Holly Grove Homecoming Read online

  “Nah. It’s pretty much healed. But it’s still a little ugly and I didn’t want to frighten the children, so I decided to cover up with a tee. In fact…”

  He paused long enough that Carly felt compelled to speak. “In fact what?”

  The skin around his eyes crinkled a bit as he obviously tried to hide a smile. “In fact, if my shoulder was a hundred percent, I’d pick you up and throw you in the water. But since it’s not, I’ll have to settle for…”

  Before Carly could react, she felt Trooper’s hands on her shoulders, and a couple of seconds later she was flying through the air.

  She managed to pull her knees up and cannonball into the water, hoping to at least splash Trooper while mentally vowing revenge. One advantage to being so abruptly introduced to the water was that her fear of snakes disappeared. No way, she decided, would a cold-blooded creature willingly subject itself to the frigid temperatures of that lake.

  She came up sputtering and was immediately inundated by a wave as Trooper cannonballed into the water a short distance away from her. More water splashed into her face, but she quickly warmed as adrenaline began to pump into her bloodstream. Trooper’s tactics clearly called for retribution.

  As soon as he surfaced, she sliced the water with the palm of her hand, sending a plume into his face. He yelped and ducked back under the water. A second later Carly felt something latch onto her left leg. Thoughts of an alligator set her heart to thumping before commonsense told her it was Trooper. He pulled and she went under.

  Her instinct was to kick out with her free leg, but at the last minute, she held back, fearing she might kick his left shoulder. Instead, she forced herself to relax, and a second later, her head bobbed above the water.

  He came up grinning and seemingly trying to appear contrite. Carly pushed the wet hair out of her face. “You louse.” She ruined the effects of her epithet by smiling.

  “You’ll have to admit that this is refreshing.” Trooper raised his brows and gave her a boyish smile.

  Carly affected a frown. “Refreshing? If you call frigid refreshing, then I suppose it is.”

  “Why don’t you swim for a minute? The exercise will warm you.”

  They’d both been treading water. Carly glanced around. The dock jutted out about fifty feet. The nearest bank appeared too steep to allow a swimmer to exit there. Fortunately, she could see under the dock and spied a ladder on the far side leading from the water to the dock. “Good idea,” she said, starting to swim away from the dock. As soon as she was beyond the reach of Trooper’s long arms, she turned to swim parallel to the dock for a few feet and then cut back toward the ladder.

  “You surely aren’t getting out yet?” Trooper called to her.

  “You surely don’t think I’m going to stay in here and freeze,” Carly called back. She was a fairly strong swimmer and reached the ladder with a few more strokes. She pulled herself onto the dock, stood for a few seconds while the water drained from her suit, and then stepped across the wooden planks to look down at Trooper, who was still treading water. “Are you coming out?”

  Trooper grimaced. “I’m not sure I can make it. My darn shoulder is just…” He paused and dropped his gaze while continuing to tread water with just his right arm.

  Carly had a pretty good idea that he was pulling her leg again, but she couldn’t walk off and leave him. She glanced around for a life preserver but didn’t spot anything closer than the shore. She looked back at Trooper, who appeared to be sinking a little bit too much for her taste. “Oh what the…” she muttered to herself, then jumped in the lake again.

  As soon as she hit, Trooper grabbed her with both arms. The grin on his face and the twinkle in his eyes told her that he had, in fact, been teasing her. But she was half prepared for that eventuality. She pretended to strangle, and when Trooper loosened his grip, she shrugged him off, dived, and grabbed his feet, pulling him under with her.

  He pulled one foot free, then reached for her with his good arm and tumbled both of them into an underwater somersault. When they surfaced again, both were laughing and Carly was no longer freezing.

  “You are so despicable,” she informed him, but she allowed him to keep his arms around her, supporting her in an embrace that added to her newfound feelings of warmth.

  Then footsteps sounded on the dock above them, and when they looked up, Roy was grinning down at them. “Hate to interrupt your fun, but Karen sent me to tell you to get out of the water and come eat with us. She brought sandwiches and chips and so forth, and everybody’s getting ready to have a bite.”

  “I, for one, am hungry,” Trooper said. “How about you, Carly?”

  Carly wasn’t sure about intruding on a family picnic but didn’t see any way to gracefully excuse herself. “That sounds wonderful,” she said. “We’ll be right there.”

  She turned her shoulders so she could face Trooper and nodded toward the dock. “After you.”

  He raised his brows. “Ladies first.”

  She grinned. “Age before beauty.”

  “Oops. Guess I can’t argue with that.” He started swimming ahead of her around the dock, and she immediately realized that he could swim just as strongly as she could, in spite of his wound. “I owe you one,” she muttered beneath her breath, but she was smiling when she said it.

  Carly was surprised to discover she’d worked up an appetite as a result of her and Trooper’s water acrobatics. She thoroughly enjoyed the tuna salad sandwich and chips that Karen placed in front of her when she took a seat beside Trooper at the long picnic table situated under the oak.

  The various cousins and their families obviously shared a degree of fondness for each other. They chatted, teased, and laughed throughout the meal. They also, she noticed, gradually drew Trooper into their recollections about events they had shared in the past.

  And while they were careful not to ignore Carly, neither did they interrogate her, for which she was thankful. She was usually ill at ease when questioned about her writing, trying to walk a line between outright lying and telling the truth. Fortunately, no one asked the questions that would have necessitated her telling either the truth or a lie.

  Still, she wasn’t unhappy when the party began breaking up. Karen was the first to say she needed to leave, and the others quickly followed suit.

  Because her bathing suit had dried, Carly slipped her shorts and shirt on over it and was dressed in short order. Trooper simply announced that he would wear his trunks and tee back home.

  Carly and Trooper made it a point to look up his uncle Roy and thank him for allowing them to use the lake that afternoon.

  “Now you come back any time,” he told Carly. “No need to wait for Trooper here to bring you, either. You just let me know to expect you so I can make sure the gator’s penned up before you get here. That old fellow’s getting real territorial.”

  For a split second Carly thought he was serious, but the twinkle in his eyes gave him away. She grinned at him. “I see that Trooper has been telling tales on me.”

  Roy laughed. “That boy created all them stories about snakes and gators years ago to aggravate his cousins. I reckon he succeeded for a long time, but they eventually caught on.”

  Carly laughed. “I’m sure he must have been wildly popular with his cousins.”

  “Oh, I suspect some of them got their revenge, didn’t they, Trooper?”

  Trooper grinned. “I don’t know what they’ve told you, but I’m sure it was a pack of lies.”

  Roy grinned back. “No doubt.” He turned to Carly. “Kidding aside, you come back anytime you want to.”

  “Thanks, I will,” Carly replied, although she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to subject herself to that near-frigid lake water again anytime soon.

  * * *

  Trooper couldn’t remember having had such a relaxing afternoon in years, and he wasn’t eager for it to end. As soon as he pulled onto the highway, he glanced at Carly. “Are you in a hurry to get home?”

&n
bsp; “Not especially. What did you have in mind?”

  “I thought I’d drive around a little. I haven’t had time since I’ve been back in Holly Grove to take a look at whatever changes might have taken place in the last twenty years.”

  “That sounds good. By the way, thanks for inviting me to your uncle’s this afternoon. I enjoyed meeting him and your cousins.”

  “I’m glad. Sometimes when you get all of them together, they have a tendency to overwhelm people, but I noticed that you seemed at ease.”

  “I was, pretty much.”

  He glanced at her again. “Just pretty much? Did they get on your nerves?”

  “Not really. But I’m always somewhat concerned that people will ask questions I’d prefer not to answer. I’m sure my presence in town has raised questions in people’s minds.”

  “I’d say you’re right. Just out of curiosity, why the big secret about your identity as Marcie Malone?”

  Her head whipped around and she stared at him for several seconds as though she was shocked that he’d asked the question.

  “Looks as though I’ve broached a subject you’d prefer to leave alone. No problem. Just pretend I never mentioned your pseudonym.”

  “Actually, I was just surprised that you seem to feel I’ve gone out of my way to hide my identity as a writer.”

  “And you haven’t?”

  “No.” She hesitated a minute, then said more forcefully, “No, I haven’t. I just haven’t gone out of my way to tell anyone. There’s a difference.”

  Trooper wondered if his background had made him too suspicious but there was something about Carly’s attitude that tended to set off alarms on his suspicion meter. After all, he could count on one finger the number of people he’d met who used two aliases but were not of the criminal persuasion.

  However, he couldn’t see any reason to ruin his and Carly’s afternoon by voicing his doubts. He would simply make a few phone calls and hopefully find out for sure that Carly wasn’t leaving anything out of her background that he or his family members would be better off knowing about.

  He shot her a quick grin. “Consider the subject closed and changed. What part of the county are you familiar with?”

  Carly’s expression changed slowly from verging on anger to verging on confusion. “To tell the truth, I haven’t explored much at all since I’ve been here. I know the downtown area pretty well, but that’s about it.”

  Trooper glanced at her. “Then prepare yourself for one of the most boring tours of your life.”

  She laughed and appeared to relax, which meant he, too, could relax, at least for a while. Somehow, he hadn’t expected the changes throughout the area to affect him as deeply as they did. What had he thought? That the county and town would stand still during the twenty years he was away? Obviously that hadn’t happened.

  A huge discount store now stood in the spot where Mona Garrett’s country store had once stocked the essentials for local farmers and homemakers. Trooper supposed the discount store might meet current needs of the citizens, but he doubted it did so as gently and as colorfully as Miss Mona had.

  He caught himself heaving a sigh and figured it hadn’t been his first when Carly spoke up. “You sound like I’m beginning to feel. The effects of our swim are starting to catch up with me and I can barely keep my eyes open. Would you mind too much if we went on home now?”

  Trooper couldn’t believe how relieved he felt at the prospect of ending his tour and heading back to Sugar Maple Drive where any changes were slight and cosmetic. “Going back sounds like a great idea to me. Now that you mention it, I’m feeling tired myself.”

  Carly’s smile looked far more sincere than any she’d shared with him since they’d left his uncle Roy’s farm. He returned her smile, then turned around in the parking lot of the new medical clinic that had been built on the site of the old skating rink and headed back to Sugar Maple Drive.

  Chapter 9

  Carly hadn’t been lying to Trooper about being tired. She was looking forward to getting home and resting for a while. Fortunately, Trooper soon turned into her driveway. She thanked him for the afternoon and then, before he could kill the motor, she grabbed her damp towels and hurried to exit his car. He waited until she turned at her front door to wave goodbye before putting his car in reverse and backing out of her driveway.

  Feeling more exhausted by the minute, she hurried upstairs to get out of her bathing suit and into the shower. After that, she dressed in baggy shorts and a tee and stretched out on her bed to rest.

  She awoke some time later, completely disoriented. Night had fallen while she slept, and since she hadn’t turned any lights on, her bedroom was totally dark.

  Grogginess lay like a heavy blanket over her senses, and she turned toward her bedside table so she could check the time on the digital clock. Almost 10:00 p.m.

  “Darn it,” she muttered, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed and sitting up. She groped for the switch on the lamp, turned it on, and then closed her eyes to shut out the sudden bright light.

  She swiped a hand across her face and groaned. Her throat was so dry that it was obvious she had been breathing through her mouth. She got up and stumbled into the bathroom where she downed two glasses of water before her throat began to feel somewhat normal again.

  She glared at her image in the mirror. “Hello, Sleeping Beauty—Not,” she muttered. Sighing, she turned and made her way back into the bedroom where she plopped down on the bed. She almost decided to crawl under the covers and go back to sleep, but then her stomach growled.

  Knowing she’d never go to sleep if she was hungry, Carly again forced herself to get up. This time she made her way to the kitchen. Finding nothing interesting in her refrigerator, she decided on a bowl of cereal, which she ate while watching the late news out of Knoxville.

  “Nothing new on the news,” she grumbled to herself. “Continued heat wave for the next ten days. No big surprise there.”

  She turned the TV off and rinsed her cereal bowl before placing it in the dishwasher. “I sure as heck can’t go back to sleep now, so I might as well write for a couple of hours,” she informed FluffBall, who’d followed her into the kitchen and now sat beside her feeding dish glaring at Carly. “But of course I’ll feed you first,” she muttered, “even though your dish is far from empty.”

  After placating the cat, she went upstairs to her office and turned her computer on. While waiting for it to finish opening, she eased over to the window and looked across Sugar Maple Drive to Myrna’s house. There were no lights on downstairs that she could see, and only two upstairs windows at the front of the house were lit from within. Was that Trooper’s bedroom? More than likely, she decided. She recalled Myrna saying that she tended to go to bed early and get up early.

  Thinking back on her afternoon with Trooper, Carly felt a smile lifting the corners of her lips. She’d thoroughly enjoyed his teasing her about the snakes and the gator in his uncle’s lake. In fact, she’d felt totally at ease with him until they’d taken their leave of his uncle and started driving around. Then somehow tension had slipped into the relationship.

  Was it due to his question about her seeming secrecy? She hadn’t reacted well, of course, but the question had struck her as coming from out of left field, and she hadn’t really known how to answer.

  Perhaps that had been the beginning of the unease between them, but she was convinced his mood had really gone south when he’d discovered that a couple of his old, beloved landmarks had been razed to make way for more modern buildings.

  Surely he hadn’t expected everything in Holly Grove to be the same as it had been when he’d left twenty years ago.

  Sighing, she forced herself to turn away from the window. There was no use in speculating about what had happened. It was just one of those things that could be a combination of factors. In the meantime, she needed to get back to work. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get behind schedule with her current book and have to write like
crazy to catch up. Sometimes she did her best writing under that sort of pressure, but she didn’t like to depend on it.

  Three and a half hours later, she pushed back from the computer. She’d had a good session, turning off quite a bit of work. Of course she’d need to let tonight’s pages sit for a few days and read over them then to be sure they weren’t crap. Sometimes when she wrote at a pace like she had tonight, she discovered later that she’d done some really horrible writing.

  But most of the time it was good, and she had a feeling tonight’s would be also.

  In the meantime, she was too exhausted to continue. Her back was tired, her eyes burned, and her wrists were beginning to ache—all sure signs that she had pushed herself too hard physically.

  She saved her work, emailed it to herself so it would be stored on a remote server, and stood. After stretching and flexing her back for a few minutes, she again made her way over to the window and looked across the street.

  Those two upstairs windows were still lit. Unfortunately, that told her nothing. If it was Trooper’s bedroom, he could be awake reading, or he could have gone to sleep with the lights on, or…or anything. No way she could know. “None of your business, girl,” she murmured aloud, then turned her own lights off and went to get ready for bed.

  An hour later, Carly turned her head on the pillow so she could see the digital clock sitting on her bedside table. “Four o’clock in the morning,” she muttered. She’d tried everything to get to sleep. Reading in bed hadn’t worked. Counting sheep had just frustrated her and made her feel even more awake. She didn’t own any sleeping pills or she might have been tempted to take one. “That’s what you get for taking a nap,” she told herself.

  Then she heard it.

  The noise was so faint that, had she been asleep, it wouldn’t have awakened her, especially now that she slept with her windows closed.

  A very steady, thumping noise sounded from somewhere outside. At least she thought it was from outside. She listened more closely, then eased out of bed. The faint glow of her nightlight enabled her to see well enough to walk over to her window. Being careful not to disturb the curtain too much, she unlocked the window and eased it up a fraction.