Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,42

things considered, he hadn’t been that far wrong.

Hope was looking distressed but there was nothing but sober sanity in her eyes.

“Maybe you have been here,” he said gently. “But don’t remember it.”

She shook her head. “Before yesterday, I’d never been west of the Rockies. Hell, never been west of the Mississippi. My parents —” she blinked, cocked her head, as if hearing herself for the first time. “My parents,” she continued slowly, “never wanted me to go west. And they never went west, either.”

Luke clamped his hand around her elbow. Not painfully, but forcefully. She was going to stay by his side. “Why don’t you walk around a little, see if more memories come?”

“Yeah.” But Hope didn’t move. She just studied the terrain in front of her carefully. Luke stood by her side, quietly. Waiting. She was seeing what he was seeing. A tract that cried poverty and degradation. None of the broken-down trailers looked lived in, though a trailer three lots down the central path had laundry fluttering from a piece of wire strung between a roof strut and a nearby tree. All the other trailer houses looked deserted, unlivable.

A cat wandered down another path toward them. A tabby, looking cared for. It had a collar and glossy fur. The only thing that looked cared for in the whole damned place.

Hope was studying a hedge by the side of the dirt track. The hedge was overgrown, a wild tangle, so thick nothing could be seen on the other side. Suddenly, Hope plunged straight into the hedge. “Swimming pool!” she shouted.

Damn. Luke plunged in right after her. No telling what was on the other side. There could be something sharp, rusty nails. He was up to date on all his shots, including tetanus, but was she?

Damn.

He pushed his way through, following Hope’s trail of broken branches. In a moment he was out on another barren stretch of hardpan. Swimming pool! That was what she’d said and goddamn if there wasn’t a swimming pool right in front of him. Or what had once been a pool and was now a cracked cement hole in the ground full of rotting leaves and dead branches and some dead rats. There was even a cracked diving board at the other end.

Something really eerie was happening here. Hope circled the pool, almost in a trance, looking down at a little sludge in what had been the deep end of the pool. Luke kept pace with her. If this were a horror movie, Hope would be seeing the deep blue of a filled swimming pool and would dive in.

But it wasn’t a movie and Hope wasn’t making any movements that could turn dangerous. She was simply circling the pool.

Luke could see that it had been a nice pool, once. It was large and surrounded by what had once been an attractive mosaic of blue and white tiles and now looked like a jagged mouth missing most of its teeth.

“Here,” Hope said, shifting some yellowed supermarket ads and leaves out of the way with her sneakered foot. “Here was a big crack.”

And — there was. A fissure in the cement underlying the mosaic tiles.

At this point, Luke was simply following her lead, following her wherever she wanted to go.

She wandered away from the pool, down another abandoned lane, just a rut in the ground. On either side of the rut were old, rusted trailers. Not the fancy kind, the ancient kind. Abandoned, mostly. There were signs that some had people living in them, but they weren’t living lives. Halfway along the rutted path a mangy brindled dog in a rusted cage barked viciously. Luke wondered whether the dog was ever taken out and was tempted to break the padlock with his foot to release the poor creature. But its lips were peeled up showing sharp teeth and its eyes followed their every move, head down, growling.

Releasing it would be kind but probably not wise. And though Luke had a lot of experience with dogs — K-9s and their handlers had saved a lot of lives in the Sandbox — he didn’t know if Hope was familiar with dogs. He didn’t have any padding to put around his arm in case the dog was feral.

Hope wasn’t paying the dog any attention.

Luke didn’t know exactly what she was paying attention to. She seemed to be on a secret mission he hadn’t been briefed on. She ignored the trailers and the people who might have been in them, touching the