Sound of Secrets Read Free

eyebrows rose. He didn't look like any police chief she had ever seen. He was too young, for starters, probably no more than his mid-thirties. And, even though she wasn’t drawn to the overly masculine type, much too attractive. Even now, moments after the strangest, most traumatic moment of her life, Cara recognized his appeal even though she couldn't figure out why she recognized him.
      "How could you have seen anything when there’s nobody here but me?"
      Cara looked around almost frantically, taking in their surroundings. He was right. There wasn't anybody here but him. How could Cara, who prided herself on being sensible, argue with that indisputable fact? She cast about wildly for the first plausible explanation she could think of for her screams.
    "A bat." She fought the unfamiliar cloud of confusion threatening to engulf her. "I saw a bat."
    "A bat?" He screwed up his forehead so that a network of lines formed on his brow. He deliberately surveyed the sky around her, which was as free of bats as the street was of life. Or death. "I don’t see a bat."
    "There was one here a minute ago. A great big one," Cara snapped, upset because he wasn’t even trying to use diplomacy. He didn’t believe her, and he didn’t care if she knew it.
    "And I suppose you’re going to tell me that you always scream like that when you see a bat?"
    He’d cocked a hand on his hip and made his eyes go wide. Normally, such blatant skepticism would have made her back down and admit everything, but the mocking light in his hypnotic eyes irked her.
    "I don’t owe you any explanations." Cara opened the door of her little green Mazda and scrambled inside, intending to get away both from the vivid apparition that had appeared in the street and the incredulity on the man's face. "Thanks for your concern, but I need to be on my way."
    She tried to close the car door, but the man placed a restraining hand on it. Instead of fear, hope leapt inside her. She leaned her upper body halfway outside the car and looked up at him expectantly. She wanted him to tell her that she hadn't been imagining things, that he too had seen the boy in the street, that he glimpsed the same familiarity in her eyes that she detected in his.
    "You saw something, too, didn't you?" she asked, her voice slightly breathless.
      "All I see," the man said, indicating the hood of her vehicle with a sweep of his hand, "is white steam seeping out of the hood of your car."
    Instantly reminded of why she had pulled into the service station, Cara sprang out of the overheated car. Confusion and embarrassment mingled to make her cheeks as hot as the car engine. She couldn't drive off with steam pouring from her car, no matter how much she wanted to.
      "It probably only needs a little water in the radiator."
    "Lady, you sure do have a vivid imagination," he said dryly. "There's something more seriously wrong with your car than the water level in your radiator."
    Irritation bubbled in Cara, because this wasn't supposed to happen. Her car wasn’t new, but she never missed a factory-authorized tune-up and had gotten it checked thoroughly before embarking on this trip. But she knew instinctively that the Secret Sound police chief wasn’t a man who made many mistakes.
    "Whatever it is, with any luck it won't take too long to fix," Cara said.
    He shrugged, and his eyes seemed to inspect her for defects. After the way she had acted, he couldn't know she was a sensible woman, able to deal with whatever problems confronted her. Except maybe the appearance of a boy who wasn't there, a little voice inside her head whispered.
    "You okay?" the man asked, possibly because she was
    standing rigidly beside her car. Her next step should be to seek help from the mechanic on duty, but she couldn't seem to move. She thought that concern, real and somehow urgent, had stamped out the wariness in his eyes. She had a wild urge to confide the strange things that had happened since she'd left the