“Penelope, look at me,” he said more firmly. He caught her face in his strong hands and forced her eyes parallel to his. “I want you to know something—”
She quickly put her hand over his mouth. “No! Don’t say anything now. Tell me later.” She slowly removed her hand, half afraid he might say it anyway. “Don’t you dare act like this is the last time we’ll see each other, do you hear me, Aidan Kendall?”
He caught her up in a fierce hug, and her tears fell freely down her face, scalding her cheeks, searing her chest.
He set her away from him. “Go,” he said, his gaze turned away from hers.
“Aidan.”
He reached across her and opened the door. “I said go, damn it. Before either of us says something we’ll regret.”
As if in slow motion, she slid over and got out of the car. She opened up the back to take Max and Spot out, and had barely closed the door when the tires of the car screamed against the asphalt in Aidan’s hurry to disappear into the night.
She stood there staring after him until he was gone from sight. Then she reached into her purse for a handful of tissues and mopped at the mess of her face.
Max whined and laid his head against her upper thigh. Spot rubbed against her opposite leg.
And Penelope had never felt more alone.
Five minutes later she rounded the corner to Mrs. O’Malley’s street and climbed the steps. The door immediately swung inward. “Oh, thank God you’re here!” Edith said, rushing out to take her arm. “I didn’t know what to do. Mavis just showed up at my door, barely able to keep herself upright, almost incoherent and saying that someone had broken into the house and knocked her lights out.”
Penelope tried to take in Edith’s words. Edith took her curious gaze as something else entirely.
“Your grandmother’s words, not mine.”
Penelope didn’t understand.
“Never mind. Come in, come in. I put her upstairs in one of the guest rooms. She refused to go to the hospital. Said that a good night’s sleep was the best prescription for whatever ailed you. But I was afraid she had a concussion and the sheriff agreed, and…”
Mrs. O’Malley’s words ran one into the next, but Penelope’s mind arrested when she stepped into the foyer to find Sheriff Cole Parker standing there, his hat in his hands, his expression flat.
“Where’s Aidan, Penelope?” he said, cutting Edith off. “Or should I say, Allen Dekker?”
Chapter Fourteen
Penelope helped her grandmother sit forward so she could put another pillow behind her back. Then she handed her a glass of water and a couple of aspirin. Good for whatever ails you, Mavis had said.
Uncharacteristically traditional advice from a woman who made a life out of being untraditional. Something wrong? She would pull a plant out of the garden, boil it, then make you drink it—different plants for different symptoms—hard to remember and even harder to duplicate. But Penelope had spent her entire life studying her grandmother’s homeopathic remedies, then making them to sell to her customers.
Did Mavis’s change of heart mean she should clear the shelves of herbal remedies and stock bottles of aspirin, instead?
Or had the whack her grandmother took to the head knocked a couple of marbles loose?
Penelope carefully sat down on the bed next to Mavis. “Tell me what happened.”
Mavis handed her back the glass, and she put it down on the bedside table. The old woman shrugged her skinny shoulders, which looked even thinner under the large nightgown that Mrs. O’Malley had loaned her.
“Do you need anything else?” Edith asked from the open doorway.
Penelope didn’t have to look. She knew the sheriff was standing outside in the hall behind Edith. But just as she’d ignored him when she’d come inside the house, she ignored him now.
“No, thank you, Mrs. O’Malley.” She looked in her direction. “Could you close the door, please?”
Edith looked uneasily at the sheriff.
“I’ll be waiting downstairs, Penelope,” he said.
He could do what he wanted. She didn’t care. She was emboldened by the truth and the need to protect the two most important people in her life. She didn’t have time or energy to consider the sheriff’s agenda.
The door clicked closed and she looked at her grandmother again. Mavis appeared well enough, but for the paleness of her skin and a huge bump at the base of her skull.
Her grandmother made a face. “What do you want me to say? That it was a mistake to have taken the doors off?” she asked, as defiant as ever.
“No. I want you to tell me what happened.”
She shifted, readjusting the bedding across her waist. “Well, I suppose that’s easy enough. I heard a sound. Thought maybe it was just you coming in, so I got up to see where you’d been and wham. Somebody knocked my lights out.”
What went without saying was that, had there been any lights on, maybe the incident wouldn’t have happened.
“Is anything missing?”
“What’s there to take? I don’t think anyone would be interested in the few pieces of old furniture we have left. Or the pictures of your mother. I checked your door before I left to come here and it was still tightly locked, so they didn’t take anything from there.”
Fear waded up in Penelope’s throat. She didn’t like the sound of this. She didn’t like it at all.
One of the benefits of living in a town the size of Old Orchard was that violent crime was practically nonexistent. She couldn’t remember the last time there had been a murder or a rape. Graffiti on the high school wall? It was probably the Polaski twins. Mowed over rural mailboxes? The Dunwoody boys were up to their old tricks.
Mavis getting blindsided?
Aidan’s brother Davin was making his move.
Penelope rubbed at the tension knot building up in her forehead. But what move was Davin making by accosting her grandmother? It didn’t make any sense.
“You know something,” Mavis said simply.
Penelope looked up to find the old woman staring at her.
“You know who did this, don’t you. Who knocked my lights out.”
“I think the correct term is ‘punched your lights out,’ Gram, and since you weren’t punched, your lights are fine.”
“And you’re changing the subject.”
“There is no subject.” She got up from the bed and paced to the window overlooking the dark and empty street. But was it truly empty? Was Davin out there somewhere even now, watching, waiting?
“It’s connected to Aidan, isn’t it. Some criminal friends of his have tracked him down.”
She looked over her shoulder at her grandmother. “Aidan doesn’t have any criminal friends.” That much was true. But he did have one darkly criminal identical twin brother who shared the same DNA and was capable of Lord knows what.
She turned back toward Mavis. “How’s your cousin in Fort Wayne?” she asked.
“What? What kind of question is that to be asking right now, for cripe’s sake?”
Penelope gathered up the nightgown Mavis must have changed out of and left on the floor, and put it on a nearby chair. “I’m just thinking you’re long overdue for a visit.”
Mavis stared at her. “Oh, no.” She pointed a finger at her. “The first action that happens in this town for half a century and you want me to leave town?” She shook her head. “Ain’t gonna happen.”
“Even if you’re the victim of that action?”
Mavis narrowed her eyes. “Am I? The victim of it, I mean?”
Penelope sighed. “In an indirect way, yes.”
“So this is connected to Aidan.”
Penelope wanted to scream. Instead, she walked to the door and quickly opened it, hoping that the sheriff wasn’t listening outside. He wasn’t. She quietly closed the door again and stood there with her hand pressed against the smooth wood.
Mavis’s heavy sigh seemed to suck all the air from the room. “You know, that’s the problem with us M
oons. No conflict.”
Penelope closed her eyes. “What are you talking about now?”
She heard the sheets rustle and imagined her grandmother shrugging again. “Peace. Serenity. Living one with nature. That’s what we call living on the outskirts of town. A part of but not active in the community. Keeping to ourselves. It’s all a load of crap. I realize that now.”
Penelope slowly turned to face the old woman, wondering if she’d been hit harder than she’d first thought.
“I’m serious,” Mavis said, holding her gaze. “You, me. Your mother before you. My mother and grandmother before me.” She gestured with her hand. “We studied the cabala. Mapped out the stars. Charted our astrological courses. Experimented with plants. Did yoga. Chanted. For what? For a peace we never really achieved.”
“Gram—”
Mavis held up her hand. “No, no. I think I’m onto something here. My head hurts like the dickens, but I’ve got to follow this through to its natural conclusion.”
She stopped talking, and Penelope did as her grandmother had requested and waited, feeling the woman might actually be hiding a point somewhere in her words.
“Without conflict, there is no true life.”
Penelope shivered. She absently rubbed her bare arms to smooth the goose bumps rising there.
“We get up at the same time every morning, go to bed the same way. We eat the same foods, boil the same herbs. Season in, season out, we’ve become more predictable than those we think we’re trying to be better than.” Mavis wasn’t really looking at Penelope anymore, rather she appeared to be searching her mind. “We don’t have friends. Neither of the female nor male variety. Oh, no. To do so would disrupt our biorhythms. Shatter the peace…” Her voice drifted off. “Waiting to die. That’s all we’re doing. Biding our time until the big pink Cadillac in the sky comes for us.”
Her eyes seemed to focus again. “But we’re already dead, aren’t we? In a sense, we’re the walking dead.”
Penelope looked away, unable to hold her grandmother’s gaze.
“I don’t know what you’re involved in or what Aidan’s involved in. But follow your heart, Popi. Don’t hide anymore. Go for what you want and hold on to it with both hands.”
Penelope’s knees felt suddenly incapable of holding her. She felt Mavis staring at her.
“Tell me. Tell me what’s going on. Make me feel alive again. Make me feel that tomorrow the sun won’t rise in the same spot. Make me feel we’re part of the living.”
Penelope stood quietly for what felt like a long moment, unsure how to respond to her grandmother’s request, her heart pounding loudly in her ears.
Then she crossed the room, sat on the opposite side of the bed and proceeded to tell Mavis everything.
An hour and a half later Penelope tucked the sheet around her grandmother’s sleeping form and quietly left the room. She had no idea what time it was but knew it was late. She made her way silently down the stairs, careful not to wake Mrs. O’Malley, only to find the sheriff dozing in a chair near the front door.
She paused. To wake him or not to wake him. That was the question.
She reached out and touched his shoulder.
He jerked awake so suddenly he made her jump.
“You, um, must have fallen asleep,” she said quietly.
“What time is it?” He glanced at his watch.
Penelope crossed her arms over her chest, watching him rub the sleep from his eyes and get up to face her.
“Where’s Aidan Kendall, Penelope?”
She told him that Aidan was at the motel on the opposite side of town.
He shook his head. “No, he isn’t. My men drove over about an hour ago after Mrs. O’Malley finally gave in and told us where he’d been staying—and he was long gone. No trace.”
Penelope’s heart skipped a beat. “Then, I don’t know where he is.”
He grimaced at her.
“All right, then.”
He was moving to open the door when Penelope touched his arm. “Wait—” She looked through her purse for the printouts from the motel and held them out to him. “Aidan…Allen didn’t do what he’s accused of, Sheriff.”
“That’s for a judge and jury to decide, Penelope. Not you or me.”
Penelope held the papers out farther. “Just look over these, will you? And if you have any questions, you know where to find me.”
“You’re going back to the house?”
She nodded. “Where else would I go?”
She breathed a mental sigh of relief when he took the papers and put them in his front pocket.
“Let me give you a lift.”
And the endgame begins…
Aidan tried to stretch the tension from his neck, hating to think of all this as a game. But to catch Davin, he had to think like him, and he suspected this was all a game to his brother. A dark and deadly game—and Davin was now the target.
Dawn had broken and he’d spent the night in the front seat of his car, parked to the side of the road and behind a thicket of trees across the street and slightly up the road from Penelope’s house. He’d watched the sheriff drop her off at around two a.m., then had heard banging. He’d gotten out of the car and rounded the house in the dark, watching as Penelope boarded up the back door, then lifted the hammer to do the same to the front. Only, she’d had second thoughts and instead blocked the opening with a sheet of plywood that left a couple of inches open at the top, then moved furniture behind it.
He hadn’t dared fall asleep. The sheriff’s office had obviously made the connection between Aidan Kendall and Allen Dekker, evidenced by the squad cars he’d watched swoop down on the motel in his rearview mirror as he drove down the road in the opposite direction. The timing dared him to think that luck was on his side. He squinted up into the lightening sky and wondered if, perhaps, someone was looking out for him.
He clenched his teeth, thinking of the life he once knew, the woman he once loved, the family he once had. All of it lost now.
Penelope had helped heal him with her gentle touch. He knew a part of him would always love his late wife, knew she’d always be with him. But he was coming to learn that that didn’t mean he couldn’t love again. In fact, it was the memory of that love that compelled him to want to love again.
He smiled faintly. Kathleen would have liked Penelope. She would have been fascinated by her quirkiness and would have talked her into letting her natural beauty shine through instead of hiding it behind muted cotton dresses.
But if Kathleen were alive, he never would have met Penelope.
He ran his hands roughly over his face, pondering the strangeness of life and the way it worked. The future was a road that twisted and turned, forcing a change in scenery and lifestyle and outlook, turning the truth into lies and the lies into truth.
And what was the truth now?
He had to find Davin before his twin found him.
And before the sheriff could put him behind bars where he would never be able to prove his innocence and make the man who had taken so much from him pay for his unforgivable crimes.
He heard a loud noise and snapped upright. Across the street Penelope was moving aside the board she’d placed in front of the door. She stepped out onto the porch—looking more beautiful than the last time he saw her—and squinted up into the sunrise, then reached down to pat Max, who had come out of the house to stand next to her.
Aidan’s heart hurt just looking at her.
And his hands itched with the overwhelming desire to touch her.
She disappeared back inside the house, then reappeared moments later with Max’s leash—heading off, he suspected, to her shop.
The normal action caught him off guard as he watched her walk down the road against the traffic.
He’d known deep down that she wouldn’t leave town, even though he’d made her promise that she would. If they had planned for her to stay, he probably would have counseled her to go about her life much as she did ev
ery day. Because if Davin was watching—and Aidan was sure he was—he would be looking for any breaks in routine. Planning for them. Then acting on them.
“Smart move, Penelope,” he was surprised to hear himself say aloud.
So long as she stuck to her routine, she would be safe.
Still, that hadn’t stopped him from making a quick phone call to the sheriff’s office earlier that morning and asking them to keep an eye out for her—even though the squad car driving by every half hour put him at risk.
He turned the key in the ignition and listened as the old Chevy revved to life. Now it was time for him to start some looking of his own….
Chapter Fifteen
The hardest thing Penelope had ever done was to go on pretending her life wasn’t turned upside down. She’d gone to the shop a little earlier than normal, had tried like crazy to lose herself in the packaging of soaps, the filling of sachets and the mixing of potpourri, all the while with her eye on the street outside, her ear listening for the telephone’s ring and her heart solidly with Aidan, wherever he was.
Late in the afternoon, as she made her way toward St. Joe’s for the last Fourth of July planning meeting, she wondered if anything would ever look the same to her again. She couldn’t even remember the woman she’d been just a week ago, the one with her eyes firmly on the sidewalk in front of her, not daring to look to the left or the right for fear of what she might find there. Not that there had loomed a real fear then. She knew how stupid she’d been before, now that there was a real fear in the form of Aidan’s twin brother Davin. A man who had wreaked havoc on Aidan’s life, harmed her grandmother and was capable of doing only Lord knew what now.
She tucked the bag that had held the clothes she’d just dropped off at the dry cleaner’s into her purse, then tugged on Max’s leash—he was considering lifting his leg, appropriately enough, on the fire hydrant outside the sheriff’s office. She looked through the front glass at George Johnson and met Sheriff Parker’s gaze. He nodded briefly and she nodded back, mildly surprised that he didn’t come out to grill her again over Aidan’s whereabouts.
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