by Cindy Myers
“Hey, Maggie.” Danielle straightened, as if noticing her friend for the first time. Maggie was used to it. Angela was at that particularly adorable age where even strangers were drawn to her. As Mom, Maggie was merely the vehicle for toting the little princess from admirer to admirer. “How are you?” Danielle asked.
“Good.” She scanned the dining room. “I’m meeting Jameso for dinner. Is he here yet?”
“Right behind you.” Two warm hands rested on either side of her waist and warm breath stirred her hair as he planted a kiss on the top of her head. Already smiling, Maggie turned to greet her husband. The appreciative look in his brown eyes always made her heart beat a little faster. She’d decided—for now, at least—to forgive him for leaving her home alone Monday night, especially since he’d offered to buy her dinner tonight.
“Hey there, gorgeous.” Jameso directed these words not to Maggie, but to the little girl in Danielle’s arms, who was already reaching for him. Angela cuddled to his chest while he kissed her, much as he had Maggie. Maggie laughed.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I was just thinking about the first time I saw you, up at my dad’s cabin. You looked like some motorcycle bandit, all black leather and scowls.”
“She tried to hit me with a stick of firewood,” Jameso told Danielle. “Can you believe it?”
“You probably deserved it.” She motioned for them to follow. “I’ve got a table for you over here. The high chair’s already set up.”
Diaper bag and purse in tow, Maggie followed her little family across the restaurant. The Last Dollar was, as usual, busy, with a healthy mix of locals and tourists. “Is that Bob Prescott over there with a woman?” Jameso asked as he settled Angela into her high chair.
Danielle leaned forward, her voice low. “Her name’s Daisy Mott. She’s in charge of the goat herd the town hired to clear weeds from the park.”
“Bob hated the idea of having goats in the park,” Maggie said. “He made a big fuss at the meeting where the town council voted on it.”
“Well, apparently, he doesn’t hate the woman in charge of the goats.” Danielle glanced toward the booth where Bob and Daisy appeared to be in heated conversation. “You should hear the two of them, bickering like an old married couple. I think they like it.”
“Fighting as foreplay?” Jameso cocked an eyebrow.
“Oh please.” Maggie covered her eyes. “Now I need to wash my mind with lye soap.”
“You don’t think we’ll still be doing it when I’m Bob’s age?” he asked.
“Considering I’ll be positively ancient by then, I can’t imagine,” Maggie said. She was eight years older than Jameso, something she didn’t like to be reminded of.
“I’ll get your drinks and Janelle will be over in a sec to get your order,” Danielle said. “Iced tea and Diet Coke, right?”
Maggie nodded. She loved living in a place where the locals knew her well enough to anticipate her drink order. As Danielle left them, she spread her napkin in her lap and let out a long sigh.
“Tough day?” Jameso asked.
She shrugged. “The usual. A tourist rolled an ATV up on Corabelle Pass. Nobody seriously hurt, thank goodness. Cassie is pushing for more coverage of the Founders’ Pageant.”
“I’m sure Rick loves that.” Rick Otis, the editor and publisher of the paper, loved to needle the grouchy librarian.
“He told her to buy an ad, which of course set her off on another rant. And you’re right, Rick loves it. I just wish they’d have their sparring matches somewhere I don’t have to listen.” Danielle delivered their drinks. Maggie gave her a grateful smile and stripped the paper off a straw. “How are things at the B and B?”
“Calm for the moment. All the rooms full. That private detective asked to extend his stay for another week.”
“What did you tell him?”
“We had the room available, so I figure, why not?”
She took a long sip of the soft drink, the sweet, fizzy soda reviving her further. “He gives me the creeps, poking around in everybody’s business that way.”
“Maggie, half the people in town specialize in poking around in other people’s business.”
“Yes, but they live here. He doesn’t. And I don’t think staying another week is going to help him find out what happened to Gerald.”
“I wonder what Gerald’s up to now?” Jameso asked.
“No good, I’m sure.”
“Maybe Bob did off him.” He slid his gaze toward the booth where Bob and Daisy had stopped talking for the moment, both focused on their dinners.
“If Bob wanted him dead, he could have killed him in the mine and made it look like an accident. At least, that’s what he said at the council meeting the other night.”
“If your dad was still alive, I’d suspect he was the one who got rid of Gerald,” Jameso said.
“Seriously? You think Jake would have killed him?” She shivered. Jameso had known her father much better than she had, and Jake Murphy had a reputation as having a bad temper and a dark side, but still, she didn’t like to think of him as a killer. Sure, he’d killed people in the war, but cold-blooded murder was a different story.
“He didn’t like troublemakers,” Jameso said.
“Then how did he ever make friends with you?”
“Ha ha.”
“Well, we know Jake didn’t have anything to do with Gerald’s disappearance. I think the man doesn’t want to be found, and he’s smart enough to keep his whereabouts a secret. No one’s going to find him until he comes out of hiding.”
“Maybe you’re right. But it’s another week’s rent on the room, so it’s all good. And before I forget to tell you, that fancy espresso machine Barb ordered for the kitchen arrived, but I haven’t unpacked it. I told her I didn’t want it, but you know her.”
“She won’t take no for an answer.” Her best friend, Barb, had decided to put her party planning and decorating skills to use by opening a bed-and-breakfast, but, not wanting to live in Eureka full time, she’d handed over management duties to Jameso. The job came with a plush apartment on the top floor of the restored Victorian mansion, complete with a nursery outfitted with every toy and baby gadget “Auntie Barb” could buy.
“Maybe I’ll take a look at it when I get home,” Maggie said. “Then at least we can tell her it’s set up in the kitchen, even if we never use it.”
Jameso grunted and studied the menu, while Maggie studied him. His thick, black hair showed not a hint of gray, though glints of silver showed in his goatee, and fine lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes when he smiled. A lifetime of working and playing outdoors—skiing, hiking, rock climbing—had weathered his skin to a year-round tan, and his hands bore the scars and calluses of hard use. Yet he could touch her so tenderly. . . .
“Do you know what you want to order?”
Jameso’s question woke Maggie to the fact that Janelle, Danielle’s partner in the café and in life, was standing by their table, pencil poised over her order pad. Dressed in a short denim skirt and a blue-and-white baseball jersey, the Nordic blonde looked ready to hit the softball field. “I’ll have the special,” Maggie said.
“Two specials coming up.” Janelle leaned down to let Angela wrap her chubby fist around one beringed finger. “Anything for the little angel?”
“She likes those teething biscuits Danielle baked for her,” Maggie said.
“One biscuit for the baby, coming up.”
Janelle hurried away and Jameso leaned back in the chair and yawned. “I should have ordered coffee,” he said. “It’s going to be a long night.”
“You’re working too hard,” Maggie said. “You can’t keep up this pace, working all day at the B and B and half the night at the Dirty Sally.” Not to mention other nights helping friends. She pressed her lips together, determined not to go down that road.
He looked away, smile vanished, eyes half closed. “Don’t start, Maggie
.”
He hated it when she nagged, and she hated being a nag. But not saying anything didn’t accomplish anything, either. “With what I make at the paper, and the salary Barb pays you, you don’t have to keep working at the Dirty Sally,” she said.
“We can always use extra money,” he said. “That Jeep of your dad’s isn’t going to last forever, and we should probably think about setting up a college fund for Angela. And retirement accounts . . .” His voice trailed away, his expression bleak.
Maggie could almost read his thoughts. Jameso Clark, carefree bachelor and perpetual Peter Pan, reduced to contemplating retirement funds and college accounts, like a tied-down, responsible adult.
“We’ll do fine without those things,” Maggie said. Tentatively, she reached out and stroked his hand. “If you don’t want to quit, at least cut back. Instead of four nights a week, do two.”
He pulled his hand away; he might as well have slapped her. She sat back in her chair, and fussed with rearranging the silverware, struggling for composure.
“This isn’t about you, Maggie,” he said after a moment. “Not everything is about you. Sometimes it’s about me. About what I need to do to feel like I’m still in control of my life.”
“I’m not trying to control you.”
“I know. But a lot of changes have happened really fast.”
If she hadn’t been so sad, she might have laughed at that understatement. In less than a year she’d showed up in town, had a whirlwind affair, gotten pregnant, gotten married, and moved into the B and B. Everything she’d thought she knew about her future had changed in the blink of an eye. How much worse was it for Jameso, a man who’d successfully avoided thinking about the future, much less planning for it, for thirty-two years?
“Good changes.” He looked at Angela, who was busy playing with the colored plastic beads strung along the front of the high chair.
Maggie took a big swallow of the soft drink, hoping to force down the knot of tears that threatened. “A lot of changes,” she said, when she thought it was safe to talk.
“I like the job at the Dirty Sally,” he said. “Most of the time. And we’re doing okay, me handling the B and B during the day and working at the bar a few nights a week.”
Except that I don’t see enough of you, she thought. But she didn’t say it. The last thing she wanted was to come off like some clinging, needy wife who didn’t want to let her husband out of her sight.
“I don’t want to keep you from something you enjoy,” she said stiffly.
Janelle delivered their dinners—two plates piled with roast chicken, homemade cornbread dressing and gravy and seasoned green beans, along with a teething biscuit made from some recipe Danielle had found online and made especially for Angela. The food looked and smelled delicious, and probably was, but Maggie hardly tasted it as she ate mechanically, fretting and seething about what she couldn’t help seeing as Jameso’s need to run away from her four nights a week.
“Hey there, handsome.” No woman would have missed the flirtatious tone in the greeting. Maggie looked up from her meal in time to see Mindy Payton crossing the room toward them. Her white-blond curls spilled from a topknot tied with purple ribbons and she wore her purple T-shirt pulled up and knotted in back to reveal a glittering stud in her navel. Painted-on low-slung jeans completed the outfit, which guaranteed the eyes of every man in the room—from Bob to Jameso—were fixed on her.
“I’ll see you later tonight, won’t I?” Mindy put her hand on Jameso’s shoulder and stood with her boobs practically in his face.
He grinned up at her. “You bet. It’s karaoke night. Are you planning to sing?”
“I just might.” She tilted her head coyly. “Some people tell me I sound just like Beyoncé.”
Maggie wanted to slap the smiles off both their faces. “Hello, Mindy,” she said, as much to remind Jameso she was still here as to warn off the younger woman.
“You remember my wife, Maggie,” Jameso said. “Maggie, this is Shelly Frazier’s sister, Mindy.”
“We’ve met,” Maggie said. “At the bar.” How was it Jameso didn’t even remember? “How is your sister?”
“Shelly’s fine.”
“You two don’t seem to spend much time together.”
“Neither do you and your husband.” She trailed her hand along Jameso’s shoulder. “See you later, tiger.”
Tiger? Maggie’s vision clouded with a red haze.
“Don’t do it, Maggie.”
She jerked her gaze away from Mindy’s departing figure to look at Jameso. “Don’t do what?”
“Whatever you were contemplating doing to Mindy. You’d never win. She looks like the type who’s been in more than one girl fight.”
“Then she needs to keep her hands off of you,” she said. “And you need to tell her to back off.”
“She just likes to flirt. It doesn’t mean anything. She knows I’m married.”
Maggie would have felt better if he’d said “happily married.” “I don’t trust her,” she said. “It’s hard to believe she’s Shelly’s sister. They’re nothing alike.”
“You don’t have to trust her. You can trust me. Isn’t that what being married is all about?”
She nodded, and focused her eyes on her plate. She wanted to trust Jameso, but doing so was harder than she’d have thought. Her first husband had left her for another woman after twenty years of what she’d thought was a good marriage. Her father had abandoned her mother when Maggie was only three days old. The lesson was clear: People you were supposed to be able to count on let you down. Jameso hadn’t fared much better. His father had been an abuser who had driven the boy away as soon as he could make it on his own. As much as they both tried to put their pasts behind them, they couldn’t escape the grip of events in their pasts.
She stabbed at a bite of chicken and chewed without tasting it. People talked about living in the moment, but now was such a slippery, elusive context. She’d read books about envisioning your future to make your dreams come true, and she’d spent a lot of time trying to conjure up an image of a perfect life that was yet to be.
In the end, the past was the only thing solid enough to hold on to. She’d been there, lived that, and knew what it felt like. Even the bad things were hard to let go of. They were familiar. And no matter how counterproductive or crippling, people always insisted on dragging the past with them into that uncertain future, an anchor that could ground them and hold them in place, or a weight that would pull them under for good.
Saturday afternoon, Lucille had just completed the sale of a large folk art painting of a rooster to a couple visiting from Wisconsin when she looked up and found Duke Breman standing in front of her counter, those brooding eyes of his boring into her. She suspected him of purposely trying to fluster her, the way he must try to unnerve those suspected of crime. And it annoyed her that he was, mostly, succeeding. “Did you need something, Mr. Breman?” she asked.
“The sign on your door says you close at five.” His eyes remained fixed on her.
“What if it does?” She busied herself straightening the postcard rack that sat at the farthest end of the counter. When he didn’t respond—or even move, for that matter—after several seconds, she snapped, “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s rude to stare?”
“Was I staring?”
She gave up on the postcards, which she suspected she was only making more of a mess, and faced him. “What do you want from me, Mr. Breman?”
“I want you to call me Duke. And I want you to go for a ride with me. Now.”
Every part of her that was proud of being independent and a feminist and a woman who stood up for herself resented the way he ordered her around. Which made the small part of her that melted at his air of command that much more difficult to bear. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have work to do,” she said.
He looked around the empty shop, but said nothing. She opened the cash register and stood with both hands over the
drawer. “You need to leave so I can lock up now,” she said.
He looked at the floor, then shifted his weight to one hip, then the other. She half-expected him to scuff the toe of one boot on the old wooden floor. “I’d really like it if you’d go for a ride with me,” he said, still addressing the floor. “You could show me your town. I wouldn’t have to go back to the Idlewilde so early and spend the rest of the evening alone. And I’d like to get to know you better.”
He was either a very good actor, or his previous abruptness was a front for a certain amount of apprehension about approaching people—or maybe just women, or maybe—maybe—her in particular. She glanced out the store’s front window. The sun bathed the street in a golden glow, and the mountains beyond rose green and blue and white, almost too beautiful to believe. Suddenly she wanted nothing more than to be out enjoying that beauty, not stuck in here counting cash or tallying receipts. She closed the drawer. “All right,” she said. “Let me get my purse and lock up.”
He waited while she took care of these chores, then she flipped the sign on the door to CLOSED, pulled the door shut and made sure it was locked, and followed him to the late-model black pickup she’d seen parked in front of the Idlewilde Bed and Breakfast. He opened the passenger door and she managed to haul herself up into the cab without help from him. She resisted the impulse to make a snide comment about Texas men and their trucks; in truth, a good share of men—and women—in the mountains favored these oversize, rugged vehicles.
He slid into the driver’s seat, clicked his seat belt, and started the engine. “Where to?” he asked.
“What do you want to see?”
“The mountains.”
“You’re in the mountains. You drove over them and around them to get here. You see them every day wherever you are in town.”
“But I haven’t explored them. I haven’t seen them through the eyes of a local.”
“Why do you want to see them through the eyes of a local? Do you think that will help you in your investigation? Gerald wasn’t a local.”