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The midnight breeze had turned soft with the hint of thunderstorms and the scent of the nearby bay. It filled the night with the restless rustle of leaves in the old live oaks. Spanish moss swayed eerily before it, creating dark, rippling curtains of shadow. Mixed with the swish of the leaves and the sigh of the breeze was a distant, low rumble.
From the west came the approaching thunder of a storm and the flicker of sheet lightning, an ominous promise. From the north, too, there came a louder rumble, a more distinct thunder and a sharper flash of light, as bombers practiced on the military reservation. Both storms had their own kind of eeriness, the one wholly natural, the other wholly unnatural.
Just as Honor Nightingale pulled into her driveway, beneath the sagging shoulders of a row of old oaks, a thick cloud scudded across the moon, swallowing the last bit of illumination. The night abruptly devoured everything beyond the yellow beams of her headlights. It was a wild, beautiful night, she thought. The kind of night that always made her want to kick off her shoes and run barefoot through the grass like a frisky colt.
She pulled up to the detached garage that sat behind her ramshackle house and shoved the car door open, pausing to draw a deep breath of the northwest Florida air. Nowhere else on earth had nights like these. Nowhere else could you smell the sea and the thunder on a breeze as soft as silk and satin.
Climbing out of the car, she smiled to herself and threw back her head to soak it all in. The wind caught at her blue hospital scrubs, snatching the fabric and molding it to her trim body. Laughing softly, she turned her head a little and let the breeze tug her hair free of its pins and whip the long, dark strands around her. It was a beautiful, beautiful night, she thought, and for just this little while she felt free of all the sorrows that had haunted her for so long.
The wind suddenly whipped around her, feeling cold and damp, and snatched the car door from Honor's hand, slamming it shut. Damn—her keys were locked inside. She absolutely didn't want to cope with that right now. She had just come off a grueling shift as triage nurse in the emergency room, it was well past midnight, and not a light had been visible in any house along the dirt road leading to the highway.
And then she recalled the damaged screen on the kitchen window beside the back door, the window with the loose latch she had discovered only yesterday. With a little patience she could probably jiggle the darn thing open. If worse came to worst, she could break the glass. So what was she standing here dithering for? Giving a last toss of her head in the breeze, she stepped toward the back porch.
And froze.
She wasn't alone. How she knew that, she couldn't have said. But suddenly her heart was in her throat and she was paralyzed by the absolute conviction that someone was watching her from the house. Her house. The house with the torn screen and the loose latch on the back window.
Holding her breath, she sorted through the possibilities with lightning speed, the same speed that often meant the difference between life and death in the emergency room. The house up the road to her right was closer, but it was deserted. The house to her left was occupied by some kind of recluse. She'd lived next door to him for a month and hadn't seen him once, but Millie Jackson, who lived up near the highway, said he was some kind of military man who just wasn't sociable.
So okay, he probably wasn't a serial killer. He was probably some soured old warrior who would—
A thump. Distinctly, despite the rustling of leaves and the distant rumble of bombs and thunder, she heard a soft thump, as if something had been bumped. From the house. From her house.
That did it. Without another second's hesitation, she whirled and took off for the recluse's house. Whatever kind of crazy he was, he couldn't be as bad as someone who would be waiting inside a house for a woman alone after dark. No way. She'd seen too many women in the emergency room who'd come home to find a creep waiting for them. She didn't need to imagine a thing. She knew.
