Eye of the Storm

“Notice I actually came to Jolly Mill. I didn’t leave,” Megan snapped. Unlike your father, she wanted to say, but Lynley knew what she meant. Barry Marshal was a self-centered egotist who had split soon after Kirstie’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. For everyone’s sake, he should have split long before that. Megan knew too many of that man’s secrets. Too many Jolly Mill secrets.

“Sorry,” Lynley said. “You’re right. I know.”

“Just bring Kirstie to the office when you find her,” Megan said.

“I will. Thanks.”

“I can come help you search.”

“No. You just be there for us when I find her.” That slender edge of tension lingered after Lynley disconnected. Megan knew her friend’s resentment wasn’t directed totally at her. She was just the punching bag for all Lynley was going through, for all Barry’s failures as a father. Megan wasn’t taking punches very well right now. Lynley didn’t know about Joni’s murder. No one here did.

Kirstie would be found again—or she would return herself home when she regained her senses, as she had done every time she’d gone missing. Everyone in the Jolly Mill community knew her and watched out for her.

Megan pushed her cell phone back into her deep purse and was turning back toward bed when a flash of light struck one of the panes. Brief. Barely there.

She frowned, staring out into the darkness. Had she actually seen that, or was it a side effect of her sleeping pill? The drug could do strange things to some people. She’d considered more than once the possibility that the drugs were causing the dreams, but she’d so craved sleep after the weeks of sleeplessness following Joni’s murder that she took them anyway.

A whisper of a different kind reached her from outside—not wind or frogs or the sound of the electric water pump. There was another flash. A newly familiar strum of panic restricted Megan’s feet to the woven mat by the front door.

She clenched her fists. Don’t allow the panic to control you. This wasn’t the mean streets of the city. This was tiny Jolly Mill, safe, quiet, secluded. She didn’t need a weapon here to protect herself.

Another sound reached her—tires crunching on rock?

Her fear quickened. When she entered her drive, her tires always met the gravel on the quarter-mile track that led to this cottage. What she’d just heard might be that gravel pop-snap in the distance. Maybe someone had turned around at the mailbox and was driving away. That had to be it.

The only sounds she typically heard here at night were the occasional bark of a farm dog, the lowing of a cow separated from her calf or the spine-tingling call of an owl that sounded more like mocking laughter at her plight. None of the wildlife in this area sounded like a car.

As she wavered, the soft rumble grew louder, followed by a flicker of shadows through the trees. A vehicle. An aura of stealth seemed to fill and then illuminate the darkness like a hunter stalking its prey.

The drive to this cottage was private. No one else around here had reason to be on it at this time of morning—except maybe a patient in trouble? She’d decided not to have a landline, despite the spotty cell coverage in Jolly Mill. If there was an urgent medical need, it was feasible someone could be coming for help, though there was a hospital in Monett less than twenty minutes away and in Cassville only a little farther in the other direction.

She checked the dead bolt lock on the front door. Of course she’d locked it. The past few years had taught her that. No one had ever locked the doors when she was growing up in Jolly Mill. Something else people seldom did was close the curtains, but right now lowering the Roman shades over all the windows seemed like a good idea.

The tight cords bit into her hands as she jerked them down, one by one. Her movements double-timed as lights crested the hill and shot through the tiny cracks in the woven material. The sharp, quick sound of her breath was harsh as it hit the matted shades. This was no dream. One set of cords tangled together, the shades tilting drunkenly as she worked a knot free and straightened the bottom edge. She rushed to the next window and then the next until she had a pseudo-barrier from the onslaught of light.

Megan’s suddenly overactive imagination transformed her little patch of wooded paradise into a battleground. Even as she castigated herself for her fear, she could do nothing to ease it.

Calm. Stay calm. Joni’s killer is dead. There’s no one after you. She wouldn’t call for help just because of a car approaching the house. She didn’t need anyone in town to think the doctor at the new clinic was unhinged. But who was coming here? Mom and Dad would have called if they were planning a trip across the state, and they wouldn’t have driven all night to get here.

Megan retreated into the shadows of the far corner of the sitting area. She curled into the love seat, clutching the throw pillow to her chest as she waited.

The holy scent reached her from the homemade sachet her former Sunday school teacher had sewn into the pillow. Martha Irene called it one of her “prayer pillows,” but Megan couldn’t pray. Who would hear her? She just squeezed the cushion hard against her chest and tried to slow her panicked imagination while the rhythm of her heart encroached on the chambers of her lungs.

She should definitely have sought treatment for PTSD.

The vehicle lights went off and the engine died, plunging her into dark silence for another few seconds before she heard a door opening and then footsteps brushing through unmown grass and last year’s leaves. There was a soft sound of someone stepping onto her wooden front porch and then a pause while she tried to still her panicked breathing, fingernails digging into her hands. This was crazy. If someone wanted to hurt her, they wouldn’t approach this way. And yet she hadn’t been totally rational since arriving here. Everything was still too fresh, and the dreams each night reminded her that the world was a dangerous place.

No one knocked. There was no doorbell. The pain in her hands distracted her.

A familiar voice reached her. One word, softly spoken. “Megan.”

She silently gulped in a great lungful of air. It couldn’t be.

“Megan? It’s me. Gerard.”

She stared through the darkness toward the door, and at once her fear metamorphosed into something even less manageable. How dare Gerard Vance follow her here?

TWO

Gerard didn’t want to knock. “Megan, please.” He could hear the cracking fatigue in his own voice. Could she hear it too?

According to his late-sleeping sister, Tess, who’d taken a couple of road trips with Megan last year, Megan had never slept this late when she lived in Corpus Christi. In fact, Tess complained that Megan never even allowed the sun to rise before her on a day off.

He knew she was here because as he’d driven up his headlights had flashed across her bright yellow Neo parked beneath the limbs of a huge oak tree around back—no missing that color. Megan was nothing if not safety-conscious. When he’d helped her pick out a replacement car last year after her old one breathed its last, her only requirement was a bright color. The front window of the car was illuminated by a few streaks of moonlight that filtered through the leaves.

“Megan, I’m not going away. I may camp out here until daylight, but I’m not leaving.”

He waited. Nothing. No movement inside at all.

Hadn’t he seen light coming through the windows a moment ago? It may have been a reflection, or imagination…though Gerard didn’t give in easily to imagination.

He pressed his forehead against the door frame of the tiny cottage. No one answered as he continued to wait. No light came on.

That didn’t mean Megan was asleep. It could just mean she was turning a deaf ear to his voice outside her front door, as she’d ignored the messages he’d left on her cell and at the clinic this past week…and with Kirstie Marshal, his source.

The energy that had kept him going for the past twenty-four hours—a full day at the mission followed by a long night of driving—began to wane. He was here. He couldn’t force Megan to open the door or to answer him, but he still had to find some way to breach the divide for her sake and, selfishly, for his. His clinic needed her, and though several local docs in the Corpus Christi area had volunteered to fill in during her absence, she’d developed a bond with her patients. She’d developed a bond with him, and he wasn’t about to let that be destroyed.

“Look,” he said, more softly still. “I’m not here to nag you about your work ethic, okay?” She still owed three months out of two years of work at the rescue mission clinic for her med school loans. She needed to complete those months. He was pretty sure she would be given some leeway by the loan officer, considering her trauma, he just didn’t know how much.

Unfortunately, he’d tried to point out that she could be jeopardizing her career if she left when she did. He’d learned the hard way that she didn’t respond to authority very well. Why had he made that stupid mistake after he’d known her for twenty-one months—appearing to pull rank on her as she’d walked away from the clinic? Demanding she fulfill her obligation? Sometimes he behaved like an inexperienced young buck. Desperation did that to him on occasion, especially when it came to a certain irresistible doctor with a mind of her own.

“Megan, are you studying?”

She’d often teased him about taking a detour past her apartment every morning on his way to the mission just to check up on her. How could he help it? He liked being near her, even if just in the neighborhood. The sight of her cheerful smile, the warmth in those golden-brown eyes, evident for all patients to see, had grabbed Gerard by the scruff of the heart as they had the rest of the staff.

It had taken his sister, Tess, to point out that Megan, with the long curtain of wavy hair the color of ginger, the delicate yet audaciously feminine lines of face and body—Tess’s description, not his—could win an international beauty contest. What he knew of Dr. Megan Bradley’s heart affected him more than any physical beauty.

And now, after nearly two years spent helping the neediest of patients, she was the one in need of help. Gerard held himself responsible for the tragedy at the clinic three weeks ago, and he couldn’t allow Megan to isolate herself out here in the woods because of it.

Of course, he was probably being egocentric to think that she belonged at the mission clinic permanently, that her life should revolve around his calling. He’d not been mistaken, however, about the look in her eyes these past few months as they met together about her patients. She loved them.

Had he been mistaken to think she was looking forward to his company with as much enthusiasm as he was to hers? Was he imagining that she cared for him? The shock of Joni Park’s murder had destroyed more than Joni’s life. It had shaken the foundations of everyone her life had touched, and though Joni’s sister was devastated, Megan had been the one to bear firsthand witness to the destruction of the young woman’s body.

The boards squeaked beneath his feet as he turned to gaze out into the dark morning and rested his head against the support post. It was possible Megan had changed her routine since leaving Corpus Christi. She may still be sleeping. It was possible.

His eyes closed of their own will. Such a long trip…but he’d made it for so many good reasons. Tess and Sean could run the mission until he returned. Gerard had things to attend to here in Jolly Mill.

Tree frogs slowed their croaking and fell silent. A tractor started up in the distance and a rooster crowed at the stars…or perhaps at the vague lightening of the darkness past the tree line. There was a rustle of brush nearby and a cottontail rabbit hopped across the overgrown lawn, sniffing for an early breakfast. Gerard stepped down from the porch and felt the soft cushion of grass beneath his shoes as he returned to the car. Once inside he closed the door quietly so he wouldn’t awaken Megan—if she truly was asleep and not just waiting for him to leave. He moved the back of his seat to nearly horizontal and closed his eyes.