For Love and Cheesecake

by Misty Simon

  “Yes, he’s scary, but I will be even scarier if you get in your car and leave while I run in for a pair of shoes.” I gave him the beady eye but was very pleased when I ran back out of the house with my sneakers on and shoelaces flying to find him still sitting in the car in the driveway. “Thank you,” I said simply.

  “You’re welcome,” he said just as simply, then winked at me. “Did you really think I would leave without you? You sure did run a whole lot faster than I think I’ve ever seen you move before.”

  “Ha, ha. And yes, I wasn’t positive you wouldn’t have hightailed it out of here before I could come back out.” I latched my seatbelt and rested back, trying to quiet my mind to think about what questions we should probably ask this brother guy to get the most information. He might not be very talkative with his sister missing and his brother barbecued. But I was glad we were going to try, and thought I should probably be prepared.

  “You don’t trust me?” He sounded hurt, but when I looked over at him, he was smiling.

  “Just do the driving while I call the doctor’s office.” I flipped open my phone, thinking it was probably nothing at all. It was most likely a cold that simply hadn’t run its course yet. I was sticking to that, no matter what.

  Four very frustrating calls later, and finally an appointment for three days away, we arrived at the brother’s house. I realized I didn’t even know the man’s name, so I asked before we got out of the car in front of the small one-story house on stilts at the mouths of three different waterways. I hadn’t been out this way before. I thought briefly about how cool it must be to have all this water around you. And if I wasn’t mistaken, there was a beach with real sand right across the lawn on the right. Very cool.

  As I watched, a heron took flight from the water, backlit by the setting sun. I was in love. If I didn’t already have a house I would so be looking out here.

  Ben tugged my sleeve, pointing up to where a very angry-looking man leaned over his second-story porch railing.

  “I got nothing to say to you folks, so you might as well move it along.”

  I was mildly surprised and very pleased to not see him toting a shotgun to emphasize his words. You never knew with these locals. Maybe I didn’t want to live out here after all.

  “I called yesterday, Mark, and you chose this time to speak to me,” Ben said, heading for the set of wooden stairs that would take us up to the house. At least I knew the man’s name now.

  I took a moment to peruse the area in case we needed to get the hell out of here fast. There was a plethora of…stuff—since I didn’t know what else to call it—under the house. An old dryer sat next to a refrigerator without a door, several table-saw things were in various stages of being taken apart or put together, I wasn’t sure which. And the guy had so many boats littering the yard, it was a wonder he didn’t charge a slip fee and let people dock there. A dinghy sat next to a kayak, which was resting on an inflatable rowboat. And there was a veritable forest of oars.

  Well, I knew where I could come if I suddenly got the urge to go out on the bay one day. Or if we needed to make a fast getaway in a boat if Mark shot out the tires on Ben’s car.

  “I’m gonna unchoose it then, buddy,” Mark said, reaching for something below the level of the railing. “I got nothing to say and no one to say it to.” And then he did come out with a gun, a really long, really old-looking shotgun rifle that had seen better days.

  I backed up, grabbing Ben’s sleeve to pull him along with me. But since he was stronger than I was, that didn’t work so well.

  It should have looked like we were struggling, but in reality it probably looked like I was hanging off his arm. No matter how I dug the heels of my sneakers into the white rock driveway, Ben wasn’t moving unless it was forward and where he wanted to go.

  “Look, Mark, I think something funny is going on here, and now I can’t find your sister. With your brother already dead, I’m a little concerned for your safety.” Ben put his hands up in the air in the universal sign for “I’m unarmed,” but Mark didn’t lower the gun at all. Pulling me along with him, Ben strode forward, on a mission to get to those stairs, I guess.

  Mark tracked him with the shotgun barrel.

  I was pretty sure I saw my life flash before my eyes. I had never done anything this stupid. Never! Well, there were those few times, but that wasn’t now. And now, I wanted to get the hell out of here without any new holes in my body. “Please, Ben, please can we go? I don’t think he wants us here, and I don’t want to piss him off. Didn’t you see the gun in his hands? I bet he knows exactly how to use it.”

  “You worry too much,” he said softly out of the corner of his mouth. It came out a little slurred, but I understood him. I wished I hadn’t, but I did understand him.

  “Getting shot at will do that to a girl.”

  “Not my girl. Buck up, Ivy, I think this guy merely needs someone to listen to him. I’m not leaving yet because we’re about to try to get some answers. He looks angry, but I don’t think he’s dangerous.”

  “Yeah, well, you sure are banking a lot on your thinking lately.”

  He paused in midstride, and with the gun still trained on us, he kissed me in front of the birds, the bay, and one lone-ranger guy.

  “I never did ask,” Mark said once we arrived on the landing to his house, “you all aren’t the cops, are you?”

  Now was a fine moment for him to ask that question, especially since he still had the gun cocked under his arm with his finger on the trigger. We could have shot him on the spot if we’d been cops and he was threatening us. At least, that’s what I thought, but I’d been wrong before.

  “No,” Ben answered, still with his hands in the air. “I’m the guy your sister hired to investigate your brother’s murder. I haven’t seen or heard from her, and we were supposed to meet yesterday, so I was following up with you.”

  Now that ran contradictory to what Ben had already said, so I wasn’t sure what the real story was. But I also wasn’t sure if we were dealing with the brightest bulb in the pack here anyway. Mark looked like he hadn’t showered in quite a few days, and his eyes were so bloodshot you could barely tell if they were light or dark. And once a breeze blew in off the water, I could confirm by smell that he hadn’t touched water in far too long. His hair stuck straight up off his head, but not in the sexy moussed way Ben’s did. This guy looked like he’d been on a bender recently, too, based on the wine and beer bottles littering the deck under his nylon chair. The ashtray positively overflowed with cigarette butts, one of which was still smoldering. I had to fight the urge to tell him to put it out in case a breeze picked it up and set the whole place on fire. It had happened before.

  Of course, this was Virginia, a very wet place. But once a California girl, sometimes always a California girl. I was very concerned with wildfires, and many had been started exactly that way.

  “Ain’t nobody need to follow up with me. I got no one and nothing. Nobody never asks me anything.”

  The double negatives were killing me. He kept saying the same thing, yet I didn’t understand how he believed it when he had family. Maybe he didn’t have anyone to talk to currently, but surely his sister had something to do with him when she wasn’t missing. Or maybe she didn’t.

  Then again, I remembered Heather coming into the shop, and the way she was dressed, and couldn’t imagine these two were related.

  “Well, now you have someone,” Ben said, laying a hand on the other man’s sleeve. “I want you to tell me everything. I’m here to listen and hopefully help out.”

  Wasn’t that a very therapist thing for him to say? And here I had thought he wanted to nail a killer, not have a Dr. Phil session.

  But apparently it worked, because Mark put the shotgun against the railing of the porch and wiped at his eyes with a dirty sleeve. Ew, but yay for shotgun no longer pointing at us.

  “If you want to come in, I think I might need a shower.” He opened a sliding glass door leading into
a very pretty and cozy living room.

  Thinks he might need a shower? The stench was nearly overpowering in the small room, though it was overlaid by a light floral scent. Who was this guy? The gun-toting hillbilly or the urbane man showcased in the vases of flowers on the mantel, surrounded by beautiful landscape pictures in carved wooden frames?

  Ben and I cooled our heels on the sofa while the water ran in the back of the small house. Well, we should have been cooling our heels, but instead we were poking around, listening for the shower to turn off so we wouldn’t get caught nosing into things and places not ours.

  There wasn’t much to find, though I was surprised he left his financial statements lying right out on the desk in the spare bedroom. Then again, he appeared to live alone and hadn’t been expecting anyone, certainly not anyone who would be sticking their fingers into his things in a closed bedroom, so that was understandable. He had every kind of classic literature I had ever heard of, some of which were totally beyond me. He also had a ton of books on fishing and a whole rack of poles stuck to the ceiling.

  His music taste was eclectic, and I saw no pictures of friends or family anywhere. Though I wouldn’t have known who was friend and who was family other than his brother and sister.

  When I meandered into his bedroom, the bed looked as if it hadn’t been slept in, since it was perfectly made. In his condition, I would have thought it would be a terrible mess, but the covers were straight, with almost military corners, and the pillows were stacked neatly. No way had he had time to do all that before coming at us with a shotgun. From my inspection there was no evidence of any women’s things anywhere. Although, that, too, might not have been a clue if I’d found them. Witness Charlie and his predilection. Can’t always judge a man by his outerwear choices, you know.

  Once the water stopped running, I heard the blow dryer turn on and paused in making my way back to the sofa to try to mentally picture what exactly we were going to get once this man came back out from the bathroom.

  What I most certainly did not expect was to recognize the guy. I thought my heart stopped. He was the same guy from about six months ago whom I had dubbed Chocolate Eyes. I’d had a teeny tiny crush on him when he came to my door asking for directions on a cold night after I’d had a fight with Ben.

  Uh-oh.

  Chapter Ten

  Let me take you back to Martha and Dad’s wedding for a brief moment, when Ben was being pursued by everything without a penis between its legs. He was in the process of being woman-handled away from me when a tall, dark, and yummy stranger came over to talk to me about ’80s music. We’d shared a laugh, I’d made an idiot of myself, and then later in the week, he’d come knocking at my door asking for directions.

  I was definitely a one-man woman, but with all the turmoil I had at the time, he had been an almost welcome distraction. Until I’d firmly told myself I loved Ben and he was the one for me. Not that I had really been tempted to stray, but this guy’s eyes had held something in them. Something that had given me the shivers—the good kind, no less.

  And they were transferring the same thing this time, now that they were clearer, but I wasn’t receiving. He was still a very attractive man, and his eyes were the exact same color, but they weren’t doing anything for me. I wondered briefly if he had been too messed up to recognize me when we first came to his house. That didn’t matter now, though, because this was going to be a sticky wicket to maneuver around. Especially because he seemed to remember me just fine now and was making a move.

  When he went to take my hand and kiss it with his cinnamon-smelling breath, I pulled back and shook his hand instead. I so did not want to have to explain anything to Ben, not that there was a whole lot to explain. We’d never done anything but shared a laugh, so I didn’t have anything to explain. But I still felt itchy when the smile in those brown eyes died and he pulled himself straighter. He sure did look like a completely different person when he was cleaned up. I never would have guessed.

  Ben didn’t help much when he slung his arm around me like I was his prize pig at the fair and we were due for our posed front-page picture.

  “Can I get you all something to drink?” Mark said, heading into the small galley kitchen. He sounded far more educated now. I wasn’t sure if he’d managed to sober up when he was in the shower, but the voice was the same from long ago.

  Ben gave me the hairy eyeball where Mark couldn’t see it. I raised my eyebrows at him and raised my chin, too. I’d done nothing to be ashamed of. I wasn’t going to act like I’d been caught being naughty.

  “I’d like some water, please,” I said, putting my hand in my lap when Ben tried to hold it. We were so not going to have a masculine pissing match right now again. He’d already sized up Jameson on Saturday, and one in a week’s span was plenty.

  “Anything for you, Ben?”

  “Yeah, I’ll take some soda if you’ve got it.”

  “Diet?”

  “Sure, if that’s all you have.” Leaning back, Ben spread his arms wide over the back cushions, effectively caging my shoulder in his hand.

  “I have beer.” Mark peeked out around the corner of the kitchen, smiling.

  That made Ben laugh, breaking the tension. “No, I think maybe we should stay away from the alcoholic beverages for the time being.”

  “Diet cola it is, then.”

  The sounds of tops being popped came into the cozy living room. Ben kept looking at me, and I kept avoiding his gaze. How the hell long did it take for someone to get three drinks? Then again, what was I going to say when Mark came back in? And what if he alluded to being at my house one night long ago? Not that he would know I had had naughty thoughts on the brain when I’d opened the door. In my defense, I had thought it was going to be Ben when I opened the door. And I’d only lusted for a brief second before reminding myself I was on a Ben-only diet. Argh!

  Anyway, he came back into the living room with two diets and a bottle of water. He set the two cans on coasters, then sprawled into one of those oriental saucer chairs. His color was up, and he looked much, much better. In my, um, very professional opinion. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

  “So, tell me what’s been going on,” Ben invited once he took a sip of his soda and it looked like Mark was not going to start the conversation.

  To my dismay, Mark spoke directly to me with a twinkle in his eye. “I actually have very little idea what the hell is going on. About three hours after they found my brother, I heard he was dead. They told me they found him in the back of the restaurant where he worked, pretty badly burned. But it looked like he hadn’t been killed there, since it was a small fire centered right on him.”

  Well, that was news to me, and very weird to see this guy smiling cheekily and flirtily while he said it. From the looks of it, the waiter-centered fire was news to Ben, too.

  He removed his arm from around me to lean forward. “The police told you he hadn’t been killed at Jerry’s?”

  “Yeah, isn’t that right?” Some worry came into his gaze. “I talked to a Detective Jameson yesterday morning at about nine, and he said they would keep me updated.”

  Which was not a good thing. Because none of this had been mentioned to Ben about the body not having burned with the restaurant.

  Uh-oh, but this time for a completely different reason.

  Before he could jump out of his seat and call the detectives (yes, I knew him well enough to pretty much be able to tell his reactions and thought processes at this point), I put a hand on Ben’s arm and smiled at Mark. “Could we have a moment out on your porch? We’ll be right back. I still have a few questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure, whatever works. I don’t have anything on the agenda today. Now that I feel half human again, I’ve got time.” He smiled at me, and I did my best to return it but ended up with a weak version.

  I dragged Ben out through the sliding glass doors before any more could be said. Pulling up one of the nylon chairs, I kicked a few of the w
ine bottles out of the way and made sure that cigarette butt was out in the ashtray. After I pushed Ben into the chair, I thought for a brief moment about sitting on his lap and giving him consolation, but I wasn’t absolutely positive that flimsy thing would hold both of us. I certainly didn’t want to embarrass myself by breaking Mark’s chair. I settled for kneeling at his feet and putting my hand on his knee.

  He, being typical Ben even when he was so obviously pissed, moved my hand up to the middle of his thigh. I left it there to appease him (good word! Will have to enjoy it later).

  “So are you contemplating going down to the police station and beating some heads together?”

  He ran a hand over his face from forehead to chin, moaning when he got to his neck. “Why did I think they were actually going to take me seriously and share all their information? I feel like an idiot. A very pissed idiot.”

  “Well, you were operating under the assumption they were being honest with you. I’ve done the same thing and paid the price for it.”

  “Shit.”

  “You know, it could be this Mark guy has it all wrong. He looked pretty rough when we first got here. Maybe he got the timing all wrong and they haven’t had time to get in touch with you yet.” He cocked an eyebrow at me, and I shrugged. “It could happen.”

  “Seriously?” His doubt was palpable.

  “I’d like to think so. I really felt they were being straight with you when they were at our house the other day. Maybe it was merely an oversight. Have you checked your voicemail lately? Maybe there’s an update message.”

  Of course, when he pulled his phone out, there was no signal. Which made him irritated all over again. I moved my hand higher up on his thigh and watched the smile return. I could sacrifice in the name of keeping everyone’s cool.

  “Let’s get back in there and talk to this guy.” I gave him a quick stroke a little higher than his thigh and blew him an air kiss. He pulled me into his arms as he stood up and gave me a proper one. Like most times, I kept my eyes closed, but then my lids cracked open and I had a glimpse of Mark watching us. Jeez. I pushed Ben away gently, then straightened the back of my shirt where his hands had wandered. “Come on.”