Page 61 of Silent Threat
Annie’s stiff posture said there was a story there somewhere about the grandfather. For one, Cole wondered for the first time, why wasn’t she staying with the grandfather instead of at Hope Hill?
Annie drove to the end of the block, turned right, drove past the cornfield, turned right again at the next stop sign. She pulled over in front of a hundred-year-old brick farmhouse. “You don’t have to come in.”
Cole was already reaching for the handle. “I don’t mind. I’ll help you carry the groceries.”
She was so clearly dreading the visit, he almost told her to stay in the car and he’d carry the bags in, but he had no right to interfere in her family business.
They found the eighty-something man alone, sitting in his striped blue pajamas in the kitchen, reading the paper. He didn’t smile at Annie, didn’t hug her, didn’t thank her for the food.
“Who’s that?” were the first words out of his mouth, his eyes slanting toward Cole.
Annie turned toward Cole as she responded. She hadn’t once forgotten, from their first session, that he needed to see her lips. “A friend from Hope Hill. His name is Cole.”
“One of the looneys?”
“He has trouble with hearing, so if you talk to him, you have to turn toward him. He needs to read your lips.”
Instead, the old man turned away, but not enough so Cole couldn’t read his next question. “You sleeping with him?”
He read the words almost as clearly as he read the disgust and censure on the old man’s face.
Annie’s expression tightened. She began putting food in the refrigerator while Cole hesitated, unsure how to defend her.
The guy was old and frail, his disapproval the strongest thing about him. A two-hundred-pound Navy SEAL mowing his ass down wouldn’t be right. And he was Annie’s grandfather. She clearly cared about him enough to help him.
She shot Cole a let-me-handle-it look.
So Cole stood there, fuming silently. He prayed the old geezer didn’t lay into Annie again, because Cole wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep from saying something he might regret later.
“Sorry about that,” Annie said when they were back in the car, her slim hand hesitating on the key in the ignition.
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“We don’t get along.”
“Why?”
“When my mom was twenty, going to college at WCU, she got pregnant by an older guy in town. Turned out, he also got another woman pregnant at the same time. He chose the other woman and the other kid.”
Annie’s face was so studiously impassive, Cole knew the rejection still hurt her.
“So then my mom quit college to raise me. She went to work as a cashier at the grocery store. We spent the first eleven years of my life living with my grandfather. He called my mother a slut and a whore at least fifty times a day, until she couldn’t take it anymore. She got a new job in Delaware, and we moved there.”
Her expression had been closed and her muscles tight since they’d pulled into the driveway, but now the look in her eyes turned dark and bleak.
“What happened in Delaware, Annie?” Cole asked as softly as possible, and held his breath for the answer.
She stared past him, out the passenger side window as her lips formed a single word. “Randy.”
“Who is Randy?” Other than a man Cole needed to kill.
Her gaze snapped to him, as if she’d only now realized she’d spoken out loud.
“He was my mother’s boyfriend.” She drove away from the farmhouse. “Need to go anywhere before we go back to Hope Hill?”
She straightened her spine, filled her lungs, and turned her tight expression into a neutral one. From the way she was desperately avoiding looking at him, he was pretty sure no further questions on the subject would be answered.
He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “I have PT in half an hour. I’d better get back.”
