Sleep No More

by Susan Crandall

  The place smelled of old timber and eucalyptus. The entire area was open. A counter and cash register sat near the far wall.

  There was a large walk-in refrigerator beyond a wide worktable. Bits of greenery littered the top of the table and the floor beneath. There was a rod sticking up at one side of the table filled with spools of colored ribbon aligned like the colors of the rainbow. Nearer the door, where he was standing, various pottery, glass vases, and garden ornaments were neatly displayed.

  The building had a wood plank floor, old enough that wide cracks had grown between them and deep sloping grooves had been worn in the traffic paths. The exposed beams supporting the roof had clearly been hand hewn.

  Realizing this building’s age, he understood the incredible loss Abby felt over the destruction of the main house. Constance had said the Whitmans never planned to rebuild on the site; what was gone was irreplaceable. But Jason wondered if Abby’s father had chosen to move to town in order to lighten the load of his daughter’s sense of guilt. As for her move back here… God knows the woman could wear a man down with her arguments.

  He looked at her behind the counter, getting a pen and paper to write down her messages. Her dark hair swept past her shoulder and hid her face. She seemed so slight, and showed incredible emotional and moral strength. But she had to find a way to forgive herself, or she would never find true peace. He wanted to help her achieve that. Then maybe she would allow herself to live a full life that included living with someone she loved.

  She pushed the button on the answering machine. Just as the voice began speaking, Jason realized he should never have let her come in here. Why hadn’t he been thinking?

  “This is Kathy Richardson. I’d like to order flowers for Kyle Robard’s funeral. Randall and Roberts Funeral Ho—”

  Jason hurried around the counter and hit the “stop” button.

  Abby was sucking in huge gulps of air. The pen had fallen from her shaking hand.

  She pushed him away and swiped a vase off the counter. The explosion of broken glass was like a gunshot in the room. She pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead and paced across the glass, grinding and popping it into smaller pieces.

  “Abby! Stop!”

  She was shaking her head in agitation, still moving across the bed of broken glass.

  “Abby!” He reached out and grabbed her arm, stepping into the glass himself. “Stop. The glass.”

  He pulled her away from the area of the floor covered by the shattered vase.

  She allowed him to lead her only so far, then removed her arm from his grasp and put some space between them. All of her angry energy turned inward. Her face took on a stony calm, her eyes focused somewhere other than in the reality of this moment.

  She faced the window, her arms wrapped around her middle. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breathing. This silent withdrawal was more unsettling than any tears he’d seen her shed; he wanted her to let him in, not retreat further.

  He chanced resting a hand on her shoulder blade.

  When she didn’t pull away, he ventured further and gently turned her toward him. Her gaze moved from the window to the floor.

  “Abby, look at me.”

  She swallowed roughly and raised her eyes to meet his.

  There were no words that could take away the pain that reached from her eyes deep into her soul. So he pulled her against his chest with one arm and pressed her head into the crook of his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he murmured.

  Her body trembled slightly and her arms wrapped around his waist. She remained eerily silent.

  He held her more tightly and stroked her hair. “So sorry, baby.”

  After a minute or so, and much too soon for Jason, she took a deep breath and leaned away from him.

  “I’m okay now.” She patted his chest. “I’m all right.”

  He framed her face with his hands and looked into those wounded eyes. He felt himself moving before he had time to censor his actions. She held perfectly still… until his lips touched hers. Then her hands clutched his shirtfront, pulling him closer.

  He tasted the salt of her tears and his heart broke just a little.

  She kissed him back, her mouth soft and yielding beneath his.

  He could feel the flutter of her pulse where the heel of his hand rested on the side of her neck. He couldn’t help but hope he was the reason for its accelerated rhythm.

  One kiss blended tenderly into another. His body awakened and he realized how long it had been since he’d held a woman. He wished this moment would last, neither going forward nor back, so he could linger in the possibilities.

  When she pulled away, she lowered her gaze and bit her lower lip.

  He smoothed her hair away from her face, hooking it behind her ear. Then he slipped a finger beneath her chin and tilted her face up. Even in her current state of exhaustion, she was lovely beyond words.

  She looked at him steadily, her seeming shyness disappearing. “I know I’ve sounded like an ungrateful snot. I’m sorry,” she said. “Thank you for being here; for helping me.”

  He smiled and felt as if he’d crossed a bridge she didn’t allow many people to find, let alone cross. It was safest to let her get used to this new intimacy one quiet step at a time. He simply said, “You’re welcome.”

  She reached up and caressed his cheek. Then she let her hand fall away and looked at the glass on the floor. “I’d better get the broom.”

  “Abby,” he said and she stopped. “Do you want me to listen to the messages for you? I can call all of them back and tell them they need to order from somewhere else.”

  She rolled her lips inward and bit them. He wondered if she could still taste him as he tasted her salt and sadness.

  After a second, she said, “No. The viewing won’t be until Tuesday and the service Wednesday. Let me think about it until tomorrow morning.”

  “Good idea.” He watched her walk away, marveling at her strength. He glanced at the machine. There were twenty-four messages. She was going to need every bit of that strength.

  Once they had the glass cleaned up, she locked the shop and they drove the Explorer a hundred yards to her cottage.

  The front door was draped in the deep shadow of evening and the giant magnolia that stood nearby. That was why he didn’t notice the door was ajar until the weak high-pitched tone reached his ears.

  Abby halted, hearing it, too.

  He quickly pulled her back and stepped in front of her. “Was this locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “The alarm is battery powered?”

  “Yes.”

  The tone was weak and faltering. Clearly running out of juice.

  “Go back and get in the car,” he said. “Lock the doors.”

  “Only if you go with me. We can call the police.”

  “There isn’t another way for a car to come and go, is there?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think they’re still here. We haven’t seen a car, even out on the road when we turned in. Besides, they would have heard our car doors by now and gone out the back.”

  “Then let’s go in,” Abby said. She pulled out her cell phone, as if it was a weapon. “I’ll have 911 ready.”

  He went up the brick steps and pounded on the door frame. “Hey!”

  “I thought you said they were gone,” Abby whispered. Jason wondered why she kept her voice low when he’d just shouted.

  “Just making sure,” he said, and thumped the door again with his fist.

  He waited, listening. Nothing but the pitiful thin whine of the magnetic alarm.

  He said, “Stay right behind me.”

  He pushed the door open with his foot, and reached to the left, where he knew the light switch was.

  The bright illumination stung his eyes when the ceiling fan light came on. The place wasn’t more than one big room with a loft overhead, so he could sweep the area easily. Everything appeared in order.

&nbs
p; He reached up and turned off the alarm switch. Then he grabbed Abby’s hand to keep her close. With his other hand he picked up a heavy candlestick off the bar between the kitchen and living area.

  They systematically checked all of the closets and the loft. When they turned the light on in her small bathroom they found the only trace of the intruder. Written across the mirror in wide red marker were the words:

  you tell

  you die

  CHAPTER 15

  Tell… tell… tell….

  The word had been echoing sluggishly in the back of Abby’s brain for the past twenty minutes. She wanted to scream, “Tell what?” and maybe it would stop. Right now her only hope of discovering what someone feared she would tell lay with Jason’s friend in Savannah.

  She needed to get up and move, to shake off this feeling of victimization. But every time she did Jason cautioned her not to touch anything. So she’d limited herself to one tiny section of sofa cushion and settled for bouncing her knees. As for Jason, he looked like he wanted to break something, and it intensified every time he looked at her. It seemed prudent to stop drawing attention to herself.

  When the police arrived they were different officers yet again; Fisher and Haggerty this time. They’d come with a serious demeanor and a full crime scene investigation kit, thanks to Jason. Abby had gathered through his conversation with the sheriff’s department that he had a working relationship with the locals as well as his old GBI contacts in Savannah.

  The officers were being exceptionally thorough—probably because Jason kept a critical eye on their every move. Even Abby, in her diminished mental state, could tell it was beginning to piss them off.

  Officer Fisher sat down to question her. She could barely hold her focus, often missing a question entirely until he repeated it. He was beginning to look at her like she was impaired in some way.

  Not that it mattered. These were the same gamut of questions she’d answered this morning. She had no new answers.

  Officer Haggerty continued to gather physical evidence. Abby watched him move about her house with a camera and a fingerprint duster out of the corner of her eye.

  Would they ever finish and get out of here? Her adrenaline rush had passed. She hadn’t thought it possible, but she was more drained than before.

  Jason paced, alternating between cautioning Fisher to take it easy on Abby and prodding Haggerty to be vigilant in his work. Abby had the feeling that if Jason hadn’t had some connection with the sheriff already, they’d have asked him to wait outside by now.

  Fisher asked, “Any idea at all what the threat is referring to?”

  Jason stopped dead in his tracks and looked at Abby. They’d discussed it while they’d waited for the police. Although she’d been slow to come around, Jason’s idea really was the only thing that made any sense.

  She said, “Maybe it has to do with the accident I had the other night. We think whoever made the 911 call to report it from Kyle Robard’s phone thinks I saw him, and he doesn’t want to be discovered.”

  Tell… tell… tell…. There was something hovering in Abby’s mind, shrouded and just out of reach. When she concentrated on it, trying to figure out why it kept plaguing her, it retreated deeper into the fog.

  “Interesting theory.” Fisher’s brows drew together. “You said he? It was a man then?”

  “I used the masculine for the sake of simplicity,” she said, her head beginning to pound more severely and her vision blurred. “I didn’t see anyone.”

  Jason said, “Now that you know there’s been a threat to Abby, how about pushing the lab work through?”

  Fisher visibly bristled, but his tone was civil when he said, “Dr. Coble, we have to rely on the state lab. I’m sure they’re processing things as quickly as they can.”

  “I’ve been involved in enough cases to know how this works. You can speed up the process.”

  “That’s not my call, sir.” The last word sounded like a restrained warning. “We don’t have the resources that your GBI has.”

  Abby wondered how Jason would have dealt with Trowbridge’s attitude. Or maybe Trowbridge wouldn’t have had an attitude if Jason had been here yesterday.

  Haggerty said, “I have everything I need.” He put his camera back in its case. “Except I’d like to take that mirror to the lab.”

  He pulled out a screwdriver from his kit and looked at Abby with expectation.

  “Help yourself.” She knew even after she got the marker off of it, she would never be able to look into that mirror again and not see those words; they would remain ghosts in the glass.

  Fisher’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and looked at the ID screen. “Excuse me.” He got up and walked over to the kitchen. “Fisher.”

  Jason returned to his pacing, but Abby could tell he had his ear tuned to Fisher’s conversation.

  She wasn’t able to decipher anything other than that it was a short exchange.

  When he hung up, he returned and asked Abby, “Officer Bigelow wanted me to ask you if you own a silver iPod?”

  “No. Mine is white. Why?”

  “When he came back to search the cemetery earlier today, he found one in the grass near the big monument.”

  “Cemetery?” Jason asked, looking at Abby.

  “There’s an old family cemetery near the road. Someone vandalized it sometime in the past week.”

  “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning?” Jason asked.

  “It’s been a long day, Jason.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that it could be a clue to who is doing all of this.”

  “There have to be hundreds of silver iPods around,” she said, thinking this was as good as no clue at all.

  Jason brightened. “But they won’t all have the same fingerprints on them, or the same songs and video clips.”

  “You got it.” Fisher gave him grudging acknowledgment. “Barring registered fingerprints, the video clips might be our best bet.”

  “Have they examined it yet?” Jason asked. “Do they know if the prints match the ones they took from Abby’s door this morning?”

  “Too soon.” There was just a hint of challenge in those two clipped words. He stared at Jason for a moment, waiting.

  Jason had his hands on his hips and a frown on his face, but he kept his mouth shut.

  Haggerty came out of the bathroom, Abby’s mirror in a large clear plastic bag. She turned away so she didn’t have to see the words again.

  As Fisher opened the door for Haggerty, he asked, “Are you planning on staying here, ma’am?”

  “No. I’ll be staying in town.”

  “Good idea.” He picked up the rest of the gear and walked out.

  Abby moved to the front window and watched them load their cars. The darkness seemed heavy and thick between her house and the road a quarter of a mile down the lane. Jason came and stood just behind her, resting a hand gently on her shoulder.

  One after the other, the two cars did three-point turns to head back out of her lane. Watching gave her a sense of déjà vu. Those headlights the night of the accident had seemed so insignificant. But now…

  “After the accident, before the police got there, I saw headlights coming—from the other direction. They stopped and turned around very abruptly. Maybe it was the person who made the call coming back, and he turned around when he saw the lights of the police car coming.”

  His grip tightened on her shoulder. “Did you tell Trowbridge?”

  “I didn’t remember until after he’d left. I was going to talk to the sheriff again and tell him. But things have been so crazy.”

  “Did it get close enough for you to tell anything about the vehicle?”

  She shook her head. “It’s probably useless information.”

  “We’ll still tell the sheriff.”

  Abby leaned back against him. She welcomed the word “we.” Even if it was only temporary, she wasn’t in this alone.

  “Tes
t it,” Abby said.

  Jason sighed, stood on tiptoe, and pressed the button on the upstairs hall smoke detector. It sent out a piercing wail.

  “Satisfied?” he asked. God, would the woman ever give up and go to sleep? It was nearly ten p.m. She could have been in bed an hour ago.

  He’d taken the front door alarm from her cottage, replaced the battery, and installed it on Bren’s bedroom door. Now he’d just tested all of the smoke detectors in the house.

  Abby still didn’t look comfortable.

  “Believe me, this is all overkill anyway,” he said. “I used to wake up when Bren turned over at night.”

  “Make sure there aren’t any matches in the room.”

  “It’s Brenna’s bedroom. She doesn’t smoke and I don’t allow her to burn candles in there.”

  She just stared at him with her arms folded over her chest.

  “All right.” He went in and opened drawers he’d never opened; invaded his daughter’s privacy in a way he never had. Then he returned to Abby in the hallway. “No matches. No lighters. No illegal fireworks. No concealed firearms. Now, please, go to sleep.”

  She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She was eyeing the doorknob. “Can you turn that around so it locks from the outside?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “Abby, I want you to be able to relax, but I will not lock you in that room.”

  A small smile came to those beautiful lips. “I thought you were willing to tie me up.”

  He kissed her forehead. “So tempting….” He stepped away, his hands itching to touch her. “There are fresh towels and a new bar of soap in the hall bath. I think Bren has some shampoo in there, but it smells like bubblegum and makes my stomach turn.”

  “Then maybe you’ll smell me coming before you hear me.”

  “Abby—”

  She laughed. “I was just kidding. Besides, I have my own shampoo.”

  He thought of the light gardenia scent as he’d held her. Heady and intriguing.