by Paula Graves
“Ow!” she complained, pushing him gently away. “You’re a menace with that thing.”
There was a knock on the door and Mike’s muffled voice from the other side. “Are you up?”
“Getting there,” she called, rolling to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. “Give me a few minutes.”
“Breakfast is almost ready.”
Breakfast, she discovered when she finished dressing and headed into the kitchen, was again scrambled eggs and toast, plus hot coffee that hit the spot. While they were eating, Hizzy wandered into the kitchen, bumping his cone against the door frame on the way to her side.
“How much longer does he have to wear the cone of shame?” Mike asked.
“The vet said I could take it off for a few hours at a time as long as I could keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t chew his stitches.” She bent and offered Hizzy a bite of eggs. “This reminds me, I need to go back home and get the extra bag of cat food I left in the mudroom. This morning I used up the last of the food I brought with me.”
“I’ll swing by and get it for you,” Mike offered. “I’ve got to head that way to meet with Randall Feeney.”
Charlie stopped with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. “He got back to you?”
“I called him back. While you were in the shower yesterday afternoon.” Mike bent and held out a piece of egg for Hizzy. The cat sniffed at it and finally nibbled the food from Mike’s fingers.
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“You were tired and stressed. I thought it could wait for this morning.”
“What are you going to say to him?”
Mike wiped his hands on a paper towel. “That I was doing a background check on you.”
“What if he asks you why?”
“I’ll tell him it’s routine for anyone who attends any of our classes.”
Charlie shook her head. “Don’t tell him I’m taking classes at the academy.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t want him to know,” she said, not certain why she felt that way.
Mike gave her a curious look, but he just nodded. “I’ll say it’s for a potential employer, then.”
“That’s good.”
“Speaking of employers, did everything go okay yesterday? Your computer setup working like it’s supposed to?”
“Everything was fine. I managed to get all caught up, so I won’t need to do any mop-up over the weekend.”
“Great, because we have plans this evening.”
The thought of their excursion into Mercerville’s seedy side made Charlie’s breakfast settle in a queasy lump at the pit of her stomach. “Right.”
He reached across the table. “If you don’t want to do this, say so. I’ll figure out something else.”
The temptation to back out of their plan was unexpectedly potent. But she’d never be able to look herself in the mirror if she chickened out. “No. We’re going. I need to see if I can remember anything else.”
He gave her an odd look. “Anything else? Have you remembered something already?”
She hadn’t told him about the dreams. She wasn’t all that sure she thought they were real memories herself. Dreams could be deceiving.
But her behavior would suggest she’d already made up her mind. If she didn’t believe those dream-memories had meaning, she wouldn’t be dredging up the most horrific night of her life, would she?
“Charlie?”
“I’ve been having dreams,” she said.
* * *
STILL PONDERING THE things Charlie had told him, Mike pulled his truck into the driveway of Charlie’s house and sat there for a moment, the engine idling, while he took a look around the neighborhood from the safety of the cab. Yesterday’s rain had given way to watery sunshine brightening inch by inch as morning crept toward midday.
Despite the improved weather, the other houses in the neighborhood were still and silent. No children played in the winter-brown yards. No home owners raked away the last of the autumn leaves.
People must keep to themselves in this area, Mike thought. He’d talked to the Campbell Cove police officer who’d come to Charlie’s house the day the intruder trashed the place. Officer Bentley had canvassed the neighborhood to see if anyone had spotted the intruders. No one had seen anything, although the nearest neighbor had arrived home early from work the day of the vandalism. Bentley had theorized that the sound of the neighbor coming home at an unexpected time might have sent the vandals running before they finished the job.
What Bentley hadn’t said was how the vandals would have known what time the neighbors usually came home in the first place. It suggested a level of surveillance that didn’t seem likely for a random intruder.
Someone was afraid of what Charlie was starting to remember. That was the only possible reason for the things happening to her now.
Charlie told him that she’d tried contacting Craig Bearden a few weeks ago, after the dreams started. She’d left a message, telling him she wanted to talk to him about Alice’s death. She’d even mentioned the memories she was starting to recover, hoping he’d be interested enough to call her back and help her figure out what had really happened that night.
Could someone at the campaign office have intercepted the message? Or had Craig received it himself and mentioned it to the wrong person?
For that matter, could Craig Bearden himself have been involved in what had happened to his daughter?
Pondering the possibilities, Mike walked up the path to Charlie’s porch. The key Charlie had given him opened the front door. He made a mental note to call a locksmith to change the front dead bolt, though he wasn’t sure it would make a difference. Whoever had wrecked Charlie’s house a couple of days ago had gotten in without forcing the lock. Either they’d had access to Charlie’s keys or they knew how to beat a lock.
He’d talk her into spending the money on a decent alarm system, too. Campbell Cove Security Services worked with a good outfit who would do the work for her at a reasonable price.
The living room looked depressingly bare, now that he and Charlie had moved the worst of the destruction to the alley behind her house. He could pack most of the bigger pieces into the bed of his truck and carry them to the dump outside town, he thought. Then maybe the trash collection truck could take the rest.
The desolation made the house seem colder than it should have been on that mild December day. It was lifeless without its vibrant inhabitant and her two cat companions.
He paused halfway down the hall, drawn toward the bedroom and the quilt-covered bed where he and Charlie had sat two nights before, talking about themselves in hushed tones in the dark.
He ran his hands over the intricate pattern of the bedcover, noting the hand stitching and the faded patches that suggested the quilt had been handmade years ago. A family heirloom? A thrift store treasure?
There was so much he didn’t know about her, and normally such a thought didn’t bother him. He was a results-oriented sort of guy. Get in, get the job done, get out. He didn’t bother too much about personalities and avoided thinking about emotions and motivations, except to make sure they didn’t come between him and his goal.
But Charlie made him want to know more. Sometimes, meeting her gaze, he sensed there was a whole other world beneath the reflective mountain-pool eyes, a place of mysteries and wonders he wanted to investigate. How much was she still keeping secret from him? What was she hiding, and why?
He tugged the quilt from the bed and folded it into a neat square. It would fit nicely on his spare bed, he thought, and it would make her feel a little more at home. Maybe help her relax her guard and share a few of her secrets with him.
He set the blanket on the kitchen table and took a step into the mudroom.
The
re was a flash of movement. He had the impression of something black and red moving toward him in a rush, then pain exploded in the side of his head, sending him reeling hard into the door frame. Agony bloomed like a noxious cloud, filling his stunned brain with a blinding mist the color of dried blood. For a moment, he could hear nothing, feel nothing but throbbing pain filling his head. Then sensations returned in a flash of light and noise. Sunlight pierced the mudroom window and into his brain like a dagger. He heard a door open and slam shut behind him, the sound like a hammer blow.
He pushed himself away from the wall, wincing at the thudding ache that had replaced the fuzzy sensation in his brain. Staggering to the back door to look through the four-paned window, he scanned the backyard. Behind her house, the woods encroached on the lawn, casting a shadowy gloom over the vista. At first, he saw nothing but the faint sway of the winter-bare tree limbs rattled by the light breeze. But movement caught his eye, and he spotted a man dressed in dark green camouflage zigzagging through the underbrush several yards from the house.
He opened the door and headed toward the fleeing figure, but his feet didn’t want to cooperate with each other. He tripped over the uneven ground, staggering sideways. He caught himself before he fell to the ground, but by the time he regained his balance, he could no longer see the man in camouflage. He watched the woods for several moments, trying to reacquire his target, but he quickly realized the effort was futile. The intruder had gotten too large a head start, and Mike’s brain was too fuzzy from the knock on the head for him to make up any ground, even if he’d managed to catch sight of the fleeing man.
He lifted his hand to the side of his head and felt the sticky heat of blood oozing from a tender spot on the side of his forehead. He reentered the house and looked around the mudroom, wondering what had hit him. There was a dented can of stewed tomatoes lying on the floor beside an otherwise neat row of canned goods on a set of shelves against the inner wall of the mudroom. Up on the top shelf, packed inside a large plastic bin with a lid, there was a large unopened bag of cat food.
He reached up to bring down the bin, grimacing at the pain shooting through his head. He thought better of taking the bag of food out of the plastic bin—if Charlie had stored it there, she must have had a good reason why—and just carried the bin into the kitchen and set it on the table next to the quilt.
Then he grabbed a few paper towels and carried them with him into the bathroom to take a look at the damage the intruder had done.
The cut on the side of his head was evenly curved, confirming his suspicious that he’d been coldcocked with the can of tomatoes. Fortunately, the can had caught him on the side of his forehead, where the thicker bone had protected his brain from the blow. A few inches lower, the thin bone of his temples might not have sustained the hit nearly as well.
There was a surprising amount of blood for so small and shallow a wound, but head wounds tended to bleed a lot. Mike had sustained worse injuries in his time in the Marine Corps. He mopped up the mess and pressed against the tender spot to stop the bleeding, then took a closer look.
The skin was already turning blue around the wound, and it would probably only get worse as the day went on, but the split in the skin wasn’t deep enough to require stitches at least. He found a couple of adhesive bandage strips in the medicine cabinet and covered the cut. With the wound hidden from view by the bandages, he almost looked back to normal.
Well, except for the blood staining the left side of his shirt. But his jacket should cover the stains for the drive home.
But he wasn’t quite ready to leave yet. Someone had come back to Charlie’s house looking for something.
What had he been looking for?
* * *
“WHAT DO YOU THINK, Nellie? Should we take off the cone of shame and see if Hizzy can behave?” Charlie scratched behind Nellie’s brindle-colored ears and looked at His Highness sitting in front of her, blue eyes staring back at her with haughty disdain.
He had finally stopped bumping into everything with the small plastic cone fastened around his head, but he was clearly unhappy with its continuing presence.
The wound on his shoulder wouldn’t be easy for him to reach, even if he twisted his head as far as it would turn, she decided. “Come here, Hizzy. Let’s get that thing off you.”
The cat eyed her warily for a moment before he slowly slinked across the floor to her and let her pet his head. She unfastened the plastic cone collar and eased it from his neck. Immediately, he started to groom himself.
She watched to make sure he didn’t start chewing his stitches, but he seemed more interested in washing his paws and his face.
The trill of her cell phone ringing made her nerves jangle and sent both of the cats skittering away to stare at her from opposite corners of the room. She pulled the phone from the pocket of her jeans. Mike’s number. “Hello?”
“Everything going okay there?” He sounded a little strange, she thought, his voice a little thick.
“Everything’s fine. Did you find the cat food okay?”
“Yeah. You want me to bring the box it’s in, too?”
“If you don’t want the cats to rip into the cat food bag and leave food scattered all over your house, yes.”
“Ah. That’s why it’s in the box.”
“I thought you had cats before.”
“It’s been a while. Since I was a kid. I didn’t bother with where to store the cat food back then.”
“You sound strange. Everything okay?”
“Yeah.”
She didn’t find his tone convincing. “Did something happen?”
There was a long pause, then he sighed. “There was someone in the house when I got here.”
“My God.” She tightened her grip on the phone. “Did you see him?”
“Only at a distance. He caught me off guard and got away. I didn’t get a good look.”
“Caught you off guard? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home. But while I’m still here—do you have any idea what the intruder might have been looking for?”
“No,” she said without hesitation. If she possessed anything that might prove dangerous to anyone else in the world, it was locked inside her brain, unreachable even by her.
“Then what was he here for?”
To stop her, she thought. To keep her from ever remembering what happened that night in Mercerville.
“I think maybe he was there to kill me,” she said.
Suddenly, from somewhere down the hall, she heard a loud electronic beep. Over the phone, Mike uttered a soft profanity.
“What is that?” she asked, pushing to her feet to follow the sound.
As she reached the source and saw the electronic monitor with one light blinking bright red in time with the beeping noise, Mike said, his voice tight with dismay, “It’s the perimeter alarm. Someone’s moving around outside the house.”
The nerves the beeping noise had set jangling were rattling hard now, making her shake as she tightened her grasp on the phone before it fell from her trembling fingers. “What should I do? Will the system notify the cops?”
“No. It can be set off by an animal crossing the sensor beam. I don’t have it set for automatic notification.”
“Should I call the cops?”
“I’m a lot closer. I’ll be there before your call gets forwarded to the right people. Just hang tight. I’m heading out now.” Over the phone, she heard a symphony of disparate sounds—Mike’s rapid breathing, a few strange, rattling thuds and then a door slamming shut. A few thumps and bangs later, she heard the sound of the truck engine roaring to life. “Stay on the phone with me, Charlie. Whatever you do, don’t put down the phone.”
He was scaring her now. “Shouldn’t I go see who’s at the door?”
>
“No,” he said quickly, “don’t go near the door.”
“I could look through the security lens—”
“The door may be steel reinforced, but the windows aren’t bullet resistant. You could be targeted. Stay away from doors and windows. Where are you now?”
“In the hall by the alarm keypad.”
“Stay right there. I’ll be home in minutes.”
She heard three hard rapping noises coming from down the hall. “I think someone is knocking on the door.”
“Don’t answer it, Charlie.”
“Not moving,” she assured him.
Two more knocks rattled the door. “What if it’s someone looking for you?”
“They’ll just have to try back later,” he answered. “Charlie, I know you’re as curious as a kitten—”
“I’m not stupid,” she snapped back. “Trust me. I’m not moving from this hall until you get here.”
“Good.” Mike fell silent, apparently concentrating on driving. From the sound of the truck’s engine, he was driving way too fast for the narrow mountain roads between her house and his, but she had a feeling he was a good enough driver to handle it.
In fact, she was certain he was one hell of a man to have in her corner no matter what the situation. She took comfort from the knowledge that he was on the way and would be here soon. It was almost enough to calm her jangling nerves.
Until she heard the scrape of metal on metal coming from the front of the house.
Chapter Ten
There was a soft gasp on Charlie’s end of the phone, and then all Mike could hear was rapid breathing.
“Charlie?” He tapped the Bluetooth earpiece. “Are you still there?”
“Someone’s coming in the door!” Her voice was a panicky hiss of breath. “Oh, my God—”
“Go to my bedroom and lock the door behind you. There’s a table by the bed—drag it in front of the door. Then go to my closet and get inside.”