It was an absolutely beautiful November morning as I practically dragged Louella down the sidewalk. A Carolina wren sang a sweet song, the sun was shining, and the wind was calm.
I left my tote and the coffee on my front steps because Louella was hard enough to handle without my hands full. I’d found my spare pair of sunglasses and had them on, but so far hadn’t needed them to evade any ghosts. My street was clear.
Mr. Dunwoody, as usual, was on his front porch, his glass in hand, a newspaper on his lap. “Morning!” he called when he looked up and saw me cajoling Louella to follow me up the path. His tee-hee-hee echoed in the quiet morning as he said, “Looks like you found Louella.”
“You want her?” I asked hopefully.
“No ma’am. No way. No how.”
She stubbornly refused to climb his front steps, and there was no way I was going to attempt to pick her up. I looped her leash around the banister and left her where she was.
Sinking into a rocker, I eyed his flask. I was tempted. Sorely tempted.
“What did you get yourself into?” he asked, studying the dog.
“Hell,” I answered. “Walked straight into it, following a ghost with kind eyes.”
He tee-hee-hee’d again.
I quickly told him about Virgil’s wanting Louella to have a home, and how right now I was the only option. “Unless you know of any candidates?”
He folded his paper and set it on the table between the chairs. “No one I know is as brave as you.”
For some reason I heard “brave” as “bat-shit crazy.” I wasn’t sure which was accurate. Most likely, the latter.
He gave me a quick once-over. “How’re you faring, Carly Bell?”
I couldn’t be anything but honest with him. “I’m okay.”
“It’s been a rough couple of days on you.”
He had no idea. “I’m ready for a vacation. I should have gone on that cruise with Marjie, then none of this ever would have happened.”
“You don’t like deep water,” he reminded, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips.
“A pesky detail.”
His soft tee-hee-hee buoyed my spirits.
After taking a sip from his mason jar, he asked, “The sheriff have any leads on the fire?”
A pair of cardinals flitted between the branches of a poplar in his side yard. “They were waiting on fingerprints, the last I heard. Could take weeks.”
Slowly, he rocked. “It’s a bad business you’re mixed up in.”
“Sure enough. No one knows anything, saw anything, had anything to do with anything.”
His beard was starting to come in nicely, but I liked his face clean-shaven. For a skinny man, he had full round cheeks that jiggled when he laughed, and I missed seeing them.
“That’s a lot of anything,” he said.
I smiled. “Don’t I know it.”
He had on a red, white, and blue checkered bow tie this morning and blue suspenders paired with his white dress shirt. Oh so casually, he said, “Saw Patricia Davis Jackson tearing out of your house last night ’bout eight or so.”
“Yep.”
Nodding thoughtfully, he said, “Sometimes people make certain choices and think they need to live with those decisions, not realizing that they have the power to make another choice altogether.”
Undoubtedly there was wisdom in his words I was supposed to embrace, but I was having trouble deciphering the message. “What kind of choices? To be a mean-spirited woman intent on making her son miserable?”
His brown eyes shined with sympathy. Rocking rhythmically, he said, “She’s intent on no such thing, and you know it. A long time ago, for whatever reason, she made a choice to not accept you in Dylan’s life, and she’s a stubborn pigheaded woman. Her choice is making her miserable, and yet she can’t see that there’s another option. She’s blind to it, terrified.”
Intrigued, I asked, “Terrified of what?”
“That she might have been wrong. Patricia can’t abide being wrong.”
I wasn’t sure she had been wrong a day in her life.
“I’m worried about Dylan,” I said softly. “None of this is fair to him.”
“He can handle what comes his way.” The rocking stopped. “But can you?”
I glanced at him.
He held my gaze. “Are you strong enough to let him hurt without feeling guilty about being part of what caused the pain? Because if a storm is brewing, he needs to know you’ll be there for him and not run away, thinking you’re saving him from even more agony.”
His words hurt, cutting to my soul.
Because I’d run before.
During our second attempt at getting married, I’d left Dylan standing at the altar and had literally run out of the chapel.
I bit my thumbnail. I didn’t want to lose him. I just didn’t want to be why he had broken ties with his mama.
Mr. Dunwoody’s rocking started up again. “The choices to be made now are yours, Carly Bell.”