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“By the man with the gun. The man in the yard over there.” I pointed toward the Ryders’ house as goosebumps once again raced up and down my arms.
Gray blinked. “He had a gund?”
“You didn’t see?”
“I din’t ged a chance. I god attacked first.”
“Attacked?” I was torn between guilt for hurting him and indignation that he’d think I did it on purpose. Then I noticed the little upward quirk of his lips where they were visible below the towels. “Beast,” I muttered.
He grinned as he pulled himself to his feet and walked cautiously to the window, towels in place, head still tilted back to stem the flow.
I caught at his arm, trying to pull him back. “Don’t, Gray. He might still be there.”
“I doubt it. He’d either be here—”
I shuddered.
“—or be gond.”
The squeal of tires taking a corner too fast and the snarl of a pedal pressed to the metal made me jump. I rushed to a front window and saw a flash of black disappear down the road bordering Freedom’s Chase.
“See? There he goes,” Gray said. “Id’s safe.”
“How do you know it’s him?”
“When I drove through the develobment for my last check of the evening, I din’t see anyone.”
“No black car anywhere? What’d he do? Hide it in a garage?”
“He was driving a black car? What kind?”
I threw up my hands. “How should I know? They all look alike.”
He gave me that guy look. “They don’t, but that’s beside the point.”
“It was just black, and what is your point?”
“My point is that there couldn’t have been anyone other than him hanging around. I’m not that blind.”
I decided that his flawed logic wasn’t worth a comment. Still, I did agree with his thought that the man would either be here ready to do us further damage or be gone. Since he wasn’t here, and since I’d heard that car take off like a proverbial bat trying to escape a very hot place, I relaxed.
“We deed to report this to the police,” Gray said.
I nodded. “He pulled it from his waistband.” I whipped my hand up to illustrate.
Gray nodded as he looked out the back window toward the Ryders’.
“You can’t see much of anything but the roof unless you climb the ladder. Remember?”
“Id’s my nose that got creamed, nod my brain. I bemember.”
“Well, you don’t have to be all snippy about it.”
He looked down at me from his awkward head tilt. “I think I’mb entitled to be a liddle snippy.”
I sighed. Maybe he was. All he’d wanted to do was to lock up and go home, probably to take some beautiful woman—his wife?—to dinner. Well, it wasn’t my fault that man had a gun and that I was scared of men with guns. Everybody was scared of men with guns.
Holding on to the ladder with one hand as he held the towels to his nose with the other, Gray climbed one rung at a time.
“He’s not dere now,” he said as he searched the area, head swinging from left to right. “We’re right. He’s gond.” He started back down the ladder, froze momentarily, then leaped back just as I had. Somehow he managed to make that giant step to the ground look easy, landing neatly on his feet.
“What?” I looked from him to the window. “What’d you see?” Then I saw it, a small hole in the glass near the top on the right. “G-gray.” I pointed.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice no longer peeved or teasing but thoughtful. He looked at me. “I think he’d have missed you even if you hadn’t ducked, bud id’s probably a good thing you did.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” The man in the red shirt had shot at me! Me, Anna Volente, intermediate school art teacher and registered coward.
I stepped closer to Gray. My hands started to shake, and my stomach felt dangerously unsettled. I swallowed several times to make sure things stayed where they were supposed to. Blood on the floor was enough of a mess. I took another step closer.
Gray pulled his cell phone from his belt and held it out to me. “Call 911. I’mb afraid to take the pressure off my dose.”
I hit the digits and spoke to the voice at the other end, ending with, “No, neither of us was shot. No, we can’t see him any more. We think we heard him drive away. Yes, we’ll wait.”
When I disconnected, I rubbed my cold arms. “But he saw me, Gray. And he knows I saw him. What if he’s now out to get me?”
“I wouldn’t worry.” Gray started walking toward the kitchen. “He’s long gone. He had to know we’d call the cops, and doe one hangs around waiting for the cops to show.”
“But what if he comes back?”
“You won’t be here. You’ll be home, tucked safely in bed.”
I followed him to the kitchen, glancing uneasily over my shoulder at the hole in the window. “Where are we going?”
“Here.” Gray leaned his body over the sink, then slowly withdrew the towels from his nose. He stood unmoving, head still slightly tilted upwards. “I’mb not bleeding any more, amb I?”
I looked at him carefully. “No, but you look like you’ve been in the war.” I grabbed one of the towels and wet a corner not covered with red. “Look here.”
Gray stood impatiently as I began the delicate job of swabbing his face and neck without hurting him further. After a minute of my tentative swipes, he reached for the cold water, turned it on full and threw handful after handful over himself, scrubbing his cheeks and neck after each wave. Then very gently he scrubbed beneath his nose.
He turned to me, dripping onto his bloody shirt. “How’s that?”
“Pretty good.” I reached up and wiped at a patch of red beside his nose. He grimaced, whether from pain because I hit a tender area or from reluctance to have me touch him, I couldn’t tell. He lifted an arm and dried one side of his face on a shirtsleeve. He repeated the operation with the other sleeve.
I eyed his shirt. The blood was turning rusty around the edges of the stains.
He looked down and shrugged. “Can’t do too much about that. I’ll just toss it.” He started toward the back door. “I won’t be long. I need to check the Ryders’ to make certain there was no damage done by our armed visitor. Don’t leave before I come back. I want to walk you to your car.” He looked back at me and grinned. “And don’t stand in front of any windows.”
I stared at him. Was that last line supposed to be funny? Because it wasn’t. “I thought you thought he left.”
“I do. You don’t need to worry. You’ll be fine.”
“You can’t know that.”
He nodded agreeably. “You’re right. I can’t. Let’s say you’ll probably be fine.”
That settled it. “I’m coming with you.”
He raised his eyebrows at me.
“It isn’t safe for you to be alone either.” I tried to sound as if I was selfless, full of concern about him. I didn’t want to admit out loud that I was reluctant—admit it, kid, you’re downright scared—to be in the house by myself.
“Don’t want to stay here alone, eh?” His smile was only slightly teasing, very understanding.
I felt my cheeks flush. Sometimes intelligent men were a burden.
We struck off across the newly sodded backyard, around the back fence and into the Ryders’ backyard, me practically skipping to keep up with Gray’s long stride.
I stared at the unfinished house wrapped in Tyvec. The holes where the windows would go stared back at me like black, empty eyes in the gathering dusk and gave me the creeps. I looked instead at the scale of the house.
“Why do people buy places this big?” I thought of the small, two-bedroom apartment I’d lived in before I moved in with Lucy and Meaghan. The whole thing would fit into the great room of the model, and this house didn’t look any smaller.
Gray shrugged. “Americans like big.”
“Even if they can’t afford to furnish half the rooms? Even if they can’t go on a vacation for years because they’re house-poor, or put money aside for their kids’ braces and educations because they have to pay that astronomical mortgage every month? Even if they both have to work to stay afloat financially, leaving the kids to raise themselves?”
I blinked. Where had all that come from?
“Easy there, Anna,” Gray said mildly. “I just build ’em. The Realtors and the buyers handle the money issues.” He started around the side of the house.
I hurried after him, unwilling to get too far from his comforting presence. It was a good thing I had no aspirations of being Nancy Drew or even Stephanie Plum, let alone Kinsey Milhone or Sidney on Alias. I obviously didn’t have the constitution for dealing with bad guys with guns. Dealing with rebellious schoolkids was more than tough enough for me. “Where are you going?”
“I want to walk around the house to make certain everything outside is okay before I check inside.”
“Shouldn’t we just wait for the police?” I glanced over my shoulder as I followed him into the front yard. “What if we mess up footprints or something?”
He stopped and looked down at the parched dingy orange subsoil studded helter-skelter with stones and pebbles of all sizes. Then he looked at me.
“Yeah, yeah,” I acknowledged. “Too hard for prints.” I glanced over my shoulder again.
“He’s gone, Anna. He was just a penny-ante thief looking for whatever he could get his hands on, maybe even the guy who’s been robbing the site.”
“Wearing gloves and a stocking mask? Shooting at innocent people? I don’t think so.” I studied him. “And neither do you.”
He smiled slightly as we rounded the last corner and found ourselves in the backyard once again. Gray went to the backdoor opening. Ignoring the lack of steps, he pulled himself up and into the house.
“Don’t you dare leave me out here alone.” I reached to pull myself up, but he turned and grasped my hand. He lifted me effortlessly.
“It’s dark in here.” I’m very good at stating the obvious.
“Darker,” he corrected. “Let your eyes adjust.”
Dusk sent its silver light through the many window openings, and I had to admit Gray was right. It wasn’t as dark as I’d first thought. Soon I could make out the rooms, the studs dividing them awaiting the electricians and plumbers before the insulation and drywall went up.
We looked carefully around the kitchen, the great room, the den, the bath, the pantry, the dining room and the living room. Aside from a couple of sawhorses, an aluminum extension ladder lying on the kitchen floor, several plastic-protected windows stacked in each room, a litter of nails and sawdust, and a ladder leading to the basement, the place was empty. The eerie silence pulled at me, making me shiver in spite of the fact that the temperature was still well above eighty.
I cocked my head as I heard a soft plop, plop, like the dripping of a faucet with a bad gasket. “Is the plumbing finished upstairs?” I pointed to the black opening to the second floor.
Gray tilted his head and listened. “That’s strange. It’s not even begun. I’m going to check the basement, and make sure nothing’s dripping down there.”
I watched him step onto the ladder propped against the hole where the cellar steps would go. Talk about dark and eerie. I shuddered. No way was I going down there. Bad as alone was, it was better than black and scary. “I’ll just wait here.” I motioned to the front hall where I stood.
He nodded and, pulling a penlight from his pocket, stuck it between his teeth. “Be right back.” Slowly he disappeared.
I walked to the front door and looked out. The police were nowhere in sight. I looked at the rapidly darkening sky, the only light the faintest of rosy glows in the west. I felt the gloom behind me deepen and press.
I turned and looked back at the front hall. It was spooky without Gray’s company, especially since the mysterious drip, drip, dripping echoed gently in the silence.
Frowning, I walked slowly around the hall, trying to find the source. I was convinced it wasn’t in the basement. Sure, sounds echoed in an empty house, but this was too loud to be coming up from downstairs. I jumped when a drop struck me on the outside of my left upper arm. I felt liquid run down and drip off my elbow. Another drop hit me.
I stepped to the side and looked up. I was beneath the place where the hall stairs, when they were built, would end at the second-floor landing, but it was too shadowy up there to see anything.
“Gray,” I called down the cellar steps. “I found where the drip is coming from.”
“Be right there.”
I went to the front door where the last remaining light showed the dark trail running down my arm. I dabbed at the wet stuff, then sniffed. My stomach pitched. There was no mistaking that sweet metallic odor.
“Gray!” I wasn’t even embarrassed about the panic in my voice
“Yeah?” His head appeared, followed by his shoulders and torso as he emerged from the basement.
“B-bring your little light over here. Shine it on my arm.”
He did so. “You scratched yourself.”
I shook my head. “That’s the drip.”
But it’s—”
I nodded.
“Where did it come from?” He used the tail of his ruined shirt to wipe my arm clean.
I pointed. “I was standing there.”
His swung his penlight, and the beam picked out a red puddle on the floor, drops plummeting from above to splash in the viscous pool. A footprint repeated across the floor, getting fainter and fainter with each step until it was almost non-existent when it stopped at my left shoe.
“Oh, no! I stepped in the blood!”
