Social Graces

by Dixie Browning

  The not-uncomfortable silence lasted several minutes. “I used to spend summer vacations at Mount Desert Island,” she said thoughtfully. “For Thanksgiving we usually went to Hilton Head. Christmas was Captiva Island—occasionally, Bermuda.”

  She was usually good at this—putting people at ease, encouraging them to open up, to give her some idea of whether or not they were suited for whatever position they were applying for. Even among volunteers for charitable causes, there were troublemakers.

  He nodded, but said nothing. She wondered where he usually vacationed…or if he did. Maybe this, for him, was a vacation. “My great-grandmother’s buried over there,” she said, indicating the small cemetery. “Probably more of my family, too.” Aware of how that must sound, she said, “I mean, I never met either of my great-grandfathers. I wish I could have known them, but I didn’t.” Her gaze slid away, “For that matter, I never really knew my mother all that well,” she admitted. Embarrassment washed over her. She never discussed personal matters with strangers. “Sorry. You were saying—? About my plumbing?”

  Instead of rescuing her, he said thoughtfully, “I don’t know if it’s possible for a child to know a parent—another family member. Not objectively, that is.”

  “Is that MacBride the psychologist speaking? Or MacBride the philosopher?” Before he could reply, she said, “Let’s stick to plumbing, shall we?” Okay, so he knew how to dismember a drainpipe and she didn’t. Big fat deal. That didn’t mean she was inferior, it just meant that their talents lay in different areas. At least she could carry a tune. He couldn’t find a C-sharp if he tripped over it. “You were about to tell me what’s wrong with it.”

  So much for poise. Her face was on fire and she had no one to blame but herself. She couldn’t remember feeling this embarrassed since she’d spilled a glass of wine in her date’s lap and then tried to mop it up with a cocktail napkin.

  “Well, for one thing,” he said finally, “your septic tank needs pumping.”

  “My what needs pumping?” One of her feet slipped off the railing.

  “For another, your pipes are old and probably about to start leaking, if they don’t already. Acid water eats away copper piping.”

  It wasn’t acid water that was eating holes in her composure. “Great. I’m afraid to ask if there’s anything more.”

  “You’ll probably need to replace them with PVC in a year or so.”

  She glanced at the sky. No help there. Then she frowned at the once-white, size-seven sneaker that was still propped on the rail beside his putty-colored size-twelve Docksiders. “I’ll make a note. Is that all?”

  “You need a new well pump.”

  “A new well pump?” Her other foot plopped to the floor and she sat up straight.

  “Hey, don’t panic. Thing’s probably good for another few months, at least. On the other hand, it could quit tomorrow. Leaky foot valve’d be my guess.”

  “A leaky foot valve,” she echoed numbly, wondering how much it cost to replace foot valves. Feet valves? She started to suggest corn plasters, but then she might have erupted in a horrible cackle. She didn’t even know this woman she was becoming. It couldn’t be the salt air—she’d breathed plenty of that without ever losing her cool.

  “Can’t claim I haven’t been warned,” she said brightly, fighting depression. Mood swings were nothing new to her after the past few months, but the troughs seemed to be deepening and there were no corresponding highs.

  Mac reached across the narrow space between the two chairs and covered her hand with his. Well…perhaps a few highs. His hands were warm. Hers were cold. He had square palms, long fingers, and despite the fact that he’d been grunging around under her sink, his nails were in far better shape than her own.

  “Hey, it’s no big deal,” he commiserated.

  Maybe to him it wasn’t. To her, with no job, a house that seemed to be falling apart around her ears—a project she was afraid to tackle but desperately needed to finish, and a man she could no more ignore than she could ignore a tsunami, everything was a big deal.

  But then, he had no way of knowing that, and she wasn’t about to tell him. Her problems were just that—her problems. Sliding her hand from under his, she rose and moved toward the door. “I’ll be in the living room if you need a hand putting the sink drain back together,” she said, and fled before she could embarrass herself further.

  Once inside the door, she paused to draw a steadying breath. All right, so she’d brought up her marginally dysfunctional family. She’d heard far more personal matters discussed at cocktail parties. Whose spouse was cheating with whom—who had just had a vasectomy. Whose silicon was starting to slip.

  The box of files was the first thing that caught her attention when she wandered into the living room. She could think of a hundred things she’d had to dispose of one way or another in order to make room for those, plus the barest essentials. The Venetian seascape that used to hang in the dining room. The chaise lounge in the morning room, where she used to curl up with one of Belinda’s romance novels when she grew tired of reading sixteenth-century poets or essays on the creative traditions of folk cultures in Appalachia.

  And the piano. Even if she’d hired a moving van or rented a trailer to bring it with her, there was no room for it here. Was there even a piano tuner on the island? Probably not. She remembered hearing her father pick out simple melodies, mostly old songs from the forties. She’d given him a CD collection of songs from that era for Christmas one year, but whether or not he’d ever played them, she didn’t know. She’d been too busy doing her thing in Chicago and later, in New York.

  Oh, darn it, she was not going to cry! Was there any emotion more worthless than self-pity?

  Her standard antidote was to think about all the women who, faced with overwhelming odds, attacked life with both hands and came out on top, Miss Mitty being a prime example. She had never married; her only family was the niece in Georgia whom she hadn’t seen in years, yet she’d managed to build a satisfying and productive life for herself.

  And there was Grax, a widow whose only son had died young, whose only granddaughter had ignored her existence. According to everyone Val had met since she’d been here, practically the whole island—certainly the entire village of Buxton—had claimed Achsah Dozier as a friend. She’d gardened and gone to church and even taken a driver’s course for seniors at the Fessenden Center the year before she’d died, though she’d no longer owned a car. There’d always been someone to drive her wherever she wanted to go. She might have lived alone, but she hadn’t been alone.

  Val could do worse than emulate two women who had been independent long before women’s independence became a cause célèbre.

  On his way out the back door, Mac glanced at the empty boxes waiting to be taken to the recycling center by the dump. It wasn’t the empties that interested him, it was the box of file folders she’d made no effort to hide, which might or might not mean there was nothing there to hide. So far he hadn’t found anything incriminating in the ones he’d gone through. He wasn’t comfortable doing it, but he’d skimmed through a few of the files while she was out, knowing even as he searched that the type of information he was looking for wouldn’t be easy to recognize. Sixteenth-century shipwrecks were probably easier to trace than offshore bank accounts.

  When it came to deciphering ancient shipping records and ships’ logs he was in his element, but high finance was another matter. That took training in financial crimes or forensic auditing. When and if he found anything that looked like incriminating evidence he would have to turn it over to the proper authorities and hope it proved what he’d set out to prove.

  The fact that he was increasingly attracted to his chief suspect didn’t make him feel any better about sneaking around behind her back. He’d been forced to remind himself more than once that Val Bonnard wasn’t the first crook who didn’t look the part. Hell, if crooks always looked the part, fighting crime would be a cinch. So she was funny and
sexy and a good sport about being so totally out of her element—that didn’t necessarily mean she was innocent.

  It also didn’t mean she was guilty, he admitted reluctantly. The odds were slightly better than even, he told himself, that she’d holed up here waiting for the heat to die down. That once things cooled off, she would light out for the Caymans or wherever she’d stashed the money, and never look back.

  Yeah, right. That’s why she wore herself out scouring every square inch of her dilapidated old ruin. Great cover. It almost had him fooled. Almost.

  Mac had talked to his stepbrother every night since he’d been on location. Last night he’d confessed that things weren’t moving quite as fast as he’d hoped. “Look, we both know I came down here expecting to find our prime co-suspect living it up in a cozy twelve-bedroom beachfront cottage complete with swimming pool, maid service and personal chef,” he’d admitted the night he’d moved in, after Val had gone upstairs. Just to be safe, he’d waited until she was asleep and then gone outside to place the call.

  “I thought you said the place she inherited was a dump.”

  “Yeah, well…happens I was right about that, but dead wrong about everything else. According to local tax records, the property’s worth around fifty grand, max. The house is a fixer-upper. I’ve got someone checking to see if there’s any possible link between her and any of the developers operating in the area. So far, no hits.”

  “Stick with it, okay? She’s the only hope I’ve got unless someone comes up pretty soon with a smoking gun.”

  Which they both knew was hardly likely, as the hunt had slowed to a crawl for lack of fresh evidence.

  From his own professional experience, Mac knew better than to go into any project with a closed mind. If he’d been diving on what was supposed to be an eighteenth-century galleon and suddenly discovered sonar gear or a fiberglass hull, he’d have known immediately he was way off base. He’d come down here expecting to find a sharp little cookie who had socked away a fortune without even raising a blip on the radar screen. Instead, he’d found a gorgeous, sexy, likable woman with dirt on her face, cobwebs in her hair, wearing designer jeans and a Cartier tank watch to scrub floors. It had shaken him up some. He’d had to back off before he could confront her again with an open mind, using the excuse of collecting his tools. Since then things had gotten worse instead of better. For a guy whose profession demanded objectivity, he was having some pretty serious problems.

  The woman he’d seen that day at the country club wearing a haughty look and a rock the size of an ice-cube on her third finger, left hand, was nowhere in evidence. The watch, maybe—and her clothes. Those carefully faded jeans she’d been crawling around in hadn’t come from Target, no matter how you pronounced it.

  The first time he’d ever seen her, he’d summed her up as post-debutante, Junior League, the whole ball of wax. Now that he was getting to know her—up close and personal, as the saying went—his earlier impression was turning out to be a hundred-and-eighty degrees off course.

  “If she’s pulling a scam, she’s damned good at it,” he’d told his stepbrother two nights ago.

  “Yeah, well…women can fool you,” Will had replied.

  Mac had tactfully refrained from mentioning Macy. Nor had he mentioned the woman he’d briefly been engaged to a dozen or so years ago, who had dropped him in favor of someone rich and good-looking. As he fit neither category, he’d wished her luck and headed to the Azores feeling freer than he had in months.

  Val scowled at the files, then lifted the only other box yet to be unpacked onto the coffee table. Okay, so she was procrastinating. Every file she’d looked though so far had left her more puzzled than before. If there was anything significant to be found, it must have been written in invisible ink. On the backs and even on the face of old bills, personal bank statements and obsolete brokerage statements, she’d found the usual scribbled phone numbers, initials and obscure notations. Having served as fund manager for a few large charities, Val knew the value of keeping clean, meticulous records. Evidently, for all his business degrees, her father had missed that lesson.

  With a sigh, she turned to the box on the coffee table and lifted out a figurine he’d given her after her first ballet recital, before they’d realized that her talents, if any, lay in a different direction. She had a good ear for music, but it didn’t extend to her feet. They’d laughed about it since.

  Now she unwrapped the china ballerina and she set it on the mantel. Framed photographs carefully wrapped in a scarf she’d purchased in Scotland emerged next. She took a moment to study the pictures of her parents, taken in the late fifties, shortly after they’d been married. Val had always likened them in her mind to Sean Connery and Greta Garbo. Her mother’s beauty still reminded her of Garbo’s cool elegance. Val hadn’t seen Lola Bonnard, or whatever her current name was, in several years. They’d met for lunch once when Lola had stopped over in New York on her way from London to San Francisco. Gazing at the photos now, she whispered, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. You’d never guess where I am now.”

  Next she pulled out a miniature oil she’d always loved. The larger paintings had all been sold to a dealer, but this one she’d held back. It could go where last year’s lighthouse calendar still hung, even though it would be lost on the twelve-foot wall space. She’d have to find a few more things to balance it. Prints, probably…if she could even afford good original prints. If not, reproductions would have to do.

  It occurred to her fleetingly that she was beginning to think long-term rather than short-term. She didn’t care to dwell on it.

  For nearly an hour she unpacked and found places for the mementos she’d brought with her, putting her own stamp on the old house. Meanwhile she listened for sounds that might indicate what Mac was doing. Not that he was obligated to work eight hours a day, but she had come to enjoy knowing he was nearby working on some project or another. At close range he affected her in an entirely different way, but out of sight he was…comfortable. Companionable. Much as she imagined a husband might be.

  Bite your tongue, woman!

  She’d do better to concentrate on having her septic tank pumped, her pipes replaced and whatever needed doing to her foot valve done. By whom, a plumber or a chiropodist? Horribly expensive, no doubt, either way.

  Mac appeared in the doorway just as she lifted the last item from the box. A tube of brand new tennis balls. Why on earth had she packed anything so useless? She’d forgotten her racquet—it was still at the club, not that it mattered. “Anyone for tennis?” she asked facetiously.

  Grinning, he shook his head. “Not my sport, sport. Looks like the weather’s closing in sooner than I expected. We’ve just got time for a sunset walk on the beach.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “No, I’m not. You need a break. You’ve been holed up in here long enough.”

  Not long enough to regain her perspective, obviously. No sooner had he appeared in the doorway than she’d lost track of what she was supposed to be doing. Come to think of it, a brisk walk—maybe even a fast run—might be just what the doctor ordered, never mind that sharing a sunset walk with a man who could send her hormones into a wild tango with no more than a single glance might do more harm than good.

  “Bundle up, it’s colder than it looks.”

  Immediately, her thoughts flew to the old Yankee courtship custom of bundling. “Five minutes,” she said, wondering if a few more layers of clothing would serve to insulate her against the man.

  Hardly. He hadn’t done a single thing to encourage her, it was her own wayward imagination that needed insulating.

  Instead of driving his four-wheel-drive vehicle onto the beach, Mac turned off the highway, drove past the small airstrip, deserted but for a single red-and-white Cessna, and parked near a chained-off entrance to a National Park Service campground. The place was obviously closed for the season. “You can warm up by stepping over the chain,” he said.

  “I thought you said
a beach walk. Is this legal? I mean, are we trespassing or anything?”

  “I understand the locals walk here year-around. There’s a couple of boardwalks to the beach. We’ll take one over, walk the beach and take the other one back. Suit you?”

  He pocketed the car key and nodded toward the chained entrance. The deserted campground was situated among a series of high wooded dunes and deep, jungle-like valleys. “This way,” Mac said, steering her right when she would have turned left and headed up a steep incline.

  He set a rapid pace and neither of them spoke for several minutes. She wore a white mohair stocking cap, but the wind found ways inside her anorak. “There’s nobody here,” she said, panting only slightly. “I thought you said the locals walked here.”

  “Way the weather’s closing in, I guess any walkers have already given up and gone home.”

  “Sensible people,” she panted. He was making no allowance for her shorter legs.

  “Might be a few fishermen on the beach,” he offered.

  “Freezing their bait off.” She cast an uneasy glance at the rapidly darkening sky. When they came to a boardwalk, he touched her arm and gestured with a nod. “Leads to the beach,” he said, “Come on, we’ll be out of the wind for a few minutes.”

  Walking single file, they traversed the narrow boardwalk between scrubby pines and stunted, vine-covered oaks. Deer tracks were plentiful. The place was growing on her. Whatever else it was—an eclectic mixture, neither ticky-tacky nor self-consciously quaint—she rather liked it.

  Before they were halfway there, the spray was visible above the wind-sculpted dunes with their dark mantle of hardy vegetation. Mac led the way and Val trudged behind him, determined not to complain of the pace he’d set. Housework, she was discovering, was no substitute for regular aerobic exercise.