They stopped at a service station a few miles down the road to wash.
"You folks hurt in that wreck up on Simpson Knob?" the underage station attendant asked as he followed them to the door of the restroom.
"No." David turned the water on full blast and washed off a grimy bar of soap before he handed it to Annie.
The attendant looked at the evidence of the carnage. "With all the ambulances that went through, it must have been a bad one."
He was a boy, David reminded himself. Just a boy. With no more concept of what carnage and mayhem and death really meant than young Daniel at the museum. Annie didn't answer; he wasn't sure she was able to. He didn't want to.
"Yeah," he said, offering no information, and finally the boy left them to the soap and hot water.
Anne scrubbed for a long time before he took the soap from her and handed her a wad of paper towels. While he scrubbed she dried, then sat on the closed lid of the toilet, her hands clasped between her knees, and stared at something he couldn't see.
He led her back to the Blazer. After a moment's consideration, he left her there and went into the station. There wasn't a big selection, but he bought a half-dozen candy bars, a couple of bags of cashews, and two cans of Coke, and piled it all into a small box he found on the cluttered and grease-stained counter near the cash register. He handed her the box when he returned to the Blazer, but she just held it as he pulled out of the service drive and once again started toward home.
Annie's silence, her near-shock state, was worrying him, a lot.
He saw a sign pointing to a boat landing off somewhere to the right. For a moment he hesitated. Would it be better just to take her on home? No, hell no, it wouldn't. Not in the state she was in. God only knew whatever it was in that house would do to her in this weakened and sensitive condition. He took the turnoff and followed the winding road to a finger of a small Corps of Engineers lake.
The parking area where he braked to a stop led to a boat launch where the water of the lake was beginning to lash angrily at the concrete ramp. The parking area served a picnic site, shaded in summer but now merely surrounded by bare trees. There was no other vehicle, no other person, in sight. One more small favor he'd have to give thanks for.
But the wind had picked up, and the sun had apparently decided to go home for the day. There was no way Anne could be warm enough at one of the picnic tables without her coat, and there was no way he was asking her to put her body in that bloodstained reminder of what she had just had to do. And his windbreaker, stashed now in the back with her coat, was only marginally less stained.
He left the engine running and adjusted the heater. Then he freed himself from his seat belt, popped the top on a can of Coke, and peeled back the wrapper from a chocolate bar. He propped the Coke in the holder on the dash and rested the candy bar across its top as he turned toward Annie, as he unfastened her seat belt, as he turned her to face him.
He handed her the candy bar and waited, not speaking, until she had taken a bite from it. She chewed and swallowed and looked at him. "I know what you're doing."
He found a smile for her. "I thought you might. Eat. A little sugar rush will be good for you about now. And I have some cashews to force-feed you some protein for when that rush crashes."
She took another bite of the candy. "Damn. I never thought there'd come a time in my life when I'd have to make myself eat chocolate."
Her words were right, but her voice still wasn't. Her color still wasn't. And the time wasn't right, but then the time might never be right for what he was about to ask. And he had to ask. He waited until she finished he candy bar and half the Coke.
"Annie, why did you study medicine?"
She closed her eyes and let her head fall back until it rested against the high back of the seat. "I don't know any more," she said. "Once—Once I thought I might be able to help. Once I thought I had to help, I had to learn to heal."
"Once." The word sounded hollow in the enclosed car. "But not now?"
"You saw how ineffective I was today. You saw how I fell apart."
"I saw how you did your best in adverse circumstances. I saw how you comforted and loved your patient—"
"My best? Yeah. Maybe that was my best. Maybe all I'm capable of doing anymore is holding somebody and crying while he bleeds—while he . . ." Her voice broke, and her face twisted in pain. "While he dies."
And that's when he knew that her reaction had some basis in her concern for the boy they had just left, but even more in the robbery in Chicago that she had barely survived and so many others had not.
"Annie. Oh, God, Annie." He twisted and maneuvered himself across the narrow console into her seat, lifting her onto his lap and wrapping her in an embrace meant to keep her demons at bay.
Maybe it did for awhile.
The tension eased from her as finally she took the comfort he offered her and lay against his chest with her face hidden from him against his neck. He couldn't see her tears, but he could feel them. And he could hear the words, as broken as they were, she gasped against his collar.
"I can't do this anymore," she said. To herself? To him? To God? Who knew? "I just can't do it anymore."
And then her sobs came, all the more terrible because at first she tried to hold them back. And couldn't. All the more terrible because he realized they must be the first she had allowed herself since the robbery took place—when?—almost a year ago?
"I begged them," she said, and he knew she was reliving that moment. "One of my patients was thirteen, still just a child. He tried to be a hero and they killed him first. I begged them to let the others go. They thought it was funny. They told me to get down on my knees. I did. But it didn't matter. They laughed. And then they panicked.
"I can't see a child bleed—I can't see blood—without seeing that room and all the people who had trusted me, who had counted on me, without being back in that room with those half-crazed, half-grown . . ."
"Annie, Annie, you're not there now." He rubbed his hand across her back, trying to soothe her, trying to bring her back from the hell she was trapped in. "I have you. I have you and you're safe. You're not there now. You don't ever have to go back there. You don't have to face it alone. You'll never have to face anything alone again. I'm with you."
She sniffed once and stopped fighting her tears, stopped fighting her sobs. He held her, this strong, confident woman who had been forced to her knees to beg. For others. He hadn't missed that in her tortured stream of words. Not for herself but for others. And he hadn't missed hearing his own words, either, even though he didn't understand where they had come from and why they felt as though they had been too long unsaid. You'll never have to face anything alone again. I'm with you.
Anne was still quiet and still emotionally drained when they reached Allegro, but then, so was he. He glanced at her before he turned into the drive leading up to her faded purple house.
"Let me take you someplace else."
She shook her head. "It's okay," she told him. "I'm okay. And going someplace else, for no matter how long, isn't going to make the warrior or the problem of what to do with him go away."
"No, but it might give you time to regain the strength you need to deal with those problems."
She gave a choked, humorless laugh and leaned her head against the back of the seat. "Do you really think anything is going to do that?"
She didn't seem really to want an answer. Maybe there wasn't one. He turned into the drive.
Wayne Samuels's truck was parked near the back porch. And so was the black Jimmy David had seen Blake Foresman driving the night before. Cautiously, he parked between the two vehicles and turned to tell Annie to wait while he checked to make sure they weren't walking in on a problem she didn't need to face. He might as well have saved his energy. She yanked the door open and stepped from the Blazer.
Margaret, Wayne, and Blake sat at the round table in the kitchen. All three looked up when they entered.
Margaret jumped up from the table. "Anne. My God—"
Blake Foresman scooted his chair back and rose to his feet. "Are you all right? Huerra? What happened?"
"A wreck," David said, and then he realized how they must look. "We weren't involved. We stopped to help."
Margaret closed her eyes briefly.
"Where?" Blake said. "No one contacted me."
"I think the kid at the service station called it Simpson Knob."
Blake nodded. "A dangerous stretch. Thank God it's not in my county. How bad was it?"
"Not now, Blake," Margaret said as she walked to Anne's side. "Be a lawman later. Come on, Doc, you look like you could use a hot shower and a change of clothes."
Anne started to resist. David saw it in her eyes. But after one long, questioning glance at Blake, which he studiously ignored, she smiled at Margaret. "You're right about that."
"I'll come back with you and tell you about the new paint the town has decided to bestow upon the clinic. It looks like we're going to have to find a gracious way to tell them to stuff their benevolence about ten feet below the town dump."
David waited until the two women had left the room before he leaned back against the cabinet.
"Okay," he said. "Anne didn't ask, but I will. What's going on, Blake? Why are you here?"
"Seems you and the Doc were spotted leaving town this morning," Blake told him. "So you had a visitor. One who didn't know Wayne was here without a vehicle. One who didn't knock on the door but went to those French doors off the side porch and let himself in."
"I figured I'd call the sheriff while he was letting himself in," Wayne said, taking over the telling. "By the time I did that, he was in, so I moved around behind him and let him know, nice like, that he wasn't alone."
David could just imagine how nice like Wayne had been. "I'm glad it wasn't me you surprised. Where?"
Wayne waited a moment before answering. "The landing at the top of the stairs. It looked like he was trying to decide which hall to take."
"Damn! Who?"
"Joe," Blake told him.
"Joe Hansom? Himself? Not just someone he sent?"
Blake nodded.
"Well, hell. I didn't think he was that dumb."
"Or that arrogant?" Blake asked.
David laughed. Nothing about this situation was funny. But, damn, it was either laugh or run his fist through a cabinet door. "So where is he? In custody?"
"No. I told him I ought to run him in. I think I put the fear of God in him, but with Joe you can never tell. I told him to get on home and stay there until I found out for sure if Anne wanted to press charges. Will she?"
"I don't know," David admitted. "I just don't know."
With Wayne and Margaret there for Anne, David asked Blake to go with him out to the Tompkins place to get the rest of his things and check out of his cabin. Anne might not know it yet, but she had just taken in a boarder. And he figured that if his cabin was no longer available, she might not argue too much about him staying in her house. After all, where else in Allegro could he go on such short notice?
Blake didn't argue. Not about going out to the lake with him. Not about his plans. In fact, he offered his assistance if Anne should argue. Imagine that.
He waited while David showered and changed clothes and packed his few belongings, then flirted unmercifully with Gretta Tompkins when they went to the office for David to check out of the cabin. Blake also told Gretta that Anne had had a burglary, and that he'd asked David to help keep an eye on the place for him. Unofficially, and strictly on the q.t.
"Well, of course," Gretta said with an exaggerated huff of indignation. "If you don't know by now, Blake Foresman, that you can tell me something in confidence, then why on earth have I been feeding you pot roast for the last fifteen years? I did manage to raise a cop, you know."
"I know, darlin'," Blake told her. "But I also know how some of the other ladies—never you—in this town would take an innocent situation and twist it all out of proportion. I was hoping I could count on you to help us keep that from happening?"
Gretta grinned at him. "On the q.t., huh? Maybe connected with some big case he's working on?"
Blake bent and smacked a kiss on her cheek. "You got it, darlin'"
"Pete will have my badge for sure if I drag his mama into this mess," David said on their way back to town.
"You didn't drag her, I did." Blake chuckled. "And you see how hard it was to do. Don't worry. Gretta has helped before. She knows what to do and how to do it."
He negotiated a series of curves before he glanced over at David. "Is there any chance he's going to do that? Take your badge?"
"Maybe," David said. "Oh, hell, no. Probably not. I think he just threatened me with internal affairs so I'd take this damned vacation. But he might. And then again, I might just give it to him."
"You know you've got a place here if you want it."
David twisted his head to the left to look at the man but Blake was concentrating on the road, not on him.
A place here? Was that an option? He hated small towns. He hated the way they sucked the life out of anyone trapped in them. But Anne didn't see them that way. She looked at Allegro as a haven, a safe place to escape from the danger of big-city crime.
Or maybe as a place to hide?
"Thanks," he said to the sheriff, knowing he had to make some response, and realizing the offer had been made without so much as a question about why his badge might be in danger. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."
"Yeah, you're welcome. I'd appreciate it if you'd return the favor."
"I trust you, Blake. You know that."
Maybe he knew; maybe he didn't. Blake Foresman didn't respond to that statement. "I did some checking on that other matter you asked about," he said instead.
"Other matter?"
"Lucy Hansom."
"Oh. Yeah." So much had happened that Anne's mother's comment about Lucy had completely slipped his mind, and he had no idea how Blake had gone from the subject of trust to an ancient missing person's report. "Did you find anything?"
"Not much. Not nearly enough for the disappearance of a young girl back in those days."
"She did disappear?"
"She and a boy—I guess a young man by then—by the name of Walter Briggs. They'd known each other most of their lives and some said they were planning on getting married. He came home on emergency leave from the army when his mama died just before Thanksgiving of '41, and they vanished. The army carried him as AWOL for years. Maybe still does. And maybe he did go AWOL. Maybe he decided the chances of going to war were looking worse every day so he took Lucy and they lit a shuck for parts unknown."
"And no one looked?"
"No." Blake said. "But that was right at the time Marian took her dive down the stairs and blamed a pair of big yellow cats that no one but her saw, at least no one who was willing to talk. She blamed them for Ralph Hansom's death, too. You did know that he died in a car wreck but his body was mauled? She also said that they'd killed Walter and Lucy, but she wouldn't say where. Or when.
"So we've got a fifty-year-old injury and one death, maybe three, blamed on cats. We've got a brand new death in Dallas and another one in Chicago. We've got you and Wayne Samuels talking about seeing or hearing big cats. We've got you and the doc running all over creation looking for God alone knows what, bringing her back looking like she's barely escaped from a war zone, and you so concerned about her safety you're willing to shred her reputation in this small town. We've got Joe Hansom, who's planning to run for a state senate seat, jeopardizing his chances by breaking and entering. And all of it seems to be tied to one godawful purple house. It'd be real nice if someone let me in on what's going on."
"Do you ever call on Anne for emergencies?" David asked.
Now Blake looked slightly startled at the change of direction. "Yeah. Some. Not often. If it's in the north end of the county, it's quicker just to go into the Fairview Hospital. Why?"
"You ever notice anything . . . odd about her when you bring her someone from a wreck or a bar fight?"
"Odd? No. Not what I'd call odd. She does seem a little uptight. Not easygoing like she normally is. I thought it was—Hell, I don't know what I thought it was. Why?"
"Because she did escape from a war zone." Blake Foresman's earlier words were all too descriptive not to use. "You heard about the clinic robbery in Chicago?"
Blake nodded.
"Well, it seems that our Annie isn't quite over that. It seems that the sight of blood brings all of those memories back, real up close and personal. Today, she let down her guard enough to tell me."
"Well, hell." Blake was quiet for a moment. "You mean she's been carrying all that pain around all this time and we didn't know it?"
"Yeah. That's what I mean." He didn't have to say more. He knew from Blake's expression that the man would cut off his right arm rather than drag Anne back out for an emergency. Unless there was no other option.
"About the other," David said.
Blake canted his head to one side but kept his eyes on the road.
"I can't tell you. Not yet anyway. Give us a few more days. We'll either resolve the problem, or I promise you I'll fill you in."
"Fair enough. So long as no one else is in danger."
Was anyone else in danger? Was Joe alive only because Wayne had been there to keep him from finding the burial? And what if Frances found a way for them to get rid of the warrior and all his grave goods and the cats wouldn't let him go? Hell, if there were any truth to this curse, why weren't he and Annie dead already?
"Is anyone else in danger?" Blake asked.
"I can't be sure," David admitted, hoping he was right. "Probably not, if we're careful. If no one else gets involved."
"That's not good enough, Huerra."
No, it wasn't. Not for Blake. Not for him. "I know. But it's the best I can do. That, and promise you that if there's any change, I'll fill you in immediately."
They'd reached the outskirts of Allegro. Blake growled out a sound that could have been agreement but was probably disgust.
"Where are we going?" David asked as Blake turned onto Main Street.
"Hardware store. Wayne asked me to pick up a new lock set for the French doors. It seems that Joe was not gentle with the existing one." He braked to a stop in front of the store and turned in his seat. "Tell me, is what you're guarding Anne against outside the house? Or inside?"
"I don't know that either." He looked at the brick façade of the hardware store in front of him, at the slightly shabby but still pleasant-looking downtown business district that stretched only three blocks in any direction. "You didn't ask why Pete was considering yanking my badge, but maybe you ought to know. I'd come dangerously close to being omniscient, at least in my own mind. The last case was just the icing, not the whole cake. I'd see the answer, clear as day, just don't confuse me with conflicting facts. But if the facts do conflict, well, hell, that's no problem. I know who did it; let's just beat those facts to fit and paint them to match."
"You're saying you manufactured evidence?"
"No. Good God, no. Not yet anyway. Who knows what I might have done if I hadn't screwed up so bad on this last case."
He might as well spill it out. Blake might never know about Marla Hamilton and her country doctor daddy, but he would understand how unchecked prejudice could subvert an investigation.
"One of the suspects was—hell, he was a surgeon. He had it all, a Mercedes, a condo, a self assurance that came off more often than not as arrogance, and a woman he hadn't had before people around her began getting sliced up. Before long, I was convinced he wasn't just a suspect; he was the only suspect. But before I could prove he was guilty, two more people died, and the real perp almost killed my suspect and his lady.
"And who knows what might have happened if I hadn't realized my unfounded prejudices got so much in the way of being a good cop that I scared myself into knowing I had to change.
"No. What I'm saying is that in the week I've been here, I've gone from being a man who was convinced he knew everything worth knowing, to someone who's been confronted by the fact that he knows almost nothing. And the more I learn, the less I'm sure of anything except that if anything ever again hurts Anne Locke, it'll have to come through me first."
"You know that already. That quick?"
"Yeah," David said. Hell, maybe a small town wouldn't be so bad after all. Maybe this one wouldn't choke the life out of him the way the one where he grew up had. Maybe. Could he risk it? "That quick. And that sure."
Margaret had Anne working with her in the kitchen when they returned to the house, more to keep her busy, David suspected, than because she needed help with the meal preparations.
And they had told her about Joe. That much was evident when she looked at Blake and repeated the words David had used so often that week. "I don't know. I just don't know."
Blake declined her invitation to stay for a late lunch, but before he left he promised to stay in the area that night, when he again took the graveyard shift for an absent deputy.
When just the four of them remained in the kitchen, Wayne reached for the new lock set and turned to David. "Come on, city cop. Let's see if you know as much about locks as you do about ceilings."
Joe had not been gentle with the French doors or the lock. Wayne had already been at work, filling and gluing the damage to the bottom of the doors where the ineffectual stops had been splintered loose by the force of Joe's entry, and removing the old, mangled lock and knobs.
"Sure of himself, wasn't he?" David asked when he realized the amount of noise Joe must have made entering the house.
"Yeah."
"Any chance he wore a size ten western boot with a riding heel?"
"Yeah."
Well, that answered at least one question. "When did you know it was Joe?"
Wayne began pulling supplies from the bag. He examined each of them before placing them with deliberate care on a table he'd brought near to hold his tools. He then rubbed the back of his neck and stared out the doors toward the dining room windows.
David picked up the mangled lock and studied it, waiting for Wayne to work through whatever held him silent. Waiting for him to decide whether or not he'd answer.
"That's a hell of an alarm system the doc's got," Wayne said finally. "I was on my way out, fastest way possible, when I saw Joe coming through the woods toward the house and realized your oversized house kitties were probably just that—an alarm system."
David dropped the lock to the table. "You heard them?"
"Oh, hell, yes. From somewhere upstairs, probably not too far from that room you warned me about."
So, it wasn't his imagination. If he'd ever had the slightest hope that it was, Wayne had just taken that away.
"Did Joe hear them?"
"Now that's the strangest thing. I'd have sworn anybody in a six-county radius could have heard them, but he didn't seem to. Not even after he was in the house, upstairs damn it, with them pacing and grumbling. I'd swear he didn't hear a thing until I stepped up behind him."
"Damn it, Samuels, you took a hell of a chance staying in the house. Why didn't you go ahead and get out when you first heard them?"
Wayne turned to the door and ran skilled fingers over his repair work. "Because after I saw the doc's cousin coming through the woods, and I got over the first panic, I realized something that's about as strange as anything I've ever known. I mean it, Huerra. Whatever they are, and wherever they were, your watch-kitties weren't fussing at me."
It wasn't difficult to talk Annie into moving her bedroom upstairs, at least for a while, especially since she'd learned that someone had been looking in windows the night before. The rooms upstairs had their share of problems too, but eventually they decided on those at the end of the front hall, as far away from Marian's sitting room as it was possible to get. David saw her settled into the room at the end, right over the study.
While the only place David wanted to be was beside her, he knew that the time probably wasn't right for that. She'd rallied some while Wayne and Margaret remained at the house, probably for their benefit, but she had to be feeling battered still from the effects of her little jaunt through memory lane. So he took the room next to hers and settled himself onto the narrow white bed, fully believing he'd spend a sleepless, restless night.
The rooms were stuffy from having been shut up for years, so he'd raised the windows in his and left them opened just enough to let some fresh air in, and he left the door open so that he could hear anything approaching. A slight breeze played through the room, not so cold as to be unbearable, merely touching him lightly before moving into the hall. He tugged the blanket around his shoulders and listened to the sounds of the night, to the whisper of the breeze, to the memory of other nights, other cool breezes, to the memory of laughter, sweet, childish, and loving, but he couldn't remember whose. They beguiled him into the sleep he'd thought would elude him that night.