Strictly Lonergan's Business

by Maureen Child

  He paused, looked back at her and sent her another one of those rare, genuine smiles. “It really is good to see you, Kara. And it’s okay. I know what you’re gonna say.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I feel the same way. Good to have things back to normal.”

  Two

  A few hours later, Kara had been to the grocery store, had a chicken roasting in the oven and had even managed to arrange for a fax machine to be delivered and set up first thing tomorrow.

  Cooper was upstairs working and down here, in the square, farmhouse style kitchen, Kara was wondering what the heck had happened to her plan.

  She hitched one hip against the worn, Formica countertop and folded both arms across her chest. Wearing her favorite pair of faded, nearly threadbare jeans, a pale blue T-shirt and wonderful, comfortable sneakers, she shook her head and said aloud, “You’re a wimp, Kara. A spineless wiener dog. A disgrace to assistants everywhere.”

  Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the curtained window, making lacy shadows on the round, pedestal table and the gleaming wood floor. Kara watched as a soft breeze ruffled the curtains, sending those shadows into a lazy dance.

  Walking across the room, she pulled out one of the captain’s chairs and plopped down onto it. Bracing her elbows on the table, she stared out through a gap in the curtains at the rolling back lawn that stretched out to a wide green field. Then she heaved a dramatic sigh of complete disgust. Oh, she wasn’t disgusted with Cooper so much as she was with herself.

  Back to normal. Abruptly, she shifted in the chair, leaned back and stretched out her fingertips. Her nails tapped against the table like a frantic heartbeat. “Not his fault he fell right back into the same pattern we’ve been in for years. You knew this was going to happen, Kara. The question is…why didn’t you quit?”

  But she knew the answer to that already. Because one look at Cooper and her fantasies took over. Her reasonable, intelligent, logical brain went right to sleep and into Fantasy Land.

  She’d imagined it all so perfectly, her dreams were even filled with the dialogue her brain had provided. And sitting right there at the kitchen table, she indulged herself yet one more time. She’d walk into a room, a stray beam of sunlight would strike her just so and…

  Cooper glances up. His gaze meets hers. And for one, heart-stopping moment, the two of them are lost in the suddenly discovered rush of love.

  He crosses the room to her, cups her face in his big, wonderful hands and says, “My God, Kara. How could I have been so stupid? How could I not have seen the real you for so long? Can you ever forgive me?”

  And Kara smiles, reaches up to cover his hands with her own and says, “There’s nothing to forgive. It’s enough that we’re finally together. I love you, Cooper.”

  He whispers “I love you, too,” just before he kisses her with more passion than she could have imagined.

  “Right,” she muttered now, coming up out of her daydream like a drowning diver frantically breaching the water’s surface to find air. “Nothing to forgive? What am I? An idiot?”

  Yes, she thought. An idiot in love with a man who was clueless enough to not even notice what was right in front of him. A man who would never see her until it was too late.

  A sigh swept through the room.

  Kara jolted upright and twisted her head from side to side, glancing around the empty kitchen, futilely trying to find the source of that heartbreaking sound. But there was nothing. She stiffened, waiting for it to come again. It didn’t. There was just a sunny kitchen, empty but for her. Chills snaked along Kara’s spine and tingled at the base of her neck.

  A ghost?

  Cooper did tell her the house was supposedly haunted. But then he’d also said he hadn’t felt a thing in three days.

  “Imagination,” she whispered, standing up slowly, carefully. She chuckled softly, and pretended that her laughter didn’t sound quite as shaky as it felt. Swallowing hard, she rubbed her hands up and down her arms, dispelling the sensation of every nerve in her body standing on end.

  Then, blaming the weird feeling on her own daydreaming, Kara shut down her brain and finished getting dinner ready.

  Cooper spent his day with a murderous demon.

  His mind raced just a few beats ahead of his fingers, furiously typing at the keyboard. He knew what he wanted to capture. What he wanted his reader to feel. What surprised him was that this was the first piece of decent writing he’d managed to accomplish since arriving in California. It felt good. Good to be lost in his own imagination. Good to be caught up by the characters forming on his computer screen.

  Good to let go—however briefly—of the memories that had been choking him for three long days.

  A silent shroud of snow covered the walkway to the old hotel, but David hardly noticed. The cold seeped into his bones, down to his soul and a ribbon of dread slowly unwound in the pit of his stomach. His shoulders hunched against the icy wind, he shuffled his steps, reluctant to approach, as if every cell in his body was trying to warn him to stay away…

  Cooper finally lifted his fingers from the computer keyboard and leaned back in his desk chair. He knew exactly how the hero of his latest novel felt. Hadn’t he himself only reluctantly returned to Coleville? Wasn’t every cell in his body still telling him to get the hell out?

  But he was trapped for the summer. No getting out of it. He’d given his word to his grandfather, and a Lonergan never went back on his word. Even to sneaky old men who lie to their grandsons about being at death’s door on a skateboard.

  Not that he was pissed off about that, he assured himself. He was glad Jeremiah wasn’t dying. Glad the old man was as healthy and apparently, as slippery as he’d always been. But damn it, Cooper hadn’t been back to Coleville in fifteen years. And if Jeremiah hadn’t pulled one over on him, he doubted he ever would have returned.

  It was too hard. Too many memories, constantly fluttering through his mind like swarms of gnats—annoying and impossible to ignore.

  His screen saver flicked on, a haunted house complete with bats, ghosts and vampires. Usually, that was enough to motivate him to get back to writing. To delve into whatever story he had going. Today though, he ignored the animated cartoon drawing filling the screen.

  From downstairs came the clank of pans and the rush of water through old pipes. The scent of something delicious wafted up the stairs and he took a deep breath, enjoying not only the mingled aromas of garlic and sage, but the realization that Kara was right downstairs.

  Damn, it was good having Kara here. And for more reasons than her cooking abilities.

  Since arriving in Coleville for the first time in fifteen years, Cooper had never felt so alone. Sure, his family was right down the road a couple of miles, but here, in this house, he lay alone at night and felt emptiness crowding in on him.

  Ordinarily, he liked being alone. In New York, he spent most days working, avoiding the phone, the doorbell, and e-mail. Kara kept the world at bay, affording him plenty of time to lose himself in his stories. When he needed a distraction, the city was just beyond his doorstep and there were any number of women he could call.

  Here though, the quiet reigned supreme. There were no hustling throngs of people. No loud crash and scream of cabs darting in and out of vicious traffic. No sirens or street peddlers. Just the quiet—and too much time to think.

  Pushing his chair back, Cooper stood up and walked across his bedroom to the window overlooking the front of the house. He wasn’t seeing the neatly tended yard, or the shade trees, or even the green field sweeping down the narrow two lane road toward his grandfather’s ranch.

  As he had the last three days, he looked beyond, to a lake he couldn’t even see from here. He’d thought that renting a house a couple of miles away would be enough. That not being able to actually see the water would make being here easier.

  But he should have known better.

  Hell, he’d been living in Manhattan for years,
and every night in his dreams, he saw that lake. Every day when he sat down to write the horror novels that had given him fame and fortune, he saw that lake. Saw again how that summer day fifteen years ago had become a nightmare.

  If he closed his eyes now, it would all come racing back. The feel of the sun on bare shoulders. The rush of laughter from his cousins. The sigh of wind in the trees. The splash as he and his cousins had taken turns jumping for distance into the icy water.

  The numbing shock that followed.

  So he didn’t close his eyes, but the memories clung to the edges of his mind, taunting him, pushing at him. He reached up, scraped one hand through his hair, then rubbed his eyes as if he could rub away the images that felt as though they were burned on his retinas.

  “Hey!”

  Startled, he spun around and found Kara standing in the open doorway staring at him. Heart pounding, he shook his head and scowled at her. “Trying to give me a heart attack?”

  “It wasn’t on the schedule for tonight, no,” she said and stepped into the room, still watching him curiously. “Everything okay?”

  No.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” he hedged and turned his back on her to walk back to the desk and his laptop. He never left the lid up when someone else was around. Call it superstition or whatever, he didn’t like anyone getting a peek at what he was working on.

  “Well, because I called your name three times and you didn’t hear me.”

  “I was…thinking,” he said and at least it wasn’t a lie.

  “New book giving you trouble?”

  “Yeah.” His fingertips smoothed over the gray lid of the computer as if caressing the words hidden inside. “At least, it was. Until today.” He forced a smile as he looked at her. “You must have brought me some luck.”

  “Uh-huh.” She crossed the room, threw the curtains back and opened the window. A cold sharp breeze raced into the room as if it had been crouched just outside, waiting its chance. “So, translation is, you didn’t work before because I wasn’t here.”

  “Right.” Cooper watched her as she wandered the room, efficiently tidying up the space, folding the old quilt at the foot of his bed, straightening a framed landscape, then turning to the desk, where she shuffled papers into neat stacks.

  He felt calmer just watching her. Damn, Kara was good for him. She always had been. Her voice, her even temper, her cool logic, her no-nonsense way of looking at the world was exactly the right leash he needed to keep him grounded.

  “So I’m guessing,” she said, glancing at him with a knowing gleam in her eye, “that means you killed me horribly again.”

  One corner of his mouth quirked into a half smile. God, she knew him better than anyone ever had. Part of the fun of being a writer was being able to kill off whomever happened to be bugging you at the time. And when Kara wasn’t around, it was lowering to admit just how lost he felt without her. Hence the catharsis of killing off a secretary/assistant in one of his stories.

  “How’d I die this time?” she asked, planting both hands on her hips. “Drowning?”

  “I told you before,” he said, his voice going as stiff as his spine. “You never drown.”

  “Okay,” she said, lifting both hands in mock surrender. “Sheesh. Just asked.”

  “Right. Sorry.” He pushed one hand through his hair again and willed the tremor inside into stillness.

  In every one of his books, at least one character drowned. But it was always someone Cooper didn’t like. Someone he thought the readers wouldn’t be too invested in. Death by drowning was something Cooper could never take lightly. Not with his memories. Not with the past that was always so close.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding as if to confirm his own word. “I’m fine. Did you come up here for something in particular?”

  “Dinner’s ready.”

  He glanced at the window. The sun was just setting. Turning his gaze back to her he asked, “This early?”

  “Shoot me, I’m hungry.” Shrugging, Kara headed for the door and said over her shoulder, “You can wait till later if you want to.”

  “No,” he said, sweeping his gaze around the room that without her suddenly seemed way too empty. “I’ll join you.”

  “Great. You can open the bottle of chardonnay I got at the market.”

  He chuckled as he followed her downstairs. “Mmm. Chardonnay from Al’s market in Coleville, California. Can’t wait.”

  “Snob.”

  “Peasant.”

  Kara was still laughing as they walked into the kitchen. She took a seat at the table and watched him as he grabbed the wine and the bottle opener. They’d already settled back into the familiar routine. And damn it, it felt good. And right.

  God, she would miss this so much when she left. And she had to leave. That was more apparent by the moment. They’d become too comfortable together.

  He sat down and his long legs bumped into hers. Kara felt a flash of something hot and dazzling skyrocket inside, and only just managed to keep from yelping.

  Naturally, Cooper didn’t notice.

  While he poured clear, straw colored wine into the pink antique glasses she’d found in a cupboard, Kara looked around at the homey old kitchen. The cabinets were painted white, the appliances looked as though they were new in the fifties, and the windows overlooked a huge backyard lined by ancient shade trees.

  It all should have been…soothing somehow. Cozy. Instead though, Kara felt a sensation of…waiting. She hadn’t heard anything weird since that sigh earlier in the afternoon and she’d almost convinced herself that hadn’t really happened.

  “This smells great,” Cooper said, helping himself to a serving of chicken, potatoes and fresh broccoli.

  “You know you could have found the grocery store yourself,” Kara pointed out, taking a sip of her wine. Cool, tart, wonderful.

  “Oh, I did,” he said, reaching for a slice of wheat bread from the plate in the center of the table. “I bought coffee and a couple boxes of doughnuts. Oh,” he added, “and a few frozen burritos.”

  “Pitiful.” And somehow, cute. How twisted was she?

  “We go with our strengths,” he said around a bite of chicken. Then his dark eyes closed and he sighed, obviously in pure heaven. “At home, I can call a restaurant. Here—let’s just say that the Burger Hut doesn’t deliver.” He swallowed and groaned. “Man, Kara. I owe you. Big.”

  She didn’t want him to owe her.

  She wanted him to love her.

  But she might as well wish for a ten pound weight loss and a spanking new wardrobe by morning. Neither wish was going to happen.

  Outside, late afternoon slid into twilight, the sky softly darkening. Inside, a familiar, comfortable silence settled between them and Kara found herself taking mental pictures that she would be able to pull out and look at later—after she left.

  At that thought, her gaze landed on Cooper and a twinge of regret pinged off her chest, bouncing off her heart, leaving it feeling bruised. She hated the notion of walking out of Cooper’s life, but at the same time, she had to, if she ever expected to get a life of her own.

  Still, she wanted to enjoy what time she did have with him, so she pushed those thoughts to the back of her mind and asked, “So, what’s the story on your grandfather?”

  He grabbed his wineglass and took a long drink. Then he eyed the liquid in surprise. “Pretty good.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, sensing a stall tactic. “Talk.”

  “Right.” While he ate, he told her the story of Jeremiah’s tricky maneuvers to get his grandsons back home for the summer. Not only had Jeremiah faked a bad heart, he’d even convinced his own doctor to go along with the deception. He’d worried them all, just to get them to come back to Coleville.

  “That’s terrible,” Kara said.

  “Yeah,” Cooper agreed, taking another bite of chicken. “Jeremiah’s a wily old goat. But this was pretty low. He scared the hell out of
us.”

  “No,” Kara said, glaring at him because he couldn’t see what she was trying to say. “I meant it was terrible that your grandfather felt as though he had no choice but to coerce his grandsons into a visit.”

  “Huh?” His dark eyes fixed on her in confusion.

  “How could you all do that to him, Cooper?” She set her fork down on her plate and the quiet clink it made sounded overly loud in the suddenly still room.

  The silence only lasted for a moment or two.

  “We didn’t do anything,” he pointed out defensively, waving his own fork at her for emphasis.

  “That’s the point,” she said, taking a gulp of wine and letting the icy liquid slide down her throat to form a nice warm ball in the pit of her stomach. “You didn’t do anything. None of you.”

  “Hey.”

  “You said you haven’t been back here in fifteen years, Cooper.”

  “There were reasons.”

  “Reasons? For breaking an old man’s heart?” Sympathy welled inside her and along with it came anger. “You went away and stayed away. The poor man. No wonder he was desperate enough to lie.”

  He sighed and sat back in his chair, gripping his wineglass as if it were a life rope. “You’re right.”

  “What?” She thunked the heel of her hand above her right ear. “I mean, excuse me?”

  “Funny,” he acknowledged with a nod. “But you heard me. I know we were wrong to stay away so long. Trust me, it wasn’t easy on any of us, either. Don’t you think we missed Jeremiah? Don’t you think it was hard for us to stay away?”

  “Then why?” she whispered, leaning on the table to watch him carefully. “Why did it take you so long to come home for a visit?”

  “Because, Kara,” he said softly, shifting his gaze from hers to the surface of the pale wine in his glass. “As hard as it was to stay away, it was even harder to come back here.”

  There was something distant about Cooper. As if he had emotionally taken one giant step back from her. As if he were deliberately trying to shut her out. And it hurt. They’d been close for five years. She’d thought they were, if not lovers, then at least friends.