Shades of Twilight (36 page)

“You're sure it was Webb.”

“I know it was,” Brock put in, squarely facing the sheriff. “I was right behind him.”

Beshears looked frustrated, then shrugged, evidently deciding he didn't have a tie between the two events after all. “So, did she fall or what? The dispatcher said it was a call for the paramedics
and
the sheriff's department.”

“Just as I got to her,” Webb said, “I heard something downstairs.”

“Like what?“ Beshears's eyes sharpened again.

“I don't know. A crash.” Webb looked at Brock and Greg.

“Brock and I went downstairs to take a look,” Greg said. “A lamp had been knocked over in the den. I went outside while Brock checked the rest of the house.” He hesitated. “I
think
I saw someone running, but I couldn't swear to it. My eyes hadn't adjusted to the dark.”

“What direction?“ Beshears asked briefly, already beckoning to one of his deputies.

“To the right, toward the highway.”

The deputy approached, and Beshears turned to him. “Y'all get some lights and check the yard on the other side
of the driveway. There's a heavy dew tonight, so if anybody's been through there, it'll show on the grass. There may have been an intruder in the house.” The deputy nodded and departed, taking several of his fellows with him.

One of the paramedics came over. He had obviously leaped out of bed to answer the call; a ball cap covered his uncombed hair, and his eyes were puffy from sleep. But he was alert, his gaze sharp. “I'm pretty sure she's going to be all right, but I want to transport her to the hospital to be checked out and to have that cut in her head stitched up. Looks like she's got a mild concussion, too. They'll probably want to keep her for twenty-four hours, just to make certain she's okay.”

“I'll go with her,” Lucinda said, but suddenly staggered. Webb grabbed her.

“Lay her down on the floor,” the paramedic said, reaching for her, too.

But Lucinda batted their hands away and pulled herself erect once more. Her color still wasn't good, but she glared fiercely at them. “Young man, I will not lie down on the floor. I'm old and upset, that's all. You tend to Roanna and don't pay any attention to me.”

He couldn't treat her without her permission, and she knew it. Webb looked down at her and thought about picking her up and carrying her to the hospital himself, bullying her into letting a doctor check her. She must have known what he was thinking, because she looked up and managed a smile. “It's nothing to fret about,” she said. “Roanna's the one who needs seeing to.”

“I'll go with her to the hospital, Aunt Lucinda,” Lanette said, surprising everyone. “You need to rest. You and Mama stay here. I'll go put on some clothes if y'all will gather up the things she'll need.”

“I'll drive,” Webb said. Lucinda started to protest again, but Webb put his arm around her. “Lanette's right, you need to rest. You heard what the paramedic said, Roanna
will be all right. It would be different if she were in danger, but she isn't. Lanette and I will be there with her.”

Lucinda clutched his hand. “You'll call me from the hospital, let me talk to her?”

“Just as soon as she's settled,” he promised. “They'll have to do X-rays first, I imagine, so it could take a while. And she might not feel like talking,” he warned. “She'll have a hell of a headache.”

“Just let me know she's all right.”

With that, Lucinda and Gloria went down the long hall to the back bedrooms, to gather the personal items Roanna would need for even a short stay in the hospital. Webb and Lanette went to their own rooms to dress. It took him less than two minutes, and he reached Roanna's side just as they were transferring her to a stretcher to carry her downstairs.

She was fully conscious now, and her eyes were wide with alarm as she looked up at him. He took her hand again, folding her cold, slender fingers against his rough, warm palm. “I don't like this,” she said fretfully. “If I need stitches, why can't I just drive to the emergency room? I don't want to be
carried. ”

“You have a concussion,” he replied. “It's not safe for you to drive.”

She sighed and gave in. He squeezed her hand. “Lanette and I are going to be with you. We'll be right behind the ambulance.”

She didn't protest again, and he almost wished she had. Every time he looked at her, he was hit by another wave of panic. She was paper white, what part of her face that wasn't covered by blood. The dark, rusty stain was spread over her face and neck, where it had run down from the laceration on her scalp.

Lanette came hurrying down, carrying a small overnight case, just as they were sliding the stretcher into the ambulance. “I'm ready,” she said to Webb, already moving past him toward the garage.

Sheriff Beshears fell into step beside Webb. “The boys
found marks in the dew,” he said. “Looks like someone took out running across the yard. Somebody's been messing with the lock on the kitchen door, too, there's some scratches on the metal. Miss Roanna's lucky, if she came face-to-face with a burglar and a bump on the head's all she got.”

Remembering how she had looked like a crumpled little doll lying in the hall, with blood spreading around her, Webb thought Beshears's definition of
lucky
was different from his own.

“I'll be at the hospital later on to ask her some questions,” the sheriff continued. “We'll do some more checking around here.”

The ambulance was pulling out. Webb turned away and strode to the garage, where Lanette was waiting for him.

It took several hours and a shift change at Helen Keller Hospital before Roanna had been scanned, stitched, and settled into a private room. Webb impatiently waited in the hallway while Lanette helped her to clean up and get dressed in a fresh nightgown.

The bright morning sun was shining through the windows when he was finally allowed to reenter the room. She was lying in bed, looking almost normal now that most of the blood had been washed away. Her hair was still matted with it, but that would have to be taken care of later. A white pad covered the stitches in the back of her head, and stretchy gauze had been wrapped around her head to hold the bandage in place. She was very pale, but all in all she looked much better.

He eased down on the side of the bed, careful not to jar her. “The doctor told us to wake you up every hour. That's a helluva thing to do to an insomniac, isn't it?" he teased.

She didn't smile as he'd hoped. “I think I'll save you the trouble and just stay awake.”

“Do you feel like talking on the phone? Lucinda was frantic.”

Carefully she pushed herself higher in the bed. “I'm okay, it's just a headache. Will you dial the number for me?”

Just a headache from a bruised brain, he thought grimly as he picked up the receiver and punched the number for an outside line, then the number at Davencourt. She still thought she'd fallen, and no one had told her any differently. Sheriff Beshears wasn't going to get a lot of information from her.

Roanna talked briefly to Lucinda, just long enough to reassure her that she felt all right, a blatant lie, then gave the phone back to Webb. He was going to give Lucinda his own reassurances, but to his surprise it was Gloria who came on the line.

“Lucinda had another spell after y'all left,” she said. “She's too stubborn to go to the hospital, but I've called her doctor and he's going to stop by this morning.”

He glanced at Roanna; the last thing she needed to hear right now was that Lucinda was ill. “Keep her in line,” he said briefly, and lowered his voice as he turned away so Roanna wouldn't be able to hear him. “I'm not going to say anything to the others now, so don't mention it to them just yet. I'll call in a couple of hours and check on her.”

He got off the phone just as Sheriff Beshears came in and tiredly settled himself into one of the two chairs in the room. Lanette was in the other, but Webb wasn't inclined to sit anyway. He wanted to be closer to Roanna's side.

“Well, you're looking better than the last time I saw you,” Beshears said to Roanna. “How do you feel?”

“I don't believe I'll go dancing tonight,” she said in that solemn way of hers, and he laughed.

“Don't guess you will. I want to ask you a few questions if you feel up to it.”

A puzzled look crossed her face. “Of course.”

“What do you remember about last night?”

“When I fell? Nothing. I don't know how it happened.”

Beshears shot a quick look at Webb, who gave a tiny shake of his head. The sheriff cleared his throat. “The thing is, you didn't fall. It looks like someone broke into Davencourt last night, and we figure you walked right up on him.”

If Roanna had been pale before, now she was absolutely
white. Her face took on a pinched, frightened expression. “Someone hit me,” she murmured. She didn't say anything else, didn't move. Webb, watching her closely, had the distinct impression she was drawing in on herself, holding everything inside, and he didn't like it. Deliberately he reached out and took her hand, squeezing it to let her know she wasn't alone, and he didn't give a damn what conclusions Beshears drew about his action.

“You don't remember
anything?”
the sheriff persisted, though his gaze flickered briefly to their clasped hands. “I know everything's confused now, but maybe you caught a glimpse of him and you just haven't realized it yet. Let's take it step by step. Do you remember leaving your room?”

“No,” she said tonelessly. Her hand was motionless in Webb's grip. Once she would have been clinging to him, but now she didn't hold on to him at all. It wasn't just that she didn't seem to need him anymore, but that she didn't want to even be around him. For a while, when she had been so confused, all the barriers had been down and she had seemed to be comforted by his presence, to need him. But now she was pulling away from him again, putting emotional distance between them even though she made no effort to physically pull away. Because of what had happened between them yesterday, or was it something else, a detail about her injury? Did she remember something after all? Why didn't she want to tell the sheriff?

“What's the last thing you remember?“ Beshears asked.

“Going to bed.”

“Your folks say you have insomnia. Maybe you were awake, and you heard something and went to see what it was.”

“I don't remember,” she said. The pinched look was more pronounced.

He sighed and got to his feet. “Well, don't fret about it. A lot of folks don't remember at first what happened right before they took a bump on the noggin, but sometimes it comes back to them after a while. I'll be checking back with
you, Miss Roanna. Webb, come on out in the hall with me, and I'll tell you what we've done so far.”

Webb went with him, and Beshears strolled down the hall toward the elevators. “We followed the trail through the weeds all the way to that pasture road that cuts off from the highway, just past the turnoff going up to Davencourt,” he said. “I figure he left his car parked there, but it's been a couple of weeks since we've had any rain and the ground was too hard for us to get any tread marks. Just to be sure, we brought in a couple of dogs, and they followed the trail as far as the pasture road, too, but nothing after that. It's a good place to hide a car, the brush is so thick anything parked even twenty yards up the road would be damn hard to see even in the daylight, much less at night.”

“He got in through the kitchen door?”

“That's what it looks like. We couldn't find any other sign of entry.” Beshears snorted. “I thought he was a fool at first, for not going in through some of those fancy glass doors y'all got all over the house, but maybe he was pretty smart. You think about it, the kitchen is the best place. Everyone should be upstairs in bed at that time of night, so he don't want to risk waking anyone by going through any of the upper veranda doors. The doors on the patio are on the side of the house, visible from the stables. But the kitchen door is on the back, and you can't see it from the driveway, the stables, or anywhere else.”

They had reached the elevators, but Beshears didn't stop to punch the button to call it. He and Webb strolled on to the end of the hall, out of earshot of anyone getting off the elevator on that floor.

“Was anything taken?“ Webb asked.

“Not that anyone can tell. That lamp's knocked over in the den, but except for that and the lock on the kitchen door nothing looks like it was touched. Don't know what he was doing in the den, unless he got rattled when Miss Roanna screamed. I suppose he ran back downstairs, looking for a quick way out, but the front door has a double lock on it and
he couldn't figure it out in the dark. He ran into the den, saw it doesn't have an outside door, and accidentally blundered into the lamp. Looks like he finally went out the kitchen door, same as he got in.”

Webb roughly ran his hand through his hair. “This won't happen again,” he said. “I'll have a security system installed this week.”

“Y'all should already have had one.” Beshears gave him a look of disapproval. “Booley used to go on and on about how easy it would be to break into that house, but he never could talk Miss Lucinda into doing anything about it. You know how old folks are. With the house so far out of town, she felt safe.”

“She didn't want to feel like she was in a fortress,” Webb said, remembering the comments Lucinda had made over the years.

“This will probably change her mind. Don't bother with one of the systems that automatically call for help, because y'all are so far out of town it would be a waste of money. Put in a loud alarm that'll wake everyone up, if you want, but remember that wires can be cut. Your best bet is to put good locks on the doors and windows, and get a dog. Everybody should have a dog.”