The Man Behind The Mask. Barbara Hannay
To try again for that thing, whatever it was, that was just out of his reach?
Brendan considered himself pragmatic and practical, perhaps with a good measure of cynical thrown in. He was the man least likely to give himself over to whimsy. But given that it seemed to have been raining for forty days and forty nights, he felt a strange shiver along his spine that he was arriving at an ark of any sort.
Below the sign Nora’s Ark was a smaller one, announcing they were supported by the Hansen Community Betterment Committee.
His company was one of the charter members!
He shook off his annoyance, and drove over a wooden bridge that spanned a creek that was still raging with spring runoff, though it was the last day of June. Up ahead, carved out of the mountainous wilderness all around, a white house—almost a cottage—was illuminated in his headlights, surrounded by a picket fence and a yard where yellow climbing roses rioted.
Through the grim, pelting rain a light shone, warm and inviting, from inside, and the house seemed like a welcoming place, not the kind of place where a charlatan who cheated vulnerable old women would live.
Was someone awake? It was probably a good time for chanting and consulting cards. Though why do it if the mark wasn’t there?
Behind the house and yard, barely visible in darkness that was slowly giving way to a soggy predawn, he could see the huge silhouette of a barn.
“Oh, we’re here,” Deedee breathed happily. “It looks just the way I thought it would.”
That explained the appearance of the place. Homey. Welcoming. Like the old witch’s cottage in Hansel and Gretel.
All the better to dupe people, to lure them closer.
“You wait here,” Brendan said, and cut off Deedee’s protest with a firm slam of the car door. He walked up a path that smelled of perfume as he crushed damp fallen rose petals under his feet.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, back toward the barn, he saw a light fly up, heard the high-pitched whinny of a horse, and, straining against the sounds of the storm, he was sure he heard the startled cry of someone in trouble. A female in trouble.
TURNING FROM THE house, adrenaline pumping, his instincts on red alert, Brendan Grant ran toward the barn.
At first, he thought it was a pile of old rags in the churned-up mud of the paddock adjoining the barn. The pile was faintly illuminated by the fallen flashlight beside it. Then it moved. Heedless of the mud, he put one hand on the fence, leaped it, landed, raced to the still form. It looked like a child facedown in the mud.
His sense of urgency surged as he squatted down. He knew better than to try to move whoever it was without assessing the injuries.
“Are you all right?”
Movement from the heap of rags and a squeak of distressed surprise were a relief to Brendan. Then the pile of rags flipped over.
It was his turn to be shocked. It wasn’t a child, but a woman. Her hair reminded him of Charlie’s—ginger, sticking up all over the place, except where a clump of mud had flattened it to her skull. But even the mud that streaked her skin could not hide the exquisite loveliness of her pale face.
Her nose was dainty, faintly dusted with copper freckles. Her lips were plump and pink; her chin had a little jut to it that hinted at a stubborn temperament. A goose egg was rising alarmingly above her right eye.
Her eyes were amazing, wide-spaced, unusually large in the smallness of her face, a color of jade that flickered with light in the grayness of the night.
If this was Nora she was an enchantress of the kind who would have no need of makeup to weave her spell.
She was obviously very woozy, because she looked at him quizzically, and then oddly, reached up and touched his cheek, a faint smile on her face, as if she did not see a dark devil arrived on the tails of the storm, but something else entirely. Something that she recognized and welcomed.
His feeling of being enchanted—however reluctantly—increased.
Then abruptly she came to her senses. She seemed to realize she was flat on her back in the middle of the night, in the mud, with a strange man who oozed menace and bristling bad temper hovering over her.
Her eyebrows knit together in consternation and she struggled to sit up.
“Hey,” he said, his attempt at a soothing tone coming out of his mouth like rust, a hoarse croak. “Try not to move.”
She looked as if she had no intention of following his well-meaning instruction, so he laid a hand on her shoulder. It was tiny underneath a thin jacket that appeared to be soaking up rain rather than repelling it.
He could see a little bow on what could be her pajamas at the V of her jacket.
She shook off his hand, sat up, wincing from the effort. He’d been right about her chin giving a clue to her temperament. She was stubborn.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing out here, on my property, at this time of night?”
He was annoyed with himself that the tone of her voice increased the sense of enchantment weaving through this miserable night. Despite the lack of welcome in her words, her voice reminded him of maple syrup, rich and smooth and sweet.
She scanned his face, that initial reaction of trust, of welcome, completely gone. Now she looked wary and stubborn and maybe just a little frightened.
What she didn’t have was the look of a person who would be trying to dupe an old lady out of her money.
No sense putting off the moment of truth.
“Are you Nora?”
She nodded. He let that sink in. No head scarf. No dangling earrings. Certainly no blue eye shadow, or slash of red at her mouth.
Brendan was aware that in a very short time he had started to hope the woman in a vulnerable little heap in the mud was not the same woman who had written Deedee a letter promising to heal her cat. With energy. For a fee.
He looked at her fresh face, tried to imagine dangling earrings and heavy makeup and the gypsy scarf, and found his imagination didn’t quite go that far. But fresh faced or not, she’d duped Deedee. He was already disillusioned by life, so why be disturbed by the gathering of a little more evidence?
Still, for the moment she looked faintly frightened, and he felt a need to alleviate that.
“I brought a cat out,” he said. “I heard a ruckus out here, saw a light and came to investigate.”
She considered his explanation, but looked doubtful. He suspected he didn’t look much like the kind of guy who would be attached to his cat.
“I heard you were a healer.” He tried to strip judgment from his tone, but he must have looked even less like the kind of guy who would put any kind of faith in a healer than one who would be attached to a cat, because her doubtful expression intensified.
“Who did you hear that from?” she asked uneasily. Her eyes skittered toward the fence, as if she was going to try and make an escape.
“Deedee Ashton.”
The name did not seem to register, but then she might be struggling to remember her own name at the moment.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked.
She put a hand to the goose egg above her eye.
“I don’t know for sure,” she said. “The horses might have knocked me over.”
He scanned the corral. Three horses were squeezed against the back fence, restless and white-eyed. He didn’t know much about horses, but these ones seemed in no way docile.