Eyes at the Window (7 page)

Alarmed, Miranda ran into the kitchen to grab paper towels. It was not so unusual for Rufus to throw up. If he grew overly excited or ate something that didn’t agree with him. Was it the casserole making him sick? She shouldn’t have given it to him, changing a dog’s food should always happen gradually and people food was seldom a good idea. Or maybe he’d ingested something when he caught that bird.

Whatever it was, she’d never seen him so sick. By the time she cleaned up the floor, he’d ceased vomiting, but had retired to his bed and lay there looking weak and miserable, one eyebrow cocked her way like he was asking why she wasn’t doing something to help him.

Why hadn’t she pushed harder to get a phone installed right away? Miranda tried to remember if she’d seen a veterinarian’s clinic when she was in town yesterday. Patty would probably know where there was one, but the post office would already be closed for today. Sissy, Sissy would know. The woman had lived on a farm all her life, she’d told Miranda while they cleaned up. She might even be able to tell how serious the dog’s illness was.

The drive to Hunter’s farm seemed to take forever, especially since she took a wrong turn twice. She had to turn around once when she reached a dead end. After that she drove slower, so she could find the right road. Rufus lay limp and unresponsive in the passenger seat, so she was relieved to finally find the huge mailbox at the head of a driveway with HUNTER written in bold black capitals.

The farm consisted of a huge white barn, a brick house and several small outbuildings. As Miranda pulled up in front of the porch, a Bassett hound who had been sleeping on the porch stood up and started baying. The dog’s tail was wagging, but still Miranda hesitated to get out of the car until Sissy herself came outside. Wiping her hands on a dish towel, she yelled at the dog to be quiet and peered at the car with narrowed eyes like she couldn’t quite see who was visiting them.

She seemed delighted to find out it was Miranda, until she found out the reason for the visit. “Come in, come in,” she said, waving them in.

“If you could just tell me where I can find a vet. My phone isn’t working and I just don’t know—“

“Well now, I’m no vet, but I’ve had dogs all my life. Let’s take a look at the poor thing and see if there isn’t something we can do for him here.” She waited while Miranda carried Rufus inside and then lead them to the kitchen at the rear of the house. “Here, sit down here with him.” She shooed a cat out of a rocker that sat near a breakfast nook. Three other cats stared out at them from under the kitchen table.

Miranda sat down, cradling Rufus gently on her lap. “He killed a bird earlier, or found one already dead. I don’t know. Could that be what’s wrong? Do birds carry rabies?”

“Let’s take a look here.” Sissy squatted down beside them and took Rufus’s head in her hands, looking into his eyes. The dog licked her hand. “This isn’t rabies, believe me. I saw a rabid raccoon once. Scariest thing I’ve ever faced. You say he got a bird. Did he eat it? Could he have eaten anything else that’s got his tummy upset?”

Miranda thought of the casserole and how funny it tasted, but didn’t want to offend Sissy by mentioning it, so just said, “He could have. Something had been chewing on the bird before he brought it to me. Plus he’s been running around in the orchard all day. There’s no telling what he might have found out there. He’s like a garbage pail sometimes, the things he thinks are food.”

“The Terminator here is like that, too.” Sissy stood up and went over to the hound who had followed them inside. She reached down to pat the Basset’s smooth head. “I think I still have some of the medicine the doc gave me the last time. Let’s see if that does any good before we start worrying.”

The veterinary clinic, Sissy told Miranda, only had set office hours and had already shut down for the day. “The doc is getting up in years, so I guess he’s entitled to be set in his ways, but Lord, if someone’s got a calf that needs tending to off hours, you’d think we were asking him to cough up a kidney.”

She wrapped up a small white pill in a piece of cheese and fed it to Rufus. He sniffed it first, then gulped it down. Licking Sissy’s hand once again, he laid his head on Miranda’s knee, awake but not alert.

“Let’s give that some time to work,” Sissy said, pulling up a chair from the kitchen table to sit next to Miranda. “If he’s not feeling better in a little bit, I’ll drive you to the doc’s house myself and we’ll bang on his door till he finally comes out, office hours or no office hours.” She pulled out knitting needles and a skein of red yarn from a sewing basket on the floor and started working on something that looked like a sweater.

“He looks like he might fall asleep,” Miranda said, noticing Rufus’s eyelids seemed to be getting heavy.

“Yeah, those pills make them a bit sleepy. Sleep is the best medicine there is. Cures a body while the mind takes a rest. Not that I recommend using drugs to get to sleep. Natural’s always the best way to go.”

Miranda agreed. “Although,” she added, “sometimes that’s the only thing that works. I’m certainly glad I took some last night. You’d think I would have slept like a log after all the work I did around the place, but I had the worst dreams that kept me tossing and turning all night.”

She was also beginning to wonder if maybe she’d need to resort to sleeping pills again tonight. She was feeling wired again, her heart pumping, ears ringing. Rufus seemed to sense her tension, whimpering in his sleep and jerking with little yips like he was having nightmares.

When Sissy offered her some chamomile tea, Miranda accepted readily, hoping that would calm her down. They chatted about their dogs while Sissy shuffled around the kitchen getting cups and tea leaves, setting the kettle on the stove. The Terminator had earned his name from the number of chickens he’d killed in his youth. “Harlan wanted to put him down but he was only acting according to his nature. A hunting dog’s got to hunt and if you don’t let him take after raccoons or pheasants, well, you’re bound to have to lose a chicken or two.”

Miranda requested recommendations for someone who could help her move or haul away some of her grandmother’s things. Sissy told Miranda where she could get the freshest produce and what time the Fall Festival started on Saturday. Harlan and Bob, she said, were off in the fields harvesting corn.

“They’re liable to be gone till after dark during the week like this. I tell you, that man owns so many acres it’s lucky he can take the Lord’s day off during spring and fall. And Bob half the time don’t even do that. You’d think the man was paid by the hour, the amount of time he spends on that combine.”

Finally the medication seemed to have settled Rufus into a natural sleep and the tea had at least kept Miranda’s skin from crawling. Miranda decided he seemed well enough to return home.

“Here,” Sissy said, pressing a bottle of pills into her hand when they reached the front door. “A dog his size, give him half a pill in the morning and another tomorrow evening. If he’s not better by then, you can find the clinic out by the interstate, next to the fast food place out there. Hours are 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. You need anything before, then, you just come on over and let me know, you hear?”

The sentiment was comforting and Miranda was grateful, but as she drove home toward the setting sun, she couldn’t help wondering what roller coaster she’d be riding tomorrow.

What on earth was wrong with her? Happy and blissful one moment, and semi-paranoid the next. She hadn’t felt this much anxiety since she’d started counseling sessions years ago. The stress of making a major life change like this certainly seemed to be taking its toll.

Chapter 8

The roller coaster that was her life lately took fewer twists and turns for Miranda in the days that followed, for which she was grateful. She had another vivid nightmare after leaving Sissy’s that day. Not as intense and threatening as the first night, but complete with night sweats and the lingering sounds of a music box tune she knew she should recognize.

The dreams occurred every night after that, but with less physical distress. She definitely did not experience the sort of waking nightmare she had the first evening in the house. She had to assume the only reason she’d been so freaked out then was from being in a new place and being beset by memories. Either that or she’d gone slightly crazy for a few hours. By the fourth night, it almost seemed natural to dream of ballerinas dancing to the twinkly tune, though it still disturbed her that the sound seemed to linger even after she woke up.

She had used Sissy’s recommendations for a moving company and hired two men who helped her bring some of the excess furniture back upstairs and haul other things away. The results were that she got the front room cleared out enough to set up an old phonograph she’d found. Cleaning house to the sounds of Glen Miller’s swing band made the work seem more fun. In the evenings, she’d put on some old rock and roll records that must have been her father’s or turn on NPR on the radio and listen to smooth jazz while she read a book with Rufus napping on her stomach.

The dog had recovered, too, feeling much more himself and raring to go. She still kept a close eye on him, though, and didn’t like letting him go outside on his own in case he got into more of whatever had made him ill in the first place.

She’d seen her trespassing neighbor a couple more times, also. Neither time had he seemed to notice her, and once he had been alone, without the dog at his side. She’d half convinced herself that he must be Harlan’s hired hand, Bob Meeks, since she knew his farm bordered hers. If that were true, though, it seemed odd that he had so much free time. All the other farmers she’d seen in the area were out in the fields day and night, chugging up and down the fields on their John Deers and New Hollands and International Harvesters.

By Saturday, she finally felt mostly settled in. The creaks and groans of the old house were barely noticeable to her now. When she snuggled into bed each night, she kept a nightlight on and felt the comfort of its glow whenever her nightmares jerked her awake. Her optimism had returned, also. She no longer felt plagued with the fear of a potential blackout in the middle of the night.

One of the rocking chairs she’d liberated from the front room made a great spot to sit on the porch in the mornings and drink her coffee. After years of drinking double skinny extra foam vanilla lattes, she’d forgotten how good a cup of freshly perked coffee tasted. A drop of milk, a spoonful of sugar and the delicious aroma woke her up and made her ready for her day.

Saturday morning, however, she stayed on the porch longer than usual. There was finally no pressing work to be done inside. Rufus, fully recovered, was chasing birds across the yard despite Miranda’s admonishment to leave them alone. The crisp fall air contained a hint of winter but the sunlight slanting sideways across that side of house felt warm and welcoming. Miranda was tempted to go inside and bring out the book she’d been reading, a book of poems by Eugene Field she’d found when she cleared the stairway. She deserved a day off.

Then she remembered Patty’s invitation to attend the Fall Festival in town. She hadn’t been to Greenville all week. The telephone company had arrived on Friday to install her landline but she’d already begun to wonder if that was such a good thing. The peace and quiet had been welcome after her hectic, deadline-driven career at WKLU.

Checking her watch, she realized the festival would begin in another hour, although Sissy had told her people usually started arriving at the park much earlier. If she was going, she should start moving. She had an overflowing laundry basket in the bedroom and Goodwill boxes still cluttered one corner in the kitchen. She could run into Riverside to take care of those chores first and then enjoy her day off at the festival without feeling guilty. She could even take Rufus with her. He would enjoy the park.

At the back of her mind, there was another reason for her decision, although she didn’t admit it to herself. There was a good chance she might run into her mysterious hunter face to face this time. She would love to find out more about him and discover why he seemed to be spending so much time on her property.

She thought about him again later with a smile on her face as she waited for her clothes to spin dry at the laundromat. This new move to the country seemed to have brought out the romantic in her. While she’d had boyfriends in the past, her career had always taken precedence. Even as a teenager, she’d been more likely to be out biking or running than reading romance novels or daydreaming about her knight in shining armor. And yet here she was, 25-years-old, making up fantasies about a man she saw four times from a distance.

An hour later, as she drove into Greenville with a clean basket of laundry, she found herself scrutinizing the pedestrians on their way to the park, looking for her mysterious stranger. Main Street and the side streets were lined with cars. Someone had draped blue and white streamers up around the large shelter in the middle of the park and music from the band playing in its shade stretched out to where Miranda finally found an empty spot.

She joined the stream of families toting picnic baskets and pushing strollers as they walked toward the sound. Two teens on skateboards were the only ones in town who didn’t seem drawn to the festival. They were taking advantage of the slow day to practice kick flips on the sidewalk in front of the gas station.

Miranda paused at the fair entrance, scanning the crowd. Nowhere did she see the young man she’d hoped to find there. She did, however, find Patty Carmichael easily enough. Patty was manning a kissing booth near the entrance and her clear tone reached halfway up the block.

“Oh, come on, darlin’,” Patty teased a young man about 19 who was red as a beet. “It’s for a good cause, you know. Just close your eyes and pretend I’m your old auntie, why don’t you?”

The boy gave her his dollar and complied, keeping this eyes open as Patty gave him a loud smack on the lips. His blush turned almost purple at the guffaws and clapping of the crowd around him.

“Friends of the Library appreciates your contribution,” Patty said. “Come back again real soon, you hear?” Then she caught sight of Miranda and Rufus. “There she is, and who is this fine little gentleman you brought with you?” She squatted and called to the terrier, talking baby talk to him. “Who wants free kisses, hmm? Free kisses for the handsome doggie.”

Rufus loved every second of it. He twirled in circles and yapped and then stood with his front paws on Patty’s knees so she could ruffle his ears and neck.

“Better watch it, Patty,” one of the men standing near them said. “You might get the reputation for being a loose woman.” He and his wife laughed.

“Oh go on, you,” Patty said, but she was clearly pleased at the joke. “I’m sure you can take over for a bit, can’t you?” she asked the man’s wife. “I want to introduce Miranda and her beau here to everyone.”

“Everyone” seemed to include half the town. The smell and smoke of barbequing pork competed with the mingled scents of cotton candy and hot dogs from a food truck parked near the jungle gym. In a large grassy area, rides had been set up for the smaller children: toy cars circling to calliope music, a carousel covered with a red and white awning, even a small roped-off area where kids waited in line to ride one small pony who looked tired already. A farmer’s market had been laid out under a canopy where several locals sold fresh fruits and vegetables and even baked goods. It looked like Miranda has missed some sort of judging. Several of the tables had blue, red or white ribbons proudly displayed on a prize squash or pie or jar of jam.

Patty introduced her to so many people, Miranda lost track of their names and had to label them in her mind with their occupation. The grade school teacher was blond and young and laughed at everything the football coach said, pleased by his flirtatiousness. The farmer and his wife who had apparently grown the largest pumpkin had just found out they were expecting. Patty spent at least five minutes guessing the gender of the baby, changing her mind several times. No one seemed to care that they’d already told her the sonogram showed it would be a girl.

Finally Miranda and Patty stood in line to fill their plates with pork chops dripping with barbeque sauce, corn on the cob slathered with butter, coleslaw, and buttermilk biscuits kept warm under heat lamps.

Patty talked the whole time. “Same thing every year. You’d think they could come up with a new menu once in a while. Still, this is some good eating.” She took an extra buttermilk biscuit. “The hubby don’t know what he’s missing. He couldn’t make it today on account of he’s working and all. On a Saturday. That man, let me tell you.

“There’s some chairs.” Patty marched over to the first table under a stretched canvas. Several people in various stages of eating sat around it, engaged in conversation with a man in a large white hat. One of those people was Harlan Hunter. He seemed to be the one with the most to say, arms on the table as he leaned forward earnestly. Sissy, who was sitting next to him, greeted Miranda with a wide smile, then forked in another mouthful of coleslaw.

“Mr. Mayor.” Patty greeted the white-hatted man with a nod and set her plate at the place next to him as if he had been saving it for her all this time. “Have you met Miranda yet?” she asked. “Of course you haven’t. She’s new to town. Living at the Preston place. You know it, I’m sure. Grandma Preston from Sunday School. You remember.”

Miranda nodded and said “Hello” as the mayor greeted her, standing awkwardly holding her plate. There was another seat available, across from Patty and right next to Harlan. But something about the way Harlan simply sat and looked at her, unsmiling, made her hesitate to take it.

Patty had continued to introduce the others at the table until she noticed Miranda still stood. “Here, here, girl. Have a seat. The mayor don’t bite, do you, Mayor?” She laughed and thumped his arm as he smiled at her. “And you know Harlan and Sissy here, I’m sure. Scootch on over there a little, Harlan, let the girl sit down.”

Rufus had already recognized Sissy and had started chewing on a juicy bone she’d handed down to him. His front paws were covered with sauce as he pinned it to the ground in order to gnaw the top of it. Miranda began to worry what the spicy sauce might do to his still delicate stomach, but it was too late to take it away from him now.

“Don’t you try and steal my beau away from me, Sissy,” Patty said. “Rufus and me are going to crash the homecoming dance, aren’t we, you sweet little puppy?” Rufus looked up at her high-pitched words and shook his tail, then got back to work on his bone.

“We’ll just have to share the cute little thing,” Sissy answered. Then she looked over Harlan to ask Miranda, “How have you been, dearie? I see Rufus is doing just fine. Are you settling in okay over there? It’s got to be exhausting trying to whip that place into shape. You should come visit again sometime soon. I know it must get lonely in that huge old house like that.”

“I have been busy,” Miranda said. “But I’ve not been completely alone out there. I have Rufus, of course, and a couple of times I’ve seen a hunter in the back woods. I was thinking it might be your hired hand, Bob Meeks. Does he hunt with a German Shepherd?”

Sissy laughed. “Why Bob wouldn’t know one end of a shotgun from the other. That’s him over yonder, see?” She pointed to a man at the next table wearing a grimy baseball cap. He didn’t look anything like the man Miranda had seen. “Bob’s as anti-gun as Harlan is. More maybe.”

“Is that what you’re bending the mayor’s ear about today, Harlan?” Patty cut a piece of pork chop and ate it, speaking around the food. “I saw you on your soap box there. What is it this time?”

“The usual,” Sissy answered. “Politics. Gun control again. Harlan is trying to make pacifists out of all these NRA members sitting around the table here.”

The mayor and three of the men laughed, but one woman said “He’s right, though. Just last month a six-year-old over in Riverside accidently shot his little sister playing cowboys with a loaded revolver. His daddy had a whole room full of rifles and hand guns. What’s a man need with so many guns? Poor baby could have been killed.”

“Now, now,” the mayor said, wiping his mouth and then laying his napkin neatly across his knee again. “Guns don’t kill people—”

“Yes, yes,” Harlan interrupted. “We know. People kill people. But guns make it a lot easier to kill people and you can’t deny that.” He leaned forward again, jabbing his finger to make his point. “You can’t tell me there’s any good reason a man needs an assault rifle as his personal weapon, for Pete’s sake. If I had my way, all guns would be illegal, but at least—”

The debate they’d interrupted took off again full throttle. Someone argued that any move to ban the personal acquisition of assault weapons was just the first step toward banning all weapons.

“That tired old argument?” Harlan countered. “That’s like saying establishing a police force in town means we’re going to live in a police state. Ridiculous. Did banning public smoking lead to arresting everyone who buys cigarettes?”

“Not yet,” someone said to a spattering of laughter.

“You talk like guns are some kind of pathogen,” one white-haired man said. Miranda tried to remember his name. Doctor somebody. “As if getting rid of guns would eliminate violence like penicillin cures syphilis. Violence is the disease if you ask me. Until we find a cure for that, let me keep my aught-five.”