“Oh, for crying out loud!”
The words burst from Nona as she turned her Ford into the drive in front of her cabin. For the second time in the last three days, the man who was staying in cabin number two had parked his pickup in her drive and she couldn’t squeeze past it.
“Some people have a lot of nerve,” she muttered angrily. She pressed her hand down on the horn and held it there. The horn’s blaring bounced off the buildings and over the lake. Nona hoped it sounded as belligerent as she felt.
“Nona! Chill out!” Maggie shouted as she came down the steps of their cabin and knocked on the window of the passenger’s side.
Nona let up on the horn, leaned over the seat, and rolled down the window.
“He isn’t here,” Maggie yelled over the knocks and ticks of the idling engine. “He took his dog and went off into the woods.”
“Not here?” Stress lines formed between Nona’s eyes and the corners of her mouth, turned down in a frown. “Well then, I’ll just park behind him and see how he likes it.”
Maggie stood by the car with her hands on her bony hips. At fourteen, she was a pencil-straight girl with light brown hair who had just begun to emerge from her childish awkwardness. While she and her sister were both slim, Maggie was already taller than Nona, who was twelve years her senior. Maggie’s legs seemed endless, and her blue eyes shone large in her perky, freckled face. She wore blue jeans and a faded T-shirt. Not at all shy, she had an openness that was a large part of her charm. She made a frown of her own as she watched her sister park directly behind the truck, then get out of the Ford.
“Take a pill, Nona. Why are you so mad? You’d think this is the only parking place in the whole world.”
“I’m not mad . . . just exasperated.” She was still shaken from her encounter with the man at the store and on the road. “Ours is the manager’s cabin, number one,” she explained impatiently. “This is our drive. He has his own drive. It’s simple. Why does he insist on parking on this side of his cabin?”
“Seems to me you’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” Maggie retorted with a shrug. She gathered up one of the bags of groceries and leapt up the steps like a young colt.
Nona edged through the front door that Maggie held open, dumped her large sack on the table, and sighed. A thin woman in slacks and a sleeveless shirt stood in front of the sink peeling potatoes. She turned and smiled at the two girls, her high cheekbones rosy with rouge, a cigarette hanging from her bright red lips.
Four years earlier, when Nona and Maggie moved into an apartment after the death of their parents, Mabel Rogers, a widow, had been their neighbor. A woman who had no family of her own, she had taken the two girls to her heart. Mabel had volunteered to care for Maggie while Nona was at work, a blessing to both the sisters. They loved her dearly. She had been “Aunt Mabel” to Maggie since they’d met. When Nona had taken the job of managing the camp, it seemed only natural that Mabel would come with them.
“Hi, Mabel,” Nona said.
“Is something wrong, dear?” Mabel asked with concern. “Why were you honking the horn?”
“She’s having a fit, Aunt Mabel.”
“A what?” Mabel asked, wrinkling her brow.
“You know. Losing her cool.”
“I am not!” Nona said nothing about what had happened in town and on the road to the camp. There was no point in worrying Mabel and Maggie. “There’s the whole out-of-doors for him to park in, yet he insists on putting that pickup in our drive!”
“He’s really very nice,” Mabel said. “Handsome, too,” she added, with a wink at Maggie. Pushing a strand of henna-colored hair behind her ears, she began unloading the sacks of groceries.
“This one is Mrs. Leasure’s,” Nona said. “I’ll have Maggie take it down to her.”
Once everything had been placed on the table, Maggie wailed, “Nona! You didn’t get my Seventeen magazine!”
“I had to choose between a magazine and raisin bran. The bran won. Our grocery dollars will only stretch so far, you know. When I think of how fast our money is going, I get panicky.”
“Did you call Little Rock again?” Mabel asked.
Nona was reluctant to place a long distance call on the camp telephone. “I tried to call while I was in town, but they said Harold was out to lunch.”
“That’s a heck of a note,” Mabel mused as she carefully folded the empty sacks.
“I think it was a lie. He just didn’t want to talk to me.”
“Did you try to call the man who hired you?”
“No.”
“We’ve been here for several weeks and haven’t heard a word from the owner of the camp. Isn’t that a bit strange?”
“I suppose so,” Nona admitted. “I send everything we take in, plus the bills, to the accountant. Unless we get more bookings in a hurry, there’ll be only the bills to send. To make matters worse, the pump on the well is acting up again. It’ll cost a mint to have someone out here to fix it.”
As she took a load of groceries over to the cupboard, Nona stumbled over a big dog stretched out on the kitchen floor. The mutt with the yellow coat looked up from where he lay, and then plopped his head back down onto the wooden floor. “Maggie! What’s Sam Houston doing in here? I’ve told you time after time to leave him outside. He gets hair all over the place.”
“Sam Houston doesn’t like the dog next door.”
“That’s because he’s a coward! It’s time he decided if he’s a dog or a pussycat,” Nona declared.
“He’s no coward.”
Nona knew that Maggie regarded her complaints with the usual teenage tolerance for adult’s irritations, but she couldn’t help insisting on what was right. The mass of red hair curled around Nona’s face, and little tendrils of it clung to her cheeks and forehead. She blew the bangs away from her forehead and decided that rather than argue with Maggie, she would take Sam Houston and go outside.
“Come on, you mangy hound.”
“You’re gonna hurt Sam Houston’s feelings, calling him that.”
“I should call him a hairy, worthless, mangy hound.”
Following Nona through the kitchen and out the back door, Sam Houston lumbered down the steps and eased himself into a cool spot of shade at the base of the porch. Nona sat down on the steps, rested her chin in her hand, and let her mind drift. She found herself back in Home, the strange man’s hand on her arm. Inwardly, she shivered. Most of the men she had encountered since coming to the camp had been polite and rather bashful. This man had been quite different.
The loud blast from a car horn startled her, but then a secretive smile curled on her lips. The man in the next cabin was back and wanted to move his truck. Not much fun is it, buster? she thought. She went back into the kitchen and peeked out the window. A tall, well-muscled man in faded jeans and an old plaid work shirt was standing beside his truck, his hand firmly pressing on the truck’s horn.
“Nona! Do something!” Maggie wailed.
“Not yet,” Nona replied with a grin. “Let him stew for a while.”
At a loud knock on the door, her smile widened. She stayed in the kitchen while Maggie opened the door.
Chapter 2
TELL YOUR SISTER TO MOVE HER CAR. Better yet, call her to the door and I’ll tell her myself.” The deep masculine voice reached into the kitchen, where Nona stood at the sink and stared out the window into the thick woods surrounding the camp. The voice sounded angry.
“I’m busy right now. I’ll be out in a minute,” Nona called. A bright little devil with a pitchfork in his hand danced before her eyes, and her lips tilted at the corners. The man in cabin number two knew he had parked his pickup in her spot. It would do him good to wait a bit.
“She’d better move it now, unless she wants it run over by a moving van.”
The booming words jerked the smile from Nona’s face. What in the world was he talking about? She went quickly to the door, flung open the screen, and stepped outside.
&n
bsp; “A moving van?”
“Yeah. A big truck that’s used to haul furniture,” he said as if explaining it to a toddler.
Nona folded her arms over her chest and stared at the man with a mixture of exasperation and confusion. Her blue eyes were analytical as they roved over his not-quite-handsome face and light brown hair. She’d only ever viewed him from afar; Mabel had checked him in when he arrived. He’d said his name was S. T. Wright. This was the first time she had seen him up close.
“Look here,” she began, deciding that they needed to come to an understanding. “The cabin is furnished. You knew that when you rented it. If you want to bring in some of your own things, that’s your business, but you’ll have to store the furniture that we provided. We don’t have the facilities to store it here.”
“I’ve no intention of storing that stuff,” he responded. “It wouldn’t even make good firewood. Then again,” he pondered, rubbing his hand along his stubbly chin, “maybe it would.” Smile lines bracketed his wide mouth and his green eyes glinted as he assessed her.
“Burn it?” she gasped. “I’ll call the owner and have you arrested!”
“You won’t need to call very loud.” The man grinned. “I’m not deaf.”
Nona stiffened visibly. She opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t force any words to come out. “Wha—” she finally managed.
“I’m the owner.”
“You’re the owner?” Shock flooded through Nona’s body as she took in the full import of his words. This was the owner? This was her boss for the summer? Color came up her neck and flushed her face.
“The one and only.”
“I’ll need some proof of that. Mabel said your name was S. T. Wright. If you’re the owner, why didn’t you say so when you checked in?” Chin up, her body taut, Nona was mindful of the thudding in her chest and the pounding in her head. Mustering the remaining fragments of her self-possession, she locked her blue eyes to his green ones and refused to look away. The way that he looked at her, amused and confident, irritated her.
“I didn’t lie. My name is Simon Thomas Wright and I didn’t know when I checked in if the owner had accepted my offer,” he replied. He appeared to be amused by her proprietary attitude.
Suddenly, the screen door banged open behind Nona. Maggie and Mabel nudged their way past her to stand on the porch. Nona knew they had been listening to every word.
“Holy cow!” Maggie exclaimed. “You really bought this run-down place? You got ripped off.”
“Hard to believe, I know.” Simon spoke to Maggie, but his eyes watched the conflicting emotions play across Nona’s face. “But yeah, I really did.”
“What the heck for?” Maggie asked with the unabashed frankness of youth. “This place is a dump. And besides, it’s way out in the middle of nowhere. Someone took you, but good, mister!”
“We’ll see, won’t we?” was his only answer. He spread his long, slim legs and hooked his hands in his hip pockets, evidently intending to offer no further explanation. He lifted a brow at Nona as if to ask if she had anything to add to Maggie’s assessments.
Nona looked directly at Simon for ten full seconds. She felt, suddenly, as if this man was not a stranger at all. There was something about him that nudged at her memory, teasing her. She tried to capture the elusive thought but couldn’t. Embarrassed at having drifted away from the conversation, she tried to regain her poise.
“What’s your dog’s name?” Maggie asked, glancing at the big black and brown dog at Simon’s heels.
“Cochise.”
“The Indian?”
“Yep. At first I was gonna call him Geronimo, but that was too long.”
Maggie’s eyes twinkled and she gave him one of her pixie grins. “I see what you mean. It would take a while to call, ‘Here Geronimo,’ ‘Here Geronimo.’”
“So I called him after my other Indian hero, Cochise.”
“Cool. Are you Indian?” Maggie asked, her eyes avoiding her sister’s.
“Back a few generations.”
Nona said to Maggie, “Don’t ask so many questions. Get my car keys, honey,” she said, trying to sound firm and in control.
Maggie was in and out of the house in record time. “Can I move the car?” she pleaded.
“If you’re careful. But then you’ve got to take Mrs. Leasure her groceries,” Nona murmured absently, her eyes lost in the man’s intense gaze. She was convinced that she had met him before, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember where. Her heart was thumping up a storm.
“She told me to call her LeAnn. Don’t be so old-fashioned, Nona,” Maggie answered.
Nona could see that Maggie was in one of her argumentative moods and decided that the best course of action was to ignore the question.
“I heard Maggie say you were having a fit. That I would like to see.” Simon lifted a brow and grinned. “Did something happen while you were in town?”
“Nothing that concerns you, Mr. Wright.”
“Anything that happens to one of the people who work for me is my concern.”
“The only thing that should concern you is how I do my job.”
Sensing the mounting tension in Nona’s voice, Mabel chimed in. “She’s been working her fingers to the bone cleaning the cabins, raking the yard, and washing curtains. I don’t think the cabins had been thoroughly cleaned in at least a year or two.”
“I don’t have any complaints about her work,” Simon said to Mabel. Nona was irritated by the way he was talking to Mabel while looking at her, his green eyes never leaving her face. “She’s done more than her share. Speaking of which, she’ll be getting help soon. I’m going to hire a handyman to help her.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“By the way, how long has the woman in number six been here?”
“Mrs. Leasure? Two weeks. Her rent is paid up for two more. Her husband had something to attend to somewhere, but she expects him back any day.”
“She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”
“Is that a crime?” Nona asked defensively.
“No. Only an observation,” Simon stated calmly. “If she’s out here by herself, how does she get groceries or things she needs?”
“When we go to the store, she gives us a list and we bring back what she needs.”
Maggie slid behind the wheel of the car and turned on the ignition. The motor sputtered, but refused to turn over. Frustrated, Maggie continued to push the key forward. A grinding sound came from the motor.
“For goodness’ sakes, Maggie,” Nona said, as she came down off the porch and approached the driver’s side window. “You’ll run down the battery.”
“I can’t help it. The darn thing won’t start.”
Before she could respond, Nona felt a hand on her elbow that gently, but firmly moved her aside. “Let me see what I can do.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?” Maggie asked as she got out of the car.
“I don’t think so,” Simon said with a wink. “These older cars can be stubborn sometimes.”
“It’s not so old,” Nona said defensively. “It’s probably newer than that old truck you’re driving.” She didn’t like the way Simon had moved her aside, and she didn’t like his know-it-all attitude. “It’s only ten years old.”
“I suppose you bought it from an old lady who let it sit in the garage for five of those years?” He grinned, stepping back to point at the dents in the fender and the door. Something about that grin set her teeth on edge.
With a wink, Simon got in the driver’s seat. As soon as he turned the key, the motor sputtered once, then caught and purred like a contented kitten.
Damn you, car! Nona fumed. It’ll be a cold day in July before I wash you again!
“Back in you go, kid,” Simon said as he got out of the car and held the door open for Maggie. The younger girl grinned back up at him with a look that was nearly conspiratorial, as if the two of them had set out to embarrass Nona.
“
Be careful,” Nona called. “Back up carefully.”
“Where will I park?”
“Park out front.”
Before Maggie could move an inch, Simon contradicted Nona. “Don’t do that. Go down and park in the drive of the last cabin.”
“She can’t drive that far,” Nona said hurriedly. “She hasn’t taken Drivers Ed yet.”
“Then someone should give her a lesson or two before she goes to Drivers Ed.” Simon smiled. He pulled open the passenger’s side door and got into the car.
Nona paced back and forth across the kitchen floor. Maggie and Simon had been gone for over thirty minutes. From time to time she glanced out the window for some sign of the Ford.
“Damn him,” she said irritably.
“She’ll be all right,” Mabel reassured her. “Simon won’t let her wreck the car.”
“Why did he have to be the owner of the camp?” Nona said with another quick glance outside. “Something about him is familiar. I don’t know what it is, but I have a feeling that I’ve seen him before.”
“He’s so handsome, I can’t imagine you could have forgotten him.”
Nona placed her hands on her hips and stared at the other woman. Giving the man a compliment offended her. “What are we going to do, Mabel? If he’s bringing furniture, he isn’t intending to leave soon. We won’t be much more than cleaners, and I doubt he’ll pay much for that.”
“Don’t borrow trouble, honey. We don’t know what he’ll want. Let’s just wait and see which way the wind blows.”
Their worries were interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps crossing the porch. A giggle from Maggie was followed by the response of a deep voice. Nona groaned. Maggie was bringing him into the house! With her back to the door, Nona busied herself by putting the clean dishes back in the cupboard.
Maggie burst into the room, a smile plastered across her face, and plucked an apple out of a dish on the table. “Simon said I’m going to be a good driver. I just need a little more practice. He’s going to let me drive his truck.”
On Tall Pine Lake Page 2