“Barney!” He took a few steps along the path toward the patio. “What are you doing out here?”
He expected the dog to turn and run to him with his usual exuberant greeting. Instead Barney pawed at the door, ignoring his voice.
The back of his neck prickled. Something wasn’t right here. Apprehension pushed him into a trot that covered the rest of the way to the house in seconds.
Even so, by the time he reached Barney, the dog was howling, pawing at the door frantically. Cal grabbed for the collar even as he realized that the noise he heard was more than just the dog.
Somewhere in the house, someone cried for help.
He yanked open the unlocked door, scrambling into the back hall and stumbling over the eager dog. “Barney—”
He shoved the animal out of his way. Barney skidded, claws scrabbling on the bare floor, and then launched his body at the narrow, paneled door of the hall closet.
Dog and door collided with a thud that echoed the pounding from inside. Cal’s pulse thudded so loudly in his ears that it took a second to isolate the voice.
Andrea—but an Andrea who was a far cry from the brisk, efficient woman he knew. She sounded terrified. If someone had hurt her…
“It’s okay,” he shouted. Anything to dispel that panicky note in her voice. “Andrea, it’s okay. I’m here. I’ll get you out.”
“Hurry.” Her voice sounded muffled, as if she’d clamped her hand over her mouth.
He grabbed the small knob that released the catch, turned it, and Andrea tumbled into his arms. She grasped him, her fingers digging into his shoulders, her breath coming in harsh gasps.
He’d sensed her claustrophobia when she’d been
closed in the toolshed for seconds. Now—now she was in the grip of a full-blown attack, as terrified as if she’d been faced with death instead of closed-in darkness.
“It’s okay.” He put his arm around her, feeling the tremors that coursed through her body. “Come with me.” He piloted her toward the library, switching on lights as they went, sensing that nothing could be too bright for her at the moment. “You’re safe now. Tell me what happened. Did someone hurt you?”
Her hand went up to her mouth as if to hold back sobs. She took one ragged breath and then another, seeming to gain a bit more control with each step they took away from the closet. Barney danced around them, trying to push his way between their legs, making little throaty sounds that sounded sympathetic.
“I’m all right.” Andrea probably had to force the words out, and he felt the tension that still gripped her body.
“You’re fine,” he soothed. He switched on the lamp next to the sofa and eased her to a sitting position. She still gripped his hand tightly, so he sat down next to her.
Barney, balked of his clear intent to take that space, had to be content with putting his head in Andrea’s lap.
Cal smoothed his fingers over hers. “Did someone push you? Attack you?” He thought of the dark figure she’d seen out in the rain, and his alarm ratcheted upward. He should search the house, but he couldn’t leave her in this state.
“No, nothing like that.” She wiped away tears with her fingers. “At least—” She hesitated. “I don’t think anyone was there. Probably the door just slammed shut when I lost my balance.”
The slight shading of doubt in her voice had all his senses on alert. “Did you see someone? Hear someone?”
“I didn’t see anyone.”
Andrea straightened, putting up one hand to rub the back of her neck, as if tension had taken up residence there. Her usually precise blond hair tumbled about a face that was paler than usual, and her jeans and white shirt were smudged with dust. None of that was typical of Andrea, but it was somehow endearing.
Focus, he reminded himself. “You didn’t see anyone. Did you hear something then?”
She shrugged, attempting a smile that was a mere twitch of her facial muscles. “You know how old houses are. This place makes all sorts of sounds even when it’s empty.”
“And it makes noises when someone is there. Someone who shouldn’t be.” His tone was grim. The back door had been standing open. Who knew how many other entrances had been just as accessible?
“I heard a creak that I thought came from the hallway, just before the door swung shut, but that doesn’t mean anything. All the floors slant, and the door might swing shut on its own.” She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself. “Besides, what could anyone gain by shutting me in a closet?”
Just saying the words put a tremor in her voice. The wave of protectiveness that swept over him startled him with its strength. He had no business feeling that way about Andrea.
He cleared his throat. “Maybe he wanted to keep you
from seeing him. Or maybe—” Another, more disquieting thought hit him. “You’re claustrophobic, aren’t you? How many people know about that?”
“What do you mean?” Her fingers tightened, digging into his hand, and her voice rose. “Are you saying someone would do that deliberately to upset me?”
“Or to scare you off.” He put his other hand over hers in a gesture of comfort and then frowned, groping for a rational thought that seemed to be lost in a sense of awareness of her.
“That’s—that’s ridiculous.” But she didn’t sound convinced.
“Look, Andrea, I’m beginning to think there’s more going on here than we realize. First Rachel’s accident, and then this business with the prowler—either the Hampton women are prey to a lot of bad luck all at once, or someone is willing to go to extremes to keep the inn from opening.”
“Rachel.” Her eyes darkened with fear as she zeroed in on the possibility of a threat to her sister. “But that was an accident. The police haven’t found any evidence of anything else.”
“I’m not trying to scare you.” He raised a hand to brush a strand of silky hair back from her face. His fingers lingered against the smooth skin of her cheek without his mind forming the intent.
“I’m not afraid.” She attempted a smile that trembled on her lips. “In spite of the evidence to the contrary. But Grams, and Rachel—”
“I know. I don’t like it, either.” He wanted to wipe the worry from her face, but he wouldn’t lie to her, pretend
ing everything was all right when it so obviously wasn’t. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s all a coincidence. But I don’t like you being alone.” Vulnerable, he wanted to add, but suspected she wouldn’t appreciate it.
“I’m not alone. You’re here. I appreciate—” She looked into his eyes and seemed to lose track of the rest of that sentence.
He understood. His rational thought processes had gone on vacation. All he could think was that she was very close, that her skin warmed to his touch, that he wanted to protect her, comfort her…
He closed the inches that separated them and found her lips. For an instant she held back, and then she leaned into the kiss, hands tightening on his arms, eyes closing. He drew her nearer, trying to deny the emotion that flooded through him, wiping out all his barricades in a rush of feeling.
“Andrea.” He murmured her name against her lips, not trusting himself to say more. This shouldn’t be happening, but it was. He’d probably regret it later, but now all he wanted was to hold her.
He’d told himself they couldn’t be friends. Maybe they couldn’t, but maybe they could be much more.
A
ndrea wrapped her fingers around the coffee mug, absorbing its heat. The warmth generated by Cal’s kiss had dissipated when he’d drawn back, looking as confused by what had happened as she was.
Maybe they’d both sensed the need to change the tempo a bit at that point. Cal had gone to search the house, leaving the dog with her. Barney had padded at her heels while she fixed coffee and carried a tray back to the library, apparently mindful of his duty to guard her. The journal, Rachel’s receipts tucked inside, lay next to the computer, the innocent cause of her problems.
She stroked the sheltie’s head. In spite of Cal’s doubts about Barney’s intelligence, the dog had seemed to know she was in trouble.
“Good boy,” she told him. “If it hadn’t been for you…” Well, she didn’t want to think about that.
“If it hadn’t been for Barney, you’d still have been all right.” Cal came into the room as he spoke. “Your grandmother would have come home and found you soon, even if I hadn’t heard the dog.”
She knew he was trying to make her feel better, but
she didn’t want to think about what she’d have been like if she’d been closed in the closet all this time. Cal didn’t understand the panic. No one did who hadn’t experienced it.
“Did you find anything wrong anywhere?”
“No actual sign of an intruder, but there are far too many ways into a house this size.” He frowned, looking as if he’d like to go around putting bars on the windows. “And I’m not saying that closet door couldn’t have swung shut on its own, or even from the vibration when you fell, but it still seems pretty stable.”
“Is that supposed to make me sleep well tonight?”
She watched as he took a mug, poured coffee and settled on the couch opposite her. She liked the neat economy of his movements.
“I’d put safety over a good night’s sleep anytime.” He looked toward the windows. “Your grandmother should be back soon, shouldn’t she?”
She glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner and nodded. “I don’t want her upset about this. It was just an accident. You agree?”
“Let’s say I’m about eighty percent convinced of that. You’re sure it wasn’t a person you heard before you fell?”
He leaned toward her, propping his elbows on his well-worn jeans. As usual, he wore a flannel shirt, this time over a white tee, the sleeves folded back. Also as usual, his brown hair had fallen forward into his eyes.
“It was a creak. That’s all. I told you—this house has a language all its own. Surely if someone had been there, I’d have heard him running away.”
An image popped into her mind—the large, dark
figure she’d seen outlined by the lightning. Her fingers tightened on the mug. If he’d been in the house, he would have made more noise than a gentle creak.
“Well, maybe. Unless he was smart enough to slip away the minute he heard you fall.”
“You searched the house. You didn’t find any signs someone had gotten in,” she pointed out.
Lines crinkled around his eyes. “Does that mean you trust me?”
“Yes.” The word came out so quickly that the sureness of it startled her. Maybe tomorrow she’d be back to being suspicious of him, but at the moment she was just glad he was here.
“Well…good.” He seemed a little taken aback by her quick response. “Have you given any more thought to what I asked you? Does anyone else around here, other than family, know about your claustrophobia?”
She shook her head, wanting to reject the possibility. “I don’t know. I suppose someone could. The Zook family probably knew.” Levi popped into her mind, and she pushed him out again. He wouldn’t remember something like that. “It was a lot worse when I was a child. I don’t even remember what triggered it the first time, so I must have been pretty young.”
“It didn’t start when you left here, then.”
She blinked, surprised at his linking the two things. “No. Why would you think that?”
The light from the Tiffany lamp on the end table brought out gold flecks in his eyes. “It’s just that I’ve gathered it was a pretty traumatic time for all of you.”
“Has my grandmother talked about our leaving?”
She asked the question carefully, not sure she wanted to hear the answer.
“Only in a general way, saying how much it grieved her when you left.”
“It wasn’t our choice.” Her voice was tart with remembered pain. “The adults in our lives didn’t give Rachel and Caro and me any say in what happened.”
“They don’t, do they? My folks split up when I was twelve, and I always had the feeling that what happened to me was an afterthought. Did your parents—”
She nodded, her throat tight. “Our dad left. Not that he’d been around all that much to begin with.” She frowned, trying to look at the past as an adult, not as the child she’d been. “He kept losing jobs, and Mom—well, she couldn’t cope. That was why we moved in here, I suppose. Our grandparents were the stable element in our lives.”
“And then you lost them, too.” Setting his mug aside, he reached across the space between them to take her hands, warming her more than the coffee had.
“My mother quarreled with Grandfather.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure what it was all about—maybe about Daddy leaving. It all happened around the same time. I just remember a lot of shouting. And then Mom telling us we were going away, hustling us out of the house before we even had time to pack everything.”
“Where did you go?”
She shrugged. “Where
didn’t
we go is more like it. Mom never seemed able to settle in one place at a time. We moved constantly, usually one step ahead of the bill collectors.”
Her hands were trembling. Silly to be so affected after all this time, but he grasped them tightly in his.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“It’s all right. We all grew up okay, in spite of it. And there was a trust fund from my grandparents to see us through college.”
“Still, it can’t have been easy, having your whole world change so quickly. Is your father a part of your life now?”
“No.” Maybe it was odd that his absence didn’t bother her more, but he’d never exactly been a hands-on father. “We haven’t heard anything from him from that day to this.”
“And your mother?”
“She died a couple of years ago. Driving under the influence, apparently. In Las Vegas.” She pressed her lips together for a moment. “We hadn’t seen much of her since we’d all been out on our own.”
He moved his fingers over her hand, offering comfort. “Sounds as if your parents let the three of you down pretty badly.”
She shook her head, the words seeming to press against her lips, demanding to be released. “It was Grandfather who let me down. Let us down, I mean. We counted on him. He could have stopped her. But he just stood and watched us leave and never said a word.”
All the pain of that betrayal, held at bay over the years she’d been away, came sweeping back, threatening to drown her. That was why she so seldom came here, she knew it now. She didn’t want to remember, and the memories were everywhere here.
“You really think your grandfather could have prevented what happened? Unless he was able to have her declared an unfit mother…”
She jerked her hands away. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He didn’t understand. Grandfather—he could do anything, couldn’t he? Or was that a ten-year-old’s view of the world?
Cal recaptured her hands. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He brought her fingers to his lips so that she felt his breath with the words. “I wish I could make it better.”
“Thank you.” She whispered the words, shaken by the longing she felt to let him comfort her, to close the space between them and be in his arms again…
The sound of car wheels on gravel had her sitting up straight. She drew her hands from his, hoping he couldn’t guess what her thoughts had been. She didn’t know whether she was glad or sorry that Grams was home, ending this.
“Remember, not a word to Grams. About any of this.”
He nodded. Then, too quickly for her to anticipate it, he leaned forward and touched her lips with his.
The organ was still playing behind them when Andrea and her grandmother stepped out into the May sunshine after worship. Andrea tucked her hand unobtrusively into Grams’s arm as they went down the two shallow steps to the churchyard. She’d seen the sparkle of tears in Grams’s eyes more than once during the service.
Actually, the minister’s prayers for Rachel’s recovery had made her own eyes damp. She’d expected to feel guilty, if anything, at going back to church after
letting regular attendance slip out of her life over the past few years. Instead she’d felt welcomed, and not just by the congregation. The awareness of God’s presence, growing in her heart since she’d returned, had intensified to the point that her heart seemed to swell. Grams had looked at her with a question in her eyes once or twice, as if she sensed what was happening.
“I see everyone still gathers out here after the service,” she said as they reached the walk and moved away from the steps to allow others to come down. She wasn’t ready yet to talk about this renewed sense of God in her life.
People clustered into small groups as they cleared the stairs, exchanging greetings, catching up on the news. A long folding table had been set up to one side, bearing pitchers of iced tea and lemonade. Several children had already started a game of tag among the tilted old gravestones. A few late tulips bloomed, bright red against gray markers.
Grams patted her hand. “Some things don’t change. Once you and your sisters did that in your Sunday best.”
“I remember. We didn’t have any silly superstitions about cemeteries after playing here every Sunday.”
The small church, built of the same stone as the inn, was almost completely surrounded by its graveyard, with burials dating back to the early 1700s. A low stone wall enclosed both church and churchyard. Even now, one little girl was emulating a tightrope walker on the top of it.
“Let me guess.” Cal spoke from behind her, his low voice sending a pleasurable shiver down her spine. “You used to be the daring young girl walking on the wall.”
“Whenever my grandmother wasn’t looking.” She turned toward him as Grams began talking to the pastor. “I didn’t realize you attended church. Here, I mean.”
“If you’re not House Amish or Mennonite, this is where you worship in Churchville, isn’t it?” He glanced toward her grandmother. “Katherine didn’t suspect anything last night?” he asked softly.
“She didn’t seem to, but it’s hard to be sure. When we were kids, we thought she had eyes in the back of her head and an antenna that detected mischief.”
“There was probably plenty, with three girls so close in age.”
She smiled, shaking her head. “Fights, mostly, over who took what from whom. Caroline, our youngest sister, was such a good actress that she could convince almost anybody of anything. Except Grams, who always seemed to know the truth. I just hope her antenna wasn’t working last night.”
“She’d probably have said something, if so. She’s not one to keep still where people she cares about are concerned.”
She nodded, but as her gaze sought her grandmother’s erect figure, the smile slipped away. Grams had changed since Grandfather’s death, and she hadn’t even noticed it. The strength they’d always counted on was still there, but it was muted now. Or maybe Rachel’s accident had made her vulnerable.
“I see now how much this place means to her.” She pitched her voice low, under the animated chatter that was going on all around them. “I don’t want anything that’s going on to affect that.”
His hand brushed hers in a mute gesture of support. “You can’t always protect people, even though you care about them.”
She glanced up at him, ready to argue, but maybe he had a point. She’d protected her little sisters during those years under their mother’s erratic care, but eventually they’d been on their own. The situation was reversed now with Grams. She’d always been the strong one, and now she had to be protected, preferably without her realization.
Cal raised an eyebrow, lips quirking slightly. “Not going to disagree?”
“I would, but I see one of your favorite people coming. I’m sure you’ll want to talk to her.”
“Not Margaret.” The hunted look in his eyes amused her. “It’ll be tough to keep a Sunday state of mind with Margaret spreading her version of good cheer around.”
She couldn’t respond, because Margaret was swooping down on them.
Swooping
actually seemed the right word—the floating handkerchief sleeves of her print dress fluttered like a butterfly’s wings.
“Cal. And Andrea. How nice to see the two of you together. Again. So lovely when young people find each other.” Margaret put one hand on Cal’s arm, and Andrea suspected it took all of his manners to keep from pulling away.
“We weren’t lost,” he said shortly. “We were just talking about the inn.”
In a way, she supposed they had been, since that was what concerned Grams most at the moment. “Cal’s been helping us with some of the repairs,” she said. To say nothing of rescuing her from dark closets.
“You are such a sweet boy, to help a neighbor who’s in distress.”
The expression on Cal’s face at being called a sweet boy suggested she’d better intervene before he was reduced to rudeness.
“Just about everyone has been very helpful in getting the inn ready to open.” Except Margaret, she supposed. “It’s coming together very well.”
“Is it?” Shrewdness glinted in Margaret’s eyes for an instant. “I was under the impression you’re nowhere near ready to open for Memorial Day weekend. Sad, to have to cancel those reservations. It doesn’t give the impression of a truly professional establishment. I’d be glad to take those guests, but naturally I’m completely full for that weekend.”
“I don’t know what makes you think that, but we’re not canceling any of our reservations.” She certainly hoped that was true. “You’ll be pleased to know that we expect to open on schedule.”
Margaret’s eyes narrowed. “That’s delightful. Of course, everyone won’t be as happy for you as I am. Still, one has to break eggs to make an omelet.” She turned away, sleeves fluttering. “Excuse me. I must go and talk to the dear reverend about the strawberry festival.”