“At first, I thought it was relatively innocuous. Sick, sure, but not life-threatening—someone wanted to play tricks on you, scare the spit out of you, but that was all. It escalated when they hurt Bailey. And with the snake, they’ve really upped the ante. Now I think you’re in danger, real danger.”
“Danger?”
Another notion popped into his mind, making him step back and scratch his head. “Although, whoever it is, is proceeding in a pretty roundabout way.”
She swung her legs out of the car and set her feet on the ground. Hands gripping the water glass, she stared up at him. “What do you mean?”
“If someone wanted to harm you, then all they’d have to do is surprise you up here and, well—” he chose his words carefully “—hurt you.” He didn’t use the word kill because that would be too much to pile on her already fragile state of mind. But he was thinking it.
“But why?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it? Can you think of any reason? Do you, did your husband, have any enemies? From your past or his?”
She shook her head vehemently. “I honestly can’t think of one, not who would do this.”
“Well, there has to be someone. Think.”
His own mind raced over various possibilities, the most obvious one, learned his first year on the job, being who would gain from a crime. “Have you made a will?”
“Not yet.”
“So, if anything were to happen to you, your family—your brothers—will inherit.”
“Over my dead body!” she exclaimed, then her hand flew to her mouth and she moaned, “Oh, God, I didn’t say that.”
Grabbing the glass, he lay it on its side. Then, taking hold of her wrists, Paul pulled her up off the car seat. He brought her hands to his chest and covered them with his, held them there while he said, “Kayla, you’re a sitting duck up here. A woman alone, unarmed, not used to danger. And it’s not like you have any protection. I mean, Bailey was less than a watchdog. You’d need a trained German shepherd or a Doberman to actually have some defense against intruders. A gate around the place. An alarm system. A gun.”
“Never.” She shuddered. “I hate the things.”
“So does everyone, until they need one.”
When she jerked her hands, he realized he was hurting her. He released them, stood back to give her some room. “Sorry. I keep holding you too tightly.”
“No, no, it’s okay.” She rubbed her wrists, then ploughed her fingers through her hair nervously. “It’s always felt so safe up here. I’ve never had to think about protecting myself before.”
“You didn’t have to think about it.” He paused. “Before.”
He could see hope flare in her eyes as a thought hit her. “But you’ll be here now, Paul, on the premises. That will help, won’t it?”
He lifted a shoulder, dropped it. “Some. But it’s no guarantee. Don’t make me out to be some kind of comic-book superhero.”
“Really? I thought you were.”
He was momentarily gladdened by the tiny smile that formed on her mouth, but he snapped right back to being serious. “No. I’m all too human. And I’m scared for you. I would feel a hell of a lot better if you left here for a while. Let the state cops do some legwork. Let the Albany cops find your brother.”
Her brow furrowed. “You want me to leave?”
“Yes.”
“Run away?”
“It’s not running away, Kayla. It’s being smart. And safe.”
She met his gaze, her grim expression matching his. For a moment neither of them said a thing, then Paul swallowed a sudden lump in his throat and said, “I would hate anything to happen to you. You’re very important to me, Kayla. In case you didn’t know.”
The expression on her face softened. “I do. And the feeling is mutual.”
He felt his heart fill up with some unnamed emotion. He wanted to reach for her, take her in his arms, keep all harm away from her. But he understood that she needed to make her mind up about what to do, and she needed to do that alone.
She moved away from the car and stared down the driveway, elbows crossed, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. After a few moments, she shook her head slowly.
“No,” she said, then, more strongly, “No” again. “I will not run away.” Wheeling around, she faced him, all traces of the victim gone from her body language. She stood tall, shoulders back. “In fact, I’m going back into the house and making myself some tea while we’re waiting for everyone to arrive. Care to join me?”
Even though he hated her decision, Paul could only marvel at the change in her. She’d gone from being terrified, nearly childish with fear, to a woman brimming with spunk and determination. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” She slapped her hands on her hips. “If that snake makes another appearance, well, I’ll just have to deal with it.” She shuddered briefly after her brave pronouncement but regained her determined posture right away. “So there!”
Buoyed by her decision, and by the warmth she felt inside at the fact that Paul, Mr. Emotional Reticence, had actually admitted she was important to him, Kayla marched herself into the kitchen, Paul right behind her. When they got there, he propped a hip against the counter and watched as she put the kettle on to boil.
“You know something?” he said. “You are one brave lady.”
Was he kidding? “Brave? I’m quaking inside.”
“That’s the definition of bravery. It’s easy to face danger head-on if you’re not scared. Bravery means you’re terrified, but you face it, anyway.”
“Well then,” she said wryly, “I’m extremely brave.”
She actually got a smile from him then. Just a tiny upturn at the corners of his stern mouth, but still…
“Call the record books! Second time I caught you in a flagrant smile.”
“I wish it were funny.”
She sighed, nodded. Dear heavens, this was such a strange situation. And wasn’t she lucky to have Paul here! What would she have done without him? She shuddered to think.
As she busied herself steeping the tea in boiling water, Paul found some tongs and plastic bags. She watched from the window as he went back outside and retrieved the package and all its wrappings, setting them down on the long, well-used wooden dining room table in the alcove adjacent to the kitchen.
She stared at the box that had contained the snake and felt another involuntary shudder course through her body. “When are the police and Animal Regulation people coming?”
“As soon as they can, is all they said.”
“If we have our tea out on the porch, will the snake come and get me?” She said it half mockingly, but she saw from his expression that he understood.
“I’ll keep an eye out, don’t worry. Believe me, he’ll stay as far away from us as he can. In fact, he’ll probably be trying to find some water.”
She darted a quick glance around her. “Kitchens have lots of water.”
“There’s no way to get into the kitchen from below. I checked.”
“Whew.”
Taking their teacups with them, they crossed the living room and headed out to the porch. Once there, they sat side by side on the Adirondack chairs and faced the view.
It was cloudier today than it had been, Kayla noted, although no, she decided, they weren’t rain clouds. When she took a sip of her tea, her hand was still shaking. She set the cup down, annoyed at her body’s reaction.
“Do you know why I wanted to come out here? Because, of all the places I’ve lived, I think of this place, this porch, as my home.” She angled her head to face him. “It feels, or it used to feel, safe. Does that sound strange?”
He took a moment to think about it, then shook his head. “No. There’s something…cocoon-ish about the place, isn’t there? Like nothing can hurt you here, like you’re wrapped in a warm blanket as you gaze out on the big, wide world, which isn’t a very safe place at all.”
Her eyes widened as she stare
d at him in amazement. He got it, one hundred percent. “Exactly…which is why I’m not good with this kind of thing.”
“Which kind of thing?”
“The thought of someone invading my safe place, wanting to hurt me. Of violence of any sort.” She gazed down at her hands, folded in her lap. “There was so much of it when I was a child. It was all around me.”
“Violence?”
She glanced at Paul. He was watching her, his eyes narrowed with concern. She nodded, then returned her gaze to the expanse of mountains and open sky. Always, this view had calmed her down, and she willed it to do its magic today.
“I used to run away from it,” she told him. “Hide under the bed or wherever I could find some…I don’t know, some sense of safety. That’s how I dealt with it then, and old habits die hard.”
“What were you running away from?” When, at first she didn’t answer, he persisted. “Tell me. Was it bad?”
She didn’t really want to talk about it, which was why it struck her as odd that she’d brought it up in the first place.
“Kayla. You can trust me.”
She met his silver gaze, saw again that same unguarded tenderness he’d shown just moments ago when he’d said she was important to him. “I know I can.”
“Tell me.”
Still, she hesitated. She never talked about her childhood, not with anyone—except Walter, of course—but she felt she could with Paul. There was something comforting and comfortable about being out here on the porch with him, two scarred souls and the mountains.
It was then she realized that a major shift had taken place inside her. Not only did she trust him, but more and more she’d come to lean on him. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? What had happened to the woman who was so adamantly set against leaning too much on a macho man for protection? When had he wormed his way into her head and heart as someone it was okay to let down her guard with?
She sighed. Barriers were erected for a reason, and were let down for other reasons. And right now, she needed someone to lean on.
She took in a breath of fresh air and began. “I told you I was the only girl of five kids. My mom died when I was three—I don’t remember her. And the rest of my childhood was pretty dismal. Never enough money or food to eat, lots of hard work. I was Cinderella before the ball, doing all the washing and cleaning and cooking. If I’d been a tomboy, it might have been better. I might have fit in more with the rest of them. But I was one of those girls who played with dolls and took care of injured animals. They made fun of me, giving me daily doses of teasing and bullying.”
“From your brothers?”
“Yes.”
“What about your father?”
She shrugged. “He drank, and when he did, there were always beatings. The boys got most of those. Afterward they would turn on one another, do even more damage.”
“And on you? Did they beat you?”
“Sometimes. But they soon learned that if they hurt me too much I was in no shape to run the house and wait on them, so eventually they stopped. But they sure knocked one another around all the time. It was sport to them.”
She saw a small muscle in his jaw clench before he asked, “Did they…abuse you? Sexually?”
“No. Although a couple of my brothers made moves.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “One good thing I’ll say for my father—the only good thing—he put the fear of God into them about that. So, no, there was no sexual abuse. Not at home.”
“Not at home?”
“No, that happened when I was sixteen.” She stopped, swallowed, not sure she wanted to go back there.
Paul knew that what Kayla needed, most of all, was a good listener, and he wanted to be that for her. But his insides were roiling with anger—at her father, her brothers, at fate. Injustice again. Take a gentle little girl, toss her into a pack of animals and give her no helping hand at all. Life could be so damned heartless.
He ordered his seething insides to relax. She didn’t need his rage at her childhood; she needed his compassion.
Her hand was resting on one of the chair’s broad arms. He reached over, took it in his and squeezed it, saying quietly, “Tell me.”
She let out a small sigh, closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. “His name was Jerry Donley. We’d moved to Phoenix just in time for my junior year. He was a big jock, a senior, and I’d had this crush on him for months. Silently, of course. If I’d told anyone, I’d have been laughed at. He asked me to a dance. I was beside myself with excitement. It was my first date, ever, and I saved up all my baby-sitting money to buy a dress. It was pale blue…”
He watched her face, saw tears brimming beneath her closed lids. He squeezed her hand again, comforting her, letting her know he was there. “You don’t have to go on, if you don’t want to,” he said.
She opened her eyes, smiled at him. “No, I want to.” She swiped a finger under each eye, took a sip of her tea, then set it down again. In a voice that seemed strangely calm, she said, “We didn’t even get to the dance. It happened in the car on the way. He pulled off the road into a cove where the local kids used to park. He…overpowered me. I didn’t really understand what was happening. I had never even been kissed. He—” she swallowed “—raped me.”
She sat still for a moment, as though remembering the horror of that evening, then added, “It was quite an introduction to what goes on between men and women.”
Paul muttered a curse under his breath; he felt as though someone had taken a knife and stabbed him in the gut, that’s how much he hurt for her.
“I tried to get out of the car, but he hit me, again and again, and then he raped me one more time for good measure. After that he pushed me out of the car and drove off to the dance. To his real date.”
“God!” Paul could barely contain himself.
“God wasn’t there that night,” she said quietly.
He took a minute to try to calm down, then asked, “Did you go to the cops? Press charges?”
She shook her head. “I had been well taught, by then, that if I was in trouble, I had to keep it to myself or there would be…repercussions.”
Man, but he was having a hard time restraining his fury. He let go of her hand, made a fist and hit the chair arm, hard. Kayla jumped, startled.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “But I’d like to get my hands on that creep.”
“You’d have to go to a mass grave in Bosnia for that. After I told Walter about it, he had Jerry tracked down. He died in a fire while stationed there a few years ago.”
“Serves him right.”
She shrugged. “I suppose so. When I heard the news, I didn’t feel much triumph or much of anything. Just…sad. I had grown up by then. It took a while. For years afterward, I was a mess.”
It was nearly unbearable, hearing what had happened to her, and being unable to help in any way. “I wish I had been around. I wish I could have fixed it for you.”
“Oh, Paul,” she said with a watery smile, “that’s so sweet.”
“Yeah, right. Sweet. Go on, tell me how you got through it.”
“I never talked about it, not to anyone, just kept running. I left home without graduating high school, came east, started working. Got my GED, put myself through nursing school, worked two jobs and took out loans to do it. I gave myself no time to think. I hid from myself, afraid to touch that…despair I knew was just waiting to get me.”
“What changed you?” The rage was slowly receding, being replaced by that same dull ache of hurt for her.
“After about a year of nursing school, after years of stammering if a man showed any interest in me, years of having panic reactions and running from the dark and the night, I got help. I heard a lecture on surviving rape and I got into a group with other survivors, then had some one-on-one therapy. I had felt so alone, you see, with this shameful secret, and then I learned that what had happened to me was all too common, that if I let it defeat me, then he—Jerry—won. If I didn’t make some att
empt to have a normal life, then he, and all the Jerry Donleys of the world, had the power, and could crush the life out of anyone who wouldn’t stand up to them.”
She angled her body to face him, her emotions right there on the surface. “I made myself confront all the fears, including self-recriminations that I’d been carrying around with me forever. You know, what had I done to make him do that to me? Why hadn’t I fought harder? What was it about me that had, maybe, even asked for it? The answer of course was that I had done nothing, nothing to cause it. That I had simply crossed paths with a monster.”
It was amazing, Kayla thought, how Paul listened. Most men had short attention spans when it came to hearing the whole story with all the details, but not him. He listened with that same intensity with which he did everything.
As Paul nodded, Kayla blew out a breath, the fierce force of memory drifting away with the cleansing effect of telling the story. “After that, I learned how to take care of myself, really take care of myself, not by hiding but by taking action. I took some self-defense classes, trained myself to not back down in a fight, to face it head-on. Not with violence, but with words.”
“Like you did with Steven.”
“Yes. I won’t be a victim, ever again.”
“Which is why you won’t leave here now.”
“Which is why I won’t leave.”
Kayla fell quiet then, and so did Paul. For several moments she let her mind empty, just listened to the birds chatter and sing in the trees all around the property, breathed in the air, even felt a touch of warm sunlight as it broke out from behind a cloud. She took another sip of her now lukewarm tea and watched a hawk circle lazily in the sky.
“What about…?” Paul’s voice startled her out of her reverie. “Damn,” he said quickly, “it’s none of my business.”
“What about what?”
“Well…” He raised and lowered one shoulder, and she could see that he wished he hadn’t asked. “I mean, I would think you would be pretty turned off by men.”
“Oh, I was.” She smiled at his discomfort. “After a while, I took the plunge. Dated some. Learned how to enjoy lovemaking, too. Not often and not with anyone special, really, but I felt I was a member of the human race, at least. And then…Walter came into my life.”
Whispers in the Night Page 14
