Her Mysterious Houseguest

by Jane Toombs

  As Sonia had said, “I know, and soon he will. It cannot be hidden any longer.”

  The problem was, Rachel still didn’t know how to begin. Still, she’d made a start by removing the contacts. Taking a deep breath, she gathered what courage she could muster up and started downstairs.

  She hadn’t reached the bottom before the front door opened and Eva breezed in. Crying her name, Rachel flew down the rest of the steps and hugged her.

  “How did you get here so quick?” she asked when they drew apart.

  “I decided you needed me, so I flew. My friend will drive my car back here from New York in a week or so. She has vacation time coming. I got a lift to Ojibway from Ironwood with the newspaper distributor.” Eva blinked at Rachel. “You forgot to put in—” She broke off, staring over Rachel’s shoulder.

  Rachel turned and saw Mikel standing in the entry hall. She swallowed and forced herself to speak. “This is Eva,” she said to him. “Eva, meet Mikel Starzov.”

  Eva scowled at him, barely managing a nod.

  “Hello, Eva,” he said. “We meet at last.” Half-smiling, he added, “As I can see, the pleasure is all mine.”

  He hadn’t yet looked directly at Rachel. She braced herself, knowing sooner or later he would.

  Sonia appeared in the hallway. “You must be Eva,” she said, brushing past Mikel. “I’m Sonia—we spoke on the phone.” Turning, she said to Mikel, “You might bring her bags upstairs.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll do that myself.” Eva’s tone just missed being hostile.

  “Whatever,” Sonia continued, apparently unruffled. “In any case, I expect you’ll want to freshen up before breakfast.”

  “I—” Eva began, stopping when Sonia help up a hand.

  “Your grandfather will look forward to having breakfast with you,” she said firmly. “I’ll expect you downstairs in about fifteen minutes.” Her determined smile took in both Eva and Rachel before she turned and retraced her steps down the hall, snagging Mikel on the way. He had time for one last look at Rachel, meeting her gaze before Sonia forced him into the kitchen with her.

  “Tawny,” he muttered, shaken. “Not brown. Her eyes are tawny.”

  “Well, of course,” Sonia said. “For a special agent you took an amazingly long time to understand who she is.”

  He blinked at her in confusion, still struggling with the truth. “You knew?”

  Sonia shrugged. “After I saw that photo you had of her sister, I suspected. When she smiles, there’s a definite family resemblance to Victoria. Hair and eyes are easy to alter these days, but bone structure is not.”

  “Not Rachel,” he muttered, still unable to come to terms with the truth. “She’s Renee.” As he spoke, it hit him. He’d been betrayed. Again.

  “I rather think she may prefer to be called Rachel, since the name has been hers so long.”

  With an impatient gesture, he snapped, “What difference does that make? She’s lied to me from the beginning.”

  “Why do you think?” Sonia asked.

  “Who cares? Lies are lies.”

  “Did you ever come right out and tell her that her sister Victoria wanted to find her?”

  He thought back. “No.”

  “So there’s your reason. Something very bad must have driven the child Renee to leave home. Don’t you think you should wait and find out what that was before you condemn her?”

  Gripped by the grief and anger of betrayal, he shrugged, conveying his utter disinterest in any possible reason why.

  “No person in this world is perfect,” Sonia said. “Certainly you’re not. Why should you expect perfection in others, then? I tell you she was hurt as a child and carries that pain with her yet. Because of whatever happened in the past, she was afraid to have her identity revealed.”

  Mikel remembered Renee’s mother telling him of the one phone call home the girl made after she disappeared, her father grabbing the phone away and threatening her. Okay, maybe she’d been afraid of him then, but she was no longer a child. How could Sonia expect him to be able to forgive Rachel for her lies to him?

  “If it were possible to shake some sense into you, I’d surely try,” Sonia told him. “Have you no heart? No soul? It’s too bad that agency you work for didn’t include understanding in those courses they taught you.”

  Aino walked into the kitchen, looked from one to the other of them and said, “Whatever she’s trying to tell you, my advice is to listen, boy.”

  Up to there in unasked-for, unwanted advice, Mikel curbed his tongue, managed a brief nod that took them both in, stomped from the house to his car and took off.

  He paid no attention to where he was going, because it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. How could he have been such a fool as to let another woman betray him? This time, despite the fact he was in no danger, the hurt cut deeper, down to the quick. His chest fell heavy, it was hard to breathe.

  He pounded the steering with his fist. Damn the woman! What she’d done was unforgivable.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The cinnamon roll Mikel ate with his coffee at Sylvia’s had no taste. Knowing it was his mood, rather than her baking, didn’t help.

  “Heavens, you look mad enough to spit nails,” Dottie told him as she refilled his cup. He noted absently that she wore glasses today. “Something go wrong?”

  “No!” he snapped.

  She raised her eyebrows and left him alone after that.

  When he came out of the café, the clouds covering the sky had begun to spit cold rain, which did nothing to improve his temper. He eyed the pay phone down the street and shook his head. No, it’d be premature to call Steve and Victoria. Confirmation from the guilty party would be his proof; he needed that before letting them know the lost had been found. Which meant he must go back to the farm for a formal confrontation with the entire crew—Aino, Eva and Rachel, who wasn’t Rachel at all.

  He should be looking forward to it. After all, his case was solved. Why, then, should depression be mixed with his righteous anger?

  Back at the farm, he found everyone, including his grandmother, seated in the living room, waiting. He could have cut the hostility with a knife. Standing, he cleared his throat as he eyed them one by one.

  “Among other recent revelations,” he said, “I know the Reynaud Colt .45 is stored in the attic. Care to tell me how all this came about?”

  Aino opened his mouth, but Rachel spoke first. “I want you to know that Leo Saari was not to blame for anything. Leo was a wonderful man who risked his reputation as well as his professional career to rescue me on that horrible night. If he hadn’t, I doubt if I’d be alive now.”

  She paused and he tried not to look directly at her. Gone were the soft brown eyes; somehow her steady tawny gaze disturbed him.

  “My father was an abusive alcoholic,” Rachel continued. “By his order, my sister and I weren’t allowed to be out of the house without my mother with us, except to go to school. I don’t know what he thought could happen to us that would be any more awful than the way he terrorized us when he was at home. Fortunately he was gone a lot. When Leo Saari asked me if I could baby-sit his daughter while he took her mother to the clinic for her treatments—” she glanced at Eva “—I knew my father would never agree, so I begged my mother to help cover up for me.”

  “She told me that,” Mikel said. “You used to wait at the corner grocery by your house for Leo to drop Eva off.”

  “Yes. It was always during the day, and we used to go up a block and across the street to a park where lots of kids played. Mothers brought toddlers there, too. It was perfectly safe. Leo would come by there and pick Eva up on his way back from the clinic. He was almost never gone more than two hours, and since my father was never home in the afternoons, he didn’t have a chance to find out what I was doing.”

  “Your mother and sister told me how your father sometimes threatened all of you with the Colt,” Mikel said.

  “We never knew whether it was loaded or
not,” Rachel said in a tight voice. “Never knew if we were going to live or die.”

  Mikel tried to ignore the pang he felt for the terrorized child she must have been. No wonder she hated guns. Scum like Reynaud didn’t deserve to live.

  “That last day my father didn’t come and pick me up as soon as he usually did,” Eva continued, glaring at Mikel. “It wasn’t his fault. My mother had a reaction to the chemotherapy and that delayed him. I don’t see why you’re picking on Rachel, anyway. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Please, Eva, I’ll handle this,” Rachel said in what Mikel recognized as her “teacher” voice. “None of us—Leo, Eva nor I—knew that, as the day darkened, those who frequented the park changed from mothers and children to drug dealers and their customers. When I noticed what I thought of as bad guys wandering into the park I got scared. Much as I wanted to take Eva home with me, I was afraid to, because of my father. Besides, Leo wouldn’t know where we were.”

  “When it got really dark, we hid in the bushes up by the road,” Eva explained, making him decide she was the irrepressible type. “I started to cry, but Rachel put her arms around me and told me we’d be okay, that my dad would be along soon. She was so brave. But then—” her voice quavered as though she were reliving her fright “—then it happened.”

  Rachel picked up the story. “We heard a loud crack—a gunshot we realized later—and then footsteps pounded toward where we were hiding. I panicked, thinking we’d been seen, grabbed Eva’s hand and, telling her to run, pulled her with me into the open. To my horror a man called my name and I—I recognized my father’s voice.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I kept running but looked back and there he was coming after us.”

  “I saw him but didn’t know who he was,” Eva said. “Rachel didn’t notice another bad guy running toward us from another direction and I was too scared to tell her. I don’t exactly know what happened next.”

  “My father ran into the other man—that’s the first I saw there was another man,” Rachel said. “I froze in terror. When they collided my father dropped his gun and it fell right at my feet. That startled me enough so I could move again. All I could think of was that if he didn’t have the gun, he couldn’t shoot us, so I grabbed it up and ran on with Eva.”

  “My dad had just pulled up to the curb,” Eva said. “We scrambled into the back seat. Rachel burst into tears and I screamed, ‘Bad guys are after us!’”

  “I’m sure poor Leo didn’t know what to do when I begged him not to take me home because my father would kill me,” Rachel said. “What he did was drive to his house, where he finally got a more-or-less coherent story from me. I handed him the gun and I remember him sniffing the barrel. Apparently he could tell it had been recently fired because he swung into action.”

  Eva broke in again. “He knew my mother was dying, our camper was already packed to leave for Michigan because she wanted to die at home there. So he carried her into a bed in the camper and told Renee and me to get inside, too. He asked her to put me to bed and to keep an eye on my mother. Then he hooked the car to the back of the camper and drove off.”

  After a silence, Aino began his part of the story. “Leo called me from the Soo, just after he’d crossed over into the U.P. from Canada, and explained the problem. By then he’d figured out what to do. I had an elderly cousin in Seney and Leo dropped Rachel off there temporarily. He’d already dyed her hair black to hide that noticeable red, and so, when my cousin brought her here to the farm the next day she was a brunette. Leo delayed his arrival until the following day.”

  “My brown contacts came later,” Rachel added.

  “How about the Rachel Hill birth certificate?” Mikel asked, his head reeling from what he’d heard. He didn’t doubt it was the truth, not when he’d watched both Rachel and Eva reliving the terror of that fateful night.

  “Fourteen years before, my Seney cousin had a granddaughter who’d died giving birth to a baby girl.” Aino told him. “The child didn’t live more than a month or two, and knowing we’d need some identity for this poor girl Leo had rescued, he brought the baby’s birth certificate with him. Her name was Rachel Hill.”

  Rachel stood up and faced Mikel defiantly. “So now you can tell my father you’ve found me. I’m ready to face him.”

  Mikel gritted his teeth, finally and very belatedly understanding why she’d been afraid to tell him who she really was. “Your father died some years ago,” he said gruffly. “Your sister Victoria is the one who wanted me to find you.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, murmured “Victoria,” and burst into tears.

  Without thinking, he started toward her, meaning to comfort her, but Eva reached her first. She put her arms around the sobbing Rachel and scowled at Mikel. “Why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell her that in the first place?” she demanded.

  “Eva,” Aino said. “He ain’t such a bad fella. Misguided, is all.”

  “Stubborn and closemouthed, too,” Sonia added. “Always has been.”

  Feeling very much like the odd man out and desperately needing to be alone to sort out his thoughts, Mikel turned away from them all and strode from the room. In the cottage, he gathered his belongings and packed the car, with Metsa doing her best to trip him. He paused before sliding into the driver’s seat to reach down and rub her behind the ears.

  “You’re the only one who regrets my leaving,” he told her. “I’ll miss you, but you can’t come along. This farm is the place for you, it’s your home. You don’t belong with a man who has no real home.” It was the truth—all his various apartments over the years had never been more than places to sleep in when he wasn’t away somewhere on a case.

  As he drove away in the rain, he glanced in the rearview mirror at the black barn and sighed. Rachel and his coming together in the loft had been an interlude he’d never forget. While he did need to be alone, at the moment he felt more alone than he ever had in his life.

  Once Rachel had shed all the tears accumulated through the years, she let Eva talk her into resting and fell into a deep sleep. When she woke, the dimness beyond her windows told her it was still raining and also that it was getting on for evening. She sat up, feeling drained.

  As though she’d been waiting for the slightest sound from Rachel’s bedroom, Eva popped through the door. “How do you feel?” she asked, sitting on the bed.

  “I’m all right.”

  “What a cruel man,” Eva said. “How did you stand him?”

  “Mikel’s not cruel.”

  Eva snorted in disbelief. “At least he had the sense to cut and run, I’ll grant him that.”

  Rachel stared at her. “Mikel’s gone?”

  “Bag and baggage. And good riddance.”

  He’d left without a word. Left her without even saying goodbye. Rachel sighed. What had she expected?

  Eyeing her narrowly, Eva said, “Don’t tell me you’re sorry.”

  Rachel tried for a smile. “All right, I won’t.”

  “Good. For a minute there you had me worried you might have fallen for him. I should know you’ve got better sense than that.”

  Because Eva was younger than she and also because, being older, she’d had to assume a mothering role, Rachel had never completely confided in her and knew she couldn’t now.

  “It’s more than I can say for grandfather,” Eva added. “I can tell he’s sliding off the deep end over Sonia. I wonder about that. She’s a bit tart-tongued, isn’t she?”

  Correctly interpreting this, Rachel said, “Scolded you, did she?”

  Eva shrugged. “I momentarily forgot she was Mikel’s grandmother. She didn’t take kindly to my comments about him.”

  “I don’t, either, you know. You’re entitled to your opinion, but it’s not the same as mine.”

  “Whoa. Maybe you’re not as sensible as I thought. You couldn’t have let that rat seduce you!”

  Instead of a refutation, Rachel said, “Hunters have their own fascination.
”

  “Hunter. Yes, I’ll grant he is that.”

  “Did you know Mikel saved Aino from a far more serious stroke? He might even have died.”

  “Grandfather mentioned that.” Eva’s tone was begrudging.

  Rachel slid her legs over the edge of the bed and gave Eva a quick hug before getting up. “I know why you want to blame Mikel. Even as a child you were quick to defend those you thought were helpless as well as those you loved. I hope I qualify as a loved one, but I’m not helpless.”

  “He got past your defenses, didn’t he?”

  “What defenses?”

  Eva rolled her eyes. “Come on, you’ve been fending off men for years. I’m not exactly stupid, you know. I understood why.”

  Refusing to deal with that right now, Rachel looked in the mirror and grimaced. “I look like something even Metsa would refuse to acknowledge as human.”

  “Where on earth did that dog come from, anyway?”

  “You won’t like to hear that it was Mikel who rescued her from a trap. Her paw was injured, that’s why she limps.” Turning to face Eva, she added, “In a strange way, he rescued me, too. I intend to get my hair cut and let it grow out to its natural color. No more hiding.”

  “I guess I can get used to you with red hair again. Just don’t expect me to go back to calling you Renee.”

  “As Rachel I’ve had the chance to live and thrive. Poor Renee would never have gotten that chance, so I’ll always be Rachel.” She sighed. “I can’t be sorry my father is dead.”

  Eva gave an exaggerated shiver. “Me, neither. I sure remember the nightmares I used to have about that awful night.”

  Later, when they were in the kitchen helping Sonia fix supper, Rachel said to her, “I hope you won’t feel you have to leave because Mikel’s gone. I don’t know what Aino would do without you.”

  Sonia smiled. “We do get on well, Aino and I. As for Mikel, once he was grown, he went his way and I mine. In his way he loves me, but I know I try his patience sometimes. Partly because I won’t let him forget he’s not perfect, mind you. Where he works, they call him Nemesis, you know. He didn’t tell me, but I have my own secret ways. I heard his friend Steve call him by that name.”