by Gayle Roper
I put a foot on the first rung of my ladder.
Gray jumped to his feet. “What are you doing? Don’t use that ladder!”
I mentally rolled my eyes. “I have to use the ladder.” I climbed the first two steps. It swayed drunkenly. “How else can I hang the treatments?”
“Look—” He halted. “By the way, what’s your name?” He actually appeared interested.
“Anna Volente.”
He nodded. “Look, Anna, get a decent ladder.”
“I am not going to go buy myself another ladder. My father gave me this.”
“Your father—” He stopped abruptly, wisely thinking better of saying whatever he was thinking. “This is a building site. We have plenty of ladders.”
“And they would be where? Oops, not here.”
He muttered under his breath. “I’ll get you a decent ladder. Just get off that thing before it collapses under you.” He stalked to me, grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me gently but decisively off. He indicated a point at my feet. “Stand there. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Do I look like a cocker spaniel or something?”
“No, though the hair’s about right for an Irish setter. Stay.” With a grin and a hand held up to emphasize the command, he left the room.
I stared at the doorway through which he’d disappeared. I looked at the spot at my feet. With calm deliberation I took my first step. Then my second, and soon I was at the front windows where I had already hung Tuscan Vine. I worked with the folds of the heavy silk fabric, adjusting them to drape just so. I stepped back and eyed the overall effect. I nodded. They looked good, if I did say so myself. Apparently he wasn’t going to say so.
Gray returned, lugging a stepladder that was taller than mine and obviously much sturdier.
“Now you won’t have to stand on the top step, so you can lean into it to keep your balance. No more falls.” He folded my old standby and set up his ladder in its place. It looked strong enough to hold both of us, an unexpectedly cozy thought.
“Now get up there and let me hand you this heavy thing.” He indicated the Tuscan Vine lying on the chair. “Or better yet, let me hang it.”
“That’s all right,” I said as I climbed quickly. I recognized potential disaster when I saw it. “I know what I’m doing.”
He didn’t say a word, merely gathered the fabric in his arms and stood there radiating energy and cooperative spirit. He handed me the top of the panel, and I began attaching it beneath the swag I’d hung earlier. I had to admit that the task was going to be easier now that I didn’t have to both hold the material and attach it.
Movement outside caught my eye. I glanced again at the house kitty-corner from the one I was decorating. The man I’d seen earlier stood at the opening for what I guessed was one day to be the kitchen door. He jumped to the ground. I squinted. What was it about him that was so strange? As I watched, he unscrewed something and stuffed part of it in his pants pocket. The rest he stuck in his waistband at the small of his back, pulling his red shirt over it. After wiping the back of his wrist across his forehead, he peeled flesh-colored gloves from his hands, balled them, and stuffed them in his other pocket. I frowned.
“Gray.” I motioned for him to come look. “The man’s back. He just took off some gloves like the ones doctors wear.”
“Gloves? Why is he wearing gloves in August? And why that kind?”
Like I knew. Shrugging, I moved as far to one side of the ladder as I could so he had room to climb. It vibrated under me as he took the first two steps, then stopped.
“Move to the center,” he said. “I think it will be better if I put one foot on either side of you. Otherwise we’ll be unbalanced.”
I nodded absently and slid to the center, concentrating on the man outside. I blinked in disbelief as he suddenly pulled what could only be a stocking from his head. His features leaped into focus.
“No wonder he looked so funny. He was wearing a stocking over his head.”
“What?” Gray stood on the step below me and tried to peer around me. “Can’t quite see yet.” He slid one foot beside mine, looking down to be sure of its placement. He began to raise himself to slide the other foot in place.
I froze as the man in the yard swiveled his head and looked directly at me. I knew I was highly visible with the westering sun streaming over me, just as he was clearly visible to me, blond hair, hook nose, mustache and all. I’m not very fanciful, but I could feel the malevolence of his stare across the distance and felt goose bumps spring up on my arms.
“What’s wrong?” Gray asked, straightening to peer over my shoulder.
“He’s—” I’d been about to say that he was looking at me, but the sentence changed when he pulled something from the waistband at the small of his back “—got a gun!”
TWO
“He’s got a gun!”
At least that’s what I meant to say. What came out sounded more like I was gargling with a particularly offensive mouthwash. I hurled myself backwards, away from the window, away from the danger.
I slammed hard against Gray who made his own gargling sound. Together we tumbled to the floor, a wild pinwheel of arms and legs. I thought I also heard a particularly heartfelt grunt from Gray when we struck the unforgiving floor. Over the crash of the falling ladder and the terrified beating of my heart, it was hard to discern one sound from another.
There was a brief moment of silence as I lay on my back, breath squished from my lungs by the bone-jarring impact. I stared at the ceiling and the little circles of red dancing across it. I gave a mighty gasp, and oxygen rushed into my depleted system. The red circles disappeared.
A gun! The man had a gun! I had never seen a handgun like that in real life before, and the hairs at the base of my neck twitched as I remembered how one looked pointed directly at me. I rolled off Gray, who had unintentionally buffered my fall, and scuttled on my knees to safety in the front hall.
“Out here should be safe, don’t you think?” I crouched, curled into a ball, and hugged the wall. “He can’t see us here.”
Of course he could decide to walk over to the house and in the unlocked front door that I was staring at. I groaned at the thought, crawled to the door, and turned the lock.
“There!” I pulled myself into a tighter ball. “My phone’s in my purse across the room. You’ll have to call 911.”
Gray didn’t answer, and he didn’t punch numbers. All I heard was a peculiar gasping sound.
“Gray?” I turned, surprised to find he wasn’t in the hall with me. I’d thought he was right behind me. “Gray?” I crawled back to the doorway into the living room and peered in. I clapped my hand to my mouth to stifle a scream. It leaked out anyway.
Gray lay on his back where he’d fallen, his mouth open, his eyes closed, his face covered with blood.
“He shot you!” I crawled toward him. Why, oh why hadn’t I decided to be a nurse rather than an art teacher? “You’re bleeding!”
Gray made that gasping sound again. At least he wasn’t dead.
“Don’t move!” I tried to remember the first aid class I’d taken as part of my health requirement in college. What did you do first? Staunch the blood! That was it. All I had to do was find where the blood was coming from. I put a tentative hand to his head, burying my fingers in his thick hair.
Gray pushed my hand away none too gently, rolled to his side, and pushed to his hands and knees.
“You shouldn’t move.” Gently I tried to push him back to the floor. “Everyone knows you don’t move when you’re shot.”
He resisted my push with a growling sound that reminded me of our neighbor’s ill-tempered schnauzer, Daisy. He gasped again, his back arching like he was doing the cat stretch exercise. Blood poured onto the hardwood floor.
Thank goodness the soft green rug wasn’t being laid until tomorrow.
Gray snaked out a hand to grab the Tuscan Vine, its unattached end sagging from the rod so that
a large puddle of silk lay on the floor. His intent was obvious.
“No!” I leaped to my feet, gunman or no gunman, and snatched up the fabric. “Don’t get that material bloody!” I pulled it as far from him as I could without ripping the already attached end, flinging it over the plum chair, for once mindless of wrinkles. “It costs two hundred and twenty-five dollars a yard.”
“Bake dat three hundred and fifty,” he muttered in an odd voice. He began pulling his T-shirt from his waistband.
“Don’t use your shirt either,” I told him. “You’ll never get the blood out. There are some towels in the kitchen. I’ll get them.”
I ran to the back of the house and grabbed the designer towels laid artistically beside the sink and raced back to Gray. I found him sitting cross-legged on the floor, his head tilted back, his T-shirt bunched under his arms and wadded against his face.
I dropped to my knees beside him and handed him the towels. “Where did he shoot you?” My heart hammered. What if Gray’s handsome face was scarred for life? What if he’d taken a bullet in the eye? Of course, reason told me, if he’d taken a bullet in the eye, he wouldn’t be sitting up holding his nose.
His nose.
“Are you having a nose bleed?” I demanded as my fear and relief transmuted to irritation.
He lowered his head enough to glare at me. “Yes, I’mb having a dose bleed, doe thanks to you.”
“Me? It’s not my fault heights give you nosebleeds.”
“Heights, by foot. Id was your hard head.”
“My head?” I lifted a hand to the back of my head and hit a sore spot. I realized suddenly that I had a miserable headache, one I’d been too frightened to notice before.
“Firs’ you gib me a header, den you dock me flad on by back—and id’s a wonder I didn’t break id—and den you fall on me and dock my breaf out of me so I thought I’d neber breafe again.”
“Well, you don’t have to get so testy about it.” Tears filled my eyes. “I thought you were shot!” Thank You, God, that he wasn’t!
“Shod? Me?”
“By the man with the gun. The man in the yard over there.” I pointed toward the Ryders’ house as goosebumps once again raced up and down my arms.
Gray blinked. “He had a gund?”
“You didn’t see?”
“I din’t ged a chance. I god attacked first.”
“Attacked?” I was torn between guilt for hurting him and indignation that he’d think I did it on purpose. Then I noticed the little upward quirk of his lips where they were visible below the towels. “Beast,” I muttered.
He grinned as he pulled himself to his feet and walked cautiously to the window, towels in place, head still tilted back to stem the flow.
I caught at his arm, trying to pull him back. “Don’t, Gray. He might still be there.”
“I doubt it. He’d either be here—”
I shuddered.
“—or be gond.”
The squeal of tires taking a corner too fast and the snarl of a pedal pressed to the metal made me jump. I rushed to a front window and saw a flash of black disappear down the road bordering Freedom’s Chase.
“See? There he goes,” Gray said. “Id’s safe.”
“How do you know it’s him?”
“When I drove through the develobment for my last check of the evening, I din’t see anyone.”
“No black car anywhere? What’d he do? Hide it in a garage?”
“He was driving a black car? What kind?”
I threw up my hands. “How should I know? They all look alike.”
He gave me that guy look. “They don’t, but that’s beside the point.”
“It was just black, and what is your point?”
“My point is that there couldn’t have been anyone other than him hanging around. I’m not that blind.”
I decided that his flawed logic wasn’t worth a comment. Still, I did agree with his thought that the man would either be here ready to do us further damage or be gone. Since he wasn’t here, and since I’d heard that car take off like a proverbial bat trying to escape a very hot place, I relaxed.
“We deed to report this to the police,” Gray said.
I nodded. “He pulled it from his waistband.” I whipped my hand up to illustrate.
Gray nodded as he looked out the back window toward the Ryders’.
“You can’t see much of anything but the roof unless you climb the ladder. Remember?”
“Id’s my nose that got creamed, nod my brain. I bemember.”
“Well, you don’t have to be all snippy about it.”
He looked down at me from his awkward head tilt. “I think I’mb entitled to be a liddle snippy.”
I sighed. Maybe he was. All he’d wanted to do was to lock up and go home, probably to take some beautiful woman—his wife?—to dinner. Well, it wasn’t my fault that man had a gun and that I was scared of men with guns. Everybody was scared of men with guns.
Holding on to the ladder with one hand as he held the towels to his nose with the other, Gray climbed one rung at a time.
“He’s not dere now,” he said as he searched the area, head swinging from left to right. “We’re right. He’s gond.” He started back down the ladder, froze momentarily, then leaped back just as I had. Somehow he managed to make that giant step to the ground look easy, landing neatly on his feet.
“What?” I looked from him to the window. “What’d you see?” Then I saw it, a small hole in the glass near the top on the right. “G-gray.” I pointed.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice no longer peeved or teasing but thoughtful. He looked at me. “I think he’d have missed you even if you hadn’t ducked, bud id’s probably a good thing you did.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” The man in the red shirt had shot at me! Me, Anna Volente, intermediate school art teacher and registered coward.
I stepped closer to Gray. My hands started to shake, and my stomach felt dangerously unsettled. I swallowed several times to make sure things stayed where they were supposed to. Blood on the floor was enough of a mess. I took another step closer.
Gray pulled his cell phone from his belt and held it out to me. “Call 911. I’mb afraid to take the pressure off my dose.”
I hit the digits and spoke to the voice at the other end, ending with, “No, neither of us was shot. No, we can’t see him any more. We think we heard him drive away. Yes, we’ll wait.”
When I disconnected, I rubbed my cold arms. “But he saw me, Gray. And he knows I saw him. What if he’s now out to get me?”
“I wouldn’t worry.” Gray started walking toward the kitchen. “He’s long gone. He had to know we’d call the cops, and doe one hangs around waiting for the cops to show.”
“But what if he comes back?”
“You won’t be here. You’ll be home, tucked safely in bed.”
I followed him to the kitchen, glancing uneasily over my shoulder at the hole in the window. “Where are we going?”
“Here.” Gray leaned his body over the sink, then slowly withdrew the towels from his nose. He stood unmoving, head still slightly tilted upwards. “I’mb not bleeding any more, amb I?”
I looked at him carefully. “No, but you look like you’ve been in the war.” I grabbed one of the towels and wet a corner not covered with red. “Look here.”
Gray stood impatiently as I began the delicate job of swabbing his face and neck without hurting him further. After a minute of my tentative swipes, he reached for the cold water, turned it on full and threw handful after handful over himself, scrubbing his cheeks and neck after each wave. Then very gently he scrubbed beneath his nose.
He turned to me, dripping onto his bloody shirt. “How’s that?”
“Pretty good.” I reached up and wiped at a patch of red beside his nose. He grimaced, whether from pain because I hit a tender area or from reluctance to have me touch him, I couldn’t tell. He lifted an arm and dried one side of his face on a shirt
sleeve. He repeated the operation with the other sleeve.
I eyed his shirt. The blood was turning rusty around the edges of the stains.
He looked down and shrugged. “Can’t do too much about that. I’ll just toss it.” He started toward the back door. “I won’t be long. I need to check the Ryders’ to make certain there was no damage done by our armed visitor. Don’t leave before I come back. I want to walk you to your car.” He looked back at me and grinned. “And don’t stand in front of any windows.”
I stared at him. Was that last line supposed to be funny? Because it wasn’t. “I thought you thought he left.”
“I do. You don’t need to worry. You’ll be fine.”
“You can’t know that.”
He nodded agreeably. “You’re right. I can’t. Let’s say you’ll probably be fine.”
That settled it. “I’m coming with you.”
He raised his eyebrows at me.
“It isn’t safe for you to be alone either.” I tried to sound as if I was selfless, full of concern about him. I didn’t want to admit out loud that I was reluctant—admit it, kid, you’re downright scared—to be in the house by myself.
“Don’t want to stay here alone, eh?” His smile was only slightly teasing, very understanding.
I felt my cheeks flush. Sometimes intelligent men were a burden.
We struck off across the newly sodded backyard, around the back fence and into the Ryders’ backyard, me practically skipping to keep up with Gray’s long stride.
I stared at the unfinished house wrapped in Tyvec. The holes where the windows would go stared back at me like black, empty eyes in the gathering dusk and gave me the creeps. I looked instead at the scale of the house.
“Why do people buy places this big?” I thought of the small, two-bedroom apartment I’d lived in before I moved in with Lucy and Meaghan. The whole thing would fit into the great room of the model, and this house didn’t look any smaller.
Gray shrugged. “Americans like big.”
“Even if they can’t afford to furnish half the rooms? Even if they can’t go on a vacation for years because they’re house-poor, or put money aside for their kids’ braces and educations because they have to pay that astronomical mortgage every month? Even if they both have to work to stay afloat financially, leaving the kids to raise themselves?”
