Whispers at Midnight (12 page)

She took a deep breath, unwilling to just abandon Hugo to his fate but knowing that, as much as she loved the cat, she was going to turn back.

“Hugo!”

But for all her concern, her voice was thin and weak-sounding. She knew she should move, should immediately turn tail and fly back to the safety that was Matt, but her feet seemed to have developed an agenda of their own and remained rooted to the spot. Breathing hard, afraid of what she might find, she slowly turned her head. The shadows took on shape and menace as she tried to make sense of them. Memories of the man in the dining room were suddenly hideously acute.

He hadn’t run away after all. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name. She could feel him, out there in the dark with her, just as she had felt him in the dining room. Her eyes, now huge and scared, focused down the slope, on the most impenetrable part of the darkness near the fence where the walnuts grew thick and close. He was there; she couldn’t see him but she knew it, with a hideous certainty that sent cold chills racing up and down her spine. Her heart pounded so hard now that she could hear nothing above its panicked beat. Her skin crawled.

The moon winked cruelly down at her, an uncaring witness to her distress; the singing insects crescendoed… .

Then, impossibly, there he was. Her first glimpse of him was caught out of the corner of her eye as he materialized not more than a few dozen yards to her right. She gasped. Her head snapped around. Frozen with horror, she watched in open-mouthed disbelief as the huge dark shape of him rushed toward her. Suddenly he was close, so close that she could feel the vibrations of his feet hitting the ground, so close that she could see the moonlight gleaming on the silver of his belt buckle, so close that she could hear the harsh rasps of his breathing.

Carly screamed like a banshee and fled.

8

T
HE DOG
. It was the dog. When he’d heard it yapping in the dark, he’d felt a rush of hate so strong it was almost nauseating. So the damned thing hadn’t died, and it hadn’t left the area either. The man would recognize that high-pitched yelping anywhere. His luck had been like a world-class roller coaster lately, dishing out enormous peaks and valleys. The dog wasn’t one of those valleys, not really; it wasn’t that important because it was just a
dog,
but Marsha had been a definite valley and the dog was connected with her. Marsha deserved what she’d gotten. If she’d kept her mouth shut she would have been fine, but no, she couldn’t do that and so she’d brought her punishment on herself. The one after Marsha, Soraya, hadn’t violated their pact as far as he knew, so he felt kind of bad about her, but, hey, after Marsha’s betrayal he wasn’t taking any more chances. There was one more, one last girl he needed to find and permanently silence, and once that was taken care of he would be free.

The dog wasn’t a danger to him, but it bugged him. The thought that it
knew,
knew who he was and what he had done, made him feel vulnerable, however stupid that might sound. He wanted it dead. A couple of times before tonight he’d come back to the cornfield where it had disappeared to look for it, but he hadn’t found so much as a paw print. He’d been getting complacent about it, just like he’d gotten
complacent about Marsha and the other girls, telling himself to forget them, they were part of the past and out of his life.

But then Marsha had turned up like a slug crawling out from under a rock. And now the dog had turned up, too. If it had been around earlier, when he’d popped open the Beadle Mansion’s locked back door with a credit card, he hadn’t seen or heard it. He’d been interrupted in the middle of his search, but not by the dog—by two women. It was just bad luck that one of them had stumbled across him in the dining room, and worse luck that the sheriff had been right there on the premises to respond to her screams. But he was still fast, still fit, and he had gotten away, using the dog’s trick of hiding out in the cornfield. He’d had a bad moment when the deputies had shown up and started shining their flashlights down the rows, but he’d managed to elude them too. He had been on the other side of the fence again, jogging down toward the road and the place where his own vehicle was concealed, when all hell had broken loose behind him.

Yap, yap, yap. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.

The shrilly distinctive barks had come out of nowhere, making him jump, making him whirl around. It sounded like a Chihuahua on speed; there was no mistaking that it was
the dog,
or that it was in full cry after something. For a moment, near panic, he’d thought it was in full cry after him, an animal nemesis springing up out of nowhere to alert the sheriff and the deputies to his whereabouts. He had whirled around, trying to see it, trying to judge which way to run. But it was the middle of the night, and where he was standing, down under some trees, was darker than the inside of a grave. He hadn’t been able to see anything but tree trunks and bushes and, up on the hill, the pale box that was the big white house that he had been chased out of just a little while earlier.

But he had been able to hear it:
Yap, yap, yap.

“Hugo!”

A woman’s voice, calling after it. He had looked toward the voice and had seen the dark shape of her silhouetted against the house. She was running, clearly chasing the dog, which just as clearly was
not
chasing him. The yaps were heading the wrong way. With his mind
relieved of that worry, he had nevertheless remained motionless, watching the woman, waiting for her to be gone before he risked moving again. Was it the same woman he had encountered in the dining room? Probably—how many women could there be on the previously empty premises, after all?—but it was impossible to say for sure. Then, all of a sudden, she had stopped running. She had seemed to turn, to stare down at him. He had known he was hidden, had known he was safe from her eyes in the well-like darkness under the trees, but still he got the impression that she somehow knew where he was. He had been edging behind a thick tree trunk just as a precaution in case he was perhaps more visible than he’d thought when she suddenly shrieked like she’d been shot and started running again, back the way she had come.

Rattled now, he started running too, away from her, down toward the road. There were too many people out in the dark tonight, he wanted no part of any of them, and the last thing he needed was to be seen and maybe even recognized.

“Carly! Carly! Damn it, Carly!”

A man’s voice, yelling. But it wasn’t the voice that interested him. It was the name: Carly. He reached the drainage ditch that ran alongside the road, then hesitated, glancing back. No, he told himself, jumping the ditch and jogging across the road to lose himself in the strip of woods that ran alongside the old Naylor place. Not tonight. Not when Benton’s finest were already on the scene searching for him. He wasn’t in that big of a hurry. And he certainly wasn’t that big a fool.

But soon. Soon he would be back.

Because Carly was the name of the last girl, the one he’d been hunting. He’d come up dry at a fancy apartment building in Chicago, which was the latest address he’d been able to find for her. The motive behind his visit to the Beadle Mansion tonight had been to see if he couldn’t locate something more recent, an address book or a phone number or even a letter or bill that might tell him where she’d gone.

If this was her, and it almost had to be, his luck was chugging up toward one of those peaks again. Fate had deposited her right in his
backyard. He would have to be careful, he had to make sure he did it right, but it would happen.

One night in the not too distant future, if this girl did indeed turn out to be the Carly he was seeking, she was going to go bye-bye just like the others and vanish without a trace.

Then he would finally be able to put the past behind him once and for all, and step out with total confidence into the bright daylight of the second chapter of his life.

9

S
CREAMING
, Carly saw Matt round the corner of the house, running full-tilt toward her.

“Matt!” She flew at him as if she had been launched from a catapult.

“He’s here, he’s here, he’s here,” she cried as the space between them closed, and then, when he was no more than a stride or so away, she threw herself at him.

The unexpected assault caused him to stagger back a step, but he caught her. His arms closed around her and he held on tight and just like that she knew she was safe. He had drawn his gun as he ran; she could feel the hard shape of it pressed flat against her hip. Shaking, panting, Carly closed her eyes and clung, burying her face against his chest, wrapping her arms around his waist. She was so terrified she couldn’t even look around.

Would he shoot the man? Would the man stop at the sight of the gun?

“Jesus, you’ve scared ten years off my life tonight.” Matt sounded breathless and exasperated and maybe just a little fond all at the same time. “What the hell are you screaming about now?”

“Behind me—” She could hardly get the words out. Did Matt not see? Had he not seen? She lifted her head to find Matt frowning
down at her. “The man in the dining room—he chased me—he’s here—out here…”

“I didn’t mean to scare her.”

The deep voice was apologetic, but it made Carly start anyway. She glanced fearfully around. The man walking toward them was black, burly, and breathless. His belt buckle was silver—this was the man she’d been running from. That belt buckle eliminated all doubt. Carly sucked in her breath before she realized he knew Matt. She frowned.

He continued, “I was in the cornfield when I thought I saw somebody go over the fence into the yard. I went after him, but turns out I was chasing the lady here.”

“She was never in the cornfield,” Matt said. “Are you sure you saw somebody?”

His arms tightened around her. Carly realized that the tightening of his hold was probably pure reflex. In all likelihood it had nothing to do with her at all. Still, she couldn’t help herself; all at once she was acutely aware of Matt as a man rather than simply a rescuer. She absorbed the firm strength of the chest against which she rested, the hard circle of his arms holding her close, the damp warmth of his skin, the crispness of his chest hair, even the faintly musky smell of him. He was bare to the waist and she was wrapped around him like an Ace bandage. The worst thing about it was, it felt so right.

“Pretty darn sure,” the newcomer replied.

It required considerable strength of will, but Carly did it nonetheless: she de-clutched Matt’s waist and pulled herself out of his arms. No matter how right it felt, in his arms was
not
where she wanted to be.

“There was somebody down there.” Her voice was still not quite steady as she mustered the inner resources to push Matt-as-man out of her mind. Taking a deep breath, she pointed down the slope to where the walnuts crowded the fence. “There, in the trees by the fence.”

Both men stared in the direction she indicated. Looking too, Carly realized once again that the darkness made it impossible to distinguish anything but the barest suggestion of shapes at such a distance.

“You saw somebody?” Matt asked sharply.

It was too dark. No way could she have seen anybody. The men must be realizing that too, because they were looking at her with near-identical frowns.

“N–no.” Okay, so it sounded stupid. The truth very often did. “I could just kind of—feel that he was there.”

The air practically hummed with skepticism as the men exchanged glances, but neither made so much as a derisive sound.

Smart men.

“I’ll check it out,” the newcomer said, sounding resigned, and headed off down the slope.

“Who
is
that?” Carly asked, relieved that Matt wasn’t going with him. It would have been embarrassing if she’d had to latch on to an ankle and beg him not to leave her.

“One of my deputies. When the guy I chased out of the house went over the fence, I called for backup. Antonio—that’s Antonio Johnson—and Mike Toler have been searching the property ever since.”