Night Whispers - Leslie Kelly [2]
He hated it.
“I’m gonna strangle that kid.”
Tossing his keys onto the kitchen table, Mitch shrugged off his jacket and loosened his tie. All he wanted to do was strip away his stale clothes and take a forty-five-minute shower. Instead, he was going to leap into a confrontation with Kelsey Logan, the bane of his childhood!
“Kid?” Fred asked.
Mitch didn’t pay him any attention. “I can’t believe I was stupid enough to let her move in here. She’s a menace, always has been, always will be. And she has liked nothing better than to irritate me since the day we met.”
Fred seemed surprised. “I don’t see her that way.”
“Believe me, you don’t know her.”
Mitch wished he’d told her mother no when she’d called last spring to ask if Kelsey could rent one of the apartments in the Baltimore brownstone he’d just renovated. But of all the people in the world, Marge Logan was one he couldn’t say no to. She’d done too much for him. He shuddered to think where he might be now if it hadn’t been for Marge and her husband Ralph—in jail, dead…no telling. So he’d said yes, hoping the move would be temporary and Kelsey would be long gone by the time he got back from his trip.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen Kelsey?” Fred asked.
“Not long enough,” he muttered. “Where is she?”
Fred pointed out the window toward the backyard. Mitch wasn’t surprised.
“I’d better be on my guard. That monster dumped a bucket of fertilizer—fresh fertilizer—on my head once, just because her brother and I made the mistake of walking through her vegetable garden.”
Fred laughed out loud until Mitch glared at him.
“I can’t begin to tell you the number of acts of terror she’s inflicted.” Mitch mentally ticked off memories in his head of the times she’d run his underwear up a flagpole, hidden dirty diapers beneath his bed—and then there was the time she’d told half the neighborhood that Mitch slept with a stuffed bear and liked to dress her Barbie dolls up as Southern belles. Oh, the list went on and on. And those were only the harmless pranks. She’d gotten him into real trouble a couple of times.
Mitch had, of course, retaliated. He’d considered pounding her into the ground, and if she’d been a boy, and five years older, that’s exactly what he would have done. Instead, he’d reacted by treating her exactly in the way he knew she’d hate most: he ignored her. It drove her nuts. He smiled at the memory.
“That was a long time ago, though,” Fred said.
“Of course, fifteen years ago,” Mitch conceded. “And I’m certainly not the type to hold a grudge. But I’m still going to strangle her.”
Mitch burst through the French doors onto the back patio, wondering why he’d been surprised at what she’d done. He should have expected it. After all, her mother owned a plant nursery in western Virginia, and Kelsey had always spent more time digging in the dirt than playing with dolls.
Mitch stopped staring at the changes in his yard and took a brief moment to enjoy the slight breeze. It was an utterly gorgeous afternoon. Indian summer had stretched into the last week of September and everything was golden and glowing. The aroma of honeysuckle and apples floated on the wind. For a moment Mitch let go of his anger to enjoy breathing clean air.
The months he’d spent in China doing research for his newest book project had been difficult. Much tougher than he’d expected. The initial thrill he always felt when immersing himself in a culture he planned to study had faded quickly amid the crowds, congestion and rigid political policies of the country. In retrospect, the months spent researching his first book, a text on the ancient Mayan civilization, now seemed like a cakewalk, though he’d been living in a small jungle village that didn’t even have a telephone.
Now that he was home, all Mitch wanted was quiet,