Her Mysterious Houseguest

by Jane Toombs

  He grinned at her. “Spot on.” Lowering his voice, he leaned closer and murmured, “But some things are more difficult than others.”

  He was so close she felt his warm breath tickle her ear. That, combined with what she knew he meant, made her insides quiver.

  On the way back down, they parked near the old copper mine and ventured inside for a few feet before being stopped by the grate across the opening. Even this short distance inside the air was much cooler. Damper, too, as water trickled underfoot from a spring.

  “Ever been kissed in a mine?” Mikel asked. Without waiting for her answer, he pulled her into his arms and slanted his mouth over hers, letting her go only when they heard voices from the outside.

  “I get the feeling we’re never going to be alone on this outing,” he said.

  She’d known that, but at the same time, had perversely hoped they’d find some secluded glade no tourist would ever discover. That obviously wasn’t going to happen.

  When they emerged from the darkness of the mine, as Rachel blinked, trying to adjust to the bright sunlight, someone called her by name.

  “Well, if isn’t Rachel Hill. Never know who you might run into, do you?”

  She stared in disbelief at a man she’d hoped never to see again—Tim Thompson, not as trim and athletic as he’d looked eight years ago, but still recognizable.

  Before she could manage a greeting, he reached for her, obviously intending to give her a hug. She took a step backward and was brought up short when she bumped into Mikel, directly behind her.

  Mikel set her aside so he was facing Tim. “It’s obvious the lady doesn’t care to be touched.” His voice, though even and calm, held an undercurrent of warning.

  For a moment she thought Tim was going to challenge Mikel’s statement, but he evidently thought better of it, nodded at her and strode off.

  Mikel didn’t say another word even when they reached the car. Though she’d planned a side trip to view a falls, a glance at his brooding expression made her decide going home was a better alternative. What was wrong with the man? She was grateful she hadn’t been forced to endure Tim’s hug and would have told Mikel so if he wasn’t acting so odd. Impossible that he could be—jealous?

  Eventually, Mikel asked her some questions about copper mining in the U.P. and she answered, so the ride home wasn’t in total silence, but not one word did he say about the encounter.

  Later, at the evening meal, as they sat around the table, Aino said, “That TV weatherman says tomorrow’s coming up fair and clear, with only a slight breeze. Sounds to me like a good boating day.” He looked at Mikel. “You know anything about boats?”

  “A fair amount. Why?”

  “Got me a boat down at the marina. Thought we’d take her out and I need a backup man. Otherwise I’ll never hear the last of it from your grandma.”

  “How big a boat?” Sonia asked.

  “Twenty-four-foot cabin cruiser. An old one I use for trolling, mostly, but I was thinking we might take a run out to Kaug Isle, just to get away from the farm. I ain’t used to being cooped up.”

  “Cooped up?” Sonia echoed. “With all your acreage? Nonsense. Not that the boat trip isn’t a good idea. I won’t ask if you have a galley, because I don’t cook on boats. I might be talked into coming up with a picnic lunch, though.”

  “Pasties,” Rachel said. “I’ve got some in the freezer, already made.”

  Sonia raised her eyebrows. “Pasties?”

  “Nothing like ’em,” Aino assured her.

  “What’s on Kaug Isle?” Mikel asked.

  “It’s pretty much rocks and trees,” Rachel told him. “The Native Americans thought of it as a spirit place.”

  Aino had a doctor’s appointment in two days, Mikel knew. If the doctor said he was doing well, then Grandma Sonia or not, Mikel would feel free to ask Aino the questions he wanted answered. Meanwhile, why not enjoy a boat ride? Though he wouldn’t be alone with Rachel, maybe that was just as well, frustrating as he found it.

  The next day, Metsa didn’t want to be left behind and howled in misery as they drove away. “Dang dog,” Aino said. “Already figures she’s part of the family.”

  At the marina, Aino let Mikel take over the boat, and after waiting until the bridge over the river swung open to let them pass, he steered the boat out into the lake. Aino pointed, showing him where the island lay in Lake Superior’s blue waters, which were calm as a millpond today. After a quick survey of the sky, Mikel was satisfied no storm clouds lurked in wait.

  Lake Superior was so vast no land could be seen across it, reminding him of the ocean, except the briny scent was missing. Sweet water just didn’t smell like saltwater. Gulls dipped and squawked overhead, following them. As he faced into a breeze that carried the faint tinge of pine, Mikel realized he could get used to this way of life real easy. Maybe he did need to take off from work on a regular basis, the way Steve did.

  Later, after they’d anchored off Kaug Isle and were sitting around talking, Mikel, bemused by the sun sparkles on the lake and the peacefulness, remembered Aino’s words about the dog. He was, he realized, beginning to feel like Metsa, as though he were a part of a family. He loved his grandmother, exasperating as she could be, and he liked Aino. As for Rachel…

  He gritted his teeth. What the hell was he getting into here? Up by the mine yesterday, he’d been ready to kill that guy for even thinking about hugging her. Thrusting the memory away, he told himself he wasn’t going to let anything spoil today’s peace.

  “Expect we’re boring the kids,” Aino said to Sonia. “Couple of old fogies, that’s what we are to them.”

  “If that grandson of mine ever even hints that’s what I am, he’ll be sorry,” she said.

  Mikel stood up. “We could swim to the island from here. Rachel and I, anyway—we’ve got suits on.”

  Aino winked at Sonia. “Think he wants to get her alone?”

  Rachel frowned at him.

  “Are you game to swim?” Mikel asked her.

  “If you’re asking me, am I capable—yes.”

  “What I’m asking you is to go with me.” Mikel held out his hand.

  After several moments of hesitation, she placed her hand in his and allowed him to help her from her chair. “Remember that water is forty-five degrees,” she said.

  “Even so.” As he said the words, he had a strange sense he was asking her something far more complex than to swim with him to the island, but he shrugged it away.

  The plunge into the water was, to put it mildly, bracing, and he headed for the islet in a fast crawl, Rachel keeping pace with him. They pulled themselves up onto the large rocks along the shore. Though the sun shone warm, the light breeze now made them shiver.

  “There’s a rock ledge over there—” Rachel pointed “—that we can climb onto to sun ourselves.”

  He saw what she meant and nodded. The ledge was part of an outcropping of rock making a wide shelf that was protected from the prevailing wind by the islet’s curve.

  When they’d climbed up to it and stretched out on their stomachs on the flat rock surface heated by the sun, they soon felt comfortably warm. When Mikel raised his head he could see the boat, but he knew he and Rachel weren’t visible to Aino and Sonia. Not that he meant to take advantage of being alone with Rachel. Not here. Frowning, he tried to decide why not here.

  “Something the matter?” Rachel asked, and he saw she was looking at him.

  “There’s something about this place.” He left it at that, unsure exactly what he meant.

  “There’s a legend about a Chippewa maiden who secretly paddled to this islet in her canoe and then scuttled it so she’d be marooned here. Her lover had been killed in a war party against the Sioux and she wanted to join him. So she set out an offering of tobacco on a large rock and asked that she be permitted to die. When the wind blew the tobacco away, she took that as a sign her wish would be granted.”

  When she paused, he said, “I presume it was
. Most of these sad tales end in death.”

  “This one is somewhat different,” she told him, “because, in the wind, she heard her lover singing.

  ‘My love does not remember

  She comes here to die

  She forgets her promise

  he forgets our vow

  Only if she remembers

  Can we be together….’

  “Then she recalled how they would paddle together to this island to be alone and how he once had pointed to a young cedar, tall and straight, and said his spirit was a part of that tree. She then told him she would place her spirit in a birch tree to grow beside him so they would always be together. Trusting in what the wind had brought her, she found the cedar, lay down beside it and waited.

  “Days later they found her broken canoe on the rocky beach, but though they searched the islet, there was no sign of her, dead or alive, until the old medicine man pointed to a graceful young birch tree growing next to a tall cedar. He told them to search no more, that her spirit lived within the birch tree. It’s a beautiful story, isn’t it?”

  Finding himself strangely moved by what she’d told him, he said, “The tale fits the island.”

  “Some people believe there’s one right mate for each of us,” she said. “I’m not sure I believe any such thing, but if it were true, then a lot of women seem to find the wrong one instead.”

  “Do you have anyone particular in mind?” He asked the question lazily, only mildly curious.

  “My mother. My father couldn’t have been more wrong for her. In fact, I doubt if he could ever be right for any woman.”

  Recalling that, like his, her parents were dead, a thought struck him. Maybe the fact both of them had been orphaned as children explained why he’d been drawn to Rachel from the beginning. Or at least it might be part of the reason. “You remember your parents that well?” he asked.

  “What child doesn’t?” Her tone was bitter.

  “I don’t recall much about mine except they laughed a lot.”

  They were both silent for a time. “You know quite a bit about the Native Americans who lived in this area,” he said finally.

  “They still do, though not around Ojibway. In school, I teach my students there were others living here before us who had different customs, but were also very much like us in many ways. To do that I’ve had to research the Chippewa—who called themselves Ainishinabe. Chippewa and Ojibway were enemies’ names for them.”

  “Everybody has enemies, must be a human trait.” He looked at her. “Like making love.”

  Her fair skin flushed, making him smile. Rachel was like no other woman.

  “What do you think would interrupt us this time?” he asked. “A voice on the wind?”

  “Saying we’d forgotten something?” she asked.

  His smile faded. He had forgotten something. He’d forgotten how Yolanda had betrayed him. Deliberately and in cold blood. How was it he’d come to trust Rachel so completely when he’d known her for such a short time? After all, she was connected with Leo Saari, who might be connected with Renee’s disappearance. She was part of the case.

  “Now you’re frowning again,” Rachel murmured.

  “Tell me about Leo,” he said. “Did he ever give you the impression he was interested in young girls?”

  Rachel sat up, hugging her knees, and flashed him an indignant look. “As a teacher he was interested in all his students, but if you’re asking me if there was anything abnormal in that interest you couldn’t be more wrong.”

  He sat up, too. “I’m trying to find a reason he might have abducted Renee.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Mikel shrugged. “If I knew, I’d be that much closer to finding out what happened to her.”

  “What if you never discover the truth?”

  “I will eventually. I always do.”

  Rachel controlled her inward shudder at his words. She believed them. Mikel was the kind of man who carried things through, whether it was planting trees with a bunch of Girl Scouts—or hunting down a lost girl. Why did he have to be a hunter? Why couldn’t he just be the right man for her? Which would never happen. Could never happen.

  “You have eyes like a wolf,” she muttered.

  “I thought theirs were yellow, not green.”

  “It’s the look, not the color, I mean.”

  “I agree eye color is distinctive,” he said. “That’s why it’s hard to understand why Renee Reynaud wasn’t spotted anywhere in the area after she disappeared—very few people have red hair and amber eyes. I don’t want to believe she’s dead, so the other alternative is that she was whisked out of the city almost immediately.”

  “You don’t believe she’s dead?” Rachel echoed.

  He shook his head. “I’m acting on a hunch, really. One that brought me here.”

  He reached over and tugged one of her hands from where it was wrapped around her knees. Holding it in his, he added, “Here, where you are, someone I never expected to meet.”

  The way he looked at her made her insides melt. If he pulled her into his arms she wouldn’t be able to resist him. Instead he rose and helped her to her feet.

  “Let’s go look for the cedar and the birch,” he said.

  Rachel had searched the small islet for them before without success. She was about to say so when she had her own hunch. Together, they were meant to find those two trees.

  The rocks made the island difficult to walk around on, especially in bare feet. But Mikel, as though following a marked trail, brought them quickly to a tall cedar with a good-size white birch close beside it. “Voilà,” he said. “The lovers united.”

  As she gazed at the two trees, without willing it, Rachel’s free hand came to rest over her heart. She turned to look at Mikel and found him staring at her. Without a word, he gathered her to him and kissed her, a different kiss than before, one that seemed to hold a promise. Or was it a vow? Before she lost herself in the kiss, her last thought was that she was developing an overactive imagination.

  She couldn’t be sure how long their embrace lasted, all she knew was that it ended too soon. He let her go, stepped back and said, “It’s time we swam back to the boat.”

  Which it was. Though still tingling from the kiss, for some reason she did not want to make love on this island, especially not at this spot.

  Back at the boat, they toweled and dressed as fast as they could, taking turns below deck. Sonia poured them each a cup of hot cocoa from a thermos, which warmed them quickly.

  “Reminds me of coming home from the ice rink during a New York winter,” Mikel said. “You always had cocoa waiting. And molasses cookies.”

  “No cookies until after the pasties,” Sonia told him. “How was the island?”

  To Rachel’s surprise, he replied, “Spirits live there.”

  “Of course.” Sonia spoke matter-of-factly. “Islands are magical places.”

  Rachel thought of the cedar and the birch growing beside each other and decided if she had to choose whether or not it was coincidence, she’d choose to believe it wasn’t.

  They ate the pasties, still warm from the thermal packing, drank more cocoa and made a dent in the cookies.

  “Guess I’ll keep you around even if you do nag me near to death,” Aino told Sonia. “You got a way with molasses, that you have.”

  When they got back to the farm, Metsa was ecstatic, trying to greet them all at once. “I see I got to teach you some manners,” Aino told the dog. “I can tell your last owner didn’t bother.”

  “Poor thing, she must have thought we’d deserted her, too,” Sonia said, patting Metsa’s head.

  “I thought you didn’t much care for dogs,” Mikel said.

  “In the city, no,” Sonia told him. “Dogs belong where they have lots of room to run. This is a good place for dogs.” She glanced at Aino and said, “I like it here.”

  He looked at her and Rachel thought she saw something pass between them, but it was gone
so fast she wasn’t sure. Aino and Sonia? She shook her head. Must have been that overactive imagination she’d acquired of late.

  That night she went to bed and, despite her escalating worry about what might happen if she grew any more involved with Mikel, slept well.

  Mikel, though, when he fell asleep, had his recurring Yolanda nightmare, only this time the woman in the dream had Rachel’s face. When he woke, heart pounding, he flung on some clothes and left the cottage in the chill of early morning to walk off the remnants of the dream.

  Almost immediately, Metsa, who slept on a rug on the back porch, caught up with him and couldn’t be persuaded not to follow. In deference to her injured paw, he sat on Aino’s lounge chair in the backyard.

  “What do you think?” he asked the dog, who was at his feet. “I don’t take much stock in dreams. Maybe they mean something, maybe not.”

  Metsa moved closer, until she was actually sitting on his feet.

  “Trying to console me, are you?” he asked. “That’s not really what I need.”

  He knew damn well what he needed. To hell with dreams. He needed to get Rachel out of his head. By making love to her? Might be one way to start. Never in his life, since Yolanda, had he ever stuck with one woman for very long.

  Metsa licked his hand.

  “Much as I like you, that goes for you, too,” he told her.

  Chapter Ten

  At breakfast, Rachel asked Aino if he wanted her along for the visit to his doctor.

  “Sonia’s all I need,” he told her. “She can tell Doc how I’m doing with the PT—that’s what it’s called, or so I hear from my expert.” He grinned at Sonia.

  “You don’t mind?” Rachel asked Sonia.

  “I wouldn’t trust this pigheaded man to go without me. He’d probably try to convince the doctor he could dance on the rooftop.”

  “Now, that’s a dang fool thing for you to say,” Aino protested. “What man in his right mind would want to dance on a roof?”

  “You know very well what I mean,” she snapped. “You’re always trying to push the envelope, like they say today.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Listen to her. Sounds like a dang TV commercial.”