by Liz Flaherty
“So,” he said, “where do you come from, Lucy Dolan? And what do you want?”
She relaxed. Straight-out nosiness was much easier to deal with than suspicious glares. Kelly Brennan had treated her as though she were a criminal for so long—from the first time they met—she’d almost come to believe she was one. It wasn’t exactly a new feeling, but it wasn’t one she’d ever gotten used to.
“I come from Richmond, Virginia,” she began, “and I don’t want—” She stopped. It wasn’t true that she didn’t want anything, but she didn’t know how to explain. “I want a future,” she said finally. “A place to call my own, enough money to pay the utilities before the shutoff notice comes, my own kitchen with a window over the sink.” She smiled, caught up in the hope it was possible to feel in the middle of the night when the air was dark and soft and nothing seemed threatening. “A pickle jar full of dreams.”
“How do you know Crockett?”
“He used to come into our restaurant for lunch sometimes. He’s a nice man, a friend.”
“Why did he send you to Aunt Gert?” His voice remained quiet, even friendly, but the question was more challenge than query.
Enough light from the streetlamp showed her that what she was starting to think of as “the look” was back on his face, and she forced herself not to shrink away. She lifted her chin. “I’ve done nothing to earn your contempt, so I wish you’d stop treating me as though I’d just come in on the bottom of your shoe.”
His face cleared instantly. “I’m sorry.” He turned away, facing where the full moon glinted silver on the Twilight. “Aunt Gert’s been everything to Kelly and me. When our folks died, I was twelve and Kelly was ten and we were nobody’s prize—we came fully equipped with tree-limb size chips on our shoulders. But she just came in and took us without so much as a blink. She didn’t have to—our only connection was that she was married to our uncle—but she did it anyway. It’s our turn to take care of her.”
“I’m sure she appreciates that,” Lucy said primly.
His laughter was a whoop, subdued by a hand over his mouth. “She abso-damn-lutely does not,” he said. “She’d much prefer we just mind our own business the way she’ll say she taught us. But there are a lot of bad people out there who prey on old folks.”
Lucy recalled her family restaurant’s unrepaired roof, its faulty eaves troughs, the cleaning service that had charged higher prices but promised a year’s-end rebate that never materialized. She thought of the uniforms for the service personnel that had been ordered and paid for, but none, except the prototype, were ever received. She remembered her father’s confusion, his hurt that people would do such things deliberately, and her hand curved into a fist. She pounded the arm of her chair with quiet and unspoken vehemence, anger roiling helplessly through her veins.
“Yes,” she said, the bitterness flowing free through her voice, “there are. But I’m not one of them, Mr. Brennan.”
“Good.” His answer was instant, and he turned his head so their eyes met. “Why a tearoom?”
She shrugged. “It was what Gert wanted. I was going to try and get a job waiting tables at the café. It’s what I’ve done all my life and I think Jenny would have hired me. The next thing I knew, Gert was on her hands and knees measuring the rooms of the house. She sent me into every attic in town to find tables and chairs. She’d applied for the beer and wine license and the local permits before I realized she was really serious about this.”
“I just can’t figure out what the secrecy was all about,” he murmured. “I call her at least twice a week and email her nearly every day. She just visited me in Chicago three weeks ago. In all this time, she never mentioned you, a tearoom, or anything. Why not?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I had no idea you didn’t know, but she may have been concerned you’d react like your sister did.”
“How was that?”
“That’s telling tales out of school.” She shook her head, sorry she’d said anything. “Speaking of school, what made you become a cartoonist?”
He chuckled. “I’ve got a writer friend who about gags every time someone asks him what made him become a writer. He says no one in his right mind would be a writer if he could avoid it. He just was one and there was nothing he could do about it. Drawing cartoons is just the opposite.”
“Why’s that?” She tucked her hands into the pockets of her robe.
“Because you can be whatever you want to be through your characters.”
She thought of the protagonists in the comic strip signed “Brennan,” with a little stick figure drawn at the end of the name. It hadn’t taken her long to recognize “Elmer and Myrtle” when she came to Taft. “You want to be Sims and Gert?” she asked mildly.
He shot her a surprised frown. “Most people don’t catch on to that. It’s not as though Elmer and Myrtle resemble them, other than Myrtle’s Birkenstalks and Elmer’s bicycle cap. How did you know?”
“When Sims came to tow my van in the first day I got here, Gert was on the porch and he yelled up to her to order some flowers because any vehicle that had lived as long as she had—meaning Gert, not my car—deserved a nice funeral. She told him he should know, since he’d been old enough to vote at her christening.” Lucy tilted her head to face Boone. “It wasn’t the same dialogue, but it was surely the same speakers. Gert and Sims love each other in the same way that Elmer and Myrtle do. Then when I met Kelly, she was obviously Daphne, Elmer and Myrtle’s daughter, right down to her designer shoes.”
Boone winced. “I hope you didn’t tell her you recognized her. Kelly doesn’t care a lot for Daphne.”
Lucy raised a surprised eyebrow. “You don’t think so? I think she’s proud of her. Check out the wall in her office, the one across from her desk.”
“You’ve been in Kelly’s office?”
“Um. Gert sent me to pick up some papers.” She kept her voice even. “It’s a very nice office. I’m not overly excited about lawyers, but her surroundings put you at ease.” At least until she does that “get back to the gutter where you belong” thing with her eyes.
Lucy wasn’t sure, but she thought Boone saw her differently than his sister did. Not exactly trustfully, but not with total disdain, either.
Right now, he was frowning at her. “So what’s there?”
She must have missed something. “Huh?”
“What’s on the wall in Kelly’s office?”
Oh. She lifted her glass and drained her tea before getting up. “You’ll have to see for yourself.”
Chapter Three
“When I suggested you come here, this wasn’t quite what I envisioned.”
Lucy started to tell the owner of the large Nikes not to step on her freshly waxed floor, but the order stopped in her throat. “Crockett!” Delighted, she came to her bare feet to hug the tall man with curly dark hair and a smile framed by the deepest dimples she’d ever seen. “What are you doing here?”
“Came to check on you, of course.”
“Yeah, right. You knew I’d land on my feet, especially considering where you sent me. Gert Taylor wouldn’t allow anything less on her watch.”
Noah Crockett ruffled her hair and tapped the end of her nose. “And have you landed on your feet?”
“I think so. Gert’s wonderful, and I like Taft. The tearoom’s going like gangbusters. Gert even had to hire someone to mow the yard and work in the garden because we didn’t have enough time to do it all. A kid named Jack that I’ve decided to keep for a little brother—I never had one, you know.” Shadows darkened his blue eyes. The creases in his lean cheeks seemed deeper than they had only weeks ago. “You seem tired, my friend.”
“I am tired. That’s why I’m on vacation.” But there was more in his shadowy eyes than weariness. He seemed wired with a tension she’d never seen in him before.
Suddenly, it was as though all the light had gone out of the room, though the sun still shone brightly through the windows’ sparkling pan
es. Noah’s attention strayed to a point beyond her, and the tension in him became almost a palpable thing.
She knew before she turned that Boone stood there. In the days since his arrival, it was as though she’d sprouted antennae where he was concerned. The good part of that was that it made it easier to avoid him. The bad part was discovering she didn’t really want to. She liked rooms better when he was in them.
But this wasn’t the loose-limbed man she was coming to know. This Boone Brennan stood tall and taut and dangerous, his dark eyes nearly black and his generous mouth set in a straight, hard line.
She didn’t think she liked this Boone.
Crockett broke the noisy silence first. “Boone.”
“Crockett.”
“Lucy?” Gert’s voice preceded her. Walking with her head down, she bumped into Boone’s straight-as-a-board back, sending him slithering across the still-wet floor, his arms windmilling backward for balance. When he reached the portion of board that had not yet been waxed, his feet stopped abruptly, but his forward motion did not.
Crockett caught him before he fell, and for a moment the two big men stood suspended in an awkward embrace that would have been hilarious if there hadn’t been such a big cloud of tension in the room. They withdrew from each other’s touch, but still avoided eye contact like two little boys who had been ordered to apologize but didn’t know how.
“Thanks,” Boone muttered, and turned away.
“No problem.” Crockett’s eyes followed him for a few tortured seconds before he said briskly, “Hey, Aunt Gert, are you still going to run away with me when I grow up? I’ll carry your knapsack and everything.”
“Take a number,” Lucy suggested, her gaze following Boone as Crockett went to hug Gert, skirting the wet wax. “Would you all get on out of here now, so I can finish this floor before we open on Monday?”
Her arm tucked through Crockett’s, Gert led her nephew into the hallway. “Come into the kitchen. I’m baking pies and can’t stop in the middle. You can tell me what you’ve been doing.”
Lucy resumed waxing. Boone stood silent and moody by the window. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He nodded, and abruptly got to his knees beside her. “You got another cloth? I’ll help, since you have to redo where I went skating.”
They worked in silence for a few minutes, then Lucy said, “He’s your best cousin, isn’t he? And your best friend?”
“Cousins, no. Kelly’s and my uncle married his aunt when we were all little kids. All three of us used to visit for the same few weeks in the summer, so we sort of grew up together. Kelly and I came to live here when I was twelve and she was ten. A year or so later, Crockett’s folks got divorced and rather than do the Solomon thing of splitting him up, they let him go altogether and he came here too.” He stared into space, his lips lifted in a half smile. “Best friends? Once upon a time.” The words were clipped, and he rubbed doggedly at the wood floor. “Aunt Gert needs to polyurethane these suckers if she’s going to have everyone in town parading over them.”
“Sims has told some stories.” She didn’t want him to stop talking about the family they had been.
“I’ll just bet he has. Crockett and I both worked at the station when we were in high school. It’s amazing the business survived.” He reached the edge of the room and sat back on his heels. “We’d do our homework while we were there. Sims would check it when he came to close up. If it wasn’t done, he’d dock our wages. Pretty soon he got wise to the fact that I did Crockett’s English and he did my math. Then there was hell to pay.”
“What happened?”
He pushed himself to his feet, his knees cracking. “We both graduated—not exactly at the top of our class, but not in the ‘get ’em out of here, they’re beyond help’ category, either.”
She knelt before the fireplace, her gaze reaching up to meet his. “I mean, what happened with you and Crockett?”
He hesitated, pain settling into the planes of his face, darkening his eyes to the point she could scarcely distinguish the pupil from the iris.
“We both loved the same woman,” he said quietly, and left the room.
She was still kneeling motionless on the marble frontispiece of the fireplace when the front door opened.
“Aunt Gert?” Kelly called.
For a reason she couldn’t have begun to explain, Lucy wanted to stop Kelly’s advance, to warn her of Noah Crockett’s presence. But before any words could leave her mouth, Crockett stepped out of the kitchen. Kelly came to a dead stop at the bottom of the staircase, the color draining from her face. She clutched the newel post, her knuckles turning white. Panic trembled from every rigid line of her slender body.
“Kelly!” Lucy came to her feet and stepped gingerly across the floor. “You’re just in time to help me with…you know, with that thing we talked about. Come on up to my room.”
She grasped Kelly’s arm and pulled her along, chattering meaninglessly until they reached the second floor hallway. Opening the door to her room, she pushed the other woman inside. “Sit down,” she ordered. “I’ll get you some water.”
When Lucy came out of the small bathroom that adjoined her bedroom, Kelly was sitting on the edge of one of the chairs at the window, her gaze aimed toward the river. She accepted the glass Lucy offered. Finally, several sips later, she spoke.
“Isn’t it amazing how you can go for years existing on the same planet with someone and not see them even when they’re right in front of you? I’ve always been able to avoid him. When he visited Aunt Gert, I’d stay away. When he came to the weddings of mutual friends, I sat on the other side and pretended he wasn’t there. At Christmas or Thanksgiving, if he was here, we managed to be in separate rooms or at opposite ends of the table. Even at Maggie’s funeral, when Boone was depending on us both, I didn’t have to confront him.”
The suffering in her voice was so intense it seemed as though one should be able to touch it and push it aside. Having no idea how to do that, Lucy sat in the other chair and chewed at her thumbnail. Kelly was Gert’s dearly loved niece—far better for her to be angry than in this paralyzing pain. “I don’t know,” Lucy said. “Till recently, my future’s always been my problem, not my past.”
Kelly’s gaze met hers across the cloth-covered round table that sat between the chairs. The brown eyes, so like Boone’s, glittered with animosity. “Ah, yes, your mysterious past.”
Lucy thought it might be kind of fun to slap the scorn right off Kelly Brennan’s face, but that would be counter-productive. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” her father used to say. She knew and was used to Kelly’s disdain even though she’d never grasped the reason for it.
But the memory of that almost palpable pain remained, and Lucy sensed the stilted climate of their relationship was a little bit changed. Even the return of the familiar contempt was tempered by those moments of human frailty.
“My past isn’t a mystery,” Lucy said. “It’s way too much of an open book. I’m surprised you haven’t discovered that for yourself. Isn’t that what lawyers do?”
“Not when Gert Brennan’s their aunt, they don’t. They have to use an entirely different playbook.” For just a moment, humor gleamed on Kelly’s face, and the resemblance to Boone was uncanny.
Lucy hesitated. “You know, you could have just asked.”
“I did. I asked Aunt Gert. She said it was none of my business.”
The resentful tone in Kelly’s voice made Lucy want to laugh. She shook her head. “I meant you could have asked me.”
“No, I couldn’t. Aunt Gert wouldn’t let me. She gave me the look—you’ve seen that, haven’t you, where she sighs and rolls her eyes?—and told me to leave it alone. She said that people are entitled to their privacy and she didn’t pay all that money to send me to law school so I could be a two-bit snoop.”
Lucy couldn’t help it. The laughter burst free. She had been the recipient of “the look” herself, accompanied by h
ands on hips and Birkenstock-clad feet shoulders’ width apart.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Kelly’s glare. “Really I am. But did you know you and your brother both do the whole eye-roll and sigh thing as well as Gert does? I’m not naturally quiet, but when any of you puts your hands on your hips, I just shut up and go on about my business.”
A hint of a smile lit Kelly’s eyes, although her features didn’t relax an iota. “And what would that business be? Exactly what do you want from Aunt Gert?”
Boone’s voice came from the open door. “Good question. I couldn’t even have a piece of pie because Aunt Gert said it was ‘yours’—after she smacked me with a spatula. Exactly what is it you need an entire pie for?”
He slouched against the doorframe, arms folded loosely over his chest. Lucy’s heart tripped over itself in immediate response to his presence even as resentment rose into her throat.
She got up. “Well, there you have it. I’m going to get the pie analyzed so I can mass-market it. And don’t you know, she’s changed her will? I stand to inherit her entire wardrobe of Birkenstocks. Maybe the two of you can start drawing up whatever kind of document it is that contests wills.” She stalked out of the room, pushing past him, anger and hurt at war in her chest.
It wasn’t until she was in the parlor setting tables for Monday’s lunch that she wondered why Kelly had been so upset by Crockett’s arrival. And who was Maggie? Why had Kelly and Crockett been at her funeral and why had Boone depended on them?
*
Boone was waiting for her when she came out of the parsonage later that day. He leaned against the gate that led to River Walk—the cobblestone path that meandered beside the Twilight—and watched her approach.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” he asked.
Her glare took over her whole face. “Tell you what?”
He didn’t know how she could stare down her nose at him when he was so much taller than she was, but she managed. He sighed. “That the pie was for the church supper and the reason Aunt Gert said it was yours was that you’d baked it.”