attendance. Spying a groggy Barry lying several feet from him, he took a step back and gave an evil hiss.
“I think we all second that sentiment,” James remarked, and Darla saw him swipe away what appeared to be a suspicious bit of moisture from his eyes.
Darla blinked back her own tears. “Hey, Hamlet, thanks for taking care of me,” she croaked. “You’re a true cat hero.”
Hamlet stared at her, green eyes bright; then, quite deliberately, he padded his way toward her.
It was at that point that the front door burst open, and Reese and two uniformed patrolmen rushed in. One of the latter shouted an all clear, and the paramedics followed inside, their gear clattering as they demanded to know where their patient might be. Jake sprang to her feet and was telling Reese what had happened, with James chiming in with his own version. At the detective’s quick word, the nearest officer slapped a pair of cuffs on Barry and then dragged him to his feet—roughly, Darla was glad to see.
But exciting as it all was, the distraction held her attention only until she felt a soft paw touch her knee. She looked down to see Hamlet gazing up at her, green eyes inscrutable. Then, with the flick of a whisker, he settled himself on her lap and began to purr.
TWENTY-THREE
“HILDA SAYS TO TELL YOU THAT SHE HOPES YOU’RE FEELING better,” Jake said as she snapped her phone shut again and leaned against the counter not far from the stool where Darla sat behind the register. Then, setting a gift bag embossed with the Great Scentsations logo on the counter, she added, “And here’s a combination thanks and get-well gift from her.”
“Well, you deserve as much thanks as I do,” Darla protested. Still, she eagerly glanced into the bag to find it filled with several products she recalled from her last foray into Hilda’s shop. She smiled wryly when she saw that one was a jar of cucumber eye compresses.
Jake, meanwhile, reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a familiar, genie-bottle-shaped vial, which she displayed with a satisfied smile of her own. “Hey, I got mine. Oh, and Hilda said she’ll email you the names of some ointments that will help fade the rest of that bruising.”
Darla put a self-conscious hand to her throat, which was wrapped in a bright blue paisley scarf of Great-Aunt Dee’s that she’d found in a box in the back of her closet. She’d donned it less as a wry fashion statement and more to stave off questions and dismayed looks from her customers who might peg her for a battered woman and decide she needed intervention. Of course, the concealing fabric was no defense against the curious shoppers who’d seen the evening television news a few days earlier and already knew her backstory, having caught the report about what Robert had been referring to as the “Showdown at the Brownstone Corral.”
The aftermath of that event, while nowhere nearly as dramatic, had been in its own way equally as trying. The ER doctor treating her had insisted that Darla stay overnight in the hospital while they assessed her head injury. A mild concussion, along with some tracheal trauma, was the doctor’s determination.
Dressed in her green ER scrubs, the young doctor had looked to Darla like a kid who’d escaped a slumber party. Still, her soft voice had an unmistakable air of authority as she reminded Darla that not all her injuries were outwardly visible.
“Let’s not forget there’s a certain psychological trauma involved with being almost murdered,” the woman had added, eyeing her over her clipboard with an expression that seemed to indicate she’d seen a few things in her short tenure. “You don’t want to go home and pretend everything’s normal, because it’s not.”
Though Darla had been determined to prove the doctor wrong, she’d not succeeded. Sleep was hard to come by, mostly because her dreams invariably devolved into a hazy re-creation of those frightening minutes when she’d truly feared for her life. And even safely ensconced in her apartment, she found herself jumping at every small noise and constantly looking over her shoulder lest Barry suddenly be there.
Physically, things were only a little better. Four days after her struggle with Barry, the distinct pattern of splayed fingertips was still visible on her pale flesh. The original reddish-blue coloring now had faded to a gruesome-looking combination of green and yellow; still, Jake had warned her that it would take at least another week