Hounded by Klumpers Anita

Author:Klumpers, Anita [Klumpers, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Prism Book Group
Published: 2016-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I am defenceless utterly.

I slept, methinks, and woke

“The Hound of Heaven,” Lines 114-115

She wasn’t in hell. How did she know that? Hell was not wet. Pleased with this logical reasoning, she made a small, self-congratulatory movement. Two things happened almost at once. Her neck and shoulder screamed in protest, and when her mouth gasped open, it filled with water. Elise kicked in panic. Her bare foot scraped concrete and she knew where she was. In the pool, on the shallow end, and every inch of her hurt. Something gripped her hair. She tried to lift arms and swat it away but the left shoulder would not cooperate. Pain took her breath, but, frantic to be free of whatever held her so relentlessly she ignored the hurting and willed her arm to move. It refused. Her right elbow ached too, but at least it responded to mental commands. Reaching up, she touched twig and bark and leaves, and intertwined with it all, her hair.

The hair wouldn’t come loose. Maybe if she broke the small branch, the main culprit, from its mother limb, she could escape. It worked. Shoving the mess away, she grimaced as it tore several hairs from her scalp. While she struggled to find footing on the pool floor, a few feeble exploratory rays of the yet-unseen sun peered over the horizon. Morose pinkish-gray light traced someone staring at her from the edge of the pool.

“Jeff! Oh, Jeff!”

Limping, shivering, with small twigs still twisted through her hair, she dragged her battered self from the water. Jeff, never a fan of swimming, met her at the edge to crowd against her. She turned to look at the pool, its water lightened to dove gray by a sun still hesitating below the horizon. It wasn’t Jeff floating lifelessly on the surface. A tired old branch from one of the tired old trees had blown into pool, adrift until it latched onto Elise’s streaming hair.

Jeff insisted they both return to the house with due haste but Elise couldn’t follow. She eased onto a patio chair and didn’t move, even as footsteps beat along the flagstones behind her. They slowed and stopped.

“Mrs. Amberson? Is that you?”

The branch in the pool moved gently in the wind. She swore she could see a few long strands of hair it had saved for remembrance.

A face, soon followed by a body, appeared in front of her. Alex? Albert? He worked for the landscaping service that kept the grounds and gardens in showplace condition. She’d forgotten they came early for tasks not requiring motorized equipment.

“Are you all right?”

“I’ve been better.”

“Uh-huh. Can I help?”

“Oh, sure. I need to get back to the house and let Jeff in. Doggone it. I stubbed my big toe too! Look at that!”

Dutifully Alex or Albert looked at the bloody toe with its partially dismembered nail, then traveled up her bruises visible below the hem of her soaked pink pants, the ruins of her pretty flounced blouse, her scuffed elbow and oddly angled shoulder.

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