“Ready?” he asked.
Both Carly and Sandra answered in the affirmative. Matt edged Carly aside, moved past her through the doorway, then pulled the two of them after him in a careful progression across the front parlor. Carly only stumbled once, over the edge of the rug. Considering the possibilities, she thought that was pretty good.
They made it into the hall, where the still-open door spilled its wedge of lighter darkness. Remembering her dignity as well as her grievance once she could see again, Carly pulled her hand from Matt’s. If he had a problem with that, she couldn’t tell. He stepped away from her without a word, picking up the flashlight from where he had left it on the radiator cover and switching it on. The bright beam was as welcome as a cold drink on a hot afternoon as he shined it around the hall.
“You know what?” Sandra said, releasing her grip on Carly’s hand. “I’ve had it with Nowheresville, U.S.A. Give me street gangs and muggers and druggies anytime. I’m going home.”
Damn,
Carly thought, caught by surprise as Sandra, still hanging on to her pan, marched toward the door. The night just kept getting better and better.
“Sandra …” Carly trailed her out to the porch. Matt followed suit, letting the screen door bang shut behind him. The flashlight
beam slid along the porch rail, slicing through the darkness like a laser. Beyond the porch, the rain had stopped. The smell of damp was as pervasive as the humidity. A chorus of frogs and insects and who knew what other kinds of revolting little creatures sang.
“You can’t just turn around and go home,” Carly protested. Sandra was the cook; Carly was the owner/manager/administrator/general dogsbody. The bed-and-breakfast could work without Sandra—but only if the guests who booked into The Inn at Beadle Mansion didn’t object to peanut butter sandwiches.
“Oh, yeah? You just watch me.” Sandra started for the stairs. Her broken sandal slapping the damp wooden floor gave extra emphasis to her militant stride. “I told you, I don’t do spooky old houses and—”
“You can’t go now. It’s the middle of the night, and you haven’t had any sleep. It took us about sixteen hours to get here,
remember?”
Carly paused before producing the clincher. “Anyway, I’ve got the keys.”
That stopped Sandra cold at the top of the steps. Planting her fists on her hips, she turned around to fix Carly with a fulminating look. Assuming an identical stance, Carly returned that look with interest. Simmering fear leavened with bursts of terror heaped on top of utter exhaustion and added to slow-cooking despair was not a combination that encouraged calm acceptance of life’s little vicissitudes, as she was in the process of discovering.
“Ladies, ladies,” Matt intervened, sounding suddenly amused as he came up behind Carly. “Think you could duke it out later? This probably isn’t the best time for a catfight.”
The amusement in his voice was a mistake. The term
catfight
was a bigger one. Carly’s pent-up emotions found a far more satisfying target than Sandra as they morphed into fury and focused on Matt. She swung around.
“Same old Matt,” she said to him with a big faux smile. “Still the ultimate sexist pig.”
Sandra stepped up to stand beside her, their disagreement forgotten in the face of this common enemy. Shoulder to shoulder, the two of them scowled at him.
“Yeah,” Sandra added with relish. “Oink, oink.”
The sheer anticlimactic ridiculousness of that caused Carly’s eyes to roll sideways at Sandra. Her head fell forward in disbelief. For a moment Matt said nothing. Glancing up, Carly caught his gaze. A smile played around the corners of his mouth as his hand rose to flatten on the truly awesome pectoral that lay over his heart.
“Ladies, you wound me,” he said, holding her gaze as his smile widened. “You really wound me.”
Carly’s chin snapped up. Her temper shot toward boiling. Before she could lose it entirely, Sandra once again stepped up to the plate.
“Can anybody here say
bacon?”
Matt laughed. Sandra bridled. Her own outrage put on hold as she mentally yielded the at-bat to Sandra, Carly awaited the inevitable showdown with bated breath.
It never came. Instead, an ungodly moan filled the air. Carly’s eyes widened. The sound was otherworldly, haunting—and it seemed to be coming from directly beneath their feet.
“What the hell?” Matt’s brows knit as he looked down.
“That’s it.” Sandra did an about-face, scuttling down the steps. “Chicago, here I come.”
“It’s only Hugo,” Carly called after Sandra, having recovered her wits enough to recognize the sound as one she had heard before. “He hates getting wet. He must be holed up under the porch. Anyway, you can’t go. I’ve got the keys, remember?”
“Shit,” Sandra said, turning to glare up at Carly. A stray moonbeam touched her face, which was already glistening from the increased humidity that the rain had left behind.
“Hugo?” Matt asked at the same time.
“My cat,” Carly explained in an aside.
“Think that’s going to keep me here?” Sandra was sounding belligerent. Her fists were planted on her hips again. “Hah! Not a chance. I’ll just call myself a taxi, so what do you think of that, huh?”
Carly looked at her with no small degree of satisfaction. “There are no taxis in Benton.”
Sandra groaned.
Another unearthly moan shivered skyward.
“Give me that.” Fed up, Carly snatched the flashlight from Matt’s hand and marched down the steps. Squatting beside the crawl space, she pointed the beam inside.
Bright eyes gleamed unblinkingly back at her. There was Hugo all right, huddled in a miserable-looking ball in the farthest corner of the dark, dank-smelling space. Planted directly in front of him and blocking his exit was another animal. Another
growling
animal that Carly couldn’t quite see clearly because a concrete support pillar blocked her view of it. But whatever it was, it seemed to strike fear into Hugo’s sheltered soul. He moaned again, clearly at bay.
“Hugo,” Carly gasped, training the flashlight on him. Her cat looked at her imploringly. Then, to the other animal, which from what little she could see of it seemed to be a fox or a raccoon or, God forbid, a large skunk, she added, “You! Beat it! Shoo!” Glancing around, she spied the pea gravel that her grandmother had always used around the landscaping in lieu of mulch. Scooping up a handful, she tossed it at the predator. “Shoo!”
It didn’t budge. Which wasn’t much of a surprise because she missed. Hugo flinched as gravel peppered the area around him, and let loose with another of those hair-raising moans.
“Are you sure that’s a cat?” Matt asked dryly. Both he and Sandra were standing beside her now. Carly looked up at them.
“Something’s got him trapped under there. Another animal.” Her conscience smote her. She’d been so caught up in this latest series of unfolding disasters that she’d pretty much left her poor cat to fend for himself ever since they’d arrived. As a result, she was now faced with the ultimate calamity: Hugo was about to become some predator’s lunch meat. Desperate to save him before the other creature could attack, she dropped to all fours and started into the crawl space.
“Shoo! Shoo!” She waved the flashlight threateningly. Hugo stared at her in alarm.
“Don’t be an idiot.” Matt grabbed her around the waist and dragged her back. Keeping a precautionary hold on the waistband of her jeans in case she should try again, he crouched beside her, took the flashlight out of her hand, aimed it and peered into the cavity.
“Be careful. Whatever it is might have rabies,” Sandra warned.
“It’s just a dog,” Matt said on a note of relieved disgust. “Here, boy.”
As Matt let loose with a series of idiotic dog-coaxing sounds, Carly squinched up her eyes and stared at the parts of the animal she could see. Matt was right, she decided, as it moved slightly: it was a dog. A small black dog with ears like a fox. A dog was better than a wild animal, she thought, but not by a whole heck of a lot. Hugo was a purist; he hated dogs.
“Here, boy,” Matt said again. This time the dog looked around. Its eyes, dark and gleaming as the light hit them, struck Carly as being as pitiless as a wolf’s. It might not be much taller than Hugo, and it was certainly skinnier, but she had little doubt that its size concealed a wiry strength. It was obviously a stray, or maybe it was even wild. She had heard tales of feral dogs that occasionally roamed Screven County in packs. They killed chickens, calves, sometimes even full-grown cows. Whatever it was, she was absolutely sure of one thing: it was more than a match for her coddled cat.
Beside her, Matt appeared to think it was harmless. Before she could clue him in to the possibilities, he made more of those ridiculous doggy-come-hither noises. In response the dog looked at him again, and gave a sharp yap.
The sound proved too much for Hugo. Fur on end, tail straight as a broomstick, he levitated, then tore toward Carly and safety so fast she was surprised his paws didn’t smoke. The dog, taken by surprise, didn’t recover enough to realize that its prospective snack was escaping until Hugo shot past. Then it answered the challenge with enthusiasm, whirling and barking its head off as it gave chase.
Carly had the presence of mind to scramble out of the way. Matt, who was admittedly less well acquainted with Hugo and his hangups and thus understandably might not have grasped the full extent of his peril, did not. He was still crouched in front of the crawl space when Hugo went over him like a freight train over a bridge. The dog, near hysteria now, followed suit.
Matt yelled and threw up his hands, but too late. Bowled over, he sprawled on his back in the wet grass.
The words that spilled in a steady stream from his mouth were
rude and unpleasant in tone and probably also profane. Carly couldn’t be sure, because beyond casting a quick glance his way to make certain he wasn’t dead, she paid no further attention to him as she leaped to her feet.
“Hugo!” she cried, taking off after her pet as the yapping, yowling midnight express tore across the lawn toward the corner of the house. With a dreaded dog in pursuit, Hugo might well run for miles, she knew. Even if he somehow managed to avoid being ripped to shreds, he would have no idea how to get home. What made the situation even worse was that, having spent his entire well-bred life to that point almost exclusively inside the plush confines of a luxury apartment, Hugo had very little firsthand experience of the dangers posed by the great outdoors. Add to that the twin facts that he was a stranger in a strange land and probably terrified out of his wits by the demon dog, and the potential for cat-astrophe loomed large.
She had lost so much, Carly thought. Basically her whole carefully constructed life. Hugo was just about all she had left, and she didn’t think she could bear it if she were to lose him too.
Sprinting madly after them, Carly reached the spot where the animals had streaked out of sight around the side of the house. Glancing back, she caught just a glimpse of Sandra extending a hand down to the still supine Matt. Then, slipping and sliding on the wet grass, she pelted around the corner, and all sight of her fellow humans was abruptly lost to her.
“Hugo!”
Over her own panting calls she could still hear the dog’s hysterical yaps, but she could no longer see either animal. The side yard was hugely overgrown; leafy bushes and vines and shrubberies provided an endless variety of cover. She was caught in the shadow of the house now, she realized as she sped in the direction from which the commotion seemed to be coming. The world around her was suddenly darker than before, so dark the temperature seemed to drop by a couple of degrees. The moon was a distant, fuzzy crescent playing peekaboo among enormous silver-edged clouds. Its meager light was capricious, dappling the ground in front of her one moment and then gone the next. Walnut trees grew close together in this part of the yard. Dodging
between their stalwart trunks, she had to take care not to slip on the pungent husks that were all that remained of the previous fall’s bounty. Thorny-leaved hollies clustered where the taller trees were not. Boxwoods pressed close against the house’s pale walls; above the bushes, windows gleamed down at her like dark, all-seeing eyes.
The feeling that she was being watched flitted around the edges of her consciousness for several seconds almost unnoticed. Carly’s skin prickled as she finally recognized the uncanny sensation for what it was. Glancing compulsively around, she discovered nothing to account for it. Still, her step faltered and slowed. She was not reassured by the blankness of the windows as she glanced toward the house, or the shape-shifting shadows or the ghostly columns of mist that drifted heavenward from the lowest parts of the yard. As dark as it was, she could not be sure that nothing untoward lurked in the shadows, that no one crouched behind a tree or crept her way.
Water droplets, most likely dislodged from the rain-laden canopy above, struck her face. The unexpected shower surprised a startled gasp out of her. As unnerved as if a hand had reached out of the darkness to grab her, she stopped in her tracks. Her pulse raced; her breathing came fast and shallow. And not just because she had been running, she realized. Not even primarily because she had been running. Her blood was racing and her chest was heaving from the sudden onslaught of fear.
Every sense now alert, her body almost vibrating as she sought to absorb the smallest nuance of her surroundings, she was thwarted at every turn. She saw nothing but night-dark greenery although she strained her eyes to their limit. She heard nothing beyond the sounds that she might expect to hear: the dog’s war whoops, which were growing increasingly distant; foliage rustling; raindrops dripping. The choir of unseen creatures hummed louder. The scent of damp earth and walnuts and rampant vegetation was strong. Still, the feeling that she was being observed by an unseen watcher grew more intense as the night seemed to close in on her from all sides.
Only then did it occur to Carly that, under the circumstances, dashing off after Hugo was possibly not the smartest thing she had ever done.