Anne didn't expect David Huerra to arrive the next morning. That's what she told herself as she leaned against the sink while she ate her English muffin, surveying the wreck of her kitchen and listening to the rain as it battered the windows.
She hadn't expected him, but when she heard the knock on the back door, she wasn't surprised.
He wore a disreputable pair of jeans and his boots—not the cowboy kind she was used to seeing around Allegro, but a pair that made her wonder if he'd ever done motorcycle patrol—his blue windbreaker, a gimme cap from Tompkins fish camp, and of course his spectacular bruise that tied his bad-guy-run-amok costume all together.
"Don't even think about walking to work today," David said as he took off his cap and hit it against his thigh, sending raindrops and ice pellets scattering on the porch.
She stepped back to let him enter the kitchen then hurriedly closed the door behind him.
He stopped just inside, sniffed deeply, and smiled at her. "Good. Real Coffee. I knew you couldn't be the early-morning-instant type."
Anne nodded toward the counter, feeling a reluctant smile of her own. What was there about this man that gave him the ability to creep behind her armor? What was there about him that she found so appealing? Especially since she suspected that with any encouragement he could be totally overbearing. "Help yourself," she told him. "And by the way, good morning to you, too."
She heard a mumble from him that could have been a belated greeting. So David wasn't a morning person? That did surprise her. She studied him a little more carefully as he reached into the cabinet for a cup and poured himself some coffee, noticing then the care with which he moved. Men! Why on earth did they have to be so—so damned macho? And why on earth did David Huerra think he had to hide his physical discomfort from her? After all, she'd been there when the accident happened. She'd cared for him then and since, and she'd continue to—
Whoa!
She'd continue to what? The eerie feeling of déjà vu, of having cared for this man before, hovered around her. For a moment she fought it but when that did no good, she searched frantically for a logical reason for the feeling. When she found it, she couldn't stop the relieved laugh that broke from her. Saturday. Of course. When she had found herself completely and uncharacteristically tending to more than his health needs.
He turned and peered at her over the rim of his cup. "Are you okay?"
Maybe she wasn't, because it seemed so natural for her to go to the fridge, take out another muffin, split it, and drop it into the toaster. For him.
"Sure. What brings you out this early? What brings you out in this weather at all?"
"Cabin fever," he said. "And the fact that your place is warmer than mine."
She raised an eyebrow at that and glanced pointedly at all four of the burners on her kitchen range, which were turned up to maximum, one of them with an upended clay flowerpot on top to act as an improvised radiant.
"And to take you to work," he added.
She'd started to tell him she hadn't planned on walking that morning, that she'd already decided to drive Agnes. His next words stopped her.
"It looks as if that four-wheel drive Blazer is going to come in handy after all."
"The roads are icy?"
He nodded. "The highway and downtown streets are bad enough, but that ski slope you call a driveway is nearly impassable."
"In November?" she asked, incredulous. "I thought this was the South."
The muffin popped up from the toaster. He looked at her questioningly. "For you," she said. "I've already eaten."
He slathered butter on it from the open container and munched reflectively. "Texas is south, Doc," he told her finally. "I'm not sure what this place is anymore." So saying, he carried both muffin halves and his coffee across the room and backed up to the gas heater. "So what time do you have to be at the clinic?"
"Soon," she said, and glanced at her watch. "Oh lord, yes. Real soon." If the streets were as bad as David said, most of her morning appointments would probably cancel, but that time was sure to be filled with work-ins of people who didn't have enough sense to stay in off the ice. "Let me get my snow boots," she told him, glad that she hadn't gotten rid of them when she made the move from Chicago.
When she returned to the kitchen, wrapped and bundled like she'd thought she'd never have to be again and carrying her bag, she found David standing at the table, gently tracing his finger along the narrow sheet of copper with the design she had worked on until well past midnight. She'd mentioned to him Sunday that she'd once worked at jewelry-making, but she had been deliberately vague about the depth of her interest; it wasn't something she had shared with many people. At least not since starting med school.
Now she wondered why.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, he turned his attention from the sheet of copper to her. "You're good, Doc. Real good."
His words warmed her more than her down-filled coat and fleece-lined boots. "Thanks."
"It reminds me of—" He hesitated. "I'm not sure just what it reminds me of. It's vaguely meso-American, but not really Aztec. Not really Mayan. Not really anything I've seen before."
She knew what he meant, because when she had first begun the series of designs, of which this was but one of many, she'd wondered if she was being derivative, and if so, of what.
"Maybe it's just 'Anne Locke,' " she said.
He touched the design once again; a salute? A farewell? "Maybe it is at that." He pulled the folded cap from his jacket pocket and settled it on his head, but waited while she put her supplies back into the tackle boxes and closed them. "So what would you like me to work on first, boss? I'm not sure I'm up to putting in the ceiling without a helper, but I'm game for just about anything else."
Anne might as well have stayed at home. She ran the clinic with the help of Margaret Samuels, an extremely efficient registered nurse who had been out of the workforce for almost a decade, but had kept her license and her training up to date and announced she was ready to return to work when Anne arrived in Allegro looking for an office assistant. Margaret had the doors unlocked, the heater turned up, and the coffee made by the time David Huerra delivered Anne to the front steps and into the building before leaving.
Margaret had also noted the cancellations who had already called, and had begun a list of those she was willing to wager a week's worth of coffee-making just wouldn't show up.
One of those who didn't show up, but who did eventually telephone—just before Anne called Blake Foresman's office to get someone to search for her—was Nellie Flynn, part-time office help, inexperienced, never before employed, who had turned out to be as dependable as the chimes in the Methodist Church in Fairview and, after an almost nonexistent training period as competent at her job as Margaret and Anne were at theirs. Nellie had slid her car into a ditch halfway down the mountain between her house and the highway and had walked back home before she'd been able to call. After Nellie assured Anne that she wasn't hurt, and that she had a neighbor who could retrieve her car for her, Anne made her promise to stay home until the roads thawed, which Margaret assured her would be soon.
Not soon enough, Anne thought with grim resignation as the day dragged on and she realized that she might have been overly optimistic about how well the people of Allegro had welcomed her. In a day when only three patients showed up, she had to admit that her practice wasn't exactly growing by leaps and bounds. While she undoubtedly got to treat most of the kids for colds and sprains and childhood diseases, and even their mothers for viruses or confirming pregnancy, she seldom saw anything serious walk through her clinic doors. If it was serious, if there was even the slightest suspicion that it might be, the patient bypassed her, usually bypassed the facilities in Fairview, too, and went directly to Fort Smith or Texarkana.
But that was what Anne had wanted, wasn't it? She'd certainly told herself it was when she'd turned down a position on staff at an Indianapolis hospital and another with an aggressive and growing clinic in Lincoln—both among the places she'd applied while her life was in the process of going to hell but before it actually got all the way down there.
At three o'clock the snow started. All day the rain had been mixed with freezing rain and sleet. It gave way entirely to big white flakes that quickly built up on fences, tree branches, and windowsills. Margaret and Anne shared a long, discouraging minute in front of the rapidly fogging doors.
"Well, hell," Margaret said, sighing. "Three days before Thanksgiving. Who'd have thought it?" She grinned. "I sure hope the deer hunters are having a good time."
Knowing the hunters she'd met in Allegro, who seemed to live for deer season, or turkey season, or some even for no season, Anne suspected a little friendly malice in Margaret's words. "You'd better get home while you still can," she told her nurse. "I can take care of things here for the rest of the day."
Margaret laughed in that earthy, abrupt way Anne had first resented because she didn't understand and now had come to appreciate. "Honey, the roaches from that closed-down tavern out on Highway 59 can take care of all the business that's going to come through this door today. Grab your coat while I turn on the answering machine and tell the county to call you just in case there is an emergency, and then I'll give you a lift home. Unless you want to call tall, dark, and dangerous to come after you."
Anne shot her a glance, but Margaret was all innocence as she turned on the answering machine, made her telephone call to the sheriff's dispatcher, and began turning off lights. Tall, dark, and dangerous, huh? Anne wondered what David Huerra would think of that description.
Margaret drove an oversized truck as down to earth and as efficient as she was. But she didn't immediately point it toward her house. When Anne turned to her to question her, Margaret shrugged. "Bet you don't have your holiday groceries bought yet, do you?"
Holiday groceries? For whom? And while Anne couldn't quite imagine turkey for one, she resisted the impulse to feel sorry for herself. Her mother, her stepfather, and her two half-brothers were on the other side of the world, the cousins her age had all moved away to find work, and Joe's part of the family hadn't seen fit to do any inviting.
"You've got that right," Anne said. "As a matter of fact, I don't even have my weekly groceries bought yet."
"Busy weekend?" Margaret asked, doing her best to leer suggestively.
Anne spluttered out a laugh. "Don't tell me the stories made it all the way up your hill. And you didn't say a word all day?"
"I was waiting for you to," she said. "Especially after I saw how you got to work."
"But—"
"Easy, Doc," she said. "Everybody in town may know he drove you to work today, but they also know he spent the night in Gretta Tompkins's Number 4 cabin. Alone.
"They also know your latest crew quit on you. And that Joe stopped to say sweet, loving words to you at the Lake Café yesterday."
Anne shook her head. "Is anything kept secret around here?"
"Nope," Margaret told her. "Not unless you work at it real hard." She frowned. "Some do." After another moment she added, "Joe usually does."
The truck skidded a bit as Margaret turned into a half-empty parking lot. She tapped the brakes lightly and brought her truck to a stop four spaces from the front door of the grocery store. "We're either real lucky or real late," she said. "Whichever, we need to stock up while there are still groceries of any sort available."
"Stock up? You sound like we're in for a blizzard," Anne protested. "Isn't this supposed to go away in a matter of hours?"
"It isn't supposed to happen at all," Margaret admitted. "Not this early. But since it has, you've got to realize that nobody knows how to drive on ice down here so you might as well be prepared. Then if the temperature goes up to seventy tomorrow, the worst that can happen is you'll have a full pantry, but if it stays cold or gets worse, you're ready for it." She grinned. "Especially if you just happen to get iced in with someone who can't get back out to a certain uninsulated cabin on a very bad road."
The house smelled like fresh paint and turpentine and simmering, spicy chicken when Margaret and Anne made the slippery run from the truck into the kitchen. Best of all, it felt blessedly warm after the buffeting they had taken from the wind in just the short distance from the truck to the porch.
And when Anne saw David Huerra standing at the kitchen sink, it felt like home.
She didn't have time to explore that, though. David whirled around from the sink when they came bursting through the door, but when he saw her he leaned back against the counter, drying his hands. "You're home early."
"Yes," Margaret said, giving him a blatant once-over. "That's because we wanted to get home. Hello." She bumped the two grocery bags she carried up onto the counter beside the ones Anne had just placed there and thrust out her hand. "I'm Margaret Samuels, Doc Anne's nurse. You left the clinic before I got to meet you this morning."
David returned her admiring smile, but Anne saw an easy humor in his eyes, not seduction. "My loss," he said, taking Margaret's hand. "I'm David Huerra—"
"The Dallas cop," Margaret finished for him. She gave a deep sigh and patted his hand. "Why couldn't it have been me out at Willie Johnson's sawmill Saturday?" She glanced at the paintbrushes that lay on the counter beside the sink, and the open toolbox that sat beside them. "I'll bet Joe's wishing pretty much the same thing."
David chuckled before he turned serious. "How bad are the roads?"
"Strictly four-wheel drive," Margaret told him. "But the snow's actually helping by covering up some of the ice. Or at least it will until it freezes over, too." She shrugged and drew her hand from his. "And I'd better get back out on them if I'm to have any hope of getting up my hill tonight."
"You could stay," Anne offered, remembering how cautiously Margaret had had to drive to get the short distance from the clinic and up her potholed driveway and dreading the thought of the miles the woman still had to travel. "I have plenty of room."
Had Anne surprised her nurse? Was her offer of hospitality so out of line? Maybe. Margaret seemed startled for a moment, but shook her head. "Thanks, anyway. But I have—responsibilities. Livestock, you know. Chickens."
Margaret left in a flurry of admonitions and cautions and promises to be careful. When Anne turned from the door and at last began unbundling from scarf and gloves and coat, she realized how much Margaret's presence had filled the room and how inexplicably awkward she felt being alone with David Huerra as the snow swirled outside and early darkness threatened.
Awkward. How strange. Especially after that one burst of . . . of belonging she had felt only minutes before.
"I'd better change clothes," she said, clutching her coat to her chest.
David looked at her, cocked his head to one side and tugged at his earlobe, but all he said was, "Watch out for the wet paint."
Awkward. Since she had met him she had felt many things, but always she'd had this underlying sense of having known this man forever, and well. What had changed? What could have changed in the few hours since he had left her at the clinic door? Nothing, she told herself. Not a thing. She dredged up a smile for him and left the room.
He'd told her to watch out for wet paint. She just hadn't realized how much of it there was. He'd finished framing and hanging the new kitchen/hallway door and replacing the trim along the hallway wainscoting and bathroom door. All of it gleamed with new gloss enamel. But that wasn't what drew her attention.
Anne stopped at the bottom of the stairwell, her attention drawn upward. For a moment she stood there with her hand on the old age-blackened varnish of the railing and her foot on the bottom step, listening—longing. Had she heard something? Or had she only wanted to hear something?
And then she realized how bizarre the last few minutes would seem to anyone else—as bizarre as David Huerra's first reaction to her house?—and gave a self-conscious chuckle as she forced herself to turn away from the stairs and go on into the bedroom to change into jeans and a sweatshirt so that she could rejoin David in the warmth of the kitchen and get on with the never-ending project of making this old house into a home.
If anyone had asked her the previous Saturday morning before she went to Willie Johnson's sawmill, Anne would have said she didn't want a man in her life. She didn't need a man in her life. She didn't need anyone in her life until she figured out what she was doing in her life.
After having had seven roommates while in med school, and never a moment to herself afterward because of the pressures of her practice and her clinic work, and the sheer number of other people who lived in the building where she had finally leased a tiny one bedroom apartment that was all her own, after she'd seen how crowding too many persons in too small a space with no hope for more destroyed the humanity in those crowded, Anne had hoped she would be forever happy, or at least content, to rattle around in her small town and her big old house without having to worry about offending, bothering, or annoying anyone else. Or being offended, bothered, or annoyed by someone.
David Huerra didn't offend or annoy her. Bother her, yes. But that was something she was trying very hard not to think about.
There was something pleasant about coming home from work and finding him there, something familiar about working together and sharing with him the meal that he had begun but that together they finished preparing; something almost . . . almost intimate about how easily they settled into each other's lives while the evening settled around them. At least that was how it seemed until he pushed back from the table after their meal and walked over to the pile of drywall and rolled insulation.
"You had company today, Doc."
"Here? At the house? Everybody knows I'm at the clinic on Mondays."
He nodded. "That's what I thought. But I couldn't be sure whether his surprise was at seeing me here, or at seeing anybody at all when the house was supposed to be empty. He covered it real well, though."
"He?" Anne had lived in the city too long. Her paranoia was working overtime. "I don't suppose it was my loving cousin Joe with an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner?"
David quirked a grin at her. "What? You'd accept and waste that runt bird I saw you stash in the freezer?"
She shook her head. There'd be no invitation to join that part of the family. She'd known that since the day she won the bid on the house. "Don't malign that bird," she said. "If you're really good, I might decide it's big enough to share with you."
His grin softened. "Thanks, Doc. And if you're really good, I might share my Aunt Elena's cranberry relish recipe with you. But no, it wasn't your loving cousin Joe. At least not in person."
It looked as though she wasn't the only one suffering from a little paranoia. "Then who? The weather today certainly wasn't conducive to casual, drop-in visitation."
He nodded. "Our buddy Hank."
"Hank Foresman?" That made absolutely no sense. "He's never so much as spoken to me if he had to cross the street to do it. What on earth did he want?"
"Work."
"Work? Here? Why?"
David snagged a card of paint samples and brought it to the table. "He said—" He set the card on the table and himself in his chair. "He said he was in Alcoholics Anonymous. You may not know, but one of the twelve steps to sobriety is to make amends for any harm you've caused."
Anne nodded. She was familiar with a number of twelve-step programs. "But he hasn't—"
"He said he'd fallen off the wagon and that his wife—Ida?"
She nodded again. Ida Foresman was as straitlaced and honest as any woman her patriarchal God ever created.
"Ida," David continued. "Anyway, apparently Ida tore a strip off him once Blake brought him home Saturday. Said he could either get back in the program or find a new home. And since I was up here helping you, he'd be able to make some amends to me by helping me out."
"Right," Anne muttered into her coffee cup. "Did you believe him?"
"For about thirty seconds. Until I saw how he looked when I explained how I could use him to help hang the new ceiling in here. And until I realized he was a lot more interested in what you were doing upstairs than in what I was so obviously doing down here.
"What are you doing upstairs, Doc?"
"You didn't take him up there?"
"I took him down in the cellar, which needs a new door, out to that old garage or barn on the back property line, which needs a new roof, even to the well house, which only needs a good shoveling out, but we just never got around to going upstairs before I told him I'd have to check with you about giving him a definite answer. But I was tempted. Real tempted. If for no other reason than to see what he thought was of so much interest up there. What do you think it could be?"
"Nothing." But Anne shivered as she remembered the feeling that had gripped her as she stood with her foot poised on the first stair, that sense of being both drawn and repelled by something unnamed and unnamable. "Absolutely nothing. There's only more old house and . . . "
"And? Come on Annie."
She grimaced. Why was she stretching for an explanation when she probably didn't even need one? "And one strange room that makes no sense."
"Strange? In what way?"
"Just—" How did she explain it? "Didn't you go upstairs at all?"
He shook his head, but not before she noticed an uneasiness in him, too. At least she thought she did.
"Then let's go upstairs and I'll show you. I need to check on a stove anyway."
Yep. There was an uneasiness all right. He stood, but not quickly, and he walked to the front of the house with her, but not with any enthusiasm, and when they got to the base of the stairs, he rested his hand on the newel post but kept both feet firmly planted on the old pine floor.
And she knew why. In no way did she want to walk up those stairs in the dark of the night. Something was up there. Something that was going to change her life. And if David felt it, did that mean his life would be changed, too?
She forced a laugh and turned toward him. "It's all your fault," she said. "If it hadn't been for your comment about someone walking over my grave, my imagination wouldn't have gone wild."
But it hadn't. She'd gone up those stairs last night without so much as a quiver and lighted the stove. Only tonight, with him in the house, had she felt any uneasiness.
"My fault, is it?" he said as he reached for her hand. "I'm not the one who bought a haunted house."
His hand enveloped hers, holding it, wrapping it in familiarity and —and safety. "Haunted house?" she managed to splutter. "Where did you get an idea like that?"
He tugged on her hand, pulling her closer, and they started up the steps together. "From your buddy Hank. He kept making all sorts of allusions to mysteries and danger and an Indian curse."
"And he was sober?"
David chuckled. "If your cousin Joe was trying to scare me away, it didn't work, Doc."
Amazing. Anne felt her own answering laughter. Why had she feared going upstairs with this man?
"It didn't work with me either," she told him. "Especially since I think it was all an invention of Joe's to keep anyone from wanting this wonderful old house."
There were five bedrooms upstairs, two bathrooms, a sleeping porch, attic stairway, a couple of rooms not large enough for anything but storage, and the room where Anne had left the stove burning the night before. They poked their heads into each room, turning on lights where there were working bulbs, rattling dresser drawers, cabinet doors, and windows, and opening the rare closet door, and finally she led him to the one room in question.
An ornate art deco light fixture hung from the ceiling, about three-quarters of the way across the room. The art deco vanity backed up to the wall that adjoined the bathroom in that end of the hall and had probably been installed about the same time as the light fixture. Instead of having, at the most, an old wardrobe or a corner that had been framed in for a closet, the entire back wall of the room had been converted into a closet. The decorative little stove that at one time must have seemed the height of sophistication glowed merrily. Instead of the floral paper she had found in every other room, this one held the remnants of a boldly striped paper with a swag border, except in one corner where it was shredded as though someone, at some time, had made a valiant, if heedless, attempt, at stripping it from the wall.
The furniture remained. All art deco. A long couch that had once probably matched a stripe in the wallpaper, although both were now badly faded. A couple of chairs. An octagonal table with a stained-glass lamp and huge ashtray. A mirrored dressing table with its matching bench. All of it lay covered with a grime that not even the years of neglect the rest of the house had suffered could explain.
David looked around the room with what Anne recognized as his cop's eyes. "I don't suppose there's a lock on the outside of that door."
"No." She could answer that. "At least, not one that can't be opened from the inside with a key. But there is a slide bolt on the inside."
"And the closets? Was anything left in them?"
"No."
Still holding David's hand, she led him to the nearest door and opened it. Light from the room went only partially into the closet, but it was enough to see that it was one deep closet extending the width of the room, empty of anything except a single, long rod and a few bare wire hangers below a narrow shelf.
"This is the back of the house, isn't it?" he asked. "The outside wall with no windows?"
"Yes." She'd known he'd realize where they were, even though they'd gone almost in a circle upstairs.
He stepped back and appraised the overhead light, then looked back into the closet. "If the closet was added later, that might explain why the light's not centered."
He'd noticed that, too.
"But not why they took out windows for this closet when there's a perfectly good inside wall," he said. He stepped into the closet and then back out, pacing the distance between the closet's back wall and the overhead fixture, then the distance from the fixture to the opposite wall. "It's short a few feet."
"I know."
"I thought you would. Any ideas?"
"No." The room wasn't cold, but Anne was. She tugged on David's hand but found him almost as reluctant to leave as he had been to climb the stairs. Eventually, though, he did follow.
"That was what I was going to do this past weekend," she told him. "Explore the possibilities."
Once again in the kitchen, both of them backed up to the stove, fighting a chill.
"How?" David asked. "How were you going to explore the possibilities?"
Anne should have known he wouldn't drop the subject. Why should he, when it was still so very much on her mind?
"I thought I'd go up to the attic," she told him. "Maybe measure the distance from the ceiling fixture wiring to the outside wall of the house."
"And if there's a discrepancy? What then?"
She shrugged, as though it really wasn't too important. But it was. She knew it, and apparently so did David Huerra. "And then, maybe knock a hole in a closet wall and see why."
"When?"
Restrained impatience. How interesting. And how very much like her own feeling. "Wednesday," she said. "I close the clinic at noon. There'll still be daylight. And maybe it will be warmer." Then, knowing on some level that she was probably doing the worst thing possible, that she hadn't felt any of these strange reactions until David Huerra came to this house, she looked up at him and said it anyway. "Want to help?"
"Yeah." He turned slightly, looking down at her upturned face. "Yeah, I do." Then as casually as if he'd been doing it all his life, he gave her a quick but thorough kiss. A kiss that went from casual to heated in the space of a heartbeat. A kiss that lasted no more than half a minute but seemed to have gone on for centuries.
"Damn," he swore softly as he clamped his hands on her arms and pulled away from her. "I don't . . . "
Then, before she found her voice or any words to use with it, he grabbed up his jacket and let himself out. Anne watched as he skidded across the backyard, buckled himself into the world's oldest Blazer, and slid his way down her hill.
And that's when her questions, and doubts, and—yes—longings really began.
Longings that weren't based on the physical.
Yeah, right.
David Huerra was a literate, sensitive, attractive man. And in the six months she'd been in Allegro she hadn't even been out for a drink with a man. Let alone a literate, sensitive, attractive one. Now she'd had him in her house from daylight until long after dark, and to herself for most of the evening hours.
And what had they done? They'd talked, yes. They'd laughed. Yes, that, too. And they'd worked on woodwork and insulation and drywall and old wiring.
All of that she could have taken in stride. All of that she could have accepted as nothing—well, not too much, anyway—out of the ordinary. But then he'd kissed her, and she realized that she'd been lying to herself since the moment she helped pull him from his mangled car.
Oh, God, she didn't want to feel this. She didn't want to feel anything. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And not for someone who regularly and consistently put himself in danger.
But when he was with her, she didn't slink back into any of those pseudo-healthy techniques she'd developed to keep from thinking about what had really brought her back to Allegro. She didn't have to. When David was with her, she didn't think about screaming children or fear or even about Anthony, her fiancé for all of six days, and how he had died.
So maybe it was a decent trade-off. A little feeling—surely she could restrain herself to that—in exchange for a little, maybe a lot of, peace.