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Connie widened her eyes with curiosity. “Why does he always have his lights on?”
Thad shrugged. “No one knows.”
Connie thought about that for a silent moment. She was intrigued by the deepening mystery that surrounded the man, and yet the unknown also made her cautious.
“Does Mr. Mason live alone, Thad?”
“Yes.”
Connie nodded. “Your father told me you deliver his groceries every week. I wanted to know…” she hesitated for a second, unsure how to proceed politely. “I wanted to know… do you
deliver any alcohol to Mr. Mason?” she fluttered her hands in a timid gesture to apologize for the effrontery.
Thad shook his head and smiled reassurance. “He ain’t no drinker if that’s what you’re worried about. The last time I delivered anything like that was a few months ago. A single bottle of wine, that’s all.”
Connie felt herself shed a little sigh of relief.
Thad frowned. “Strangest thing in Mr. Mason’s weekly delivery is the roses,” he added as a sudden afterthought. He threw the desiccated shreds of the grass on the ground and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. Over his shoulder he heard the big roller door being hauled down and then the truck began to slowly pull away from the delivery dock. One of the men in the truck gave Thad a wave and he smiled back as the heavy vehicle roared away in a belch of black exhaust smoke.
“Roses?”
“Seven,” Thad flicked his eyes back to Connie and nodded. “Every week. A rose for every day.”
Connie blinked. “For a man who lives alone?” Her face became a mask of bewilderment, yet there was something touchingly romantic about Thad’s revelation that plucked at her heart. She gazed at the young man with wide yearning eyes. She needed to understand the meanings behind the many enigmas surrounding Bill Mason.
Thad simply shrugged his shoulders, as though the man was as great a mystery to him as he was to the rest of Hoyt Harbor’s local residents.
“Do you ever talk to Mr. Mason when you deliver his groceries?”
Thad smiled. “Of course,” he said.
“What kind of things do you talk about?”
Thad frowned and thought. “Just the usual stuff, I guess,” he said with a dismissive shake of his head. “The weather, the beach, fishing… things like that.” He was starting to feel uncomfortable by all the questions, and there was a mountain of work that needed doing in the store. He cast a distracted glance at the sky and saw it was getting late. There were dark storm clouds creeping like black menacing fingers over the horizon.
“What kind of a man is he?” Connie persisted.
Thad blinked like he didn’t understand the question, or maybe he didn’t quite know how to answer. “What do you mean?”
Connie wasn’t quite sure herself. She fluttered her arms as if she were reaching for the words. “Well… is he loud, angry… is he rude to you?”
Thad shook his head. “He’s just a normal guy,” he assured Connie and then started to walk slowly back towards the store. “Just a man who likes his privacy.”
6.
Connie returned to the vacation rental and carefully packed the precious paintings in her suitcase between the layers of clothes she had brought from New York. She cast a quick glance around the bedroom. Her laptop was on the bedside table. She hesitated for a moment, wondering whether to email the images of the paintings to Duncan, and reluctantly decided she should. It cost her fifteen minutes, so that by the time she carried her suitcase out to the car, the day was darkening into the long shadows of dusk.
Connie drove south, one eye on the clock, and the other on the road. The miles and time drifted by and her thoughts began to wander back across the unanswered questions that surrounded the paintings and the mysterious man who had made them.
In the back of her mind was the nagging doubt that Duncan might be right – the paintings could just be the work of a talented amateur – for Connie had never trusted her instincts like this before.
It was the first time in her life she had followed her heart – allowed her instincts and intuition to lead her into the unknown with nothing more than a faint hope and naïve faith that maybe – just maybe – the little paintings in the suitcase might be the solution to her freedom, and salvation from the obsessive clutches of Duncan.
As Connie drove on, the cloud front suddenly passed overhead and immediately she was plunged into an eerie twilight, fraught with boiling black clouds and a sudden wild shriek of wind that swayed the mighty pine trees along the verge of the road and littered the blacktop with a hail of debris.
Connie clutched at the wheel as the wind buffeted the car. The world turned black and brooding. She flicked on the headlights and saw small branches fall like rain through the searching reach of the beams. She eased her foot off the gas and peered ahead into the storm. The temperature dropped dramatically, and then the first drops of rain detonated against the windshield.
Connie drove on. The rain came in spatters – enough to make the road slick and shiny, driven horizontal against the car by the wind that howled through the trees. Connie saw headlights up ahead and then a car parked on the opposite side of the road. As she drew closer she recognized the shapes of two hooded men. They were leaning over a vehicle, scraping away the shattered shards of glass of the driver’s-side window. Connie’s tires bumped over a splintered tree branch that was strewn across the road and she wondered if it had caused the damage.
After more than an hour of anxious driving Connie saw a bent and dented sign loom out of the night. She peered hard through the windshield, slowed her speed to a crawl, and breathed a heavy sigh of relief when she read the word ‘Jellicat’. It was the first turn off. She crept past, gradually built up speed again, and then – finally – the heavens opened and the world turned grey and blurred with a thunderous downpour of torrential rain.
Connie glanced anxiously at the digital clock on the car’s dashboard. She had passed the turnoff ten minutes ago. She knew the green mailbox must be close. She dabbed the brakes, felt the car slide a little before it gripped. Connie’s heart leaped fearfully into her throat, and then a tree branch suddenly fell from out of the darkness and crumpled against the trunk of the car. She shrieked in fear and clamped the steering wheel tight. She stamped on the brake pedal and the front end of the car dipped hard on its suspension. Connie felt herself thrown forward against the seatbelt as the car’s speed bled away dramatically. She swung off the road and sat with the engine idling for a full minute while the rain drummed against the car until her nerves settled and her hands stopped trembling. It was now completely dark. There were no roadside lights – just an endless smothering darkness. At last she nudged the vehicle back onto the blacktop, and a few seconds later she saw a clearing in the tree line – a turnoff into the night.
She was shivering with relief. She bumped off the road and onto a narrow rutted track that turned left and right into the teeth of the storm. Rocky outcrops loomed up around her and she heard long grass and shrubs scrape against the side of the car. The headlights bounced and swayed and she felt herself thrown about in her seat until finally she came to an area where the trees seemed to become stunted and the howl of the wind rose to a maniacal flute.
Somehow over the roar of the storm, Connie thought she heard the far off growling boom of the ocean. She hunched over the steering wheel, went cautiously around a long curve in the track – and then the car slid out from underneath her and crashed nose first into a ditch.
The impact of the collision jarred her back and snapped her head forward. She felt the coppery, metallic tang of blood in her mouth. She dropped her hands from the wheel and tried to push herself back. She was trapped at an impossible angle, tilted forward and to the side, so that the restraint of the seatbelt was all that held her in the seat. Connie started to sob with pain and the after-effects of shock. The headlights threw crazy angled beams of light into the surrounding woods.
Connie unfastened the catch of the seat belt and fell across the car, tumbled against the passenger door. She felt a white-hot lance of agony shoot through her knee. She wept with the torture of it and then pounded her fists frantically against the door. It was jammed shut, wedged against the side of the ditch. Sobbing, Connie forced the window down and then clawed her way out through the narrow opening, her injured leg dragging useless behind her. She tumbled onto her back in the mud, stared up into the howling black face of the storm – and then passed out.
7.
Connie awoke to the horror of slobbering jaws
and the stench of foul breath in her face. Something wet slithered across her cheek and her eyes fluttered open then grew nightmarishly wide. A beast with foaming froth at its jaws was hunched over her. She choked on a whimper, and then screamed.
For a moment nothing happened. She filled her lungs again and then suddenly saw the blinding glare of a flashlight beam flicker across her face.
From out of the darkness a man’s voice carried on the night. “Connie?”
She blinked. The beast hung over her like a black avalanche of menace. She tried to scramble away, before the man came from the far side of the car and knelt in the mud next to her.
“Back off, Ned,” the man said softly. The beast took two steps away from Connie and then sat. “Good dog.”
The man played the flashlight across Connie’s face and then flicked the beam down across her body. She was covered in mud, soaked through to the bone. The thin dress she wore clung to her like a second skin and she was shivering uncontrollably. The man put an arm around her shoulder. “Can you sit up?”
Connie nodded. The man eased her head out of the mud and propped her back against the side of the ditch. He flicked the beam once more down over her legs.
With a tender touch, he pressed his fingers lightly to her knee. The skin there was broken and he could see a large knot of swelling. Connie winced and clamped her teeth down on her lip to stifle a cry of agony.
“Not broken, I don’t think,” the man said. His voice was steady and even – a deep resonate sound filled with a quiet kind of confidence and calm assurance.
“How do you know my name?” Connie asked in a bewildered croak. She searched the darkness for the man’s face but it was hidden behind the glare of the flashlight. Past his silhouette she could see a sky full of shredding clouds and a slice of bright yellow moon, low on the horizon. It was still raining, but she sensed the worst of the storm had passed.
