Charming Lily Page 7

  Now all she had to do was try to figure out how the shepherd got loose and where Matt was.

  If only the big dog could talk.

  Chapter Four

  She was running for her life, from whom or what, she didn’t know. Matt’s name was on her lips, and her throat burned from screaming and shouting. She knew she was in the bayous because she could see the thick cane and the buckvine, not to mention the ancient cypress leaning out of the slimy water at crazy angles. She swatted the insects swarming about her face and arms, cursing the cold, slimy water, wondering if a cottonmouth water moccasin, or copperhead would find her ankles. She called his name again as Gracie and Buzz stood on the bank barking furiously. She needed to get back to where the dogs waited, needed to get to the south and the piney woods and the huge live oaks dripping moss and the reed-thin conifers. If she followed them, she would land in the grassy marsh because that’s where Old Muddy bent toward the sea. In the piney woods she could use her survival skills. In this swamp she was the proverbial duck out of water.

  “I’m coming, Matt. I’m coming! I’ll find you. I swear I will. You said you trusted me just the way I trusted you. I won’t fail you. I promise.”

  “Lily, wake up. You’re having a bad dream. Shhh, it’s okay. We’re all here in the apartment. Go back to sleep, Lily. It was just a bad dream,” Sadie said soothingly as she stroked her friend’s hair back from her forehead.

  Sadie waited until Lily rolled over on her side and her breathing evened out. When she saw Dennis standing in the doorway, she crept out of bed and joined him in the living room. “It was just a bad dream. What time is it?”

  “A little after five. If you show me where everything is, I’ll make us some coffee. There doesn’t seem much sense in going back to sleep now. This is a nice comfortable apartment you have here,” he said, looking around.

  “I’ll make the coffee. Would you like some toast? It’s about all we have. Lily pretty much cleaned everything out before the ... you know, before. The apartment came this way. Nothing here belongs to us. When I look back now, I have to wonder why we ever came here.”

  “Why did you?” Dennis said, flopping down on one of the kitchen chairs. He looks adorable, Sadie thought, with his rumpled hair and his silk pajamas. His feet were bare. Big feet, she noticed.

  “We needed a place to come back to during the winter. Neither Lily nor I have any family left. We’ve been friends forever. Working at the survival camp nine to ten months out of the year didn’t warrant buying property or keeping up an apartment and paying rent for those nine months. Then a few years ago we decided if we shared an apartment and split the rent, we could have a place of our own to call home during the winter months. It worked. We weren’t crazy about Florida. Too many sad memories. Generations of my family used to live here, so it was logical for us to come here, I suppose. As a child, I came here summers for a few years and as I grew older, the visiting stopped for some reason. I inherited the old house and sold it to Lily. She’s having it renovated, and it was supposed to be her wedding present to Matt. A place to put down some roots. A place to come home to. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen. Do you have any ideas, any clues, or are you just going by gut instinct here?”

  “Not a whole hell of a lot, Sadie. Like you just said, I’m going by my gut instinct. I’ve known Matt forever, and I know he wouldn’t do this to Lily. I know all about the first time. That was different. He wasn’t ready for such a big step back then, and he had worlds to build, mountains to climb, and oceans to swim. He’s done all that. He was more than ready for home and hearth. Now with Gracie in the picture . . .”

  “Are you going to stay here, or are you going back to New York?” Sadie asked as she reached into the cabinet for cups and saucers.

  “I’m going to make some calls as soon as the office opens, but I would like to stay on here if you and Lily don’t mind. The sofa is quite comfortable. Did I misunderstand Lily when she said you were going to Australia to meet your fiancé’s parents.”

  “Yes and no. That’s all over and done with. He wasn’t my fiancé. We were just very good friends. I’m a free agent,” she said pointedly. “That means I can see or go out with anyone I want to.”

  Dennis grinned. “I assumed that’s what it meant. I’m pretty much a free agent myself these days,” he twinkled.

  “Imagine that,” Sadie said, setting the coffee in front of him. “I hate computers,” she blurted. “I always press the wrong button, lose stuff, other stuff freezes, the mouse won’t work, yada yada yada.”

  Dennis threw back his head and laughed. “I hate the woods, getting wet and cold and trekking up mountains, crossing skimpy bridges that sway back and forth with your weight. That’s just another way of saying I could never in a million years do what you and Lily do. Are you going back?”

  “I don’t know. I took an extended leave. Lily resigned outright. I’m going to stay around long enough to see her over this rough patch, then I’ll make some decisions.”

  They stared at each other across the kitchen table. It was Sadie who finally broke the silence. “Do they always kill you when you’re kidnapped?”

  “Jesus! Don’t even think that. I don’t know. What do they do on those crime shows?”

  “I’m not much of a television watcher myself. If Matt was kidnapped, who would get the ransom note? The company or someone in the company like you or Marcus?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never come up against anything like this before. Life was routine, no surprises. Just same old same old. Hell, I don’t even know where to start. I’m thinking about going to the police to file a missing person’s report after I call the office. Matt had this ... thing about involving the authorities if anything like this ever happened. Gives the company a bad image. I have to think it through.”

  Sadie leaned across the table. “Tell me about Marcus Collins. You know, the guy stuff. And the business side of him, too. I want to know all about his relationship with Matt. I know Lily doesn’t care for him, and maybe her opinion of the man rubbed off on me and has colored my opinion. I don’t care for him either.”

  “You aren’t trying to tell me you think Marcus had something to do with Matt not showing up for the wedding? Or are you?”

  “I think it’s highly suspicious,” Lily said from the doorway. “Marcus didn’t seem the least bit concerned about Matt’s absence. Like me, and unlike you, Dennis, he was very quick to assume and believe Matt was doing an encore, and I could tell he was getting a perverse kind of pleasure out of it. Do we have a game plan here, or are we just going to flounder around?”

  “Want some toast, Lily? Dennis?” Both heads bobbed up and down.

  “I had this really bad dream. I dreamed I was in the bayous searching for Matt. If someone took a person out there and left him there, he could die. If we’re going to report his disappearance to the police, we have to know what’s going on at Digitech. I could tell that Marcus doesn’t want this reported to the police. So what if Matt gets upset. I know that’s what the police are going to think. I say we look for him ourselves. Sadie and I are very good at tracking. Now if he’s in and around the Natchez Trace or out by Anna’s Bottom, we have a chance. If he’s in the bayous, we’re in trouble. Assuming he didn’t go off and dump me. Gracie pretty much cancels that theory out. I’m not feeling good about this, but I don’t feel quite so devastated. Do you think I’m being a fool?” Lily asked.

  “No, of course not,” Sadie said. “Hope springs eternal.”

  “Absolutely not,” Dennis agreed. “Look, if Matt was kidnapped, and we don’t know that he was, there should be a ransom note soon. Marcus has my cell-phone number, and there have been no calls. I have to assume there hasn’t been one. Matt made us all swear that we wouldn’t involve the authorities. To a point we have to respect his wishes. We could hire some private dicks. We have plenty of those on our payroll. I don’t know how quiet you can keep something like this. The FBI has to be called in, things like t
hat. Marcus will bust a gut if that happens. That means his nice, orderly, obsessive, expensive life will grind to a halt. Marcus cannot function in chaos. Matt, on the other hand, thrives on chaos and somehow manages to bring order to everything at the end of the day.”

  “I’m going to take the dogs out, then shower,” Lily said. “By the time you two get dressed you should be able to call the office. Depending on what you find out, we can decide then what we should do. Is that okay with you? Good. I’ll see you in a bit then.”

  Sadie twirled a hank of her hair between her thumb and forefinger as she stared across the table at Dennis. “Why do I have this feeling there’s something you aren’t telling? There’s something going on at Digitech, isn’t there?”

  Dennis squirmed in his chair and tried to look everywhere but at Sadie.

  “C’mon, spit it out. We’re all in this together, and that means we have to share what we have with each other even if it seems unimportant. What you know might be a clue or something we can work at.”

  “Look, it’s just little things. I could be so far off base and talking about it might give you and Lily the wrong idea.”

  “Think of me as your shrink. Talk,” Sadie ordered.

  “We . . . Matt, Marcus, and I work out of the New York office at least a week out of every month. Marcus is there most of the time because his kids are in school there. And because of his wife. She doesn’t like Oregon, where our main headquarters is located, and she refuses to relocate. I don’t know why because Oregon is so beautiful it takes your breath away. The Digitech campus is magnificent. Marcus is on top of everything. Nothing gets by him. Man, he was pissed to the teeth when he found out Matt was going to be named High-Tech Man of the Year again this year. He wants that honor so bad he can taste it. Betsy does, too. Actually, I think she wants it more than Marcus does. Something happened about six weeks ago. Nothing important, but if you link it with some other weird things, then it does make sense in a cockamamie kind of way. Marcus took it upon himself to change our trash pickup. He just decided one day the company that had been with us from the beginning wasn’t good enough. I thought they were fine. It was a family company run by the father and two sons. They were pricey but dependable. This new company is for the birds. They show up when they feel like it. They’re sloppy, inefficient, and the workers are dirty and slovenly. I saw Matt raise his eyebrows when he got a gander at them, but he didn’t say anything. Matt never overrides anything Marcus does. The new company bills twice as much. Before you can ask, we shred everything.”

  Sadie stared at her coffee cup, her mind racing. “Okay, he’s ticked off because he isn’t Man of the Year, he doesn’t like working in Oregon because his wife doesn’t like it there, and he changed trash collectors. It’s not much to go on. What else?”

  Dennis bit down on his lower lip. “We’re supposed to unveil our new software in a few days. But, there was to be a really big announcement following the unveiling. He wants to go ahead with it, but I’m voting no.”

  “Because ...”

  A deep frown etched itself between Dennis’s brows as he stared at the thin, winter sunshine filtering into the kitchen from the window over the sink. He eyed the straggly plant hanging from the ceiling with its yellowing leaves. “I think your plant needs to be watered. Because . . . because I think Matt would want to put a hold on it. At least for now. I’d explain it to you, but you wouldn’t understand. What we’ve developed is going to change the entire industry. Marcus was to make the announcement about the new software, and I was going to make the big announcement. Then we were going to do a hookup so that Matt could say something from wherever he was going to be on his honeymoon. I think someone sold us out. Marcus won’t look me in the eye. Matt had some difficulty back in early December when he went on the road. I think Marcus convinced him I was leaking secrets. I absolutely refused to defend myself. My loyalty to Matt and Digitech is and has always been one hundred percent. That’s all of it in a nutshell.”

  Upstairs, Lily stepped from the shower, aware that both dogs were watching her. She dried off, rubbing the towel over the Wish Keeper hanging around her neck. Her head snapped backwards as a vision rocketed in front of her. A hypodermic needle and Matt, asleep in the backseat of his Jaguar. Stunned, she reached out to the towel rack for support as she struggled to take deep breaths. The dogs circled her ankles, their tails between their legs. “Shhh, it’s okay. Everything is okay, I think,” she said soothingly as she scratched each of them behind their ears. Gracie whimpered before she flopped down on the cool tile. Buzz continued to growl.

  Lily’s body trembled as she stepped into her underwear before pulling on a warm sweat suit. Her fingers itched and shook as she tried to tie her shoelaces. She finally gave up as she rummaged for an old pair with Velcro strips in the closet.

  Lily leaned her back against the vanity, her eyes closed. What did it all mean? Why was she having these visions? Why me? She wailed silently. Why me? Once or twice she’d read articles about people claiming to have visions after a bad trauma or a head injury. Being stood up at the altar, even if it was for the second time, wasn’t exactly a trauma that would support something like this. A knot of fear formed in the pit of her stomach. If only she knew what it meant. She’d never been good at puzzles. Sadie was worse than she was. Maybe Dennis would know. Maybe a lot of things.

  “Okay, let’s go! Everyone in the truck. A romp in the yard, then we’re going to go inside the big house to make pests of ourselves. We need to goose that contractor a little. I think he’s taking advantage of us.”

  Lily breezed through the kitchen, stopping only long enough to grab a cup of coffee and tell Sadie and Dennis about her latest vision. “You two try and figure it out. We’re going for a romp in the gardens on North Union Street. Then I’m going to walk Gracie up and down the street to see if she can pick up on anything. It’s a long shot, but you never know. I’ll be back by lunchtime. Let’s go to Fat Mama’s Tamales for lunch. Tell Dennis about Mama’s Naked Margaritas, Sadie. He needs to get one of her stickers to put on his baseball cap.”

  “Sounds good,” Sadie said. “Be careful in that backyard, Lily. You should start thinking about having some of those vines cleared away. God knows what’s underneath them. They’re choking off the real plants. If I remember correctly, there were some prize hybrid camellias in that yard you might want to cultivate later on.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Twenty minutes later Lily stopped her 4-by-4 in the driveway and let the dogs out. They immediately raced off. She looked around, her eyes misting. Her wedding present to Matt stood directly in her line of vision. One day it would be as beautiful as the six hundred antebellum mansions, houses, churches, and other structures in Natchez, her testament to a long-ago time. All done with love for Matt. She swiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. Her shoulders straightened imperceptibly.

  Her eyes dry, she stared at what she called the house on North Union Street. She looked first at six live oaks scattered across the winter lawn. They were ancient, the gray moss thick and long, swaying in the brisk January wind. She couldn’t help but wonder who it was that originally planted the magnificent trees and was it their intention for the trees one day to shield the house from the winter winds and to frame the old house or hide it from prying eyes? Did young children play on the wide expanse of lawn or did they play in the backyard? She wished she knew.

  The outside of the house had been painted back in September, when the days were still warm and dry. It glistened now in the winter sun, the front pillars sentinels to the large mahogany door with the stained-glass fanlight overhead. A treasure, the contractor had said. And it was. In the early-morning light the colored glass cast mini rainbows all over the front rooms of the house. Matt would have loved it.

  The structure was two stories high with a cupola on top. The first floor fanned out to the left and right, probably additions as the family grew in size. The shutters were the originals, patched and re
patched, and then painted a rich hunter green. The ancient hinges had heen rusty but restored. Now she would be able to close the shutters to ward off the brutal late-afternoon heat. But it was the porch that she loved the most. She’d had so many dreams where the porch was always visible. It was bare now, full of strips of lumber and Sheetrock and all manner of saws and building supplies. When it was all done, the porch was the last thing she would do. She already had her mental list of furnishings. Six cane rockers painted white, wicker tables set among the chairs, green fiber carpets on the gunmetal gray floor. Huge clay pots full of colorful flowers she would water every day would be all over the porch. The oscillating fans would whir softly as they stirred the delicate fronds of the ferns that would hang from the rafters. A place of serenity and peace. A restful place to sip ice tea or lemonade, perhaps coffee in the morning or a beer with Matt in the evening when the sun went down. She added clay flowerpots for each side of the six steps to her mental list. Maybe deep pink or pinky red geraniums and some inkvine trailing down the pots. A sob caught in her throat. Would she ever sit here on the porch with Matt?

  Lily swiped at her wet eyes again as she ran down the steps and around to the backyard. She called the dogs. “Now, Buzz!”she shouted. Both dogs came on the run. They looked at her expectantly before they streaked off again. She followed them to the far end of the property. She’d never walked this far back simply because of the thick undergrowth. Now, however, the dogs had flattened a path of sorts. She gasped at what lay before her. “A cemetery!” she said in surprise.

  She ripped at the vines to expose tiny stone tablets. A children’s cemetery. She continued to attack the vines, yanking and pulling until she saw a row of larger stones, eight in all. It was the last one that brought her hand to her throat. She leaned over to run her hands over the letters. MARY MARGARET, and underneath the name, the words, THE WISH KEEPER.