Nighttime Guardian

“Coward,” she muttered. She was thirty years old, no longer the same little girl who had cried “monster” more than two decades ago. But if the passing years had dimmed her memory of that night, time had done nothing to convince her that monsters didn’t exist. She knew all too well that they did.

But real monsters didn’t creep up from the river in the dead of night, as she’d once believed. They walked into offices in broad daylight and killed for the contents of a safe.

He can’t hurt you now, Shelby. You know that, don’t you?

She could picture Dr. Minger sitting behind his desk, his kind eyes soft and a bit blurred by the thick lenses in his glasses. Albert Lunt is in prison, serving a life sentence. No chance for parole. It’s over.

But it wasn’t over, Shelby thought, fingering the silk scarf she wore at her throat. It never would be.

Months of therapy had helped. The nightmares were fewer and farther between now, but they still came. Albert Lunt still terrorized Shelby’s sleep just as surely as he’d done the day he’d murdered her husband. Or the night he’d broken into her home and tried to kill her. As long as he was alive, he would always have this terrible hold on her.

I’ll find a way to get you, he’d promised as the police had dragged him from her home that night.

And a part of Shelby still believed—would always believe—that he would.

She shivered, even though the evening was warm and humid and the air conditioner in her rental car was turned low. She reached over and shut off the fan, wishing she could turn off her memories as easily. But they were there, niggling at the fringes of her mind as they had been ever since she’d left L.A. Distance wouldn’t quiet them, nor time. Nothing would.

Outside, the night deepened. Through the patches of trees, she had an occasional glimpse of moonlight on water. A silvery ribbon that wound for miles and miles through the very heart of Arkansas, the Pearl River had once held a fascination for Shelby, and then terror, after that summer. Now she realized that she had been hoping it might hold the key to her salvation.

Sixteen months, she thought numbly, as her headlights picked out the last curve in the road before she reached her grandmother’s house. Michael had been gone for over a year. Sometimes it seemed like only a heartbeat ago that the two of them had been planning their future together. Sometimes it seemed like a lifetime. Those times were the hardest, when Shelby would lie awake at night, unable to remember what he’d looked like. Oh, she could recall his beautiful grey eyes, the sound of his voice, the way he smiled. But she had trouble putting all those features together, making him seem real again.

It’s time to let go, Shelby.

I can’t. It’s my fault he’s dead. If I hadn’t been late—

Lunt would have killed you, too. You know that.

Getting out of L.A. was a good idea, Dr. Minger had said. There were too many memories that bound her to the tragedy. She’d been trapped in a terrible limbo since Michael’s death, not seeing friends, not going to work. Their savings and the proceeds from the sale of Michael’s business had enabled her to let her career as an accountant slide into obscurity because she hadn’t wanted to cope with the day-to-day pressures of getting on with her life.

If it hadn’t been for her grandmother’s call for help, Shelby wasn’t certain she would have yet had the courage to break free.

Around the curve, the silhouette of her grandmother’s house, perched on wooden stilts, came into view, but the sight of flashing lights down by the river almost stopped Shelby’s heart. For one terrible moment, she thought she was back in L.A., back in her husband’s office, bending over his lifeless body while the sirens wailed outside.

Then she thought of her grandmother, but Shelby quickly reminded herself that she’d left Annabel little more than an hour ago. Her grandmother was safe in the hospital and slowly on the mend. This had nothing to do with her.

Her uncle James? No. James didn’t like the river. He had a place in town now. This was nothing to do with him, either.

But the reassurances didn’t stop Shelby’s hands from trembling as she pulled into her grandmother’s drive, parked the car and got out. The lawn ran to the edge of an incline that dropped gently to the river. Several police cars and a hearse were parked along the road, and she could hear voices down by the water. With increasing trepidation, she walked across the yard and stood at the top of the bank, gazing down. A flashlight caught her in its beam, and someone shouted up to her. After a moment, a policeman scurried up the slope toward her.

“Get back in your car, Miss, and move along. This is police business.”

“But I live here.” She waved her hand toward the house.

“Annabel Westmoreland owns this place, ma’am. I happen to know she’s in the hospital.”

“I’m her granddaughter,” Shelby said a bit defensively. “I’m going to be staying here for a while.”

The deputy cocked his head. “Shelby?” He shone the flashlight in her face, and she flinched. “Sorry.” He doused the light. “You are Shelby, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” She still didn’t know who he was.

He chuckled ruefully. “Guess you don’t recognize me in the uniform. No one ever expected a Millsap to be on this side of the law.”

“Millsap?” she said incredulously. “Dewayne?”

He nodded and grinned. “Been with the county sheriff’s department almost ten years now.”

The Millsaps, along with their cousins, the Bufords, had once terrorized all of Cross County and half of Graves County. No one had ever expected any of them to amount to a hill of beans, as her grandmother would say.

“What happened, Dewayne?” Shelby asked uneasily. “Why are the police here?”

His expression sobered. “My cousins found a body tangled in one of their trot lines.”

Shelby caught her breath. “Oh, no. Who was it?”

He hesitated, then shrugged. “Guess it won’t matter if I tell you, seeing as how we’ve already notified his next of kin. His name was Danny Weathers. He was a local diver.”

“How did he…die?”

“Looks like a boating accident. The coroner’s down there now.” Dewayne nodded toward her grandmother’s house. “Look, maybe you best go on inside. This isn’t something you want to see.”

“But—”

“Hey, Dewayne!”

He turned at the sound of his name, then muttered a curse as a tall figure topped the bank and headed across the yard toward them. “Pardon my French, but I sure as hell don’t need this tonight,” he muttered to Shelby. He called to the newcomer, “Look, you got questions, you need to talk to the sheriff, Nathan.”

Shelby’s mouth fell open in astonishment. Nathan? Nathan Dallas? The boy who had once gotten her into so much trouble? Was it possible?

She’d heard Nathan had left this part of the country years ago. Like her, he’d migrated to a big city. Her grandmother had told her once that he was some hotshot reporter in Washington, just as he’d always said he would be. What in the world was he doing back in Arcadia?

“McCaid won’t talk to me, you know that. Come on, Dewayne, cut me some slack here, okay?” Nathan strode over to the deputy, his back to Shelby. “I want to know what the coroner found when he examined the body.”

Dewayne sighed. “And have my words splashed across the Argus? No thanks. Been there, done that.”

“You got burned once by my uncle,” Nathan said. “But you’re dealing with me now. If you say something is off the record, it’s off the record.”

“Yeah, right.”

Nathan ignored the sarcasm. “You don’t really think this was a boating accident, do you? Come on.”

“What else would cut a man up like that?” Dewayne said grimly. “He got caught in a boat propeller.”

…cut a man up?

Shelby shivered uncontrollably. She’d forgotten how dangerous the river could be, how unpredictable. She’d come here seeking solace from the violence of her past only to find more death, more horror. But surely this was an accident. A terrible, tragic mishap.

“It’s how he got caught in a prop that makes me curious,” Nathan persisted. “Why was he out there diving alone?”