By the Book

by Mary Kay McComas

  “I decided to leave the cloak and dagger at home,” he said, hoping she’d equate his lack of a tie with some sort of effort to fit into his present surroundings, rather than with his dislike of them.

  “I’m glad,” she said, aiming for a breezy attitude, her heart fluttering wildly. “You look very nice.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  A muffled groan from down the hall had him frowning. He pulled his gaze from hers and looked past her with some anxiety.

  “Thank you,” she said, reaching for the purse she’d set on a table near the door. “I’m also starving.”

  He looked confused and still concerned. “Didn’t you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “That noise? Like moaning?”

  “No.” Amazing. With the proper attitude, lying was easy. She suspected that with an altogether different attitude, murder would be the same. “Ready?”

  He nodded uncertainly, stepping aside to let her lock and close the door, then following her down the stairs. He wasn’t one to hear things that weren’t there or to forget small, inconsequential things readily. Details were his business, and as a rule, few escaped him. But her bare back and the sweep of her hair that left her throat exposed and vulnerable had a disturbing effect on his mind. Filled it, in fact, with nothing but thoughts of touching her, of pressing his lips to the warm nape of her neck, of drawing in the scent of her. ...

  “Any trouble getting here?” she asked, perturbed that Felix had dead-ended their discussion of her beauty—as if it were frequently debated, which it wasn’t.

  “No. None. In fact, I’d given myself a few extra minutes to get lost in, so I had to sit in the car for ten minutes before I could come up.”

  “Oh no,” she said, glancing back at him, her stomach lurching with excitement when their eyes met. Breezy. Easygoing. Self-assured, she reminded herself. “You should have come up. Or are you a stickler for punctuality?”

  “It’s an old habit.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said playfully. “A military-CIA-FBI-spy guy would have an old habit like that.”

  He chuckled as they came to the bottom of the stairs, and was about to reply when they heard Mrs. Phipps.

  “Oh, Ellen,” she said, swinging the door wide from its cracked position. “We thought we heard someone out here. We thought Eugene was bringing the trash down. But don’t you look pretty,” she added, looking at Jonah.

  “Thank you. Mrs. Phipps, this is Jonah Blake. He’s in town visiting his father for a while,” she said, then addressed Jonah. “Mrs. Phipps taught third grade here for ... how long, Mrs. Phipps? A hundred years?”

  “Goodness. Was it only that long?” She laughed at Ellen’s gentle teasing. “Seems more like two hundred to us, although we have to admit it sometimes feels like it was at least that long ago since we did it. But then, time has a way of speeding up and slowing down all in the same day so you don’t know how long ago anything has been.” She held out her hand to Jonah. “And are you Earl Blake’s son? From the camera shop downtown?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, sliding his hand between both of hers, allowing her to rub and chafe it as they spoke. Ellen was relieved to see she wasn’t the only one around with a soft spot for sweet little old ladies. “Do you know him?”

  “Yes, indeed, though not very well at all. We understand he’s ill. How is he?”

  “He’s had a stroke, ma’am. They say he’s stable but ...” He shrugged.

  “Oh, what a shame, what a shame.” She patted Jonah’s hand sympathetically, then finally released it. “He is so talented. We remember him coming to our AARP meeting to talk about his pictures one time, years ago. He showed us the magazines and journals and told us about all the places he’d been to. He really is a fascinating man. You look a good bit like him, you know.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “It’s true. And what do you do? Are you also a famous photographer?”

  “No, ma’am.” He and Ellen exchanged an amused glance. “I’m a terrible photographer. I haven’t any artistic talents at all.”

  “What a shame. But then, neither do we.” She laughed. “My son was very artistic though. Not like your father, but when he was little, he drew wonderful pictures in crayon. Very ... alive. Colorful.” She hesitated a moment as if she’d lost track of her thoughts. She did this sometimes—especially when she talked about her son, who had died in his adolescence in a farming accident. “And what is it you do?”

  Again their gazes met and held and shared an amusement as Ellen turned toward him with great interest to hear his answer. Sharing a thought or idea with only a look, without touch or word or gesture, was very intimate somehow. An invisible linking between them. She liked it.

  “Right now I’m trying to keep my father’s camera shop afloat in case he recovers enough strength to go back to it,” he said, evading the question not because he needed to, but to entertain Ellen. “From what I can tell, it’s about all he’s got, and he hasn’t been able to tell me yet what he wants done with it. Leaving it closed up while I sat around the hospital doing nothing seemed like a waste.”

  “And it would have been. That’s very good thinking, young man. We know your father will appreciate what you’ve done for him.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Oh, look at me. Holding you up in the hall here, all dressed up. You look so nice together. A very handsome couple.”

  They both smiled at her and edged toward the door, saying their good-byes and good nights.

  “Nice lady,” he commented moments later.

  “Yes. Very nice.”

  “Nice night.”

  “Yes. Very.”

  “Nice parking job,” he said, eyeing Felix’s car.

  She couldn’t help it. She laughed, breaking the awkward what-to-talk-about-next tension between them. “I only know your father by sight,” she said, watching as he opened the car door for her. “I didn’t know he was famous.”

  “I didn’t either.” She looked startled, then confused, so he explained. “I mean, I didn’t know the extent of his fame until I moved into his house here. I’d seen some of his pictures and knew he was well known, just not how well known.”

  “Oh.”

  He could see she was still bewildered as he swung the door closed and circled the car to get in on the other side. He wasn’t used to having a father, much less talking about him, and the idea of discussing their relationship made him even more uncomfortable. Still, this woman was different; what he felt for her was different. Maybe he should treat her differently. Maybe he should make an effort to explain himself and his life to her. Open up a little. Be uncomfortable for a change, and not keep trying to avoid it.

  He got into the car and fastened his seat belt, then turned toward her.

  “I didn’t grow up around my father. I hardly know him.”

  “Oh,” she said sadly. “I’m sorry.” She would have left it to his discretion to say more, if she were still too nice. However ... “Were your parents divorced, then?”

  “Yes,” he said. Unable to simply sit and talk about it, he distracted himself by starting the car and pulling away from the curb. “He was gone before I was a year old. I didn’t see him after that till I was six, when my mother died.” He took a deep breath. “I can count on one hand the times I saw him after that.”

  Then who had raised him? Where had he grown up? These questions kept her silent for a minute. She decided to take a giant leap forward and work her way back.

  “Until now.”

  He nodded. “Until now. Now I see him every day, and we still don’t speak to each other.” He smiled at the irony.

  “What sort of photographer was he?” she asked, fully aware that a great deal more had happened between them since he was six. She could hear it in his voice, tight and tempered. She’d blundered into an open wound and, too nice or not, couldn’t bring herself to cause him any further pain. “Would I have seen any of his photographs?”

>   “Maybe. ... There’s only one Italian restaurant in town, on Glover; I checked. Is that where we’re going?”

  “Yes.” He checked? Standard procedure for a mercenary-CIA-FBI-spy guy? What had she gotten herself into?

  “If you’ve done much reading or research on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement in the seventies, the riots and all,” he was saying, turning into a busy intersection, “then you’ve no doubt seen several of his photographs. He has a wall full of photojournalism awards from the sixties and seventies and a couple from the early eighties. Forty of them maybe. Gruesome photographs. But you can tell he was good.” He hesitated. “You can tell that he loved his work.”

  She mulled this over. “Is that when he moved to Quincey? When all the unrest died down?” Another thought. “Why Quincey?”

  “I don’t know for sure when he moved here,” he said, sounding almost apologetic. “We’d lost all contact by then. The records on the shop only go back to 1990. He must have been doing something. ...” His voice trailed off. “But I do know why he moved to Quincey,” he said brightly, thinking it a real trick that he knew anything at all about him. “He inherited his house and the lease on the shop from a man named Levy Gunther. I found that out from his lawyer—who, by the way, didn’t even know I existed. He didn’t know the whole story either, but it seems this Levy Gunther was the father of some kid my father photographed and then later saved in a bombing or something. I guess this kid came home from Vietnam and eventually died of something else, leaving Gunther with no one to leave the shop to, so he left it to my father. As a sort of thank-you, I guess. And I suppose he thought someone like my father would appreciate a camera shop. So, according to the lawyer, my father showed up here about six years after the man died, and stayed. Paid the taxes. Painted the house. Opened the shop and settled in.”

  “Huh,” she said, too wrapped up in the story to recall her attitude. “That’s amazing. Did Gunther and your father ever actually meet?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, stopping at a red light and glancing at her. The amazing thing was how easy she was to talk to. All he had to do was answer the questions she wasn’t too shy or too apathetic to ask. She was genuinely interested in people—in him—and it showed.

  “How old is your father?”

  “Seventy-eight.”

  “Then he would have been about seventy when he came here.” A pause. “I was just thinking that he should have opened a portrait studio or something here, so he could keep taking pictures, instead of just selling cameras. But maybe he was feeling too old for that. You know, I don’t think I ever saw him out taking pictures around town. And I never heard talk about him being famous. Do you think he stopped taking pictures altogether when he came here?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again, pulling into the parking lot beside Pappino’s Italian Restaurant. When he’d parked and turned the engine off, he looked at her. There was such a sad expression on her face that he couldn’t help asking, “Why? Why do you ask that? What are you thinking?”

  “Just how hard it is to give up something you love like that. He wears glasses, I know. Maybe his eyes got so bad that he couldn’t see well enough to take great shots anymore. That would be a horrible thing to have to admit to himself. Maybe he had nowhere else to go. Maybe he came here to sit out the rest of his life, waiting to die.”

  “Maybe,” he said, and because his heart was overflowing with a venomous hatred and the air around him was heating with anger, he got out of the car. He stood there for a moment, gulping the cool evening air, trying to forget that his father had given him up long before he’d given up his beloved camera; that they both could have had a place to go in times of need if he’d been any kind of father to him.

  It didn’t help to remember. He sighed. It didn’t help to remember because it wasn’t enough to make him turn his back on the man now, when he wanted to most.

  “Jonah?” He turned and looked at her over the roof of the car. “I’m sorry. I can see I’ve upset you. I didn’t—”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not you. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you’d say more things like that.” He laughed softly at how strange that sounded and walked around the car to her. “Say whatever comes to your mind. Say what you’re thinking.” He shook his head. “Because I don’t know what to think. I don’t know him, Ellen. He’s my father and a complete stranger. Sometimes I hate him so much, I could kill him with his pillow. Sometimes I sit for hours staring at him, trying to see my face in his, to read his mind, to understand him. I don’t even know where to begin.” He took a step closer to her. Close enough to touch her. “What you said just now ... about him giving up his photography and how it must have hurt him. I understand that. If it’s true, I ... I can’t say I’m sorry, but it doesn’t make me happy either.” He studied her face for a moment. He found comfort in it, and the acceptance he needed to go on. “But it’s something, one thing, that I can understand about him.”

  She didn’t think about the inclination to reach out to him, to touch him. She just did it. Palming his cheek was the most natural thing to do, no matter what kind of person she was.

  She didn’t say anything. What was there to say? That he was hurting and confused was obvious. But they were both human, they both had feelings, and somewhere along the way their spirits had connected.

  He stood perfectly still as long as he could, the warmth of her palm seeping through his skin, heating the chill that protected and preserved his heart. The lovely face he’d admired from afar was close enough to kiss, and the woman who owned it was more than he thought possible. In her eyes he could see the gentleness and perception he’d suspected her of having, but more, a true kindness and empathy that needed no words, no action to be activated. It was ever present in her, as spontaneous and unconscious as her next breath.

  She felt his fist pressing softly below her chin, his thumb brushing along the curve of her lower lip. There was a tender gratitude in his eyes. And behind it, beyond the mysteries, was an all-consuming need that once unleashed would devour her completely. It frightened her and yet somehow she knew that he was ... akin to the wind. That he could come at her hard and harsh, or slow and gentle, and the effect would be the same—she would be changed forever, reshaped, different. And like the wind, he would be unstoppable.

  He tipped his head and leaned toward her, pressing his lips against hers, then hesitated. She knew the first kiss had been born of gratitude. She knew, too, that the second one wouldn’t be. He was giving her a chance to run, to refuse him, to protect herself. But in that moment no little green book, no attitude, no promotion, no pay raise, no huge character flaw was more important to her than that next kiss. There was nothing left to the world but him and her and that kiss.

  She put her lips to his, moved her hand from his cheek to the back of his head, where his hair was thick and soft in her fingers. She felt his hands at her waist and stepped closer, opened her mouth to the first tentative touch of his tongue and was instantly lost.

  A dam of pent-up emotion broke free inside him. Mingled with the acute physical sensations and the thrilling excitement was an overwhelming stir of relief, and he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was simply good to confirm that she felt as right in his arms as he’d hoped. Perhaps it was just a matter of getting the first kiss out of the way. Or of knowing she hadn’t been averse to a second. But it was such a huge relief, a relaxing sigh from his soul, that he believed it was something much more significant.

  They came away breathless and feeling awkward, stared at each other in amazement. Then they laughed, their arms falling away to hang loose at their sides, their common sense forcing them to take mental steps backward.

  Ellen scrambled immediately for her lost attitude. What would he think if she made too much of the kiss? That she’d never been kissed that way before? That she’d wanted him to kiss her that way? Well okay, she had, but ... She was shaken to her very core and feeling vulnerable as hell. Attitude was
the perfect shield to hide her fears and make her appear brave and strong—and kissed like that all the time.

  Jonah, on the other hand, was much more adept at hiding his feelings and recovered much quicker.

  “You should have been a shrink,” he said casually, closing the car door and, with a light hand to her back, leading the way to the restaurant. “You’re very easy to talk to.”

  “I get that a lot,” she said lightly. “But if I hung out my shingle, talking would become my job and not as much fun. I’d have to charge people and get a fifty-minute watch. No, I think I’ll stick with my amateur status. Then I only have to talk to people I want to talk to, and I can use my expert skills for other things.” She arched a sly brow at him.

  Looking duly cautious as he held the door for her, he asked, “Such as?”

  “Such as extracting information from mysterious men who work in camera shops,” she said, smiling mischievously as the hostess approached them.

  Pretending enlightenment, he grinned at her. And while her stomach embarked on an Olympic-style acrobatic routine, he turned the exact same grin on the hostess and asked for a table for two. Ellen sighed, disgruntled, and followed the woman toward their table.

  Seated, menued, watered, and alone again, they simulated a detailed investigation of the meals available while their minds pondered their next moves and their hearts yearned to return to the parking lot. When their gazes met over the tops of their menus, they recognized themselves in the other’s expression and smiled. They were the same really. Both nervous. Both attracted. Both wanting the night to go well so there could be others. Both needing. Both a little shy and reserved. Both remembering the kiss, and both a little overwhelmed by it all.