“Only if Darlene is there, too. And Daisy can’t miss any classes. I don’t want to be responsible for her not going to college!”
“You let me worry about my kid and your shop,” Carole smiled. “You just focus on feeling better.”
“I’ll be good in the morning. I’ll get to the shop as soon as I can.”
“How are you going to get there?” Carole wondered, a gentle smile on her lips. “Don’t you remember what happened to your van?”
“Oh, criminy! How bad is it?”
“Walter says it will be in the shop for a while. Your insurance company will get you a rental, I’m sure.”
“I have to call them,” I muttered groggily, beginning to fade.
“First thing in the morning, Cady. You’ll have all day to take care of that. Now, just go to sleep.”
Carol sent Daisy home to watch after Dylan. She stayed in my guest room, checking on me from time to time. Even though she was still on the thin side after the last round of chemotherapy, her energy didn’t seem to flag. If anything, she seemed energized by the chance to play Florence Nightingale.
I spent much of the night tossing and turning, trying to find a comfortable position. My muscles really hurt. That’s the trouble with bracing yourself for a crash. I would have been better off not seeing that mailbox coming at me.
Just after seven, I opened my eyes and lay there for a few minutes, watching the changing sunlight play upon my bedroom wall. So many thoughts flooded my head, but the one thing that stood out for me was the green-eyed gnome. He was so different in responding to the emergency, showing genuine compassion, but that gruffness seemed to turn on and off with the ease of a light switch.
After fixing me some toast, yogurt, and coffee, Carole headed home to shower and get to the shop by eight. Lonnie, our neighbor at Soundings, had offered to drop her off on his way to work. Daisy ran into him on the sidewalk, roping him in as taxi driver for her mother. She was becoming a very resourceful young woman.
Darlene always started her shift at seven, opening Cady’s Cakes for the day, greeting the first customers as they trickled through the door in search of a coffee and pastry. She was an experienced hand, so I knew she could keep things copacetic with Carole, her enthusiastic, but untrained volunteer. Even if my friend only greeted people, she would be helpful. I just didn’t want Carole overdoing it.
Daisy stopped by on her way to school. She poured me a second cup of coffee.
“I’m really sorry about your van,” she repeated for the tenth time.
“You know what? I’m really sorry, too, Daisy. But it’s still not your fault. You did everything right. I’m glad you weren’t hurt.”
“You don’t look so hot, Cady,” she announced as she watched me make my way to the sofa. “You’re walking like my great-grandma.”
“Gee, is it that bad?” Gloria was going on eighty-five and was scheduled for hip replacement.
“It really is. Hey, Cady,” she continued, “that guy was pretty nice last night. I mean, he seemed kind of cranky when he came into the shop for coffee, but he was different when he was helping us.”
“He was,” I agreed.
“You should go out with him.”
“What?” That came out of left field and caught me unaware. “What are you talking about?”
“I think he likes you. You guys should date.”
“He used to be a medic, Daze. That’s like being an EMT in the military. His job was to take care of injured people”
“Oh.” I saw her process the information. But then she surprised me again. “I still think he likes you. He was looking at you like he cared.”
“Maybe he just likes blueberry muffins,” I suggested.
“Maybe he just likes you. Besides, it’s about time you started dating. Stephen’s not coming back, is he? Thank goodness. That guy was a loser. And stupid, too.”
“Don’t you have to get to school?” I asked, wagging my finger at her. She tossed her head back and laughed.
“I’m going, I’m going. See you.” She closed the door behind her, making sure it was locked.
Stephen. I hadn’t thought about him in weeks. Or was it days? I was finally at the point where I couldn’t remember. I must be healing. I must be almost over him.
As a man, he was attractive. Tall, with a mop of well-coiffed, slightly graying hair, he had the good looks of a classically rugged Hollywood heartthrob. His usual attire was a plaid shirt, jeans, and boat shoes. In the summer, the shirt was cotton madras. In the winter, it was cotton flannel. It made him look like he stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad. To complete the image last summer, Stephen replaced his ancient Mercedes with a 2010 Lincoln MKX.
As a human being, he was lacking in significant ways, something I learned over the six years we were together. Too many women found him charming. He used to hold court at Pages and Puzzles, his bookstore over on Main Street. As an independent bookseller, he was constantly competing with the big chains, so he expanded the shop in 2008 to include puzzles and collectible board games for sale. There was always a jade chess set sitting by the cashier’s desk, and several regulars stopped by to challenge him weekdays. Saturdays, he hosted a chess competition that brought players from as far away as New York.
He was also rather a savvy marketer, knowing his buyers and their preferences. That’s how he drew the ladies in, by offering cooking demonstrations with nationally known chefs and holding book talks with the divas of romance.
Just six months ago, he had invited Rachel Honeycutt to a Sunday gathering. The red-haired author of Flaming Passions, Burning Desires talked about how she set about to get what she wanted by never taking no for an answer. She followed that up by hitting on Stephen. He quickly succumbed, following her to New Mexico, leaving his assistant in charge of the bookstore. I guess that’s the benefit of inheriting a boatload of money from your uncle -- you can pursue your passions and indulge your whims without having to worry about your wallet or what you’re leaving behind. Once his uncle’s will passed through probate court, Stephen went from being a respected bookstore owner to being a dabbler in life. He threw together a charity, set himself as the administrator, formed a board of advisors, and then began to fund a variety of arts programs, which got a lot of free publicity for Paper and Puzzles. That only seemed to increase the number of women buzzing around him like flies on honey.
I’d come to the conclusion that Stephen really never was all that interested in me as a person. He liked the idea that I owned my own business, that I was a respectable member of the community, and that I didn’t demand that he give up his freedom. Looking back, it wasn’t that I didn’t want him all to myself. I just really wanted him to want me that way. And when Rachel came along, with her sexy book talk and her demands for physical pleasure, I realized that all Stephen was looking for was a comfortable bed and someone in it who wouldn’t tax his spirit by asking for anything other than sex.
Ironically, Stephen didn’t own a place of his own in Old Saybrook. He lived aboard his 42’ Meridian yacht at the marina in the warmer months, and when the chill of winter rolled around, he sailed his boat down to the Florida Keys for some deep sea fishing and a little scuba diving. He would periodically come back to town to attend to his shop, moving in with me on those visits. Lucky me. Every spring, as soon as the weather cleared and the last of the snow was gone, he brought the Wretched Wench back to Long Island Sound.
But things changed when Rachel Honeycutt came to Old Saybrook. She wasn’t looking for commitment. She was looking for pleasure, pure and simple. After he left for Taos in late autumn, in pursuit of the apparently irresistible redhead, I waited for him to come to his senses. His boat remained tied up at the dock until he hired a crew to move it down to Florida, where no doubt he and Rachel used it for their sex-capades. I, meanwhile, crawled back into my little hidey hole, dragging my wounded heart with me. I may have gotten back to my everyday life, but no longer saw romance in the cards for me. Six years of my life
had been wasted on a man incapable of having any kind of deep commitment. The irony of Stephen’s soulful journey to discover his true self wasn’t lost on me. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. You can’t squeeze much of anything from a stone. It is what it is, and in the end, Stephen was what he was, a man who could embrace big popular concepts and intellectualize just about everything on the planet, but was incapable of committing to a real relationship. He was surprisingly vacuous. When it came to self-reflection or appreciating what was good in his fellow humans, he was unable to see the details, living life in a fog of easy generalizations and vague ennui.
Stephen’s unceremonious dumping of me after six years for the racy novelist managed to turn me off romance, probably for good. That door was shut and locked tight. I wasn’t about to let some guy, even one with a passion for coffee, get me to open it again. Besides, the medic didn’t strike me as a man who trusted, let alone liked, women. Too gruff, too intense, too...tough. Impenetrable, with a heart that sat behind a set of heavy iron doors that barred the entry of a fortress. That way he had of speaking plainly hardly encouraged romantic thought. I certainly wasn’t in any danger of being swept off my feet. The only time he seemed to show a human side was when people were injured and in pain. Once the emergency was over, he seemed to transform back into his gnarly self. Gnomes are like hermits, aren’t they? They live by themselves, sometimes under a troll bridge, and they shut the world out of the forest, sauntering out only for the occasional cup of coffee and blueberry muffin. Those were my thoughts as I sat there, cradling the notion that I had locked onto the truth about the man with the oversized raincoat and tattered jeans. Who knew I could be so wrong, or that before long, old wounds would reopen, wounds I thought had long ago healed. And it was all because Daisy was on someone’s hit list.
Chapter Four --
By ten, I was almost feeling human again. My shoulder hurt like hell and it was hard to raise it up to my chest, but I had the Henslacker wedding on Saturday. That cake wasn’t going to bake itself. I tried to figure out how I was going to manage the decorations on that cake. We were supposed to have one hundred tiny honeybees on that cake, along with an assortment of fondant flowers. I had made the little bees last week and stored them. I hadn’t started the edible blossoms. Maybe I could substitute gumpaste flowers from a supplier. That meant I only had to bake the cake and cover it with the fondant. If we adjusted the pattern of the icing, Walter and I could still provide the Henslackers with a cake that wouldn’t disappoint. I turned on my laptop, and with my left index finger, tapped in an order for what I would need from Sugar Art. I doubled the number of flower sprays, thinking that if any broke, I still would have enough to be able to finish the cake without any gaping holes in the design. The leftover sprays could be used on someone else’s cake, so it wouldn’t be a loss for me. I paid extra for the expedited shipping, but it was worth it to know they would arrive within two days.
Tara and her mother had also ordered my celebration cookie bags as guest favors. We would need to bake and decorate ten dozen white chocolate-covered, wedding bell-shaped almond shortbread cookies. I was fairly confident that Walter and Darlene could prepare the dough and do the cutouts for that. Daisy was actually pretty adept with icing, despite her youth, so I would give her the opportunity as calligrapher on the project, as promised. With my injured arms, I might be able to manage the white chocolate bath for each cookie, but I didn’t think I was up to much more. At least we had a reasonable plan that I thought we could use, so I wrote down my notes, ingredients, and recipes, to share with the baking team.
Once that was done, I picked up the phone to call Mary Sue Therkauf, my insurance agent. She promised to get me fixed up with a rental, have the damaged van examined and appraised, and to arrange for the repairs to be made. About twenty minutes after I hung up, she phoned me back.
“The police will be in touch with you later today to get your statement. There were plenty of witnesses, who all said Daisy was not at fault. They still haven’t identified the driver. I heard you two really got hit hard.”
“You did?” I was surprised that news traveled that fast. Then again, this was Old Saybrook.
“You were lucky. According to what folks told the cops, that guy came out of nowhere, Cady. Several people said it almost looked like he was aiming at your van. Any disgruntled boyfriends lurking in the shadows? Customers who didn’t like the cake you baked?”
“Not to my knowledge,” I laughed nervously.
“Must have been a freak thing, then.”
“Must have been.”
Officer Renquist stopped by at eleven-thirty to ask me some questions and take down my statement. She wrote it out for me, since I was in no shape to do it myself, but insisted I sign the statement. Groaning at the effort, I complied.
“You were lucky,” she told me. “There were a lot of witnesses. We got a couple of descriptions of the driver and a partial license plate. We might get lucky and catch the guy.”
“Might?”
“The chances are decent. The funny thing is all the witnesses insist the driver seemed to hit the van deliberately. Do you have an ex with a grudge?”
“My ex is in Taos, with the new love interest. And before you ask, he dumped me.”
“Oh.” For a moment, I saw doubt in her serious brown eyes.
“No, it’s not like that. The torch was extinguished the moment the guy decided the grass was greener on the other side of the pasture. He’s just not worth it. I don’t want him back. She can have him.”
“I hear you,” said Officer Renquist, with a knowing nod and a wink. “Men. Can’t live with ‘em and can’t chain ‘em to the dog house when they’re bad. You just have to move on.”
“Who needs that kind of heartache at my age?” I asked her. “It’s just too much work for too little reward.”
“You got that right, sister,” she laughed. I escorted her to the front door and saw her out.
The phone rang at quarter to twelve. It was Carole, reporting in.
“We’re fine here, Cady. It’s been a decent morning. I’m calling to see if you plan to come in and if so, arrange for someone to pick you up.”
“I would like to come in,” I agreed. “I’m feeling a little better and I have to get ready for that wedding on Saturday.”
“Okay,” said Carole. “I’m sending someone over to pick you up.”
“Oh, but I don’t want to take anyone away from the shop,” I told her. “We’re usually really busy at noontime.”
“Not to worry. Daisy’s here, making coffee, Darlene’s handling the baked goods, and I’m on the cash register.”
“You can’t afford to lose Walter in the kitchen,” I insisted.
“I’m not sending Walter. One of the customers is going to pick you up. He’s been pitching in all morning.”
I couldn’t imagine which one of Cady’s Cakes regulars that might be. I was about to ask when Carole cut me off.
“Oops! Customers. Got to go. See you when you get here!” she called out cheerfully as she hung up on me.
I decided to get dressed, not wanting to be caught unaware by my volunteer driver. I slipped on a pair of my black exercise leggings, knowing they were easy to pull on and off. Even if they were cropped just below the knee, they were functional and I needed that more than I needed to look like a million bucks. I threw on an oversized black-and-red striped top over the leggings, cinched it at the waist with a black belt, and then added a pair of red ankle socks rolled down at the top and a pair of my chef clogs. All that I needed was my hair in braids and I could pass for Pippi Longstocking. Either that or some deranged “Glee” wannabe.
Once I was presentable, I grabbed up my pocketbook, my tablet, and my house keys and put them on the coffee table in the living room, ready to go. As I waited, I dug my makeup bag out of my purse and took a seat at the kitchen counter. I pulled out my compact mirror and propped it against the side of my antique cookie jar, so I wouldn’t have to
hold it. Reaching into the bag, I found my eye shadow and flipped it open. I picked up the little stick with the foam pad and leaned in towards my makeshift makeup table. Carefully swiping my eyelids with color as I followed my progress in the tiny mirror, I then sat up and looked for my eyeliner. I started to follow the shape of my lower lid. That’s when the doorbell rang. With the speed of Mrs. Wiggins in an old Carol Burnett skit, I crossed the room to greet my driver.
“Morning.” It was the gnome with the green eyes. He had traded in his oversized raincoat for a down vest, which he wore over a black turtleneck, a fisherman’s sweater, and a pair of faded jeans. On his feet, he wore a pair of black hiking boots. Looking at him, I couldn’t help thinking that he was the real-life version of the outdoor man in Ralph Lauren ads.
“You! What are you doing here?” Even I heard the accusatory note in my voice and flinched.
“Does that mean you’re happy to see me?” he wanted to know, one eyebrow lifted in curiosity.
“I’m sorry. I was expecting someone else.” Anyone else. Even Mrs. Pritchard, Old Saybrook’s most notorious driver. She never went faster than twenty-five miles an hour, even on Route 9. The cops gave up pulling her over with warnings about traveling too slowly.
“Disappointed?” He tilted his head, watching me with intense eyes that burned slow and hot, giving off steady heat.
“No,” I insisted, suddenly feeling shy. I reached for a more gracious tone. “No. I was waiting for my ride to the shop. What are you doing here?”
“I’m your ride to the shop,” he announced matter-of-factly, with what seemed to be some healthy measure of satisfaction.
“Oh.” I was stunned.
“You have a mark on your face,” he told me, striding across the living room and taking a tissue from the box on the end table. “Let me get that.”
Charleston with a Clever Cougar: A Dance with Danger Mystery #6 Page 3