Silent Threat

by Dana Marton

  “Herbal tea. Hibiscus pomegranate.”

  He shook his head as he started the engine. “That’s not normal. You know that, right?”

  “Considering the effect caffeine has on the nervous system, everyone should—”

  He raised his index finger between them. “If you bad-mouth coffee, I don’t think we can be friends.”

  She watched him as he drove out of the parking lot.

  Friends. Is that what they were becoming?

  Not really.

  He was her patient. In a few weeks, he would be gone. He shouldn’t need a lot more time in intensive therapy than that. What the staff did at Hope Hill worked.

  Annie liked seeing patients getting better and stretching their wings, flying away. And she’d be happy for Cole when he did the same. If she felt a pang of something else at the thought of him leaving, she shoved the knowledge away.

  “Might as well stop by the feed store on the way over.” She gave him directions. Best to just focus on the work.

  At the store, she picked out what she needed and asked for help with loading the truck. While she was chatting with Maddie at the counter, the woman’s eyes rounded as she openly ogled Cole through the window. She was forty, newly single, and definitely enjoying the freedom to look.

  Annie turned, her gaze snared by the sight of Cole tossing fifty-pound feedbags into the back of the truck one-handed. And when Maddie sighed, Annie might have echoed her.

  Then she snapped out of it and ran. If he hurt himself, the physical therapist was going to strangle her.

  “Cole!” But because she was behind him, he couldn’t hear her, so she had to tap his shoulder.

  “What?” he turned, his gaze immediately snapping to her mouth. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  “Don’t hurt yourself.” As soon as the words were out, she knew she shouldn’t have said them.

  A hard look came into his eyes. “I’m not useless.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Obviously, you’re stronger one-handed than I am with two. But you’re still recovering.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “I’m not recovering.” The words came out clipped. “I’ll never be recovered. My right arm will never regain full movement.”

  Her heart fluttered and maybe bled a little. But the last thing he’d want was her pity.

  So she said, “Let’s not pretend you can’t do twice what normal men can, with one arm tied behind your back. Honestly. To be frank, this kind of petty whining is completely unappealing. Also unbecoming a Navy SEAL.”

  She passed him and put the milk for the skunks into the cab. When, from the corner of her eye, she saw him shaking his head and going back to work, she got into the cab without offering to help.

  A couple of minutes passed before he slid behind the wheel next to her. “Don’t think I don’t know you’re trying to manipulate my emotions with some kind of therapist ninja tricks.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m an ecotherapist. Ninja therapy is a completely different branch. I could never do that. I don’t even like wearing black.”

  The tight set of his mouth softened again. He didn’t look quite as lighthearted as earlier, but he wasn’t back to full resistance either. Annie relaxed into her seat.

  Recovery had two components: physical and psychological. As far as she was concerned, the latter was more important. She was always fully conscious of that during a therapy session. In a session, she would never tell anyone they couldn’t do something, like she had just done to Cole. She’d slipped. Cole was out here, in her real life, and it threw her off.

  The patients at Hope Hill weren’t locked up. Annie ran into them in town all the time, chatted, even had coffee with a few. But they hadn’t hung around her like Cole, hadn’t gone home with her.

  He was more intense, more take-charge than the others. He didn’t exactly ask. He went ahead and did what he wanted. Maybe the need to dominate was a Navy SEAL thing. Would those qualities help or hinder him in his recovery? She hoped for the former.

  “Did you always live in Broslin?” he asked.

  “Lived here as a kid, moved away, then moved back recently.”

  “Big family?”

  “One grandfather and one cousin.”

  “How do they feel about the nature-therapy thing?”

  She grinned. “You make it sound like I’m a pole dancer.”

  His gaze sharpened. A hungry-bear look came into his eyes, and it sent a shiver of awareness down her spine.

  “Ecotherapy is a legitimate branch of therapy, based on scientific study,” she rushed to say as they stopped at a red light. “Paoli Hospital is not that far from here, up on Route 30. They did one of the early studies there. The ward where their gallbladder patients recover has an odd arrangement. Half the rooms have windows that look at a brick wall, and the other half look at a courtyard with trees. The patients in the rooms that look to the courtyard were able to go home a day early, on average. They needed one dose of heavy drugs postsurgery to deal with pain. The brick-wall patients needed four.”

  He didn’t say anything. Looked thoughtful. At least he was no longer laughing at the concept.

  “Japan and Germany have done a bunch of similar studies,” she added. “Nature therapy has been long accepted and used there. In Japan, they call it shinrin-yoku, forest bathing.” And because Cole didn’t stop her, she kept going.

  By the time they reached her house, the contractor’s truck waited by the curb, next to the dumpster. As Cole pulled into the driveway, Ed Sanders came around the back.

  The contractor was in his midfifties, in good shape, hair that sexy salt-and-pepper gray. He wore his trademark overalls stamped with the red company logo designed by his wife. He lifted a calloused hand in greeting. “Hey there.”

  After Annie introduced the two men, Ed fitted her with a hardhat from the back of his truck and took her around back, leaving Cole to unload the feed bags. Nothing she could say to him would stop him anyway.

  “How bad is it?” She eyed the blue tarp tacked to where the bathroom wall used to be.

  “Not good.” Ed looked upset on her behalf. “You ought to look up whoever inspected this house when you bought it and ask for your money back.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind. The house isn’t going to collapse, is it?”

  “Not from this damage, but let me look inside before I give you a definitive answer.”

  She had the keys, so she let him in the back door, into the kitchen that also stood in shambles.

  He walked through, making sympathetic noises. “Natalie saw the show. She said it was something.”

  Natalie, his wife, was a soft-spoken, lanky black woman who ran the Broslin Ballet School. She was about five years older than Annie, always impeccably put together, graceful, and kind. She donated free dance lessons to foster kids.

  Back in July, Natalie had Annie bring two orphaned baby goats over to the dance school so the girls could copy the goat kids’ frolicking for two hours as a movement lesson. Annie had never laughed so hard in her life. She had a feeling neither had some of the girls. She had the video on her animal-sanctuary website. That single video had received twice as many clicks as all her other posts put together.

  Ed thought Natalie hung the moon and the stars. That Annie still believed in true love was at least half due to the two of them.

  Ed scratched his neck. “So I take it Kelly’s crew ain’t coming back to fix this mess?”

  Annie winced. “They aren’t really a crew. They were picked more for decoration. Kelly pulled them together for the show.”

  “Were they insured and bonded?”

  Annie looked down at her shoes. “I feel pretty stupid.”

  Ed patted her arm in a fatherly gesture. “You were helping your cousin.”

  “She was helping me too. Can’t blame her for not knowing the bathroom studs were rotten. I live here, and I didn’t know it either.”

  They walked
back to the bathroom, to the worst of the damage. Every time she looked at that blue tarp, she wanted to cry.

  Ed tapped around and shone his flashlight into the walls and partially open ceiling. He hemmed and hawed, but then finally said the words Annie most wanted to hear. “Good news is, the house definitely isn’t gonna collapse.”

  But before Annie could sink into sweet relief, Ed added, “Bad news is, I’m booked a couple of months out. I’ll ask the crew and see how many guys can come over after the regular hours.” He frowned.

  “But?”

  “They can still only put in an hour or two a day. Construction’s hard work. They’re pretty tired by the time I’m done with them. And they’ll want overtime.”

  While that sounded reasonable, it also sounded expensive. And slow. So much for a quick fix.

  She must have looked as discouraged as she felt, because Ed said, “You could ask someone else. I won’t be offended.”

  “I’d rather wait for you.” She wanted someone she trusted.

  “I’ll send out someone with some plywood, tomorrow the latest. He’ll seal up the hole, so at least the house will be secure. Then I’ll make sure someone comes by to clean up the construction rubble inside. I saw you have a construction container already, so at least we don’t have to wait for that.”

  “You have a roundabout estimate?”

  “I’ll work one up by tomorrow. Then I’ll see if I can squeeze you in the schedule somehow. If you’re sure Kelly’s crew won’t come back.”

  “I’m sure. Her guys looked traumatized.” Rob, the one who’d knocked out the wall, had called twice to apologize. “And I think Kelly lost confidence.”

  “She’ll bounce back. That girl always does. Shame about her husband.”

  Annie couldn’t deny Kelly’s resilience. She wanted their relationship to be less strained, but she wasn’t sure how to overwrite the past.

  “I called the insurance company yesterday,” she told Ed. “They’re sending a claims adjuster next week.”

  “We shouldn’t do anything until they see everything and take pictures.” Ed began walking out. “Give me a call after they leave. Think about how you want to fix up things, how much budget you can get together. See how much the insurance gives you, then call the TV station and Kelly. They should take responsibility.”

  “I’ll contact the TV station.” Although, as far as she knew, the tiny local station was always strapped financially. And Annie definitely wasn’t going to sue her own cousin.

  Ed left with an encouraging smile and a friendly wave. Annie headed to the garage, not surprised to see Cole’s shiny new truck in the driveway already unloaded.

  She went in search of him.

  He wasn’t in the garage. Weird. He hadn’t been in the house, so where was he?

  Finally, as she went around the front, she saw him by the road. She could see the tight set of his mouth even from thirty feet away. Now what? Then she saw what he was looking at, and her breath caught.

  Could I, please, catch a break?

  A ten-foot section of her fence was down past the garage, posts and wire fencing lying on the ground, demolished.

  Cole must have seen her from the corner of his eye, because he turned toward her.

  “When did this happen?” she asked.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  She was moving too fast, nearly running, so he couldn’t read her lips. She slowed down as she neared. “When did this happen?”

  “Sometime after we left last night.” He ran a hand over his bald head, his wide shoulders stiff as he considered the mess. “I would have seen this kind of damage as we drove away. It’s a big fricking hole.”

  She didn’t grind her teeth, but only because she couldn’t afford the dentist. “Someone went off the road. Did they leave a note?”

  “Not here.”

  She checked her phone. Nobody had sent her a text or left a message while she’d been talking with Ed. If a neighbor had done this, they might have. “I’m going to check the mailbox.”

  Whoever had run over her fence had better step up to the plate and accept responsibility—pay for the repairs. She had to have the fence fixed. The llamas, along with Esmeralda the donkey, and sometimes even Dorothy the pig, spent most of their day outside. It would be bad enough when the weather turned cold and they had to be cooped up inside.

  She searched through her mailbox and groaned when she found nothing but junk mail and bills. She put them in Cole’s pickup. She’d look through them at Hope Hill.

  By the time she returned to Cole, he was standing on the shoulder of the road, among her small field of colorful whirligigs. His expression was closed, his body even tenser than when she’d left him.

  Then she saw the small lump in the grass next to him, and she tensed too.

  Not again. She moved forward with dread.

  The fully grown fox lay motionless, eyes glazed over, limbs frozen in death. His beautiful autumn-red fur ruffled in the slight breeze.

  Annie’s throat tightened. Her heart clenched. She hated seeing an animal hurt. She hated seeing one dead. What people felt for the loss of a beloved pet, she felt for every deer, woodchuck, and raccoon she saw by the side of the road. She’d always been that way. She couldn’t even stand it when people ran over the worms on the asphalt after a rain.

  “I hate this stupid curve in the road.” Misery and frustration thickened her voice. “You have no idea how many animals get hit here.”

  “Is that why you have all these?” Cole jerked his head toward the slowly clattering whirligigs.

  “Yes. To scare animals away from crossing the road here where people can’t see them as they drive around the curve.”

  Cole watched her with that expressionless gaze of his, probably thinking she was a nutjob for being this upset over a stray fox and for trying to stop animals from getting run over. But when he opened his mouth, he didn’t bring up her weirdness.

  Instead, he said, “Whoever hit your fence didn’t lose control of their car. They hit the fence on purpose.”

  She glanced between him and the fence as she processed his words.

  “No skid marks on the road,” he pointed out. “No skid marks on the shoulder. No skid marks on the grass.” He watched her. “Your stalker ex?”

  Her mind, too, immediately jumped to Joey, but she rejected the idea just as fast. “Joey wouldn’t do this. Nobody would do something like this on purpose. Why would they?”

  She wanted agreement from Cole, but Cole wasn’t done yet.

  “The fox wasn’t hit here.” He toed the animal with his boot and turned the stiff body, making Annie’s stomach lurch. “No blood on the ground. No blood on the road. No blood on the shoulder. Somebody hit this fox somewhere else, or found the carcass on the side of the road, and brought it here.”

  She blinked at him and shivered. She rubbed her arms, frowning in her effort to understand. Someone brought her a dead animal? For what possible purpose?

  “You say this happens a lot,” Cole said in a careful tone. “How often?”

  She had to think. “Once a week? Sometimes more than once.”

  “Since when?”

  “It started a couple of months ago. Around the time when they broke ground on that new development on Victoria Circle. I figured the noise was scaring animals this way. I started finding—” She flinched. “When I come out in the morning.”

  “Do they do construction at night?”

  What? “No.”

  Then she caught his meaning. Oh. She always found the broken little bodies in the morning. The animals were hit at night. But they wouldn’t be running from the construction noises at night.

  She felt stupid for not having thought of that before. Yet she still wasn’t ready to concede. “That doesn’t mean someone is bringing them here.”

  The maliciousness of the idea raised goose bumps on her arms. She had a hard time believing anyone would do that. There had to be another explanation.

 
Cole kept watching her. “You drive around town an average amount?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you see roadkill always in the same spot, this often?”

  She thought about it. “Roadkill yes, but here and there, not concentrated like this. It’s the country. We have animals all over. You see roadkill every day. But not in the same place.”

  She had trouble comprehending what that meant. After all the grief and worry and heartbreak she’d felt because she hadn’t been able to save these animals . . . someone had done that to her on purpose.

  Who would do something like this?

  She still didn’t want to accept the possibility. “I don’t think—”

  Irritation flashed across Cole’s face as he took her by the shoulders. A shoulder and an elbow, actually, since his injured arm didn’t have full range of motion and couldn’t reach all the way up.

  He fairly towered over her, and her breath caught. He really was as big as a bear.

  He flashed a dark scowl. He was standing too close, his gaze too heated, his tone clipped when he said, “You can’t brush this off.”

  She tried to shrug his hands off, but he was unmovable. “Stop trying to scare me.”

  “Stop pretending, dammit! Denial can be as lethal as a hand grenade.” He growled the words.

  Chapter Eight

  COLD FURY COURSED through Cole at whoever was threatening Annie. Close on fury’s heels came frustration. He couldn’t stand seeing her so crestfallen.

  His fingers tightened on her as he drew in a rough breath. “You’re too damned determined to assume the best of everybody.”

  She needed to grow up, and in a hurry.

  “You’re the most softhearted person I’ve ever known, you know that?” Pure light. Hopelessly unfit for living in a harsh world. He wanted to shake her and snap her into reality. He wanted to protect her.

  Maybe if he stopped acting like a Neanderthal, she’d let him.

  He dropped his hands.

  “I’ll see what I can do about the fence.” He pivoted while she still stood there, wide-eyed at his outburst. He stalked toward the collapsed section, calling over his shoulder, “You call the cops.”