Cara looked around almost frantically, taking in their surroundings. He was right. There wasn't anybody here but him. How could Cara, who prided herself on being sensible, argue with that indisputable fact? She cast about wildly for the first plausible explanation she could think of for her screams.
"A bat." She fought the unfamiliar cloud of confusion threatening to engulf her. "I saw a bat."
"A bat?" He screwed up his forehead so that a network of lines formed on his brow. He deliberately surveyed the sky around her, which was as free of bats as the street was of life. Or death. "I don’t see a bat."
"There was one here a minute ago. A great big one," Cara snapped, upset because he wasn’t even trying to use diplomacy. He didn’t believe her, and he didn’t care if she knew it.
"And I suppose you’re going to tell me that you always scream like that when you see a bat?"
He’d cocked a hand on his hip and made his eyes go wide. Normally, such blatant skepticism would have made her back down and admit everything, but the mocking light in his hypnotic eyes irked her.
"I don’t owe you any explanations." Cara opened the door of her little green Mazda and scrambled inside, intending to get away both from the vivid apparition that had appeared in the street and the incredulity on the man's face. "Thanks for your concern, but I need to be on my way."
She tried to close the car door, but the man placed a restraining hand on it. Instead of fear, hope leapt inside her. She leaned her upper body halfway outside the car and looked up at him expectantly. She wanted him to tell her that she hadn't been imagining things, that he too had seen the boy in the street, that he glimpsed the same familiarity in her eyes that she detected in his.
"You saw something, too, didn't you?" she asked, her voice slightly breathless.
"All I see," the man said, indicating the hood of her vehicle with a sweep of his hand, "is white steam seeping out of the hood of your car."
Instantly reminded of why she had pulled into the service station, Cara sprang out of the overheated car. Confusion and embarrassment mingled to make her cheeks as hot as the car engine. She couldn't drive off with steam pouring from her car, no matter how much she wanted to.
"It probably only needs a little water in the radiator."
"Lady, you sure do have a vivid imagination," he said dryly. "There's something more seriously wrong with your car than the water level in your radiator."
Irritation bubbled in Cara, because this wasn't supposed to happen. Her car wasn’t new, but she never missed a factory-authorized tune-up and had gotten it checked thoroughly before embarking on this trip. But she knew instinctively that the Secret Sound police chief wasn’t a man who made many mistakes.
"Whatever it is, with any luck it won't take too long to fix," Cara said.
He shrugged, and his eyes seemed to inspect her for defects. After the way she had acted, he couldn't know she was a sensible woman, able to deal with whatever problems confronted her. Except maybe the appearance of a boy who wasn't there, a little voice inside her head whispered.
"You okay?" the man asked, possibly because she was
standing rigidly beside her car. Her next step should be to seek help from the mechanic on duty, but she couldn't seem to move. She thought that concern, real and somehow urgent, had stamped out the wariness in his eyes. She had a wild urge to confide the strange things that had happened since she'd left the interstate.
"Are you okay?" he repeated.
She nodded even though she had never been less okay in her life. She hadn't even been this out of control a month ago when her much-loved parents had died within days of each other. They had been elderly and ailing, and the doctor had told her to prepare for their deaths. But how do you prepare to go out of your mind? And how do you tell a stranger who probably had the power to commit you to an asylum that it's happening?
"Listen," the man said and paused, and something she recognized burned in the depths of his eyes. "Is there someone I can call for you?"
"There’s no one." Cara’s voice caught at the realization that she didn’t have anybody in whom she could confide about the strange visions. Except, perhaps, the man standing in front of her. She bit her lip before she could say so, because that was lunacy.
"You've got to be joking?"
Frustration bubbled in Cara's voice when Sam Peckenbush returned to his office after a brief inspection of her car, but the service-station owner didn’t react. He had a thick, muscular build padded with too much fat, and Cara figured him to be in his mid-forties. His beefy cheeks made his small eyes appear like little more than slits, but he didn't look away from her when he spoke.
"I don't joke about business, lady." He slowly drew out each word. "Your water pump's shot, and if you try to drive that car without a new one, it's gonna burn up on you."
"So can you replace it?"
An atypical edge marred Cara’s voice. After everything else that had happened, how could a car she kept in perfect working condition have failed her?
He gnawed on a toothpick dangling from the side of his mouth and settled deeper into his worn chair. "Sure I can replace it," he drawled, "but not this late in the day."
"I don’t understand."
"You don't shop American." The toothpick moved along with his lips. With his surly curbside manner, she wondered how he survived in a job dealing with the public.
"You'll have to be more specific, because I still don't know what you mean," Cara said, even while a part of her supposed she should be thankful to Sam Peckenbush. A gnawing irritation had begun to replace the panic and confusion that had clouded her brain in the muggy darkness.
He leveled her with a slit-eyed stare. She resisted the urge to look away, refusing to let him see that he had managed to intimidate her.
"I carry a fair number of parts for American cars, but you're driving a foreign job. Since car-part places 'round here close early and I’m fixin’ to close myself, I won't be able to pick up a part for it until tomorrow morning. It'll be sometime tomorrow afternoon before it's fixed."
"Do you mean I'm stuck here?"
An inexplicable dread gripped Cara. Even if she hadn’t been looking forward to spending two weeks in Miami Beach on her first vacation in five years, she wouldn't choose to stay here a minute more than necessary.
The gas-station proprietor laughed, although Cara didn't see anything humorous about the situation. "I reckon you are."
Cara’s heartbeat accelerated, and she frantically searched for something, anything, to make the prospect of staying in Secret Sound more appealing. A mental image of the cop with the stormy eyes formed, but she was hardly likely to see him again. She wasn't sure why that added to her aches.
She swallowed, telling herself the car trouble would only delay her for one night. She could stand anything for one night. By tomorrow at this time, she’d nod with good humor while her less-responsible friends teased her about falling victim to car trouble.
"Can you recommend a good hotel?" Cara asked, even though he didn't seem like an authority on fine lodging. Judging from the dirt on the convenience-store floor and the grease stains on its owner’s clothes, he didn't place a high premium on cleanliness.
Still, she paid dutiful attention as he directed her to a hotel less than a mile away. Her next request was for a taxi. In answer, he picked up a telephone book and dumped it unceremoniously on the counter separating them.
The vision of the little broken boy flashed before her eyes, and she blinked it away, determined not to crumble in the face of adversity. She only wished she had more practice at it.
She was an only child, a late-in-life baby whose adoring parents made her life safe and comfortable. Her biggest disappointment had been her parents' refusal to let her leave home to go to college to study journalism. Even then, a secret part of her had been glad she could stay in her safe little cocoon. She’d gotten a two-year business degree at a commuter college, and eventually landed an undemanding job in the circula
tion department of a local magazine.
The demands of her life, in fact, had been virtually non-existent until both of her parents had fallen ill five years before. They'd needed around-the-clock care, but Cara had refused to put the people who had given her so much into a nursing home. She'd spent nights and weekends caring for them after the day nurse had gone home and developed a reputation for being competent, practical and level-headed.
So why, as she dialed the taxi company, did she keep seeing the car slam into the ill-fated child who hadn't been there?
Cara pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes. Darn it! She had seen the child with eyes that had been checked barely a month before. She wasn't the sort of person who imagined things that didn't exist. Hadn't she been accused of being too much of a realist, because she considered the world in stark terms? She would never look at a cloud and imagine a snow-white leopard or sky-high palm tree. To Cara, clouds were clouds.
The phone made a sharp click when Cara replaced it on its cradle, and an idea jangled in her brain. If she had seen the child, maybe Peckenbush had seen him too. She swallowed, reluctant to expose herself to any more of his open rudeness but even more reluctant to walk away before she had answers.
She cleared her throat, feeling as though two frogs leaped out when she did so, and reminded herself that Peckenbush had no reason to question her sanity. Unlike the nosy cop, he hadn't heard her scream at nothing.
"Mr. Peckenbush," she began, and her voice broke, "did you see a little boy around here about the time I pulled up?"
He screwed up his forehead as though she had asked if a colony of rats had overrun the town's most exclusive neighborhood. For a full thirty seconds, he stared at her through half-closed eyes. By the time he answered, she was trembling.
"A little boy?" Suspicion dripped from every syllable. "What kinda little boy?"
Cara tried to put conviction into her voice. "A dark-haired little boy around four or five years old."
The brief confusion that crossed his face did nothing to buoy her courage, because she didn't think he was searching his memory for a face. He was wondering why Cara had asked the question.
"No little kid’s been here. We're a mile from town, so I don't see many kids unless they're in cars. Why you askin'?"
Instead of immediately replying, Cara gazed out the smudged window at the barren street. A few cars sped by, but their drivers were surely as oblivious to what had happened there as Sam Peckenbush.
"The cars go by fast," Cara said. "I suppose it's a good thing there aren't many children around. One of them might get hit."
He snorted, a rough, unpleasant noise that made her start. "Are you askin' about the kid that was hit in front of the station?"
Sweet, soothing relief surged through Cara, but it lasted but a fraction of a minute. The inescapable fact was that, although she hadn't witnessed something that had never happened, she had quite possibly seen something that had already happened.
"When did it happen?" Cara forgot her reluctance at questioning him. "Yesterday? The day before that?"
"Yesterday?" His thick eyebrows shot up, and he shook his head slowly. "The little boy I'm talking about ran in front of a car out there in front of the gas pumps something like thirty years ago."
CHAPTER THREE
Gray thought the woman still looked shaky when she walked out of Sam Peckenbush’s office. Her face was a pale oval against the darkening sky, and her steps were hesitant. She brushed her burnished brown hair out of her face, and her lips seemed to tremble.
Gray straightened from where he had been leaning against his car, and knew the exact instant she spotted him. Her posture stiffened, her shoulders squared and her chin raised. She waited where she stood outside Sam’s office while he walked toward her. Again, he had to fight a powerful urge to sweep her into his arms and tell her everything would be all right.
Even if he were inclined to give into his urge, which he wasn’t, he could tell by the steel in her voice that she wouldn’t let him. "I thought I made it perfectly clear I wasn’t going to the hospital with you."
"You did." Gray examined her. He no longer thought she was on drugs. Despite her pallor, her skin didn’t have the sallowness associated with users. Her eyes were alert rather than dulled from too many bad trips. "Seeing that we practice southern hospitality around here, I thought I’d give you a ride to a hotel."
Her chin raised another notch. "There’s no need for that. I already called a taxi."
"I’ll cancel it then," Gray said, but caught a flash of yellow out of the corner of his eye and knew it was too late. She walked past him toward the cab and asked the driver if he’d get the luggage out of her trunk.
"That’s okay, Eddie." Gray called the wiry, middle-aged driver by name when he got out of the cab. "I’ll help her with the luggage."
"Sure thing, chief," the cabbie said, giving him the big-toothed grin that was his trademark. "Wouldn’t mind at all if you did my job for me."
Gray felt, rather than saw, the woman sigh before she headed off in the direction of her Mazda. He followed, his eyes automatically dipping to the gentle sway of her hips and the bare smoothness of her long, shapely legs. His mouth went so dry that he longed for one of the beers waiting for him at the weekly poker game.
She popped open the trunk of her car, and he was surprised at how much she had stuffed into it. A striped beach chair and matching umbrella, which looked brand new, lay among paisley-print luggage that also appeared new. She pointed to one of the bigger bags.
"That’s the only one I’ll need for now."
Gray heaved the suitcase out of the trunk while he wondered where the woman had been headed and why she had stopped at Sam’s instead of a station nearer the interstate? He frowned, remembering her reaction when he’d pointed out the swirling steam around her car.
She hadn’t even realized how serious her car trouble was until he called it to her attention.
"Well, um, thanks," she said as he settled her suitcase into the trunk of Eddie’s cab. Her eyes met his, and something inside them reached out to him and gave a hard tug. She looked lost and, somehow, alone.
He swallowed to stop himself from asking her, once again, what was wrong. He wanted to help her, but he couldn’t force her to accept that help, especially when she wouldn’t even accept a ride to a hotel.
"It’s my pleasure, ma’am. I’m only sorry I wasn’t around sooner to protect you from that bat."
She gave him one last backward glance before getting into the cab. Gray sighed as the cab pulled away from the station, regretting his smart-aleck remark.
He had the absurd feeling he had failed her and had to stop himself from getting into his car and following. The smart thing would be to head in the opposite direction.
He didn’t know why he felt such a strong connection to a woman he’d never seen before in his life, but he couldn’t afford to get involved with her.
The point was moot anyway, he thought as he lowered himself into his car. She was a tourist, passing through town, and he wasn’t likely to see her again. He wasn’t about to analyze why that reality stung.
Cara got out of the taxi in front of the hotel Sam Peckenbush had recommended and paid the driver while she calculated how many hours she had until she could leave Secret Sound.
Her hands had finally stopped shaking and absolutely nothing had looked familiar since she’d left the service station, but the uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach was as strong as ever. She had never been intuitive, but now she felt that something was about to happen.
She shuddered and hugged herself. She should have thought more carefully before setting out for Miami Beach. She probably would have if she hadn’t been so eager to get away from the grief that had seized her since her parents’ deaths.
She wasn’t the kind of person who should take a trip alone. For as long as she could remember, she’d gravitated toward people and things that were safe and predictable. Now she found
herself in a town that was neither.
She took a deep breath, picked up her suitcase and surveyed the hotel in front of her. It had the gleam of a new building, with twin stories of rooms and whitewashed walls. She calculated that it couldn't be more than a few years old.
Pulling herself together, Cara walked toward the hotel and found herself wishing that she’d called off the taxi and accepted the ride from the stranger. Stranger. She supposed that was what he was, but he seemed so familiar. The difference was that looking into his eyes elicited warm comfort instead of the icy terror the other things in Secret Sound evoked.
She gave a short bark of laughter at the words she had associated with the big, tough-looking cop. Warm and comforting. Those adjectives didn’t accurately describe the most aggressively male specimen she’d ever seen.
Her laugh died, and she wrinkled her nose. If she were honest with herself, which she usually was, she’d admit that hot and sexually charged better described her reaction to the man.
An immediate sense of disloyalty swept through her. She thought of Richard Lansford waiting patiently at home in Sumter for her answer to his marriage proposal, as he’d been waiting since he issued it a year ago.
Richard was kind and sweet and malleable, the sort of man who’d never dispute her contention that she was screaming because a bat scared her.
A rush of cold air greeted her when she walked through the double doors leading to the hotel lobby. Cara stepped inside, hugged herself to ward off the chill and froze. The interior of the hotel, exuding old-world charm with its mahogany tables and Queen Anne furniture, was completely at odds with its impersonal exterior.
Cream-colored walls set off old-style furniture positioned on an Oriental rug with an intricate design. The registration desk, beautifully enhanced with wood inlays, matched the furniture. A vague tinkling filled the room, and Cara raised her eyes to the source. An elaborate crystal chandelier, the kind made in bygone eras, hung above the sitting area.
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