Her dog, Khan, a mixed breed with some Australian shepherd ancestry visible in his mottled coat and mismatched eyes, let out another soft bark from his spot on the rag rug beside her bed. He looked up at her hopefully and thumped his tail on the floorboards as if he expected her to let him onto the
bed.
“Are you nuts?” she asked, rolling over and reaching down to scratch him behind one ear. “It’s midnight and you and I both need to sleep, so don’t even think about getting up here, okay? I just need something for this headache.” She rolled off the bed and padded barefoot to the bathroom.
As she stepped into the cramped room, she heard the soft thump of Khan hopping onto the bed. “Get down!” she ordered and flipped on the light. She heard the dog land on the floor again. “Nice try, Khan.”
Some dog trainer you are, she thought as she scraped her hair away from her face, holding a handful of curls in one clenched fist. You can get search and rescue dogs into disaster areas, burning buildings and even into the water, but you can’t keep that mutt off the bed.
Leaning over the sink, she turned on the spigot with her free hand and drank from the faucet, letting water splash against her flushed skin as the remnants of the nightmare burned at the corners of her brain.
Don’t go there!
Ryan had been dead for three years and in that time she’d been accused and absolved of killing him. “So get over it,” she grumbled, snatching a towel from the rack and dabbing it over her face and chest. The nightmares, her shrink had assured her, would lessen over time.
So far that hadn’t proved true. She looked into the mirror over the sink, reflective glass clamped over the medicine cabinet, and cringed. Dark smudges appeared beneath her red-veined eyes. Her auburn hair was tangled, a mess from restless sleep, damp ringlets clinging to her skin. Tiny lines of anxiety appeared in the pinch of her lips and the corners of her eyes.
“The face of an angel hiding Satan’s tongue,” her brother Neville had said after they’d been involved in a particularly brutal argument when she was around fourteen.
Not tonight, she thought sourly, as she grabbed a washcloth from an open shelf, rinsed it under the water and dabbed the wet rag over her skin.
Neville. She still missed him horribly and that particular knot of sorrow when she thought of him tightened painfully in her chest. Technically, since Neville had been born a scant seven minutes after his twin brother, Oliver, Neville had been the closest in age to Shannon, who’d come along nearly two years later, the last of Patrick and Maureen Flannery’s brood of six children. Though Oliver and Neville had shared that special “twin bond,” she, too, had felt an intimacy with Neville that she never experienced with the rest of her siblings.
She wished Neville was here now. He’d rumple her hair, smile crookedly and say, “You worry too much, Shannon. It was just a dream.”
“And a phone call,” she would reply. “A weird phone call.”
“A wrong number.”
“At midnight?”
“Hey, somewhere in the world it’s already happy hour. Chill out.”
“Right,” she muttered, like she could. She soaked the cloth again, wrung it between her hands, then placed it at the base of her neck. A headache, brought on by the nightmare, pounded at the base of her skull. Reaching into the cabinet, she found a bottle of ibuprofen and tossed two pills into her palm before chasing them down with another long swallow from the tap. She saw the bottle of sleeping pills on the shelf under the mirror, the ones Dr. Brennan had prescribed three years earlier. She considered taking a couple, then discarded the idea. Tomorrow morning—no, later this morning—she couldn’t afford to be groggy or sluggish. She had several training sessions scheduled with some new dogs and she was supposed to sign papers on her new place—a bigger ranch. Although the move was still weeks away, the deal was falling into place.
Remembering the property she was going to buy, she felt another jab of distress. Just last week, when she’d walked the perimeter of the ranch, she’d felt as if she was being watched, that there had been unseen eyes hidden behind the gnarled trunks of the black oaks. Even Khan had seemed edgy that day. Nervous.
Get over it, she mentally berated herself. Unlike most of the dogs she trained, Khan wasn’t known for his intuition. No one had been following her, watching her every move. She wasn’t in some kind of horror movie, for God’s sake. No one had been hiding in the shaded forest that surrounded the place, no sinister being had been observing her from the outcropping of rocks on a nearby hillside. No one, other than herself, had been there at all.
She was just antsy about plunking down all of her inheritance and savings on the new place. And why wouldn’t she be? Her brothers had all been against her plan and each had enough nerve to tell her the vastness of her mistake.
“This isn’t what Dad would have wanted,” Shea had pointed out the last time he’d stopped by. His black hair had gleamed blue in the lamplight as he’d stood on her porch while smoking a cigarette, staring at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Dad spent his entire life scrimping, saving and investing and wouldn’t want you to squander your share on a run-down, overgrown farm.”
“You haven’t even seen the place,” she’d charged, undeterred. “And don’t pull out the violin and crying towel. Dad always trusted my decisions.”
Shea had given her a dark, unfathomable look, drawing hard on his cigarette and giving Shannon the distinct impression that she hadn’t known their father at all.
“Dad always backed me up,” she said, her voice faltering just a bit.
“I’m just tellin’ ya.” He blew out a plume of gray smoke, then tossed his cigarette butt into the dust and gravel of the lot separating the house from the barns and other outbuildings. “Be careful, Shannon, with your money and yourself.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
The cigarette smoldered, trailing a tiny wisp of smoke.
“Just that sometimes you’re impetuous.” He cocked his head and winked at her. “You know. All part of the Flannery curse.”
“Don’t even go there. That’s the biggest load of bull I’ve ever heard. Just a way for Mom to get back at Dad. Flannery curse? Come on, Shea.”