It Happened on Love Street

by Lia Riley

“Challenge!” Doc fired a shot across the bow.

  “I don’t think you want to be doing that,” the General said. “Yo is a word.”

  “I said challenge, damn it,” Doc repeated.

  “They’re right.” Lucille consulted her book. “Yo is listed right here.”

  “Final five points to me.” Pepper rubbed her hands. “How about a score check?”

  “Pepper is at six hundred and twenty-seven, Doc is five hundred and ninety, Lucille is five hundred and three, and I am bringing up the caboose with four hundred and sixteen.” The General pushed the wad of bills toward her. “To the winner, her spoils.” The gang looked on with begrudging admiration.

  Pepper pocketed her reward—twenty bucks would fund a few indulgence pints of Häagen-Dazs—and checked on Wolfgang, snoozing beneath the shade of Davy Jones’s statue. “One more history question. What’s the deal with Davy Jones?” she asked.

  Three pairs of eyes bored into her. “The deal?” they cried in shocked unison.

  “Why, it’s a tale of heroics,” the General replied solemnly.

  “Of loyalty,” Doc added, placing a hand on the General’s shoulder.

  “A story of love.” Lucille dabbed at her eyes.

  The General began: “A long while ago now, Hurricane Angelica struck the coastline. She was a mother of a storm. Cat four. The winds were so loud it sounded as if Everland was a train depot. All through the night the river rose. Davy was a mutt. No one knew where he came from, and no one ever owned him. I guess he was what you’d call a drifter. He’d show up sometimes downtown. Always friendly. He had a way about him, didn’t he?”

  “Indeed he did,” Lucille said. “Except for the fire hydrant fascination.”

  The General gave an indulgent chuckle, scratching his beard. “That dog couldn’t walk past a fire hydrant without taking a piss. Pardon my language.”

  “None taken,” Pepper said.

  “I’ll take her offense and lump it with mine. Kindly clean up your talk when regaling us with tales about such a noble beast,” Lucille said.

  “My apologies.” The General wiped his grin away and reset his cap. “You’re right. Absolutely right. Now where was I?”

  “No one in town had seen Davy Jones in some time,” Doc said. “Weeks.”

  “And here was this storm on its way, and everyone was boarding up buildings, and gathering supplies,” the General jumped back in. “No one had a second to spare. The storm moved faster than the meteorological forecasts predicted.”

  “And no one stopped to say so much as a hello to dear old Davy Jones,” Lucille said in a choked voice.

  Doc cleared his throat twice with evident emotion. He was grumpy, but he seemed to have a soft, sensitive underbelly.

  “The storm rocked and rolled. I’ve never seen nothing like it,” the General said. “Before or since.”

  “Sometime around three in the morning, the howling started.” Lucille shivered. “I can hear it still.”

  “A sound to wake the dead,” the General continued. A few folks finally banded together and went out. Couldn’t even stand upright because of the wind. There was Davy Jones, up on the river levee off Main Street, right near my store. The rain and storm surge meant that Everland River was about ready to overflow. Burst the banks and flood the town. Alarms were sounded and people braved the storm. Sandbagging until dawn. Anything they could do to keep the water out. It took all night but the town was saved. Thanks to Davy Jones.”

  “What happened to him?” Pepper asked.

  “No one knows. He wasn’t seen again.” The General consulted the great oak above them. “I like to think he was a manifestation of Everland’s community spirit, there to help in a moment of need.”

  “More likely some Hogg Jaw no-account snapped him up to use as a hunting dog,” Doc grumbled.

  “And that brings us to Hogg Jaw,” Pepper said curiously. “What’s the problem, besides the fact they claim to possess a likely fictional three-hundred-year-old pirate treasure?”

  “The problem with Hogg Jaw is that it’s full of Hoggs,” Lucille stated with a matter-of-fact tone, reaching into her purse to remove a hand mirror. “I’m meeting Earl for a late lunch at Chez Louis,” she announced, checking the state of her stylish gray pixie cut.

  “They are liars. Thieves. Classless cheats.” Doc snuck in a last word, punctuating each word with a fist on the table. “The whole lot.”

  “’Course, Hogg Jaw thinks much the same about us,” the General said with a live-and-let-live shrug. “The two towns don’t see eye to eye. Never have. Never will. Used to settle differences with muskets and powder kegs. These days the competition stays on the high school basketball courts and football fields. Mostly.”

  Pepper jolted as the clock tower chimed noon. Where had the time gone, and how was this possible? She’d been enjoying herself in a dog park. A. Dog. Park. With small-town strangers chatting about phantom savior dogs.

  Who was she?

  The idea sank in, sending ripples through her puzzled brain. What if she didn’t know herself? She had so many ideas for so long, and what if she’d never taken the time to look right where she was, at the woman she was, not the woman she wanted to be?

  She took her time on the walk back to Mr. Drummond’s. The sun might be hot as a branding iron, but the air from the coast was cool, clean, and tinged with a hint of salt. Wolfgang didn’t attempt any sexual deviancy. The time passed peacefully.

  No sirens. No horns. No pressure to walk fast to keep up with the crowd. No sensory overload from hot dog stands, buskers, billboards, or the idea that you lived cheek to cheek on an island of millions of people.

  Yes, there was a part of her that craved the city’s endless excitement, the fact that she could be Super Pepper, headquartered near the NYU campus, ready to seize success, gain stability, and have a future brighter than the sun hitting the glass panes of the Freedom Tower.

  Except the super secret of Super Pepper was that her invincibility cloak felt more and more threadbare. Like the time she’d fainted after sitting for the bar exam, and while she sat in urgent care getting an IV of electrolytes, Tuesday called in tears afer losing out on a commercial. Or when her Dad again evaded pointed questions about whether or not he paid the farm’s property taxes.

  Or Mother’s Day.

  She huffed a small sigh. How quickly the satisfaction of coming to the rescue—of being needed—could morph into feelings about being overextended, overwhelmed, and underappreciated. And that’s when she loved the city the most, how she could step on a crowded rush hour subway, or sit in Union Square, and lose herself. Be nobody’s hero. An anonymous face in a crowd. At least for a few blissful minutes.

  She could never take off the cape for long, because what if Tuesday and Dad tried to fix their problems while she was off-duty? Batman couldn’t take extended vacations because Gotham might organize a community crime watch, take down the bad guys, and realize they didn’t need him after all. In some ways he needed them as much as they needed him. Maybe more.

  The unsettled feeling lasted all the way home. When she got back to Love Street, her mailbox was empty except for a postcard. It was a picture of a roaring bear and read, “What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. Except for bears. Bears will kill you.”

  On the back, scribbled in Dad’s messy handwriting, was a short note:

  Chili Pepper,

  Dropping a quick line to let you know that I had a tumble last week. Hurt my back again. Nothing serious. Tried to patch up a broken window screen and slipped off a sawhorse. Stayed in the hospital two nights but back home now and fit as my favorite fiddle. Fitter even. Please pass the message on to your sister. Miss you.

  Her arms fell to her sides and she sank to the top stair, burying her face in her hands. “Yeah, Dad, of course I’ll handle telling Tuesday,” she muttered, hating the bitterness curdling her tongue. “Of course, I’ll handle everything.”

  Seriously—a sawhorse? Dad wasn’t a spri
ng chicken; he should be using a stepstool. But trying to urge him to make practical choices was like trying to read a blank piece of paper. She could try and try, but what good would it do? She’d only drive herself crazy.

  Hospital stays meant hospital bills. She rocked in place, calculating the costs. This required more than Batman skills; it needed a Bruce Wayne fortune.

  At least she’d gotten him on a health insurance plan two years ago because he didn’t qualify for Medicare for another year. How on earth would he pay for the deductible? The short answer was, he couldn’t. A cold wind blew through her, even though the wind was warm. He was an overgrown kid. A fiddle-playing grasshopper who kept on laughing and hitting his homemade moonshine even as winter drew ever closer.

  His carefree attitude to life was charming, but his financial negligence rankled. Right now her plate was full—jam-packed—without extra room to hold this news. Except filial responsibility meant making room, even if that required her shoving her own stuff to the side.

  Even if it came at the expense of her own sanity.

  She walked inside the house and slammed the door behind her with too much force. Real life wasn’t dog park Scrabble, river swimming, or cute Southern gentlemen. It was her thought-out, meticulously organized plan. She couldn’t goof around. Not when Dad would have to count on somebody, someday soon.

  A place like Everland could never be home, and she couldn’t get comfortable. She was just here visiting.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Pepper snuggled deeper beneath her quilt, halfway through the world’s best comfort food (God bless Entenmann’s raspberry danishes) and the second disc of the BBC’s Jane Eyre. There were many fine Mr. Rochester renditions in the world, but this particular incarnation left the others all behind.

  Dad’s cryptic postcard had dealt her peace of mind a crippling blow that even starched cravats, repressed passions, and sugary frosting struggled to repair. She reached for her wineglass as her butt buzzed.

  She lurched forward to grapple with her cell. An unfamiliar number. Ugh. Who used phones for talking these days? She hit the green Answer button with a rumble of displeasure. “Hello?”

  “Isn’t it past your bedtime, Miss Knight?”

  Heat radiated through her chest, like she’d slugged a shot of Southern Comfort. No mistaking the owner of that molasses-slow drawl, rich as peach cobbler. “Rhett?”

  “Your light’s on.”

  Whoa. That was an honest to goodness rumble. Her hand wandered to her inner thigh, her fingers tracing lazy spirals over the sensitive skin. “You spying on me?” Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

  “Not hard when your bedroom window’s across the fence from mine.”

  “I know,” she murmured. Her wandering gaze might have drifted back to his window, one or two (or twenty) times since the towel incident, by accident, of course. Line of sight and all that. Unfortunately, his curtain had remained drawn.

  Wait a second. Her nails drove into her skin. What if he knew she’d peeped on him in the towel? A Danish crumb stuck in her throat.

  “Busy?”

  “No. Rewatching a movie,” she wheezed, her dry mouth making it hard to swallow. “Brooding gentleman in a scary English manor keeps a mad wife locked in the attic while he falls for the young governess.”

  “Romantic.” His drawl went heavy on the sarcasm.

  “Shut up! It is. There’s pain. Lots of sweet, sweet pain.” She hit Pause on the computer, freezing Mr. Rochester’s face in a shiver-inducing scowl. “Sorry, lover,” she mouthed.

  His low chuckle sent a jolt of heat through her. “Remind me never to hire you for marketing.”

  “It’s more than pain, though. It’s watching two lost people find a home in each other, you know?”

  The other end went silent. Because what was the appropriate response to that level of blurt?

  She licked her lips and fought for composure. Her foot-in-mouth disease had progressed to stage four. The only corrective course of treatment was a total tonguectomy.

  A chair creaked on his end. “Can I come over?”

  “Wait?” She quit writhing, frozen with surprise. “Now?”

  “It’s late.” He sounded chagrined. “But there’s a situation that I need your help with.”

  He needed her? “Yeah. Yes, of course.” That magic word sent her scrambling from bed, yanking up the coverlet and cramming the Danish box into her nightstand drawer before reaching for her trusty lip gloss. “Come on over. I’m just sitting around.” She smacked her lips. Nothing like Peppermint Kisses to restore composure.

  “I’ll meet you at the back door,” he answered. “The fence is easy to jump. Keep your yard light switched off.”

  She frowned at the strange request. “Why the stealth?”

  His response was a muffled grunt. “Never know who is watching who around here.”

  She stared down at the phone, the call ended, before glancing to her window. Was that an insinuating comment?

  She snapped up her head. No time for worry. Not when she had sixty seconds to appear like she’d spent the night doing something more attractive than stuffing her face with two thousand calories’ worth of jam-filled puff pastry. Lurching to the dresser mirror, she fluffed her bedhead and pinched color into her cheeks.

  Not helping. She looked like someone who’d chased a bus.

  Taken as a whole, her features were incongruent parts of a jigsaw puzzle forced together. The faint dog-bite scars. Eyebrows too thick. Mouth too thin. The weird mole on her lip. The perpetual frown in her forehead. A truly underwhelming chin.

  She blew up her bangs and spritzed a little No. 5 into her palm, and briskly massaged the fragrance into her knees and elbows. Coco Chanel had once said a woman should never smell like just a rose, or just a lily of the valley. We were complex creatures and deserved to be treated accordingly. “Damn straight,” she muttered, hiking up the straps on her super-soft pink cotton sleep slip.

  All this fuss was a little silly. This wasn’t some Hollywood rom-com where Rhett crept over to hop aboard the tongue train to Saliva Swap City, population two. He needed her help. Time to drop-kick her mind from the gutter, don her Superwoman cape, and oh, fine, what the heck, her sassiest underwear.

  She shimmied out of her white cotton briefs and opened the drawer, fingering her silky-soft, rarely worn scarlet string bikini.

  Within a minute, she’d unlocked the back door, tiptoed to the stoop, and glanced toward his yard. The moon was almost full and offered a pale spotlight to the half-built boat hull balanced on two sawhorses in the corner of his patio. Wayward fireflies flitted over the stern, illuminating the darkness.

  Two thumbs up for the whole sweaty, brow swiping, cold beer drinking, honest labor, building a boat in the backyard routine. Total competence porn.

  Did her imaginary corner office dream man ever use power tools while dressed in a ratty Under Armour tank top and carpenter jeans?

  No.

  Talk about a glaring fantasy oversight.

  Rhett’s side door eased a crack. He shushed one of the dogs before snicking the screen shut and padding across the grass to hurtle the fence in a single confident motion.

  Even that. That move right there. Such a major turn-on. Did he have a single idea how hot that gesture was, as if beneath the good-guy demeanor was a coiled tiger waiting to spring into the sheets and devour her whole?

  From the lost-in-thought frown, no, it wasn’t right on the forefront of his mind. He dressed in head-to-toe black. Dark hoodie. Dark sweats. More ninja than amorous. In fact, he looked perturbed.

  “What’s up?” she asked, acutely conscious that beneath her no-frills sleeveless short nightie was a scrap of red lace that put the f in fundies.

  “Not here,” he glanced around as if the rosebushes were bugged by security cameras. “Even the trees have ears in Everland.”

  He stalked into her kitchen and drew the curtains.

  “Stop. Breathe,” she ordered, rea
lizing before he did that her nipples puckered from the cold and folding her arms. “Unless you robbed a gas station and the cops are five minutes from busting down my door, take it down a notch.”

  He crossed the room, close enough that there was no ignoring his woodsy-scented soap. His face half-masked by shadows, panting hard, a no-frills guy, unapologetically take-it-or-leave-it. And right now? She kind of, sort of, please-God-just-this-once wanted to take it.

  “Hell, Pepper.” He dragged a hand through his hair and held up his phone. “We have a bona fide unfolding crisis on our hands.” He stepped back and flopped into a kitchen chair, leaning back onto two legs and resetting his glasses.

  She frowned, registering his words. “We? What’s this we?”

  “Has anyone filled you in on the Back Fence yet?”

  “The town blog? Yeah, I used it to find this rental, in the classifieds.” Why was he asking such random questions, and, more important, why was there a gap between his hoodie and sweats, and a line of V-shaped muscle. Her tongue explored the roof of her mouth. What she needed was some chocolate. Or a cold bath. Or a spare AAA battery for battery-operated boyfriend.

  “It started last fall. Folks act appalled by some of the more gossipy articles, but the monthly site visits are through the roof. Must be the single reason why everyone over the age of seventy owns a smartphone around here.”

  She let the fact sink in. “I had noticed a remarkably technology-forward senior population.”

  He passed over his phone with a groan. “This popped up this evening. My friend Beau gave me the heads-up.”

  She peered at the screen image. It was grainy but clearly the outline of their bodies, leaning together in Rhett’s Bronco near the Kissing Bridge. Heat stole up her neck, sending warm tendrils toward her jaw. “It’s a ‘Caption This’ contest.” She squinted and read a couple entries. “Romeo Rhett Finds His Juliet?” Inadvertent laughter erupted from her chest. “Oh, wait, this one’s even better. ‘Randy Rhett Ruts at Last.’ And ‘Rhett Needs to Rub-a-Dub after Getting Racy at the River.’ Okay, that one gets my vote, no contest.”