The Girl Who Cried Murder Read online

  Eric pressed his lips into a tight line. “Stabbed the cat for the same reason?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe the cat got in the way. Wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Hissing and spitting, getting in the way...”

  “Right.”

  Eric’s voice dipped a notch. “Do the bosses know you’re getting involved in Charlie’s mess?”

  “Sort of.” Mike hadn’t really talked to Heller about anything that had happened since the tampered brakes incident. His boss was probably expecting to hear something from him soon. “I’ll give Heller a call. Catch him up on everything.”

  But not tonight. He couldn’t risk Heller telling him to back off and let Charlie handle things alone.

  He didn’t want to defy a direct order.

  “You want me to stick around awhile?” Eric asked. “I could help with the cleanup.”

  Mike thought about it. “I think she’s going to be uncomfortable enough with me there. You go on home. If anything comes up, I have your number.”

  Eric clapped him on the shoulder. “Okay. Take care. Tell Charlie I’m sorry about the mess, and I hope her cat’s going to be okay.”

  When Mike entered the house, he found Charlie already hard at work cleaning up the mess. She had a broom and a long-handled dustpan in her hands, sweeping up the shattered bits of her belongings and dumping them into a large trash can lined with a plastic bin liner.

  “How can I help?” he asked.

  She looked up at him, her hazel eyes dark with anger, and for a second, he feared she was going to throw him out. But finally, she thrust the dustpan at him. “I’ll sweep. You dump.”

  He took the dustpan and helped her sweep up the mess. When the worst of the small pieces had been thrown away, they started tackling the bigger pieces of detritus—the ruined sofa cushions, the mangled bits of electronics. They worked that way for another hour, in silent concert, until the living room had been cleared of most of the chaos.

  “Good thing someone scared them off,” Charlie muttered as she retrieved the dustpan from him. “Or we might have been at this all night.”

  “Why don’t you go on to bed?” he suggested. “I can lock up.”

  “Fat lot of good that lock did me today,” she muttered, slanting an accusing glare at the door.

  “We’ll put in a new lock tomorrow. And if you’re serious about a security system, that’s one of the things we offer at Campbell Cove Security Services.”

  She turned her glare on him. “So all this solicitude is a sales pitch?”

  “No, of course not—”

  She gave his arm a light punch and grinned. “Just kidding.”

  He couldn’t muster up a smile in return. “You are taking this stuff seriously, aren’t you, Charlie?”

  Her smile faded. “Yeah, I’m taking it seriously. I just don’t know why it’s happening.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Believe me, if I knew who was doing this, I’d find a way to stop it myself.”

  He moved away from her, crossing to the remains of a rocker they’d stacked next to the door. He’d told her not to throw it out until he’d had a chance to look at it more closely. He crouched next to it now, examining the damage. “It’s just— It seems such a coincidence that you start taking a self-defense class and suddenly you’re facing two threatening incidents.”

  “Coincidence. Luck. Whatever you want to call it.” She didn’t sound terribly convincing.

  He quelled the urge to look at her and kept his focus on the rocking chair instead. The pieces weren’t broken, he realized with a closer look. The legs were pulled out of their sockets and the rockers twisted out of place, but none of the individual pieces had been damaged. He could put everything back together with a little wood glue and elbow grease. “Okay. Whatever you say.”

  “You make it sound as if you think I’m lying.”

  He stood and turned slowly to face her. “I think I can fix that rocker, no problem.”

  Her lips thinned with annoyance, and she took a couple of belligerent steps toward him. “You do think I’m lying. Don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I do. But it’s your business. I could do a better job of helping you protect yourself if you’d level with me, but that’s entirely up to you. I’ll do what I can. The rest is up to you.”

  Her nostrils flared, and he could tell she was furious, but he had a feeling she was angrier with herself than with him.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said bluntly and walked out of the room.

  He watched her go, wondering how long it would take her to realize she couldn’t face her trouble alone.

  * * *

  ALICE’S SMILE WAS ELECTRIC, her straight white teeth gleaming in the bluish tint of the bar’s low light. “Relax, Charlie. Nobody here knows us. And it’s just beer, right?”

  Her stomach was already cramping with anxiety. If her mother found out what she’d been doing, she’d freak completely. Charlie was supposed to be the sane one in the family. These days, with Vernon and Jamie up in Blackburn Prison, and the other two boys barely keeping their noses clean, Mama depended on Charlie to be the one she didn’t have to worry about.

  And here she was, three years under the legal drinking age, at one of the seediest bars in eastern Kentucky, nursing a light beer and hoping like hell nobody she knew walked into the place.

  “Isn’t this place great?” Alice sipped her Trouble Maker through a long black straw, her blue eyes shimmering with excitement. “This is a big night, Charlie. Bigger than you know.”

  “Why?” Charlie asked.

  Alice’s gaze flitted around the room, never settling anywhere, though for a moment, when her lips curved around the straw, Charlie thought Alice might have spotted someone she knew. But when Charlie twisted around to see what Alice was looking at, all she saw was a stuffy-looking man in a shirt and tie, drinking something gold in a tumbler with ice. Whiskey of some sort. Probably bourbon.

  “Do you know that guy?” Charlie asked.

  Alice shook her head and took another sip of her cocktail. “Drink your beer, Charlie. It’s just beer.”

  Charlie took a sip of the beer, grimaced at the bitter, yeasty taste and wished she’d gone for something like red wine instead. At least it would have been sweet. And classy.

  Instead, she was sitting here in her short ill-fitting dress, drinking a low-rent beer like the low-rent little redneck she was.

  Alice had flitted away, her womanly curves selling the lie that she was over twenty-one. Red was her color, and she was wearing the hell out of the body-skimming little red dress with the tiny spaghetti straps and the hem that stopped several inches above her knees. Her tawny blond hair was scooped up into a messy ponytail, with lots of wavy golden tendrils dancing around her face and neck as she walked.

  The room was starting to feel close and hot, and her stomach was rumbling a little. Maybe she should have eaten something before coming here, but she’d been too nervous and jittery to swallow even a bite of the sandwich she’d made before leaving the house.

  She should relax. Try to have fun.

  She took a third sip of the beer. It didn’t taste any better than the first two sips. The rumbling in her stomach continued, accompanied by a cold sweat breaking out on her forehead.

  The room closed in on her. The lights seemed to dance before her eyes in rhythm with the bass beat of the music blaring from the music speakers. She pushed away from the bar, leaving the beer where it sat. She wasn’t going to drink any more of it, especially not the way her stomach felt.

  There was an outdoor patio. She could see other bar patrons out there, enjoying the unseasonably mild night. She slipped her leather jacket on, gave her skirt a quick downward tug and weaved her way through the crowd.

>   The air outside was colder than she’d expected, but she didn’t mind. In fact, the chilly night air seemed to clear her foggy brain for a moment.

  But then the dizzy sensation returned, along with a sudden, bone-deep weariness. She found an empty table near the edge of the porch and sat, pressing her hands to her eyes.

  “There she is.” The voice was male. Distant. Sort of familiar, though Charlie couldn’t place it.

  “How much longer?” That whisper was female, and for a confused moment, Charlie was sure it was Alice’s voice.

  “Soon, I think,” the male voice answered, closer now.

  Charlie put her head on the table, closing her eyes against the whirl of color and light assaulting her brain.

  Then it all went away. For what felt like a long time.

  The darkness ebbed slowly, replaced by a muddy yellow glow just beyond her closed eyelids. Something hard, cold and damp lay beneath Charlie’s cheek. It smelled of gasoline and grime, and as she tried to move her head, grit stung against her skin.

  She stopped trying to move and concentrated instead on opening her eyes. Her eyelids felt leaded, hard to lift. She forced them open anyway.

  The light came from streetlamps. Without moving her head, she couldn’t see the lamps themselves, but the circular glow that spilled onto the pavement suggested the light source.

  Something lay in the street a few feet away from her. Red and pale white. Crumpled. Still. The tawny waves spilled out around her head, streaked with blood. One blue eye was open and staring.

  Alice. Oh, God, Alice!

  The world seemed to narrow to a pinpoint, until all she could see in the blackness was that one blue eye.

  Then it disappeared into an endless black void.

  Charlie fought against the darkness, but she couldn’t seem to move. Couldn’t push air past her vocal cords to make a sound.

  She wanted to scream her fear and anguish. Cry out for help. Beg for someone to find them and save them from whatever had happened.

  But she couldn’t.

  Hands caught her arms and gave her a shake, and she heard a voice in the blackness.

  “Charlie!”

  * * *

  CHARLIE JERKED AWAKE, her breath rising on a keening gasp. For a moment, she felt as if she was still trapped in the darkness, but after a panicked few seconds, the dim light from outside the house filtered through the curtains and into her sightless eyes, and she realized she was in her own bed, in the small house on Sycamore Road.

  And the strong hands clutching her shoulders belonged to the broad-shouldered man sitting on the bed beside her.

  “Charlie?” He sounded wary.

  She realized her hands were bunched into fists in front of her, pushing against Mike’s hard chest. His hard, bare chest.

  She dropped them to her lap. “Sorry. I must have been dreaming.”

  “You called out a name,” he said quietly.

  “I did?” She shook her head, not sure she wanted to remember whatever images fluttered elusively at the edge of her mind.

  “You called out the name Alice,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited a moment, perhaps expecting her to continue. When she didn’t, he added, “You sounded scared.”

  The image from the dream had stuck with her, vivid in a way dreams rarely were once she awoke. She could see Alice lying crumpled in the wet street, her hair splayed around her head. She could see the blood staining Alice’s tawny hair and the blank stare of her one visible eye.

  She’d never remembered seeing Alice before. The voices, the jumble of words and phrases that had played games with her mind, yes. But the sight of Alice, lying dead in the road—that image was new.

  Was it a memory? Or was it her vibrant imagination bringing Alice’s death to life for her?

  She didn’t know. She only knew that something wasn’t right. She had taken three sips of light beer and her head had started to swim. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she knew that it would take a lot more than three sips of beer to make the world turn upside down the way it had.

  And no way would it have made the rest of the night a blank until she woke in her own backyard just before dawn the next morning.

  “What are you thinking?” Mike asked.

  She shook her head, not ready to share her thoughts with someone she’d just met. Not until she’d had a chance to try to piece everything she was starting to remember together into a more coherent pattern.

  The last thing she needed to do was give people ammunition to dismiss her stories as typical Charlie Winters’s confabulation.

  “I was just trying to remember my dream,” she said. That answer was true, wasn’t it? If not quite complete.

  “And did you?”

  “Bits and pieces.” She pressed her hands to her face. Her elbow brushed against Mike’s arm, reminding her again just how close he was sitting to her.

  And how little clothing he was wearing.

  “What time is it?” she asked. She didn’t have an alarm clock. She’d always lived by her own internal clock, somehow able to wake up in time to do whatever she needed to do.

  “A little after three.”

  “And you heard me calling out from the living room?” That was where he’d bedded down for the night.

  He shifted, running one hand through his short-cropped hair. “I moved the sleeping bag to the hall. Outside your door.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wasn’t sure I could beat an intruder to your room if they entered through the back door.”

  “Oh.” Clearly, he was taking the possibility of a threat against her life seriously. “I wish I could offer you a sofa to sleep on instead. Sleeping on a hard floor can’t be fun.”

  His soft laugh was a warm, low grumble in the darkness. “Beats the hell out of sleeping on an Afghanistan mountainside in winter.”

  She jumped at the chance to change the subject. “How long were you in Afghanistan?”

  “A couple of years. I went to Afghanistan first, then Iraq. Then Kaziristan for a few years.”

  “Then where?”

  His tone grew suddenly cautious. “Then I retired and came back to the States.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “A couple of years. I worked security here and there for a little over a year before one of my bosses called to see if I was interested in working for him at Campbell Cove Academy. He was looking for instructors and thought I’d be good for the job.”

  “You seem pretty good at it,” she said. “Not that I have a lot of experience with self-defense instructors.”

  “I’m just sharing some of the things I learned in boot camp. Geared toward civilians, of course.”

  “Yeah, no rifles or bayonets in our training.”

  “Well, not at the intermediate level, no.”

  Her eyes must have better adjusted to the dark, because she could see the pale white gleam of his teeth in the dark, suggesting he’d spoken the last words with a smile.

  “Why did the security company choose little Campbell Cove, Kentucky, as their home base?” she asked, starting to enjoy the warm intimacy of the moonlit conversation.

  “Not sure,” he admitted. “I think maybe one of the owners is from this area. I know they liked the seclusion of the property. It’s not easy to get to if you don’t live right in the area. And we’re in a place where we can see trouble coming well ahead of time.”

  She nodded, only half listening to his words. Instead, she was drinking in his voice, a gravelly rumble of masculinity that somehow made this dark bedroom feel like the safest place on earth.

  “I like it here,” he added. “It reminds me of home.”

  “And where
’s home?” she asked, feeling half-drunk from his nearness.

  “North Carolina.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “I lived a little ways east of Cherokee, in the Smokies. A town called Black Rock.”

  “Evocative.”

  “Yeah?”

  She closed her eyes, breathing deeply. In the warmth that flowed between them, she could smell a faint piney scent coming from him. It reminded her of long, hot summers playing in the mountain woodlands as a child, as perfect a memory as she had.

  “I can picture the place. It’s small. Surrounded by the woods and mountains. There’s probably a little creek running through the town, and a little stretch of downtown you can drive through in about a minute. Am I close?”

  “Yeah, pretty close,” he admitted. “You sure you’ve never been there?”

  “Yes.” She opened her eyes. He was looking at her, his gaze intense, as if he could read her expression in the dark. “I’m just from a place a lot like that. Bagwell, Kentucky. Population six hundred and holding.”

  “I think I’ve been through there. It’s on the way to Pineville, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence fell between them then, thick with exquisite tension. Attraction, she realized. Unsurprising on her part—he was talk, dark and lean, with the sort of powerful body that women bought magazines to drool over. His face looked as if it had been chiseled by a master sculptor, and that voice was made for seduction.

  What threw her off balance, however, was the attraction she felt radiating from Mike. Attraction for her.

  So not what she expected.

  “You should try to go back to sleep,” he said, rising from the bed and edging toward the door.

  She felt his sudden absence keenly, as if a cold breeze had just washed over her. “Okay.”

  “Sweet dreams this time, okay?”

  “I’ll try,” she said, grimacing a little at the smitten sound of her own voice. “You, too.”

  “’Night.” He slipped from the room and closed the door.

  Charlie laid her head back on her pillows and stared at the ceiling, about as far from sleep as she’d ever been.