Читать книгу Two Souls Hollow - Пола Грейвс - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe sound of running feet pounding down the corridor outside Danny’s hospital room stopped Ginny’s song in the middle of a verse. She turned her head in time to see Anson Daughtry speed past the open door.
With a quick glance to make sure Danny was still sleeping, she hurried out into the corridor. Down the hall, the door to the stairwell was slowly swinging shut.
The pretty dark-eyed nurse at the desk caught her eye as she passed, a frown on her face. “Friends of yours?”
Friends? As in plural? “The tall, lanky guy is. There was someone else out here?”
“An orderly, I think—at least he was wearing the uniform.” She frowned. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before, though. Should I call security?”
“Yes,” Ginny said, heading for the stairs.
She could hear the sound of footsteps running a couple of floors below her, shoe soles squeaking on the rubber stair treads. She headed down after the sounds before she talked herself out of it. If Danny’s life was in danger, she needed to know why.
On the landing two floors down, she stopped, listening for more sounds of running. Either they were so far ahead of her the sound didn’t carry up to the fifth-floor landing or they’d exited on one of the floors above.
As she started back up the stairs, she heard a door swing open below and a flurry of footsteps rushing up the stairs toward her. Gripped by a sudden urge to run, she took the steps two at a time, stumbling as she reached the sixth-floor landing and hitting her shin hard on the top step.
Biting back a gasp of pain, she pushed to her feet, darting a quick look behind her.
Anson stared back at her, his eyes wide. “Are you okay?”
She slumped against the wall of the stairwell, grimacing at the throbbing ache in her bruised shin. “What the hell is going on? The nurse said you were running after some orderly?”
“We need to get back to your brother’s room.” The note of urgency in his voice made her stomach ache.
“Why? What happened?”
He put his hand on her shoulder, steering her toward the next set of steps. He wasn’t even breathing hard, she noticed, considering he’d just gone running up and down several flights of stairs. His hand was solid but gentle against her back as he led her through the door to the seventh floor.
There was a barrel-chested black man in a security-guard uniform standing at the nurse’s desk when they emerged from the stairwell. The nurse nodded toward them and the security guard started walking their way, wariness evident in his dark eyes. He kept one hand near the weapon tucked into his gun belt.
“Is there some sort of trouble?” he asked.
Anson answered in a calm, authoritative tone, “Earlier this evening, one of your patients was stabbed by one of four men who accosted him and his sister. I just spotted one of those men in a pair of scrubs heading toward his room. He turned and started running, so I went after him to see if I could catch him. But he had too large a head start, and then it occurred to me that he might have been a diversion.”
Ginny looked up at Anson. “You think—” She didn’t even stop to finish, darting down the hall toward her brother’s room.
When she dashed into the room, she found Danny still sleeping peacefully. The monitors next to his bed showed no signs of distress.
She slumped into the chair beside his bed, pressing her face into her shaking hands.
“Is everything okay, ma’am?” The security guard’s gravelly voice made her look up. He stood in the doorway, Anson a step behind him.
“Seems to be,” she answered, her voice wobblier than she liked. “I think I’d like a nurse to come check on him.”
The security guard nodded and headed back down the hall.
Anson waited in the doorway, his eyes narrowed as he looked from her to Danny, then back to her. “You okay?”
She nodded. “Are you sure it was one of those guys at the Whiskey Road?”
He entered the room, nodding. “Why would they come all the way here to go after him again?”
“I have no idea,” she admitted, feeling scared and helpless. It was a terrible feeling, one she’d experienced far too many times growing up, and she struggled not to give in. “I honestly don’t. Danny hasn’t said anything about being in trouble, and I haven’t noticed anyone suspicious hanging around the property or anything—”
“Does he live with you?”
“Since he went on disability.”
A nurse entered then, smiling at Ginny as she crossed to take a look at the monitor by Danny’s bed. “All his vitals look good.”
Danny stirred at the sound of the nurse’s voice, his eyes squinting at the light overhead. “Whass ’appenin’?
Ginny rose to comfort him. “Nothing’s happening, Danny. Why don’t you go back to sleep? You’ll feel a lot better in the morning.”
His eyes stopped struggling to focus and within a minute, he was asleep again. Ginny stared down at him, torn between wanting to tuck him in and wanting to jerk him up by the hair and shake him for what he was putting her through these days.
“He seems to be recovering nicely,” the nurse said with a gentle smile. “Call us if you need us.”
Ginny moved away from the hospital bed and sat down again, slumping forward, her forearms resting on her knees.
“You’re going to stay here all night, aren’t you?” Anson asked.
She looked up at him. “Yeah.”
“Did you call Quinn?”
She shook her head, feeling defeated. She had so much work on her desk waiting to be processed, and now she’d be another day behind. “I’ll call in the morning. I guess I’ll need to ask for a few days off.”
“No,” Anson said.
She looked up at him. “No?”
“There’s no reason for you to stay here with your brother for three days while he detoxes. You’re not his mother.”
Anger at his presumption flooded her tense gut as she rose to her feet. “You don’t have a say in what I do or don’t do.”
“No, I don’t. But I do have experience with drunks. And there’s no way you can baby him back to health. He has to want it for himself.” There was no hardness in Anson’s words, no censure. His rumbly voice was gentle and even sympathetic. “Until he wants it for himself, you’re just standing in the way of a freight train that has no intention of putting on the brakes.”
“I don’t think my staying here is going to make him stop drinking,” she said in a softer tone. “But if you’re right about that orderly being one of the men from the bar, then he might be in danger.”
“And you think you’re big enough to stop one of those guys?”
“No. But if I’m here, I can call for help.”
He looked as if he wanted to argue. But finally, he gave a brief nod. “Fair enough. But you’re going to need to sleep sometimes. You can’t stay here playing bodyguard around the clock.”
“There’s no one else to do it.” She sat in the chair again, wrapping her arms around her stomach, hoping to calm a sudden case of the shakes. She was starting to feel completely overwhelmed.
“Yes, there is,” Anson said quietly. “I can stay with your brother.”
She looked up again to see if he was serious. He was. She shook her head quickly. “No, that’s— I mean, it’s very nice of you to offer—”
“Thanks but no thanks?”
“Mr. Daughtry—”
“Anson,” he corrected gently.
“It’s a generous offer, but you don’t really know us. And I don’t really know you that well, and Danny doesn’t know you at all. And surely you have other things to do with your time.”
“Right now? Not so much.” He looked around the room, spotted a second chair and crossed to bring it closer to the recliner where she sat. He leaned forward until his eyes were level with hers. “I have an ulterior motive. I’ll admit that.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m bored. I don’t have a job to go to, and I don’t have anything interesting set up on the side while I’m waiting for Quinn and his investigators to finally figure out I’m not out there leaking company secrets like a rusty pipe. Plus, I happen to have a little experience with people who drink too much. And maybe it’s a good thing Danny doesn’t know me, you know?”
“You think I’m a pushover.”
“Didn’t say that.”
“Didn’t have to.” She looked over at her brother. He was still asleep, his face soft and boyish, reminding her of the boy he’d once been. She sighed. “I know I’m too soft on him. But he’s all I have.”
“Believe me, I get that.” A melancholy note in Anson’s deep voice drew her attention back to him. He was looking at her, his gaze warm and serious. “I know what it’s like to be you. Only it was my father. And he never recovered.”
The thought of losing Danny to booze or, God forbid, drugs was enough to send a chill all the way to her bone marrow. She hugged herself more tightly. “I’m sorry.”
“Let me do this. I’ll even stay tonight if you want so you can go home and get some sleep.”
She shook her head. “No car, remember?”
“Oh, right.”
As an awkward silence descended between them, there was a light knock on the door, and a moment later, the security guard who’d questioned them earlier stuck his head through the doorway. “Everything okay in here?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said, managing a weak smile at the man.
“Did you find the man with the beard?” Anson asked.
The security guard shook his head. “He could have gotten out of the hospital before we even got a chance to start looking. I’ve alerted the guards to keep an eye out for him, and I’ll be staying on this floor for the night, just in case.”
“Thank you.”
Anson turned to look at her after the security guard closed the door behind him. “I don’t think they’ll try anything again tonight.”
“I hope you’re right.”
He pushed to his feet. “I’m going to head on out and leave you and your brother alone. Is there anything I can do for you before I go?”
She shook her head. “I’m good.”
He looked at Danny. “He might want some clothes for tomorrow. A change of underwear or something. You may want some clean clothes, too. Is there someone I can call to get some things for y’all?”
She hated to admit there was no one, but it was the truth. She worked all the time, and Danny’s drinking had made it hard for them to do any sort of socializing with their neighbors. “No. Maybe I can run home sometime tomorrow and grab a few things—”
“No car,” he reminded her.
Her heart sank. “Right.”
“I can do it for you. If you trust me.”
She stared at him for a moment, suddenly uncertain. He had been a lifesaver for her that night—literally. But what did she really know about Anson Daughtry? If the people she worked with at The Gates were telling the truth, Anson was a free spirit who looked like a redneck and thought like a tech genius. But he was also on administrative leave from the company, the prime suspect in a case of industrial espionage.
Nobody at The Gates seemed to believe he was guilty, though—
“Forget I suggested it.” Anson turned to go.
She caught his hand, holding him in place. “Wait.”
He looked down at her fingers closed around his. His hand was warm and rougher than she expected, more like a workman’s hand than that of a man who worked on computers all day long.
His gaze swept up to meet hers, dark and soft. “Yes?”
“I would really appreciate it if you would get a few things for Danny and me,” she said, releasing his hand. Her fingers still tingled a little where their skin had touched.
Shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans, he nodded. “Okay.”
She grabbed her purse from the floor and pulled out her keys to remove the house key from the ring. “Here’s the key to the house. The driveway circles around to the back—you can park there. The back door opens to the kitchen. Just go through there to the hall. My room is on the right. Danny’s is on the left.”
“You want me to pick out some things for you, too?” he asked with a slow smile that made her own lips curve in response. “Go through your unmentionables? You’re a brave woman, Ginny Coltrane.”
“Or crazy,” she murmured. “Clean jeans and a T-shirt for me. A change of underwear. Think you can handle that?”
“I think I’ll manage. What about your brother? He have any jogging shorts, something like that?”
“I think he does. That sounds perfect. Thank you.” She told him her address and he jotted it down on his phone. “I really appreciate this.”
“Give me your phone number and I’ll call if I have trouble finding anything.”
She told him her cell-phone number and he typed that into his phone, as well. “Are you going tonight or in the morning?”
“I was thinking maybe tonight,” he answered. “You’re probably going to be awake for a little while longer, right?”
She nodded. “I’m not sure how easy it’ll be to fall asleep tonight.”
“I’ll go now, then. And if I need your help finding anything, I’ll call you. Sound like a deal?”
“Sounds like a deal,” she agreed.
He left the room with a little wave of one large hand, closing the door behind him.
Ginny looked around the quiet hospital room, feeling as scared and alone as she’d felt in a long, long time.
* * *
GINNY COLTRANE’S SMALL bungalow sat in the heart of Two Souls Hollow, a small valley cut through the mountains north of Purgatory. The homes in this part of the hollow were spaced far enough apart that Anson couldn’t see either of the neighbors’ homes from the car park behind the house.
It wasn’t the kind of house paid for by corporate espionage, he thought with a frown. Not that he’d been thinking of her as a suspect for the past few hours, not since she turned those big blue eyes on him and transformed him into a love-struck adolescent.
Where was Danny’s car? he wondered as he parked in the empty drive behind the house. If it had been parked at the Whiskey Road Tavern, surely Ginny would have taken it to the hospital rather than depending on him for a ride. If there was something he was beginning to realize about her, it was that she liked to handle things on her own whenever possible.
She lived in a small town, but there were no neighbors she trusted to pick up a few things for her stay. She had no family to speak of, besides her alcoholic brother. He’d never seen her socializing with anyone at the office, either—she had a work ethic that would put most CEOs to shame.
What did she do for fun?
Did she ever get to have any fun?
“Now I’m depressing myself,” he muttered as he pulled out the house key Ginny had lent him and unlocked the back door.
The light switch was just inside the door. He flicked it on and took a quick look around the small, neat kitchen. The house wasn’t new, and neither were the appliances, but everything seemed to be clean and well maintained. There were dishes drying on the rack by the sink and a neatly folded dish towel on the counter, the only sign that the kitchen had been used that day.
He went through the door into the hallway and took a left into Danny’s bedroom. It wasn’t nearly as neat as the kitchen, though he wouldn’t show up on any reality show about hoarders or anything. His bed was unmade, the pillows lying haphazardly across the mattress. There was an empty glass on the nightstand, as well. Anson took a sniff, surprised that he couldn’t smell any alcohol. Maybe he didn’t do any drinking around the house?
Yeah, no. Alcoholics always had a stash. Always.
Anson found Danny’s in the sock drawer of his chest of drawers, tucked near the back of the drawer. Two bottles of Jack Daniel’s, only one full. The other was half-gone.
He left them there, though he would tell Ginny the next time he talked to her so she could get rid of it before Danny returned home.
But his next discovery caught him off guard. In the underwear drawer, wrapped up in a pair of boxer shorts, he found a bag of white powder. Short of dipping his finger into the bag and tasting it—which sounded like a really stupid idea—he could only assume it was some sort of illicit substance. Or why would Danny have bothered to hide it in his underwear drawer?
Hating to do it, he pulled out his phone and dialed Ginny’s cell phone.
She answered on the first ring. “Hello?”
“Ginny, it’s Anson Daughtry. I’m at your place, picking up the change of clothes and I found something in one of Danny’s drawers.”
“He has a stash of booze there, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, but that’s not the only thing.” He told her about the plastic bag containing the white powder.
She was silent for so long he wondered if the call had been cut off. Just before he spoke, she said, “Can you tell what it is?”
“Probably coke or heroin,” he said. “Meth usually comes in crystalized form. Have you ever known him to do drugs?”
“No,” she said with a weary sigh. “But it’s not like drugs are hard to find in these damn hills.”
“The hospital may have done a tox screen on Danny in the ER. I don’t suppose he’s put your name on his medical forms to have information released to you, has he?”
“I honestly don’t know.” She sounded bone-tired and utterly devastated. Anson wished he could reach through the phone and give her an encouraging hug, a feeling that should have alarmed him but somehow didn’t.
“I think we need to dispose of it, whatever it is. There’s enough here to get your brother in a mess if the police were to conduct a raid.”
“Maybe I should turn him in.”
The pain in her voice made his chest ache. “Do you think that would help him? Or do you think it would just make him cut you out of his life completely?”
“I don’t know.” She was crying now, damn it. He’d made her cry.
“Listen, I’m going to get rid of this stuff. Flush it down the toilet and put the bag in the trash. You hang in there and I’ll be back at the hospital before you know it.” He pulled out the clothing he’d come there to gather for Danny. “Does Danny have a gym bag or something I could put the clothes in?”
“In his closet,” she directed. “It’s the door to your right if you’re facing the chest of drawers.”
He opened the closet, wary about what he’d find inside. But it was an ordinary storage space, with a few clothes hanging from the bar at the top and several pairs of shoes lined up on the floor next to a dark blue gym bag.
The bag was empty, so Anson stuffed Danny’s clothes inside. “Your room next. Any drawers you want me to avoid?”
“You’re a big boy. I think you can handle anything in my drawers.” She made a watery sound that might have been a laugh. “Wait. That sounded really naughty.”
He laughed as he crossed to her bedroom and flicked on the light. It was neater than Danny’s room, but it still had a slightly messy, lived-in feel he rather liked. No flowers or knickknacks, no candles or fluffy throw pillows in this room, just a four-poster bed covered with a handmade quilt and two pillows in white cases. “Nice room.”
“Thanks. Did I remember to make the bed?”
“You did.” He crossed to the tall chest of drawers beside the bed. “I’m at the chest of drawers. What do you want from what drawer?”
“The top drawer is my underwear. A couple of panties and bras would be great.”
He opened the drawer and found panties and bras inside, neatly folded. Pretty, bright colors, he saw, but none of the bras seemed to go with any of the panties. “Do you care if they match?”
“No,” she answered. After a few seconds, she added, “This is such a strange conversation.”
“I like to think of it as getting to know you, kamikaze-style.” He grabbed a couple of sets of underwear and put them in the bag. “What else?”
As she started to speak, he heard the sound of shattering glass coming from somewhere in the house.
It was apparently loud enough to carry through the phone, for a second later, Ginny asked, “What was that?”
“I’m not sure,” he answered, keeping his voice low. He stepped out of her room into the hall. From there, he could see into the kitchen. Nothing seemed out of place.
Then he heard the sound of more glass breaking, coming from the front of the house. Glass clattered onto a hard surface, then a second later came the unmistakable crunch of glass being broken underfoot.
“Anson?” Ginny’s voice rose in his ear.
He ducked back into her bedroom and eased the door closed, his heart pounding. “Someone’s breaking into your house.”
