“I’ll bet your grandfather doesn’t approve.”
“I can’t say any of them approve, but that’s never worried me before.”
She tried her tea, made no comment. “You just do as you please, don’t you? I wish I could—but I always have to try to please everyone. Most of the time I end up pleasing no one, least of all myself.”
Her “fling” with Seth Hawthorne hadn’t pleased her family. But, then again, she’d kept the full extent of it from them.
“I don’t think I met your sister—Susanna, isn’t it?” she asked.
“That’s right. She’s a few years younger than I am. Once my grandfather accepts I’m not ever going to run Fox Oil, he’ll realize what a gold mine the company has in Susanna. Our father already knows.”
“Your mother?”
“She’s terrific—just wants us all to be happy, so long as it’s not doing something that’ll get us thrown into jail.”
Julia looked right at him. “What about killed?”
Daniel shrugged. “That, too.”
“Fighting oil fires is dangerous work.”
“Doesn’t help matters when someone tries to blow your helicopter out from under you.”
“You still think that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“I can’t imagine…” She stared at her tea, a tortured look coming over her. “I can’t imagine Seth would try to kill me—or anyone. You don’t know him. He’s just not the type.”
Daniel swallowed some tea. “I’m not accusing anyone of anything.”
“It doesn’t look good, his taking off—my father spotting him last night.”
“He didn’t go after him?”
She shook her head. “It was raining, and we had company.”
“Wish I’d been there,” Daniel said.
Julia was on her feet, moving across the small kitchen toward him, a sudden intensity coming over her. “In your heart of hearts, Daniel, do you think Seth’s guilty of sabotaging your helicopter to get at me?” She searched him with her sapphire eyes. “Do you think I could drive a man to do such a thing?”
Daniel was not unmoved. Even J.D., who distrusted inherited wealth, wouldn’t have been immune to Julia Vanackern’s mix of vulnerability, beauty, and instinctive sexiness. There were layers and layers of mystery to peel away—or maybe that was just what she wanted men to believe. Would a man ever know what he was getting was the real Julia Vanackern or just some manifestation of what she thought he wanted her to be?
Not so, he thought, with Cozie Hawthorne. Come hell or high water, she was what she was.
Julia was so close he could smell her light perfume, see the pale highlights in her hair. “You’re not going to give me an answer,” she said softly.
“I don’t have an answer, except that whatever he did or didn’t do, Seth Hawthorne’s responsible for his own actions. Not you.”
“I can see why your grandfather said you would have made general if you’d stayed in the military. You’re an impossible man to read.” She spun out away from him, the ends of her hair just missing his chin. “Thanks for the tea.”
“Where are you headed?”
“Mum and I have a tennis game scheduled. She’s a brutal competitor.” She gave him a strained smile. “She just wants me to be happy, too—so long as it’s doing something she thinks a Vanackern ought to do. Sometimes I think she’s more of a Vanackern than Dad is. Well, I’m off. Will you let me know if you run into Seth?”
Daniel pulled himself away from the counter. “I don’t see why not.”
“And if you see Cozie, tell her my father will go to the police. If she knows where Seth is, she’d be doing him a favor by getting him to come forward. She’s always had more influence over him than anyone else has.”
“I’ll tell her, if I see her.”
“Oh,” Julia said, “I think you’ll see her.”
After she left, Daniel called J.D. from the extension in the kitchen. He was alert and ornery, more the old J.D. The salvage crew had found the helicopter and thought they could pull it out of the shallow gulf waters in one piece. Then they’d bring in the experts to go over it.
“Oh, and your granddaddy came by this morning,” J.D. said. “Told me I looked like death warmed over, which was better than being dead but not much. I think mostly he was checking up on you. I didn’t tell him you were falling for some loud-mouthed Yankee. He might have sent in the troops.”
Daniel chose not to tell J.D. about last night with Cozie and the bat. “He’s not planning on interfering, is he?”
“You don’t think he’d tell me?”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
Then, almost as an aside, J.D. added, “Doctors say I’ve got an infection in my leg. They’ve got me on extra doses of antibiotics, but they might have to go in and clean things up.”
A cold chill went through Daniel. “J.D.—”
“Yeah, yeah, if it’s a choice between saving me and saving my leg, they can have the damned leg. Look, if I have to go under, I won’t be able to keep up with the salvage crew until I get coherent again.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ve done plenty.”
“It’s given me something to do besides watching the talk shows and soaps—and I got myself hooked on C-SPAN. Love those one-minute congressional speeches. Nurse is coming. Gotta go.”
“You take care of yourself, J.D.”
Daniel hung up and got on his leather jacket, heading out to his truck. He drove into town, getting used to the twisting, hilly, narrow Vermont roads. Cozie’s Jeep was in her parking space outside the Vermont Citizen. He could see her through her office window and made a point of going slow past it, so she would know he was keeping an eye on her.
Back up Hawthorne Orchard Road, he tried Seth’s again, but the sagging red farmhouse was still quiet, no sign he’d been around. Daniel left his truck in the driveway and walked out into the light woods behind the house, not knowing what he was looking for, what he’d find. How far had Cozie gone this morning? Had she found her brother?
About all Daniel accomplished was getting himself thoroughly lost. He managed to thrash his way back to his truck, cursing Cozie Hawthorne most of the way. But, hell, he thought, in her position he wouldn’t trust him either. And it wasn’t as if he trusted her.
He went back to the sawmill, back to the little mill pond and the falling bright orange leaves. The temperature was tumbling fast. Tucked on the hillside, he couldn’t see the night coming, not like he could from the front porch of his dilapidated ranch down home. But he knew it was closing in on dusk. He could tell by the change in the light, the feel of the air.
He wondered how Cozie would respond to a Texas sunset spread out on the horizon.
Without thinking, he launched himself down the narrow path along the edge of Hawthorne Brook. The air was filled with the earthy smells of damp pine needles and rotting ferns, of hemlocks that grew close to the brook. He kept moving, not pausing to reflect, to think about the fear—unarticulated and probably unacknowledged—he had heard in J.D.’s voice. J.D. would bluster his way through even the loss of a limb.
As the brook wound closer to Hawthorne Orchard Road, Daniel took the narrow, well-used path that led up a short, steep hill directly across from the black-shuttered white clapboard house. Smoke was curling out of the stone chimney. He could smell it as he walked up the loop-shaped dirt driveway.
A maroon minivan was parked alongside Cozie’s battered Jeep. He spotted kids hauling pumpkins up from the garden, one little towheaded girl of maybe three struggling with a misshapen pumpkin about as big as she was. She wasn’t about to abandon it or permit the two older boys, presumably her brothers, to help her.
Had to be a Hawthorne, Daniel thought.
Cozie was standing near the back steps with another woman, shorter, darker, a little heavier. The sister, Meg. They had their backs to him, unaware of his presence until Zep bounded up from the pumpkin patc
h to greet him.
“Well,” the darker woman said, turning around, “you must be Cozie’s infamous new tenant. I’m Meg, her not-so-infamous sister. I saw you from a distance the other day.”
She gave him a frank once-over, measuring him, Daniel guessed, against the gossip-generated image she had. Then he noticed the old aunt, Ethel, walking up from the garden with two small pumpkins. Sugar pumpkins, she called them. “I’m making soup,” she told him, eyeing him warily. “I’ll bet you’ve never had pumpkin soup.”
“No, ma’am, I can honestly say I haven’t.”
“Thelma puts curry in hers. I just like a touch of cinnamon and nutmeg in mine—tastes like a pumpkin pie without all the sugar.”
Sounded lovely.
“Daniel,” Cozie intervened, “I’d like you to meet my nephews and niece. Ethan, Matthew, and Sarah, this is my new neighbor, Daniel—” She faltered. The aunt smirked, waiting.
“Hi, guys,” Daniel said. What did a last name matter to kids? “Nice pumpkins. Going to make soup out of them?”
No way, they said, theirs were for jack-o’-lanterns, they hated pumpkin soup. “And we’re not going to let anybody steal them and roll them down the hill,” Ethan, the older boy, said.
Daniel looked to Cozie for translation.
She smiled. “Kids like to swipe pumpkins and roll them down some of the steeper hills, see how far they go before they get smashed. It’s a sort of Halloween tradition.”
“Charming custom.”
Ethel sniffed. “I don’t mind so much if they use their own pumpkins, but they ought not to steal somebody else’s.”
Daniel guessed he’d rather roll a pumpkin down a hill than make soup out of it, but he didn’t tell Ethel Hawthorne.
A rangy, fair-haired man around his own age came out the back door. The kids swarmed. At least one pumpkin landed on his toe. He introduced himself as Meg’s husband, Tom Strout, and, generally unfazed by the bedlam, proceeded to pile kids and pumpkins into the minivan.
“Nice meeting you, Daniel,” Meg said on her way to join her family. “Cozie’s keeping me posted. I’m in her corner, you know. And my brother’s.”
“Message received,” he said.
The old aunt, he noted, had no visible means of transportation unless by broomstick. She continued to keep a close eye on him while Cozie saw her sister off. “Meg and Tom are going off shopping over the river in New Hampshire. Cozie’s giving me a ride home. I guess it won’t matter if she leaves you here alone a few minutes. From what I hear, you’ll do as you please regardless.”
Under the circumstances, especially with these people, it wasn’t a bad reputation to have. “Your nephew hasn’t turned up yet, has he?”
“You know, I’ve gone more than two days without seeing Seth and not worried one bit.” She tucked her pumpkins up on one bony arm like she would a fat baby. “Those calls my niece has been getting worry me more than the idea Seth might have swiped a few things from the Vanackerns.”
“I can understand that.”
“My nephew’s not behind them, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Daniel wondered how many had made the mistake of underestimating Ethel Hawthorne. A breeze stirred, and he could feel the cold right through his leather jacket. He zipped it up. “If he’s innocent, all the more reason he should come out of hiding.”
The old woman snorted in disbelief. “If you’ll excuse my saying so, I wouldn’t want to face an interrogation by the likes of you either. So. You are watching out for Cozie, aren’t you?”
Daniel stared at her but realized she wasn’t being inconsistent. As much as she didn’t trust him on other accounts, Ethel Hawthorne trusted him to look after her hotheaded niece. He smiled, and laid on the Texas twang. “I am sticking to her like a burr to a dog’s hind leg.”
“If he is,” Cozie snapped behind him, “it’s only because he thinks I can lead him to Seth. Come on, Aunt Ethel, I’ll run you home. Are you sure you don’t want any more pumpkins? I’ve got plenty. I’m just going to compost them if you don’t use them. Tell Thelma she can have as many as she wants.”
They headed for the Jeep without any further acknowledgment of Daniel’s presence. The aunt climbed into the passenger seat as casually and comfortably as if it had been a Cadillac. She probably could split wood and throw a blanket over a bat, too, and Daniel would bet that a few garter snakes in the cellar didn’t give her pause. He patted Zep on the head as he watched the two Hawthorne women depart. He considered heading down to the garden and picking out a couple of pumpkins for the sawmill porch. Just let some bored Vermont kid try to steal them to roll down some damned hill.
Crows wheeled and cawed overhead in the waning sunshine, drawing him out to the side of the house, past a crabapple. He could smell the sweet-sour odor of the rotting fruit, clinging to branches and scattered on the ground.
And he asked himself: why the Hawthorne powwow?
He plucked a sorry-looking crabapple. It was soft and wormy, with spreading brown spots. He pitched it up and over the toolshed. Zep, the dope, chased it. Daniel grabbed another.
Meg, Ethel, and Cozie Hawthorne had joined forces to discuss Seth’s predicament. If Cozie had found him that morning, she’d told them where he was. If she hadn’t, they’d put their heads together and figured it out. He was one of their own. They knew his habits; they knew the territory. They’d figured it out. For all Daniel knew, they could already have fetched him. Cozie could have had him tucked in her Jeep, Meg in her minivan. Aunt Ethel could be making pumpkin soup for him.
The next crabapple splattered on the toolshed roof.
Daniel thought of J.D., of his own family in Texas, imagined what they were doing—would they have a powwow to discuss his trip north? He imagined the heat, the shade of live oak, the cries of migrating birds on their way south to warmer climates.
His next crabapple cleared the toolshed roof. He had a few minutes until Cozie got back—enough time, surely, to take a look around the place and see if Seth Hawthorne was stuck in with the bats and snakes.
Cozie stood at the top of the stairs in the corner by the woodstove, not all that surprised to find Daniel coming up from the cellar. “Hunting snakes, I suppose?”
He grinned at her, totally unembarrassed. “Garter snakes aren’t worth hunting. I save my energy for rattlers.”
“You’re being sarcastic,” she said.
He came up beside her. “Smart lady.”
She went back around the woodstove and dropped into her father’s chair, having promised Aunt Ethel to be circumspect around “her Texan,” whom she apparently trusted to keep her niece from bodily harm and not to miss a trick. But everything about him—his untucked shirttail, his western boots—struck Cozie as casual, rugged, sexy. It wasn’t going to be easy to keep her focus.
“You didn’t find Seth,” she said, “because he’s not here.”
“But you know where he is.”
“You know, I can see how people think you’re arrogant. You always sound so damned sure of yourself.”
“In this case, I am.”
She did, of course, know where her brother was. She wanted to sneak out to the monk hut to ask him about the Vanackerns’ missing jewelry and what he’d been doing out at their place last night, but now she had Daniel to contend with.
He shoved a log on the woodstove fire. “How long have you had snakes?”
So he wasn’t going to badger her about Seth’s whereabouts—or he was just buying time, plotting his next move. “I noticed them when I moved in this summer. Who knows how long they’ve been here. Mother always had a live-and-let-live attitude toward them. Figured they kept the mouse population under control. Not me. I hate snakes.”
“Your parents must have been quite a pair,” Daniel said, turning to her.
“They were. My mother was devastated by Pop’s death, but she gave herself time to recover; she didn’t push it. She seems comfortable with her decision to move out. She loves having th
e freedom to travel.”
“And the money, I would think.”
Cozie shrugged. “It helps.”
He came and sat on the couch, near her. “Did you buy this place because of her, or yourself?”
“Both.”
“But did you want it?”
“I can’t imagine being without it. If Mother had had to sell to strangers…” She sighed. “It would have been really hard. But it would be better than seeing her suffer, pass up all the things she’s wanted to do. It was her choice.”
“What about you? What are you passing up by sinking so much time and money into this place?”
She didn’t answer at once. She listened to the crackle of the fire in the woodstove and leaned back against the lumpy cushion of the old chair. “I don’t think it’s a question of what I’ve passed up but what I’ve taken on,” she said at length. “Sometimes I miss my sawmill—I rattle around in here like a pea at the bottom of a barrel. And the house needs work. That’s obvious. I don’t mind that. But the land…it’s a part of who I am. I don’t mind taking that on.”
“What about your brother?”
She gave him a sharp look; she’d fallen into the bastard’s trap. “What do you mean?”
“It’s different, mooching off your mother and mooching off your sister.”
“He’s not mooching.”
Daniel didn’t back off. “Your success has changed his life as well as yours and your mother’s. When you bought this place, he couldn’t pretend anymore that he’d get his act together in time to buy it himself or that your mother might will it to him. You took that option—that fantasy—away.”
“I don’t know that he ever had that fantasy. You don’t either.” She tightened her hands into fists on her lap, trying to keep her tension under control. “And even if he did, it doesn’t mean he sabotaged your helicopter.”
“No,” Daniel allowed, “it doesn’t.”
“Things happen in life that we don’t necessarily want to happen—that we don’t expect. You didn’t want or expect your helicopter to crash. I wanted my book to do well, but I never expected it would do as well as it did. It’s how we respond to the unexpected that counts.”
Finding You Page 20