, a hole…a deep one.
Something trickled down his spine, an awareness of…Being watched.
He turned slowly, saw nothing but road and woods and hills beyond, heard nothing but the sigh of wind on the Appalachian air. His instincts told him otherwise, though. Somebody was here. He reached for his gun, held it down at his side. He’d replaced the bullets back at the rental house, on R&R but still operating on automatic.
Somebody was here and something was going on, he just didn’t know what. He’d lay odds someone had been digging out behind Keely’s house this afternoon…. Why?
He heard a noise and knew it came from the barn. He was maybe fifteen feet f
rom it. No cell phone, no backup. No authority, frankly. An engine roared.
A thundering crash shocked him and he barely threw himself out of the way as a truck rammed straight through the barn doors, screaming toward the road. Jake hit the ground hard, rolled, scrambled to his feet in time to see nothing but the white tailgate of a late-model pickup disappearing around the sharp bend.
Chapter 7
“Did you hear about Jud Peterson?”
“No. Could you grab the other end of this shelf?” Keely focused on the task at hand, only half listening to her friend and part-time assistant, who was usually in the office, but today she needed all available hands on restocking duty. The store was a wreck inside with things toppled off shelves in every aisle, but it was open. She had an obligation, being the only full-service grocer in town, but beyond that it was keeping her mind off what had happened to the farmhouse. And what had happened with Jake Malloy.
Lise Tanner was not deterred even as she helped Keely get a lower shelf back on its tracks. “I heard he called a paranormal detective.”
Now that got Keely’s attention. “What?”
“He said he got surrounded by some kind of weird red light out on Boscastle Road last night. Said it came down on the ground right over top of him and he ran and it followed him everywhere he went, like he was running in a ball of red light.”
“He was drunk. He’s always drunk.” Jud got picked up about every other weekend for public intoxication. Everybody knew that. He was nice enough in between times and scraped out a living doing odd jobs around town. Keely hired him occasionally herself out of charity—he’d gone to school with Ray.
“Probably.” Lise propped a box of detergent back up on a lower shelf. “He’s an ass.” Lise had dated Jud one summer in high school. Back then, he’d been a cute bad boy and Lise had sown her wild oats for a few months. “But you know he’s not the only one saying weird stuff happened last night when the quake struck. Like, UFOs or something.”
Keely felt a rush of something cold go down her spine. She’d seen a weird reddish light, too, and there’d been that strange way Ray’s box had tumbled nearly into her hand right before they’d gotten rescued.
Secrets Rising Page 5