“I know nothing about it.”
“Then I doubly apologize. Tess told me about it some time ago. She even drew a map showing where the entrance is. Your cousin Luke found it while he was gardening, and he said it was for the Underground Railroad. Tess told me he’s kept it in good repair for years now.” He sipped his tea. “I forgot to ask if you wanted sugar.”
Sara shook her head. “So where are you planning on spending the night?”
Mike glanced toward the hallway that led to the two little bedrooms.
“No,” Sara said as calmly as she could muster. “You aren’t going to spend the night with me.”
He looked at her over his cup.
“You know what I mean! I k
now you’re a cop in a big city, but this is a small town, so you can’t …” She trailed off because he yawned.
“Sorry. Long day. Mind if I take the bathroom first? Unless you … uh …”
“No,” Sara said, “I don’t have to ‘uh’ anything. I was just saying—”
Mike stood up. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” He put his empty teacup in the sink. “Just leave the dishes and I’ll take care of them in the morning. Sleep well, Miss Shaw.” With that, he went into the one bathroom, which was between the two bedrooms, and shut the door.
Absolutely not! Sara thought. Under no circumstances was she going to spend the night in the same apartment with him. As she thought of the rampant gossip that would spread if she did, she got up, grabbed her phone off the counter, and started to call her mother. She would spend the rest of the night at her parents’ house. If she did that, maybe the town wouldn’t even find out she’d been alone with this stranger for the last hour. And if they didn’t know, then no one would tell Greg.
It was at the thought of Greg that she quit punching buttons. Yet again, she remembered the abrupt way he’d left her just two nights before. They’d been in her apartment—the lease was up on Greg’s place, and he’d said there was no need to pay for two residences, so he’d moved in with her. His cell had rung just before midnight, waking both of them, and Sara had watched him fumble for the phone. When he saw the name in the ID, he sat up straight, instantly wide awake, and said, “What is it?” He had listened in silence for what had to have been five minutes, then he’d said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it,” and hung up.
He flung back the covers, got out of bed, and began to dress.
“What’s wrong?” Sara asked, blinking sleepily.
“Nothing. I have to go away for a while, that’s all. Go back to sleep.”
“A while? How long does that mean? The wedding—”
“Damn it, Sara, you’re not going to start nagging me again, are you? I know when the wedding is. How could I forget when I was the one who got stuck with all the work for it? Something’s come up and I have to go. I’ll be back for the wedding.” He grabbed his wallet and car keys off the dresser and left. Just like that, with no explanation.
Sara had sat up in bed feeling like she’d just been through a tornado. She didn’t know what had happened, but Greg was gone, not taking so much as his shaving kit, and she didn’t know when he’d return.
She couldn’t go back to sleep and as soon as it was daylight she began calling Greg, but he didn’t answer.
Then, early this afternoon, Luke had run her out of her own apartment with his cans of noxious bug poison, saying he had to spray right then and that she could move into Tess’s apartment while he fumigated. Sara started to put her things into the guest room, but Luke had insisted she take Tess’s bedroom. “But why?” Sara’d asked. “I don’t need—”
“The bed in the other room is bad. No springs,” Luke said as he went back outside.
All in all, the whole thing was so odd that for a while Sara had thought a surprise wedding shower was being planned for her. But, hard as she looked, she saw no evidence of it.
Sara heard the water running and it now occurred to her that she wouldn’t mind if Greg did hear that Tess’s brother had stayed in the apartment with her. “What else could I do?” she’d ask Greg, her lashes fluttering helplessly. She’d say, “It was nighttime and he had nowhere else to go. You can see that I didn’t have a choice.” When she imagined Greg’s anger and jealousy, she smiled on the way to the bedroom. Yes, it might be quite good to be able to tell Greg that another man had been alone with her.
As she closed the door, she thought about the tussle she’d had with Tess’s brother. He could certainly move quickly! And when she’d been on top of him, she’d felt the man’s muscles. But later, he’d handled a teapot in a way that was worthy of a geisha. She was used to men like her father and Luke, who left their dishes where they lay.
Sara was drifting into sleep when she heard him leave the bathroom, and she remembered that he hadn’t answered her questions about why he was there and why Tess hadn’t warned her he was coming. Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll buy a lock for that trapdoor and one of us will leave.
3
SARA SLEPT LATE the next morning, and it was several moments before she remembered all that had happened during the night. Rolling onto her stomach, she looked at the floor. There was a small rug by the bed, but one corner of it was folded back, a testament to last night’s fiasco. She got up, moved the rug aside, and saw that the square cut in the floorboards was clearly visible.
“I’m going to give Luke Connor a piece of my mind,” she said aloud. It angered her that he’d let her move into the apartment without telling her about the trapdoor that led to … To what? she wondered. That the man had come up through it meant it must lead down to an underground exit. So why didn’t everyone in town know that Edilean Manor had a secret tunnel? She could almost hear her cousin saying, “Then it wouldn’t qualify as a ‘secret,’ would it?” Luke could sometimes be maddening!
Sara took her time dressing and was quiet about it. If the man had driven all the way up from Fort Lauderdale the day before, then he probably wanted to sleep in. And when he did get up, Sara planned to be cordial and polite, but she’d also be firm: He had to leave. He could not stay in the apartment with her. It was one thing to tell Greg that a man had stayed with her for one night because of an emergency, but it was another to say that he’d spent two nights—or more.