Her Mysterious Houseguest

by Jane Toombs

  “We don’t dig up any plants ’cause we’re on a state park trail.” Delia smiled at Mikel. “If we’d brought a tree, though, we could plant it.”

  “Good thinking,” he told her.

  When they set off, Mikel noticed that Delia had shuffled herself around so she was the last one in the line of Scouts, making him realize she wanted to be next to him. For some reason this made him feel as good as when he’d finished a case successfully.

  He wasn’t sure he was entirely happy about this—what was happening to his Nemesis persona?

  Noise wasn’t a no-no on the trail, he discovered. The Scouts sang, chattered and generally let every creature in the woods know they were coming. Other than a chipmunk streaking across the trail and into the safety of a decaying log, Mikel didn’t see any other critters.

  When they reached the campsite Rachel had chosen, everybody threw off their backpacks. Mikel saw it was no more than a small clearing in the otherwise dense woods.

  “Can we eat now?” Beth asked.

  “Not until the tents are up,” Rachel told her. “We’ll put them over there near that grove of pines so we’ll be off the trail.” She pointed. Then, looking at Mikel, she warned, “No fair helping anyone—they have badges to earn.”

  He watched the girls, all of whom seemed to know what they were doing. But then, he already knew Rachel would be good at anything she undertook—teaching included. He glanced at her and their gazes locked for a moment until she blinked and looked away.

  He took a deep breath and let it out, wondering what he was going to do about Rachel. She’d moved into his head, crowding out thoughts of what he should be doing instead of wanting to be with her. Covertly watching her, he didn’t realize at first that Delia was trying to get his attention. He walked over to where she’d set up her tent.

  Delia pointed to the pine grove. “She went in there.”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  Glancing at Rachel, who was some distance away, Delia lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Laurie told me yesterday she was going to sneak into the woods and use her compass to get back to the camp just to prove she could. And she did.”

  “Maybe she just had to use the facilities,” he pointed out.

  “No, Rachel makes us go in pairs for that. Laurie’s my friend but she likes to show off. I’m scared she might get lost and I don’t want to tell Rachel on her ’cause then Laurie’ll be in trouble. Can you go after her?”

  Looking into Delia’s trusting blue eyes, he nodded. It’d only take him a few minutes to find Laurie and haul her back to camp. Taking care not to be obvious, he sauntered toward the pines and slipped among the trees. Not until he was well into the woods did it occur to him that he didn’t have a compass, something he’d always relied on in the agency tests. He shrugged. The camp wasn’t far, surely he couldn’t miss finding it again. Just in case, he tried to spot landmarks but, unfortunately, all the trees looked pretty much alike.

  Pulling his all-purpose utility tool from his pocket—something he always carried—he used the knife part to carve a blaze into the trunk of one of the trees.

  Okay, so you can find your way back here if you keep marking trees as you go on, he told himself. The problem is, can you be sure of the way back from here?

  A shriek from somewhere up ahead froze him in place. Laurie! What had happened to her? He automatically touched his shoulder holster.

  “Where are you?” he called, hoping she’d be able to respond.

  The high-pitched blast of a whistle answered him and he followed the sound until he finally caught sight of the yellow neckerchief all the girls wore.

  “Laurie?”

  “Here I am.” Her words came out between sobs. He found her huddled against a pine trunk, crying.

  “What happened?” he demanded.

  She pointed up at a nearby cedar. “He climbed up there.”

  He looked but could see nothing through the foliage. “Who or what did?”

  “The porcupine.” She scrabbled in a pocket and came up with a wrinkled tissue, using it to wipe her eyes. “I didn’t see him in time and—look.” She thrust out one leg and he saw what were unmistakably quills stuck into her jeans at thigh level.

  “It hurts,” she wailed.

  “Hold still,” he ordered, flipping out the pliers part of the tool. He knelt on one knee. “It’ll hurt worse for a little bit,” he warned, “and then you’ll feel better. There’s no more than about five quills here so you got off pretty easy, considering. If you feel like it, you can scream when I pull them out.”

  Keeping up a running commentary to distract her, he began to extract the quills one by one. Laurie flinched and whimpered while he worked, but didn’t cry out.

  “Got ’em all,” he said when he was through. “When we get back to camp Rachel will put antiseptic on them and you’ll be okay. Think you can walk?”

  She nodded.

  “One little problem remains,” he said. “Did you, by any chance, look at your compass before you left camp so you know what direction we should take?”

  “I dropped it when the porcupine swiped me,” she confessed.

  “Where?”

  “There, I think.”

  After searching, Mikel finally came up with the shiny aluminum compass. “We’ll look at it together and you can tell me in which direction camp is.”

  “West. It’s west.”

  He took her hand, and in what seemed no time at all, they reached the pine grove near the camp and soon came out among the tents.

  “Thank heaven you found her!” Rachel cried. “We heard the whistle and then Delia told me what was going on. When I found out you’d gone after her, I decided to wait rather than make a search myself.”

  Her trust in him warmed his heart, but he covered it by saying, “Because I always get my man—or in this case, girl?”

  “It was awful,” Laurie said, beginning to cry again. “Mikel had to pull five porcupine quills out of my leg and it really, really hurt. I wish I hadn’t gone off alone.”

  Mikel put his hand on her shoulder. “Laurie was brave about it all. And here’s my confession—if she hadn’t looked at her compass before leaving camp, so she knew how to get back, we’d be out there yet blowing her whistle and waiting to be rescued. Because, you see, I went off without a compass. Never a good idea.”

  Rachel, impressed by his admission that he, like Laurie, had made a mistake, also noticed how Laurie’s tears had stopped when he called her brave. What a great guy he was. “Come with me into my tent,” she ordered Laurie. “We’ll get some antiseptic on that leg.”

  When she and Laurie emerged, the other girls were gathered around Mikel, who, from the sound of their laughter, was evidently telling them a funny story.

  Later, after the cookout, Mikel supervised the burying of the scraps of leftover food at a good distance from the camp, causing much amusement by instructing every one of the cleanup crew to check their compasses because otherwise he’d surely get lost again.

  He was so different from the man she’d at first believed him to be, Rachel told herself. She would never have imagined the tough P.I. with the green hunter’s eyes could care about her girls, their feelings as well as their welfare. No wonder Delia was suffering from an acute case of hero worship. Laurie probably would be, too, now. She couldn’t blame them.

  In the twilight, as they donned light jackets against the cool of the evening and began to gather around the campfire, Delia came up to Rachel and whispered something. Rachel bent to hear. “Carol says she heard her mother tell her father that Mikel kissed you on the beach,” Delia confided. “Did he?”

  Rachel sighed and tried to choose her words carefully, but wound up admitting, “Yes, he did.”

  “Are you going to marry him?”

  Poor Delia, she probably wanted Mikel to wait until she got old enough so he could marry her. “No, we aren’t going to marry,” she assured the girl. “We’re just friends.”
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br />   Delia eyed her doubtfully, but then Rachel saw her notice how the other girls had begun to gather around Mikel. Delia immediately rushed over and made certain she got to sit next to him at the fire.

  Then it was time for tales and songs and, eventually, bed. Once the girls were snug in their tents and quiet, Rachel came back to the fire and to Mikel, who was standing there staring into the flames. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you how wonderfully you handled the porcupine episode,” she said. “I had no idea Laurie would go off like that.”

  “Laurie was no more foolish than I,” he said. “I hope you didn’t scold her too much.”

  “No need. She learned a lesson without scolding.”

  “So did I,” he said ruefully. “Not good to go around thinking you’re infallible.”

  She smiled, looking into his eyes. “I’m glad you came on the hike.”

  He took her hands in his. “So am I.”

  What she wanted to do was sway toward him, into his arms, where he’d kiss her until the world went away and left them alone together. But they weren’t alone. She pulled away. “It’s time I crawled into my sleeping bag,” she told him.

  “I’ll walk you home.”

  Since her tent was only a few yards away, it made no sense, but, wanting to prolong the moment, she said nothing. Side by side they walked to where her tent nestled among those of the girls. When they reached it, he took her arm and led her around to the back of the tent.

  “I wouldn’t want your Scouts to go home with tales of their fearless leader kissing the rear guard,” he said.

  “Carol has already told Delia about us on the beach. Delia wanted to know if we were getting married. I told her no, but I’m not sure she believed me. I think she intends to marry you herself.”

  “She’s a cute kid. I hate to disappoint her, but marriage is definitely not my line.”

  “Nor mine.”

  He tipped up her chin with his forefinger. “Why not?”

  “I don’t care to discuss my reasons.”

  His lips came closer and closer, until she felt the caress of his warm breath and he murmured, “Tell me you don’t want me to kiss you good-night.”

  “No,” she whispered, unsure whether she meant no, she didn’t want him to, or no, she wasn’t going to tell him anything of the sort.

  Whatever she meant, he kissed her, anyway, and a thrill shot through her. She leaned into his embrace, sliding her hands under his open jacket. Bemused by this kiss, at first she didn’t realize what was under one of her hands. Leather? When it finally occurred to her she must be touching a shoulder holster, she flung herself away from him.

  “A gun!” she cried. “You’re carrying a gun!” She turned and fled around her tent and dived through the opening, pulling the flap closed. Crouched on her sleeping bag, she hugged herself, shuddering, fighting off the terror of the past.

  Mikel stared after her in bewilderment. There was no mistaking her fright—his gun had given her a case of the blue devils. Just as, he remembered, his speaking of a gun had seriously troubled her once before. As he walked away from her tent toward the fire, he puzzled over her extreme reaction. Though she didn’t know what he actually did for a living, she did believe he was a P.I., so the fact that he owned a gun shouldn’t have been a surprise. What was it, then?

  What had happened to Rachel in the past that even the bare mention of a gun frightened her? She lived in an area of the country where hunting was common. He suspected most of the men in Ojibway owned rifles and shotguns for hunting. Perhaps even Aino did.

  He could ask Aino about Rachel’s gun phobia. And, when he finally cornered Sonia and told her the truth about why he’d come to the U.P., he’d find out from her if she thought Aino was well enough to be asked the other questions that needed answering, about Leo and the missing Renee.

  His obsession with Rachel was scattering his wits. He had to come to terms with it and get back to work on his mission. If she ever let him make love with her, that might do the trick, might rid him of this consuming need.

  He wasn’t looking for any long-term involvement with a woman. How could he after Yolanda had shattered his belief in any woman’s honesty? True, Rachel did seem honest, but so had Yolanda. What he needed from Rachel was only a temporary coming together; it had to be that and no more.

  Mikel sat down on his sleeping bag by the fire and stared into the dwindling flames as if they held the answers he needed.

  Chapter Eight

  After their return to the farm, while Rachel went off to deliver the van to Amy’s parents and collect her own car from them, Mikel found his chance to corner his grandmother for a private conversation.

  “This is truth-telling time,” he confessed, once they were settled in the living room. “What I told you on the phone about Rachel wasn’t true. I’d barely met her at the time. She’s not my girl, I just said so to keep you from asking questions. Because I am on a case, even though I’m on vacation.”

  She frowned. “How can the people you work for do such a thing to you?”

  “They didn’t. This is my case, one not for pay. You remember meeting my friend Steve, well, it’s a wedding gift to him.” He went on to explain how Steve’s bride, Victoria, had been devastated as a child when her older sister, Renee, had vanished. Renee had never been found.

  “That was fourteen years ago and the trail’s pretty cold,” he finished, “but I finally got a lead. Aino’s son, Leo, lived in the same New Jersey community that Renee did, and he left town about the same time she disappeared. He’d been her teacher and she also sometimes baby-sat for Leo’s daughter. I discovered Leo had died since then, but I traced his route up here to Aino’s farm, hoping to find some clues. Instead, I wound up taking Aino to the hospital. And that’s how I met Rachel. So, you see, I’m not romantically involved with her.”

  Sonia was silent for a long moment before saying, “Then you’re more of a fool than any Starzov has a right to be.”

  Mikel shrugged.

  She frowned at him. “Another thing, young man. You lied to me. How dare you?”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have. It won’t happen again.”

  “The only reason I can forgive you is because your untruth led to my coming to Ojibway, here to this house where I’m obviously needed. Not just any therapist could get along with Aino, you know.”

  She shot him a warning look. “Mind you, I won’t have you bothering the poor man with your questions.”

  “I don’t intend to set up an inquisition, I merely want to ask him about Leo’s arrival in Ojibway fourteen years ago. How’s that going to harm him?”

  “I’ll think about it. Is there no one else you can ask?”

  “I’m staying here until Leo’s daughter, Eva, returns from a visit to Finland in a week or so. She might prove to be a gold mine. But I really do need to talk to Aino. He doesn’t even know why I’m in Ojibway.”

  “Have you told Rachel the reason?” Sonia asked.

  “More or less. I said I was searching for Renee Reynaud, a missing girl. For some reason Rachel thinks I’m a private investigator and I’ve let her go on believing it. She doesn’t need to know I work for the government.”

  “Don’t try to fiddle with my mind, young man. I know perfectly well you’re some kind of special agent.”

  He grinned at her. “That’s government, isn’t it?”

  His grandmother studied him for a moment. “Has it ever occurred to you that, though you expect honesty from your friends and relatives, that you, yourself, are rarely completely honest with anyone?”

  “It comes with the territory.”

  “Mikel, that’s no excuse. You are not an agent when you’re with friends and family.”

  “All right, it’s gotten to be a habit.”

  “Habits can be broken. And, while I don’t wish you bad luck in finding that poor missing girl, have you considered that lives may be disrupted by the search alone? As for Rachel, make no mistake, she’s the gir
l for you. If you don’t seize this chance to be happy, you may never get another. That’s all I have to say for the moment.”

  With a rueful smile, Mikel watched her march from the living room. When his grandmother announced that was all she had to say, he could be certain of hearing variations on the subject for days to come. It was time to absent himself from the scene.

  Sonia poked her head back into the room. “I forgot to tell you, Aino would like to see you. He’s in the backyard. But no questions! You let him talk.”

  He found Aino resting on the lounge so he hauled over one of the wooden chairs and joined him.

  “Pretty dang hard to get out of one of those contraptions once I get in,” Aino told him. “But that grandmother of yours says I have to rest. I guess the camp-out went okay, hey?”

  Mikel told him about the various mishaps, earning a chuckle. “I took my handgun along in case of wild animals,” he finished, “but Laurie’s porcupine was the closest to a critter anyone saw. It upset Rachel when she found out I had the gun. She seems afraid of it.”

  Aino gave him a sidelong glance. “She’s never liked guns. I keep my rifle and shotgun hid for her sake. What’s your opinion of fishing?”

  Surprised by the abrupt change of subject, Mikel took a moment to answer. “I’ve never had the chance to do much fishing,” he said finally.

  “Ever stream fish for trout?”

  Mikel shook his head.

  “Then you’ve missed one of man’s finest sports. Wish I could take you out myself, but I’m a ways from that yet. Your grandma’s seeing to me pretty good for an old gal. I appreciate that. Appreciate you staying around to help out, too. Thought I’d ask Rachel to take you to my secret fishing hole. She’s got her own fishing gear—you can use the new rod and reel Eva got me last Christmas. Break it in for me. It’s stored in the attic, so you’ll have to fetch it.” He went on to tell Mikel where to find the rod and reel.

  As he climbed the steep attic stairs, Mikel realized the old man’s offer of his fishing gear and his secret fishing spot was his way of saying thanks. Feeling inexplicably guilty—Aino had no idea what had brought him to the farm—Mikel retrieved the new rod and reel from its cubbyhole near the chimney and brought it down to Aino. By the time Rachel returned home and came to join them, Mikel had learned the basic elements of fly-casting—at least in theory.