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“Ah.” The sound was long, drawn out, a whisper of something disturbing in the heat. “There is that, isn’t there?”
Josie frowned. Standing in front of him, holding her ground against his clear if unexpressed wish that she leave, she had the sense that she was leaning forward into the winds of a hurricane. Pale and gaunt faced, he was like the swirling winds of those storms, the power sweeping out around him, bending everything in its path. “I haven’t seen them since then, but you have to keep them locked up. It’s not safe to let them roam around.” Uneasily she looked over her shoulder and off to the woods behind her and to the left.
“They’re not here,” he said, and his voice was gentle. “I don’t have…pets.”
Odd, Josie thought, the way he echoed her earlier thoughts. Stubbornly she persisted. “I want an explanation.” She tapped the edge of the hoe against the porch boards.
“So do we all.” He smiled at her, a faint stretching of facial muscles that moved like clouds across the gulf. “Want explanations. For something or other, don’t we?” His gaze locked with hers.
“I want your dogs to stay away from me,” she insisted. “Sooner or later, they’re going to hurt someone. I don’t want them anywhere near my property.” As she glared into his hooded eyes, cold waves rolled over her, sapping her strength and dragging her down to darkness. Dismayed by the lethargy sliding through her bones, Josie struggled against the waves of passivity. She banged the hoe again. “Those creatures are as dangerous as a loaded gun. And you know it, Mr. Hayes.”
“I never said they weren’t…dangerous. But I can’t control them.”
“You did earlier.”
“Yes, well, miracles do occur.” His words were ironic and fraught with a meaning she couldn’t interpret.
Josie fought the apathy, fought against the rush of sounds and darkness that enervated her. “Then find another way to make a miracle.”
“I wish I could.” Low and filled with suffering, his drawl wrapped around her, and she felt the beat of his anguish with each beat of her heart. “Believe me, I wish I could.”
His words turned to vapor in front of her, a cool mist surrounding him and brushing against her flushed skin as he continued, his words growing fainter with each syllable. “You need to be careful, Josie Birdsong.” His image blurred.
“Conrad,” she whispered. “Josie Conrad.” He knew her middle name. Her mother’s name. He couldn’t know. But he did. Josie was drowning in cold and darkness and she was terrified, reaching out for his hand. “What’s happening?” she moaned and gripped his fingers, their strength solid in the rolling darkness.
And in that moment as her hand curled around his, from somewhere deep in his house, she heard the cry of a child. Sharp, distinct.
And then gone. Silence.
All rational thought vanished with the sound of that child. Josie yanked her hand free and shoved against the door. Down the dark corridor where she sank, she saw a white flutter, a hand, a face. A shape in the dim hallway of the house. Mellie. Oh, God. “Mellie,” she cried and pushed against the force of Ryder Hayes closing his door in her face. “My daughter’s in there! You have my daughter in your house!”
“No!” he muttered. The hard planes of his face contorted, the angles sharp as a knife, the lines around his mouth white and deep with torment. “No one’s here. No one.”
“Mellie!” she screamed and slapped both fists against the door panels.
His face twisted, and he threw up one hand to shade his eyes, his expression hidden. “For God’s sake, go away!”
In that brief glimpse of his expression as he slammed the door, Josie saw the horror in his eyes. She didn’t understand it, but she knew with absolute, unshakable certainty that his horror was real.
With the slam of his door, cold and darkness vanished. All around her was heat and silence, thick and heavy against the ice that encased her shaking body.
She heard the metallic click, the rattle of a chain, as he shot the bolt.
Motionless on a current of air, a solitary grackle hung in the pale sky.
The house with its shuttered windows and locked door loomed in front of her. Hostile.
“Mellie,” Josie whispered, tears mixing with the dirt on her face.
Bracing his back against the door, Ryder ground his fists against his eyelids and sank to the floor, facing the narrow hallway that led from the front of the house.
He should have stayed away from the woman. Should have stayed away from Josie Conrad. Birdsong came the whisper. Birdsong.
But he’d been drawn to her by a power stronger than his intelligence, stronger than his will. He’d gone that first night and watched her small, strained face float above candle flames through the darkened rooms of her house.
And he’d returned the next night.
The night after that.
“Damn, damn, damn.” Banging his fists against his face, he swore, the stream of curses no relief to the grinding agony inside him.
He should have been able to resist.
But he hadn’t.
No, he should never have gone to Josie Conrad’s house.
Not that first time when he’d watched her from the woods and seen her pacing hour after hour in the candlelit rooms of her house. And especially not today.
It was growing worse.
Something had happened while she stood in the doorway. She’d seen something. She believed she’d seen a child.
He groaned, a raw, animal sound of pain.
He was losing control.
Rising in one jerky motion, Ryder stood and turned around, facing the direction she’d taken. Through one of the louvers in the small window next to the door, he watched her slender figure as she vanished down the path. Her moss green eyes had been unbearably sad. Lost. Underneath her reckless courage, she’d been lost.
As he watched, a long braid of shiny black hair swung like a metronome against the pink of her blouse. The end curl of the braid hung like a comma past the waistband of her baggy shorts. A strip of smooth, tanned skin showed above the waistband and pink blouse edge.
He wanted to run the back of his finger along that small strip of satin skin, wanted to touch his tongue to the tiny dimple at the back of her knee and see if it truly tasted of honey and flowers. He wanted—God in heaven, he wanted—
The wooden louver cracked between his fingers, the sound like a gunshot.
A bead of blood appeared along the side of his palm as he stared down the empty driveway. Ryder leaned his forehead against the shattered strip, pressing hard, reminding himself.
He had to stay away from Josie Conrad. He would make himself leave her alone.
If he could.
Like an echo to the tattoo beat of his heart came that whispering thread of sound.
Birdsong. Birdsong.
CHAPTER TWO
Josie never knew how she returned home. She knew only that she was there, the desperate green line of her garden an oasis in the brown of dead and dying grass. She couldn’t remember walking back down the path at all.
But she remembered very, very clearly the sound of the bolt slamming shut against her. Remembered, too, the suffering in Ryder Hayes’s face, the sense of power that came from him and pulled her beyond resistance. Step by step, she tried to analyze what had happened and couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried. She struggled to make sense from an incident that made no sense. She’d been frightened. Oh, yes, Ryder Hayes had definitely frightened her.
But not until that darkness had come from him, a cold, chilling shadow that swept over her like huge, enveloping wings.
And in those moments she’d heard a child’s cry. She’d glimpsed, vaguely, indistinctly, a hazy shape drifting away from her down the long hallway.
Or had she?
Putting her hoe back on the porch, she frowned. She must have been in shock over the incident with the dogs. Or dizzy with hunger. Low blood sugar could account for that enveloping darkness that had claimed her.
Odd, but it had seemed like a claiming. A moment utterly beyond her experience.
Remembering the texture of Ryder Hayes’s arm against her hand, she shivered. The hard muscle of his forearm had flexed, tightened at her touch.
But his skin had been so cold.
She’d had the most surprising urge to rub her hand over his arm, to warm him.
In the closet she’d turned into a bathroom, Josie splashed tepid faucet water against her face as she tried to recall if she’d eaten that day and couldn’t remember eating anything since the bowl of cereal the evening before.
The water spotted the white sink, sending iridescent reflections against the white, the shimmering drops like the flash of colors in the black feathers of the grackles.
Josie stared at her startled eyes in the spotted mirror above the sink and then passed her wet hand over the image in the mirror. Water splintered across her reflection. For a second she’d seen Mellie there, Mellie who lifted herself up to the mirror to see if she was “bootiful” today.
Memories. The unending heat.
Sighing, Josie pressed her palms to her burning eyes. Maybe she was fooling herself. Maybe she wasn’t coping as well as she thought she was. She’d been in the sun all morning and then stormed along the path in the heat of high noon. Heat could make a person do strange things. Imagine things.
Her fingers rested against her closed eyes.
She hadn’t seen the colony of birds on her return. It was as if the curious massing of birds had been a dream.
They had been real, though.
The slow pursuit of the birds had been as real as the feral dogs. But like her conviction that the dogs were watching her with an evil intelligence, her panicked flight from the birds made no sense to her, either.
She wasn’t a woman given to wild imaginings. She’d coped with the reality of blood and bones in the operating room and dealt with prima donna orthopedic surgeons. She was faced with reality every moment of her life. She liked reality.
Or she had until the reality of Mellie’s disappearance and what it meant.
Had she heard a child’s voice, though? Really? Had she actually seen a small form in that chilled, silent hallway?
Yes?
No?
But something had happened.
Cooling her feverish skin, Josie slicked water down her arms. She couldn’t begin doubting her own perceptions. She was a trained observer in the operating room, competent in emergencies. Grounded. As she’d told Hayes, she wasn’t a woman given to hysterical imaginings.
Before he’d strolled out of her life and Mellie’s with a charmingly regretful smile on his face, Bart had always mockingly teased her about her sense of responsibility, but she’d sensed the knife-edge of truth in his teasing, the stab of hostility behind the charm.
“No imagination, no sense of fun, Josie,” he’d said, shrugging. “How can I be tied down to a woman who lives by schedules and lists all the time? I’m a restless kind of guy, Josie,” he’d said, throwing his duffel bag over one very broad, very restless shoulder, “and you’re, well, doll, you’re so predictable. And I like spontaneity, know what I mean, sugarbabe?”
Oh, yes, she knew. But someone had to worry about schedules and bills, and babies needed order, routine, and—
Josie breathed deeply, stopping the bitterness welling inside. No, she wasn’t a woman given to fancies.
She could’ve been mistaken about—
Flipping water at her throat, she paused and considered possibilities. It made more sense to her that thrown off-balance by the power of Ryder’s presence, she probably had seen nothing more than the flutter of a curtain in the shutter-induced twilight of that house, the yowl of a cat becoming a childish cry, the product of her own need.
But with one more child missing, she had to tell Jeb Stoner what she’d seen, no matter how flimsy the evidence. He was the detective investigating the disappearance and deaths of the children. He was the one who’d taken all the information about Mellie. He should know. It was his call.
The police could add Ryder Hayes to their list of suspects. They could search his house. If they found nothing…
She let her face dry in the air, welcoming the illusion of coolness as she scooped out the water from the sink into a can. She would pour the water on her garden tomorrow at daybreak.
Sooner or later, someone would slip up. She would find out what had happened to Mellie.
That was the day she lived for now. That fierce determination to look into the face of the person—
Josie smacked her hand against the sink.
No, she hadn’t seen her daughter in that long, shadowy hallway. She’d given up hope that Mellie was out there, somewhere, desperate and frightened.
Now, all she hoped for was that someday she would know.
The drought would end.
The killings would end.
She would find out what had happened to Mellie.
In the meantime, she put out raisins for the mockingbirds that sang at night and pans of water for the drought-stricken animals that staggered and crawled to her yard.
While she endured the slow passage of heat-heavy days, she planted seeds in her scrap of garden, saving water to dribble on the parched earth that rolled up around the drops of water and coated them with dust.
And, always, she waited.
But a child was missing again.
The shrill ringing of the phone shattered her thoughts.
She went into her kitchen. “Hello?”
Humming silence. “Who is it? Hello? Who’s there?” she repeated, her heart speeding up a little. A click. Static. Josie replaced the mouthpiece of her squatty black rotary phone, the old-fashioned relic of a phone Bart had hated, gently onto the base. A bad connection. A storm somewhere buzzing along the electrical wires.
She always hoped, somehow, though, that the phone would ring and it would be Mellie.
