His chuckle was dry. The scrape of the shovel against the cement cut through the veiled tension. Pippa’s insinuation in regard to his previous life wasn’t veiled at all.
“You should go home now.” Jake dumped the load into the wheelbarrow. “Hasn’t your father told you what a bad influence I am?”
“Yes,” Pippa replied honestly.
Jake outright laughed this time. “Of course. I can’t blame him. Your father doesn’t want you near me. Neither does your man,” Jake tossed over his shoulder as he neared another pile of elephant dung.
“Forrest isn’t my—” Pippa bit off her argument. Forrest was stuck to her indelibly, like the glue children used in primary school. “Please, may I see Lily?”
She skirted an elephant pie as she moved across the ring toward the doorway on the far end that led to the high-ceilinged elephant shelter.
“Not a good idea. Ernie won’t approve of that any more than your father.” Jake’s back was broad, but it was the way his shoulders strained against his shirt that captured Pippa’s fascination.
“And does no one care about Lily? What she needs?” Pippa winced.
Jake stopped and planted his hands on his hips. Penn was diligent to her mission and positioned herself between them. Her tail didn’t wag, and her eyes were sharp and focused on Jake. Jake’s expression was unreadable.
Pippa hobbled up to him. “My father isn’t pleased with me.”
Jake chuckled and tipped his head to the side. “Fancy that.”
She forged ahead. “But I care about the calf and her survival. I still want to help.”
“Even after you’ve failed as miserably as the rest of us. You want to work alongside me?” There was a twinkle in his eye.
“No, not you.” Curse the man, he’d turned her into a flibbertigibbet. “I didn’t fail miserably. Lily did take the bottle for a bit when I offered aid. Please, I just want to help.” To give the baby elephant a sense that someone cared, that she wasn’t alone, that there was hope for her future. Or, more honestly, to be at the circus so she might find the Watchman and also sift through this new information about a toy. A zebra toy.
“There’s nothing you can do.” Jake’s curt response snagged her attention away from the toy.
“But the calf responded to me. I can bring her comfort.” Pippa grew braver with her insistence. Something in Jake’s demeanor seemed to give her permission, and a part of Pippa couldn’t resist it.
“She’s dying, Miss Ripley. You’re only here to report our failure back to your father.”
“That’s not true!”
“So, you’re not a snitch? Here to bring home more tales of misdeeds and the circus’s mishandling of the elephants?”
Pippa drew back. The man was goading her. She knew it. She knew it was also working. “I’m not a snitch!”
“Pippa . . .” His voice caressed her name, as if even the sound of it tasted good to him. Maybe being alongside him to minister to the injured elephant wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“Go home,” Jake repeated. His eyes squinted with an insistence that wasn’t gruff but instead seemed to be laced with a protective warning. “I know you like being at the circus. I’ve seen you here before.”
Pippa’s breath caught. He’d noticed her.
“But this isn’t—” Jake hesitated and looked to the ceiling as though offering a quick prayer—“this isn’t the place for a lady.”
Pippa reached for Penn as she always did when she was feeling anxious. The dog responded and pushed against her legs, sniffing her palm with its black nose. “I won’t go home.”
Because it wasn’t home.
They locked eyes.
Jake blinked.
Pippa didn’t.
Jake’s left eye squinted even more as he curled his lip and half snarled in resignation. “Landstrom won’t be pleased you’re here without him. Your father will hunt me down if they know I’m anywhere near you.”
Pippa shook her head. “I won’t tell them.” The words slipped from her lips with shocking ease.
Jake raised his brows in surprise, and then a lopsided smile tilted his mouth. “You won’t tell them,” he said with a vague tone of admiration.
Again, Pippa’s stomach flip-flopped.
Jake rubbed a finger under his nose as if considering the ramifications of allowing her to see the calf. “Fine. Follow me around if you want.” Then he gave her a wink. But it wasn’t flirtatious; it was a challenge. It was an if you dare wink.
It was dangerous.
Chapter fifteen
Before Lily, Pippa didn’t know that elephants could cry. Could weep the same lonely tears she wet her own pillow with at night. Lily’s round face was damp, a tear having trailed from the corner of her eye to the edge of her mouth. Pippa had lost track of time, and maybe, if she was being honest, she was okay with disregarding the clock. Disregarding her father and Forrest too.
She rested in the straw beside the gray bulk of wrinkled skin. Penn had sniffed every corner of the stall and ignored Jake’s dark look, instead huffing to slump beside the calf, her nose tucked against the elephant’s trunk. The animals stared at each other. Reading thoughts, sensing emotion. Companions and, maybe, kindred spirits.
“Lily won’t feed because she wants her mother.” Jake broke the silence. He’d cleaned out much of the stall around them. Spread new straw. Emptied the water and hauled buckets of fresh liquid.
Pippa ignored the way her dress was no longer a crisp white. She leaned into Lily and drew her hand across the rough hide, the little hairs prickling her palm.
“Maybe,” Pippa responded.
“Maybe?” Jake set down the bucket and leaned against the doorframe of the stall.
Pippa felt her cheeks warm. She avoided Jake’s curious stare. “I just meant that sometimes an infant senses more than we give them credit for.”
“Such as?”
She had no authority on the subject. Just instinct. Personal experience. Pippa traced her hand down Lily’s trunk and then rested it atop Penn’s gray head. Her dog whined, deep in her throat. An understanding and a confirmation of Pippa’s thoughts. “Sometimes an infant just knows when they’re not wanted.”
Silence.
Pippa found courage in her words and in the lack of rebuke from Jake. “She’s crying. That’s sadness, a deep pain.”
“You’re giving an animal human emotion.”
“And you don’t believe they have emotions?”
Jake shrugged. He toed the bucket in front of him. “I believe . . .” He paused, then shook his head. “I don’t know what I believe.”
Pippa observed his face for a long moment. He was fixed on Lily. He didn’t seem nearly as imposing or intimidating now. There was a lost look in his expression.
She moved her hand from Penn’s head to Lily again and stroked her trunk. The elephant calf stirred beneath her touch, raising its trunk from the straw and flopping it onto her lap.
“Jake,” Pippa breathed.
“I’ll get a bottle,” he said.
As Jake turned to leave, Pippa noticed a piece of paper sticking up from his back pocket. It caught on a splinter of wood and pulled from the pocket, floating onto the hay. She opened her mouth to make him aware, but he was already gone on his mission to retrieve the elephant’s bottle.
Pippa leaned over and stretched, reaching for the paper.
Average height. He wasn’t very tall.
Average build.
His hands were rough.
The cursive writing seemed to become shakier, and some of the ink had smeared as though water—or tears—had dripped on it.
I couldn’t see his hair.
His eyes were blue. Ice blue. Like a frozen lake.
He wore brown trousers, and his shirt was gray.
He smelled like the circus. Dirt, sweat, manure.
Alarm grew inside of Pippa as she read words she knew she was never supposed to read. It was feminine script. The words of
a woman who had experienced something horrific. Coldness spread through Pippa. Coldness that accompanied the presence of evil, of violation and wrong done to another human being.
She flipped the stationery page over, and her body froze. Her breath stuck in her chest, and if someone had come up behind her and held a knife to her throat, she might have been in less shock than she was now. Horrified, Pippa ran her fingers over the page, as if they would erase the image, and in doing so erase the implications.
A hand snatched the paper from her grip. Pippa squealed as she jumped. Penn scampered to her feet, and even Lily’s eyes widened, her long lashes sweeping upward at the outcry.
Jake dropped the large milk bottle onto the soft straw. He refolded the paper and rammed it back into the pocket of his denim pants. “That’s not for you to see.”
“W-who wrote it?” Pippa tripped over her question.
“Never mind.” Jake retrieved the bottle from the hay. “Try to feed Lily.” He was dismissing her. Dismissing it.
Pippa reached over and wrapped her hand around his forearm and was taken aback by the warmth of his skin. She dropped her hand as he jerked his head around to stare at her. Incredulous. At her touch? Maybe. At her uncustomary boldness? Most definitely.
“What happened?” she whispered. The image was seared into her memory. It linked them. In unexplained ways, it tied them together, and she knew Jake wouldn’t want that connection, nor the obligation that came with it.
Jake’s jaw worked back and forth. Pippa could see the war being waged within him. A war he’d locked up and refused to share with anyone. A fighter’s fight that only he could strike against, only he could battle.
“My sister.” His answer was clipped. He transferred the bottle to his other hand. Fidgety. Irritated.
“Is she—all right?” Pippa hated that she knew the answer before even asking it. Hated that she’d already deduced the reason for the darkness that hovered around Jake Chapman, like a phantom refusing to release its prisoner.
Penn whined in her throat, nudging his knee as though sensing the taut moment, thick with memory.
“She’s dead.” Jake’s response was disheartening at best. He shot her a disturbing glance, one that was open enough to reveal an emotional pain deep in his eyes. This time Pippa didn’t look away.
“What happened?” She needed to know. Selfish but necessary. Seeing the image sketched on the paper . . . her body was shaking from the inside out. Enough that she hid her hands behind her back, clasping them to control the trembling.
Jake flicked the large rubber nipple on the equally large glass bottle meant for Lily. “She was murdered.”
“I’m so sorry,” Pippa whispered. She couldn’t say more. Couldn’t ask more. It would be disrespectful and abhorrent to do so.
Jake grunted. “Sorry resolves nothing.” His jaw muscle twitched, and he sniffed.
Pippa could tell he was dismissing any emotion other than pure rage. He locked eyes with her. A searing look that shook Pippa more than she was willing to admit.
“Sorry doesn’t take away the memory of cutting your own sister down from where she hung. From trying to understand her when she was frantically trying to breathe, to talk, to tell me something. The rope, the strangulation—she had no voice left.” Jake swore. “Bridgette couldn’t talk.” He patted his back pocket where he’d slipped the paper. “But she lived long enough to give me this. And I will find him.”
Pippa shivered at the coldness in his voice. Determined and bold.
Then he yanked the paper from his pocket and unfolded it so Pippa could once again see the now-familiar silhouette. Jake jabbed at the man’s face with his forefinger—at the burlap sack with gaping holes for eyes—and gave a dry laugh. “At least I’m good at one thing. I’ll kill the coward who hid behind that hood. I’ll kill him for Bridgette.”
The idea was chilling. That Jake’s sister had weakly sketched the visage of the Watchman on that paper was telling. It told a far different story than the Watchman being Pippa’s guardian in the shadows. It told of someone far more perilous, someone who had left behind a horrible trail of violence.
Chapter Sixteen
CHANDLER
Where’s Peter?” Chandler struggled to sit up in the hospital bed. Denny Pike pushed her back down, his thick fingers gentle against her shoulder.
“Don’t be moving, girlie,” he instructed. “Your boy’s fine. Margie’s got him back at the house.”
Chandler scanned the room. The monitor. The IV. The window with the black of night beyond it. The cross-armed Hank, who stared down at her from the foot of the bed.
“You shouldn’t have brought me here.” Chandler fumbled with the IV tape. “I don’t need to be hospitalized.”
“They’re gonna run some tests,” Denny explained.
Great. Chandler pulled at the tape, ignoring the sting of it against her skin. “I don’t need tests.”
“Girlie, you need to stop that.” Denny gripped her hand and pulled it away from the IV.
Ignoring him, Chandler fumbled for the call remote. She hit the button to summon a nurse. “I already know what’s wrong. I had a seizure. It’s not unusual, and it’s happened before.”
“It has?” Denny’s brows winged upward. His leather motorcycle vest creaked a little as he shifted to exchange surprised looks with his nephew.
“Do you have meds for it?” Hank asked bluntly.
“No,” Chandler responded, equally as blunt. “I’m not epileptic. I already had an EEG a few months ago. They ruled it out, along with just about everything else that’s serious.”
“So then . . .” Denny’s words trailed off.
“I have an autoimmune disease. The fancy acronym for it is PTLDS.” Chandler blurted it out as she sagged back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling. Their silence indicated their lack of familiarity with the acronym. “Post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome. It’s basically chronic Lyme disease.”
“Chronic what?”
Chandler tried to control the watery sound to her voice, her frustrations overwhelming her. “It’s caused by a tick bite. A lot of people have it—even celebrities. It acts like lupus or multiple sclerosis but with a side of arthritis. Once it settles in the brain, you’re pretty much screwed. It’s not going away.”
“What’s the treatment?” Hank asked. His deep voice resonated from his chest.
Chandler didn’t meet his eyes. The ceiling was a good place to keep staring. “Well, medically there aren’t a lot of options. Lyme isn’t well recognized. My neurologist suggested my seizures are stress-induced from PTSD. He thinks I should see a therapist.” She winced. It was more than she’d meant to share, but the words just tumbled out under Denny’s grandfatherly-like gaze.
“Is that so?” he barked, but with no edge or bite to it.
“No. Of course not. I’ve not been traumatized or experienced any abuse.” And she hadn’t. “I just . . . stress can influence my seizures. But there’s no reason for them really other than Lyme.”
Denny patted her hand. “Poor gal. Gonna have to get you healthy. How’s it you can drive?”
“The word seizure is a loose term in my case,” Chandler went on to explain, wishing she didn’t have to. Wishing this had happened when she was alone and could just wake up feeling like crud with no one being the wiser. “It’s more like being drunk. I can feel it coming on long before the extreme happens. It’s not like an epileptic seizure that comes out of nowhere and makes you lose control. So I’m not technically registered as having seizures per se. It’s just an easier way to describe whatever’s happening.”
“Still probably should take an Uber,” Denny said. He looked genuinely worried.
Something inside of her warmed—she hadn’t expected Denny to be the one by her bedside. Granted, she hadn’t expected to be in a hospital bed. Hank was most certainly not her preferred companion. And thank God for Margie. She was proving to be a lifesaver. A Peter-saver.
“Did t
he hospital call anyone?” Chandler ventured. With her luck, her parents were on their way in Uncle Neal’s private plane.
“Nope.” Denny shook his head. “We didn’t know who to tell ’em to call. Figured you’d come out of it and then we’d just ask.”
Relief washed over her. The kind of relief that was palpable. She could taste it. Maybe she was overreacting. Maybe Mom and Dad wouldn’t go hyper-grandparent on her and insist something change. Insist that Peter be better taken care of. Throw in her face how irresponsible she’d been in college and now look at her. Not to mention Uncle Neal. Gosh, she loved her uncle, but he had a business to run too. If Jackson convinced him that she couldn’t do this job . . .
“Hey, hey!” Denny read the anxiety in her body. His beard brushed her arm as he leaned forward. “You need to relax. Worrying isn’t going to help matters.”
Footsteps sounded, and the door cracked open. A nurse peeked in. Her black hair was parted on the side, her dark brows arched over beautiful brown Latina eyes. Or maybe Italian. Either way, for the moment, Chandler felt quite dowdy and pasty, and she didn’t miss the appreciative glance Hank tossed in the nurse’s direction.
“You needed something?” Her smile was warm as she eased into the room, her scrubs a vibrant teal.
“To go home?” Chandler pleaded.
The nurse, whose nametag read Beth, reached for Chandler’s glasses that sat on a side table and handed them to her. “Well, the doctor will have to release you. He’ll be here in about an hour, I think. He’ll look you over, see if there are any tests we need to run. Do you have medical records I can ask for from your primary care provider?”
Chandler motioned for her purse and reached inside, pulling out her insurance ID and the business card of her doctor back in Michigan. “You can get the records from them. I have PTLDS.”
“Ahh.” Beth nodded her understanding, and the hope in her eyes dimmed a little. She knew. She knew there wasn’t much to be done. Maybe adjust some medications and hope for the best. “Well, we’ll still have Dr. Fellows check in with you. You weren’t in great shape when you came in.”
The Haunting at Bonaventure Circus Page 13