Love Me If You Must

13

Pain shot up my leg.

Brad lifted me to a sitting position. “I would’ve caught you, but that funky little spin threw me off.”

“Why’d you say my name like that? I thought the boogeyman was behind me.” I tried for a smile, but flinched instead.

“I was worried you were going to pass out. Your face was all white.”

I held my ankle, rocking and rubbing the twisted joint. It finally registered that the little squeaky sounds I’d been hearing came from my own efforts not to cry.

“Here. Let me take a look,” Brad said.

He manipulated my ankle, sending me into star-punctuated spasms.

“Okay. That’s enough,” I squealed.

This couldn’t be happening. I needed all my limbs intact. There was no time for debilitating injuries or whacky hallucinations. I had to get the job done and move to the next project, before I fell in love with Rawlings . . . or whomever.

“Help me up.” I held out my hand and Brad pulled me to my good foot. Spirals of color flared in my side vision. There had to be a broken bone in there somewhere. Sprains didn’t hurt like this.

I gritted my teeth. “I think I can walk.”

Brad guarded my back as I hobbled up the stairs using one foot and the handrails. I crawled across the kitchen floor, content to lean against the cupboards for lack of a chair. It was one of the few times I regretted traveling light through life. A big, soft, sink-down-in-fluff-up-to-my-chin love seat would really fit the bill about now.

Brad stood above me in the empty room.

“Well,” I croaked, “you’ll have to investigate on your own. It might be awhile before I can make that trip again.”

“I’d feel better if we got that looked at,” Brad said. “There’s a walk-in clinic just north of town. Tell me where your keys are and we’ll take a drive.”

My foot hurt too bad to argue with him.

A somber display of bare forest and gray fields rolled past as we drove. Brad’s easy chatter about area history and childhood escapades kept my mind above the ankle.

He pulled into the circle drive of a brick-and-vinyl-sided building, popped Deucey into park, and set out for a wheelchair.

With Brad as my entertainment committee, the wait in the lobby flew by. A nurse wearing a smock smattered with coconuts and palm trees ushered us into an exam room. A few minutes later a man in his late fifties entered.

“I’m Dr. Phillips.” He smoothed down the back of his long white cover-up and sat on a stool. He wheeled over to my place on the table and took my dangling bare foot in both hands. “A little swelling. Some discoloration. Most likely gave your sciatic nerve a good twang. That’ll cause a buzz in your leg that could take a few weeks to settle down. I’ll write you a prescription that should help calm things.”

“How soon before I can walk on it?” I asked.

“I’d give it a few days.” He squinted at my foot and craned for a closer look. “Let’s have you remove your other shoe.”

Brad helped do the honors.

The doctor compared the soles of my feet. “There’s some discoloration on your good foot as well. Where do you live, Patricia?”

“Almost right downtown Rawlings. And please call me Tish.”

“You may have been more bruised from your fall than you realize. Or . . .” His brow wrinkled. “No, it couldn’t be.”

I gave him a questioning look.

“I served as a missionary doctor near Bangladesh a good number of years ago. Saw a fair number of people suffering from arsenic poisoning, from water right out of the village wells.”

My eyes widened.

“I’m not saying that’s what this is. You may want to consider a water filter system, just to be safe. If the bruising doesn’t clear up in the next week or two, come back in for testing.”

I gave a laugh of relief. “I’m sure it’s not arsenic poisoning. I only drink bottled water. I read all about the township wells before I moved to the area.”

“Like I said, just keep an eye on things.” Dr. Phillips wrote the prescription.

Brad and I rode back to my house in near silence, stopping at Goodman’s Grocery to fill the prescription.

Brad helped me into the house. I downed a pill with a glass of purified water the moment we walked in the door.

“Let me get you situated,” Brad said. “Then I’ll go downstairs and check out that window.”

He saw that I made it to my humble portable bed.

When he left, I lay on my cot taking short little gasping breaths, waiting for the drug to do its job. I wondered all the while what Brad would find in the cistern.

Why would someone prop open my basement window, anyway? There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the house, no valuable electronics, not a dime in cash lying around. The most anyone could hope for was the thrill of sneaking in and out of a “haunted house.” But after the strange crew of trick-or-treaters I’d gotten the other night, it wouldn’t surprise me if a couple of them had become daring.

I leaned up on one elbow and stared out the big front window. Across the street, the neighbor lady was at it again, raking, clipping, and sprucing up her lawn. I had a big job ahead if I was going to compete with her neat-freak yard.

I gave a little chuckle despite my pain.

Just wait ’til spring. The woman wouldn’t know what hit her. She might be the reigning queen of the block when it came to fine flora, but I’d unseat her in a heartbeat with my guaranteed curb-appeal strategy.

That is, if my injury didn’t put me back too far. To stay on track, I had to get the upstairs finished by Christmas. Then I could get to work on the first floor. And if Lloyd & Sons ever got back on board, their portion of the basement renovation should be completed by Valentine’s Day. That would leave me three months to finish up the cellar plus do the exterior. By the time June rolled around, I could get the furniture in and be ready for the first buyers of the season.

I groaned and lay back down on the cot. Unfortunately, the way I felt, there was no chance that would happen.

The pain seemed to come in waves, starting at my ankle and washing up to my hip. I transported my mind elsewhere and joined Jan Hershel on the beach in Cancun, or wherever she was healing from her marriage-gone-sour. I reclined on the wooden lounger next to hers and listened to the crashing surf. The sun beat down on my gimpy leg, heating it through, soothing the pain.

Total relaxation.

The ocean breeze kicked up. A puff of white dust landed on my baby-oiled skin. I looked over to see where it had come from. Jan was covered in the white stuff. She scraped at it and beat at it, but it stuck to her like . . . concrete.

I jerked upright on my cot, grateful for the sharp pain that snapped me back to the gloomy Michigan afternoon.

Hold it together, Tish, I chided. Jan Hershel is not buried in your cistern.

In fact, nobody was buried in my cistern. And why my line of thinking kept heading in the body-in-the-basement direction was beginning to be a source of concern. If I weren’t in such a rush to get out of Rawlings, I’d consider taking a full-time job to keep my mind off the past, present, and future.

But I’d come to the realization awhile back that I was completely unemployable. Three years of forced menial labor had cured me of the job market forever. And when I’d finally collected my two-bedroom inheritance and enough money to pay my attorney bills, I’d leveraged my way from that first broken-down house in Walled Lake to this veritable mansion in Rawlings.

The windows rattled and I knew Brad was making his way up the basement steps.

He stopped in the doorway of my future master suite.

I gave him an arched-eyebrow look that demanded he tell me everything.

“Probably just kids looking for thrills,” he said. “There was no damage, so I locked up. You’re good to go.”

I found it interesting that whenever somebody said something I didn’t want to hear, I got this chokey little ball in my throat. Right now, Brad was lucky I couldn’t go after him on two feet.

I swung my legs over and gripped the edge of my cot. “What do you mean, I’m ‘good to go’?”

In my book, a stick in the window was as close to a break-in as they come. Brad had better track down the offenders, or I’d contact his superiors and let them know that Officer Walters was a dud.

“Look.” Brad crouched down to my level. “There was a stick. That’s all. There was no sign of an actual entry. I’ll make sure the department steps up its drive-bys on this corner.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

Incredible. And not acceptable.

I leaned close enough to detect toothpaste on his breath. “Run some prints. Do whatever detective stuff you guys do. I want to know who was monkeying with that window.”

“Tish,” he said, tapping his thumbs together, “Rawlings is a small town. All that detective stuff costs money. If there had been a murder or grand theft or something, I’d consider it. But there hasn’t even been a crime committed other than possible trespassing. The latch on the window isn’t even damaged. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought the stick was put there from the inside.”

His voice was gentle and soft. Mesmerizing. Convincing. It made me want to forget that Brad was the last one in the basement . . . the only one who could have put the stick in the window from the inside.