by Meg Benjamin
“Maybe later.”
Greta sighed, turning toward the door of the shed. Obviously, Hyacinth wasn’t open to suggestions about her pet. Still…
As she walked back toward the house, Greta wondered how much Hank knew about turtles. Hyacinth might not listen to her, but maybe she’d be more open to the Voice of Science. Dealing with a heartbroken child and a dead turtle didn’t rank high on her list of favorite things.
Hank pulled his truck into the carport a little earlier than usual. Part of the reason he’d left before the usual time was his foot, of course, which still bothered him, although not as much as it had before.
The other part of it—maybe the larger part—was Greta. That kiss in the moonlight had skipped around his mind most of the night, showing up in a couple of dreams that had left him hard and aching in the morning.
Sort of like high school. Not exactly an experience he wanted to revisit.
Still, he wanted to spend more time with her. Maybe taste those lips more fully. Maybe find out whatever secret she was trying to hide. She was a fascinating combination, Greta Brewster. Practical and fantastic. Sneakers and Gone With the Wind dresses. He wasn’t sure he’d ever run into anyone quite like her before. He certainly didn’t know any archaeologists who ran around in hoopskirts—no sane ones, anyway.
He stepped inside the kitchen door, pausing to appreciate the smells. Pastry, with an added sort of flowery scent.
Greta looked up from the stove, where she was working on something. “Hi.”
“Hi. Smells good.” Smelled fantastic, if he was really honest. “What is it?”
“Probably my cake.” Greta frowned down at the pan in front of her. “Let me get this gratin to the stage where it can fend for itself, and then I can talk.”
He leaned against the counter, watching her arrange the potato slices in a fan around the pan.
“How did you slice them so thin?”
She shrugged. “They’re not as thin as they should be. I didn’t have a mandolin. I sort of improvised with a knife.”
He stared at the spiral of slices that looked paper thin. “And you didn’t slice off a finger in the process?”
Greta gave him a dry look. “Slicing off parts of your body while you were cooking was frowned upon in culinary school.”
“Right. Still impressive, though.”
She gave him a quick smile. “Thanks. I love being impressive.”
Oh, babe, trust me—you’ve got impressive down.
He glanced around the room. “Where’s everybody else? I thought you usually had an entourage in the kitchen. Yesterday, Hyacinth looked like she was training for the Iron Chef.”
Greta gave her potatoes a pat. “Hyacinth’s sort of mad at me right now.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Hyacinth mad. What’s up?”
“How much do you know about turtles?”
He shook his head. “And now for something completely different? I had a few turtles when I was kid. That’s about it.”
“Hyacinth showed me her turtle. Has she showed it to you?” She folded her arms across her chest.
He shook his head again. The turns in this conversation could give a man whiplash. “Nope. Is it something I should see?”
“I don’t know. She’s got it in an aquarium out in the shed. I probably wasn’t as enthusiastic as I should have been. I mean, I don’t think wild turtles are good candidates for house pets.”
“Nope.” He shrugged. “It should be okay if she doesn’t keep it more than a couple of days.”
“She says it’s endangered. Aren’t you supposed to leave endangered species alone?”
Hank pushed himself upright again. “Strictly alone. That’s the kind of thing that can get you in trouble with all kinds of people, including the Feds. What does she want to do with it?”
“She wants to keep it. She’s feeding it lettuce.” Greta picked up a spatula, pushing the potatoes down flat in the casserole dish. “Is that what you’re supposed to feed turtles?”
“Some turtles, yeah. Some turtles eat insects. Hell, some turtles eat meat along with their veggies. She can’t just feed it lettuce, even if she plans on letting it go eventually. And if it’s really endangered, she shouldn’t be keeping it at all. Where is she?” He started toward the dining room door.
Greta frowned. “I haven’t seen her since earlier this afternoon. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any of the Dubrovniks since I took my cake out of the oven. Nadia was here then, but she left. You’d think Alice would at least be around.”
“I’ll see if I can find them.” He pushed open the door to the dining room. The empty dining room. Also the empty lobby. He stepped toward the front door, only to see a Closed sign, with another on the door of the general store.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he muttered, heading up the stairs. Alice usually closed the store around six, but she left the light on in case anyone wanted an emergency can of beans.
A note was thumbtacked to his door.
Gone to Promise Harbor for dinner and a movie, Nadia had written in her dramatic script. I suggest a picnic.
Hank unpinned the note, heading back down the stairs toward the kitchen. Greta glanced up as he came back through the swinging door. “What’s up?”
“Apparently, we’re on our own for dinner.” He handed her the note.
She frowned, reading it over. “Well, hell. I’m not taking potatoes gratin on a picnic, even assuming I could get it baked in time.”
“Can you put it in the refrigerator?”
She shrugged. “Sure. I guess we could have it for dinner tomorrow night.”
“And do we have anything we could take on a picnic?”
“Ham sandwiches.” Her forehead furrowed in thought. “There are some chips in the pantry, although I don’t know how fresh they are. And I got some tomatoes and carrots at Merton yesterday. And, of course, there’s rose geranium cake. I don’t know what we have to drink, though.”
“Do you have any objections to beer?”
She shook her head.
“Then we’ve got it covered. Sounds like a plan to me.”
Greta gave him one of those slow smiles that made his blood pressure spike. “I’m all in favor of plans.”
“Good. You grab the food, I’ll grab the beer, and we’ll be on our way.”
She raised an eyebrow. “On our way where?”
“Leave that to me.” He took a deep breath as he headed for his room and the six-pack of Samuel Adams he had tucked in his minirefrigerator. Thank you, good old interfering Nadia.
Chapter Ten
By the time Hank had maneuvered his truck down the dirt road leading from the sign for Tompkins Lake, Greta had given up trying to figure out what exactly was going on. Nadia hadn’t said anything about taking Hyacinth and Alice to the movies while she’d watched Greta take the rose geranium cake out of the oven. Nor had she said anything while Greta spread the cake with fragrant pink frosting. Greta had even talked about her plans for dinner, and Nadia hadn’t said a word. Maybe because she was plotting.
Clearly the whole movie thing was a last-minute decision. But Greta wasn’t at all sure why Nadia had decided to do what she did or how Greta herself was supposed to feel about it. Nadia was the only one at Casa Dubrovnik who knew all the details of Greta’s marriage disaster. It didn’t make any sense that her first reaction would be to send Greta out on a date with Hank when she was still decompressing from the divorce bends.
A date? Is that what this is?
Well, sort of. It made more sense to call it a date than to call it anything else. While she and Hank might spend a pleasant evening discussing current affairs in Massachusetts, she didn’t really see that happening. Unless affairs was taken to mean something a lot broader than its usual definition.
This is headed in one obvious direction. The only real question is how I feel about it.
The truck finally moved beyond the trees, and Greta got her first view of Tompki
ns Lake, glimmering silver among the groves of white pine and hardwood. She could see a few picnic tables tucked in among the trees, complete with families having dinner. One or two small children waded in the shallows of the lake.
“Not exactly deserted,” she murmured and then blushed. Who said Hank was looking for a deserted spot in the first place?
He grinned as he turned the truck up another short road. “It gets more deserted a little later, after all the parents leave to put their kids to bed.”
She nodded absently, as if the prospect of the parents taking off was only faintly interesting. Which it was. Absolutely.
Uh-huh. Right.
Hank pulled the truck in next to a pine grove and turned off the engine. “This look okay?”
“Sure.” Greta glanced at the aging wooden picnic table on the square of gravel and grass. The wood had weathered to silver and probably had several hundred splinters per square foot. Suddenly she really wished she’d brought a tablecloth.
“I’m not sure that table is going to work,” she said slowly.
“Don’t worry. I brought a blanket.” He lifted a battered picnic basket from behind the seat.
“For a tablecloth?”
He shook his head. “To sit on. If that’s all right with you.”
“Um…sure.” There was no reason not to eat on a blanket spread on the grass. None whatsoever.
Hank lifted out an even more battered cooler that he placed beside the basket. “I found the basket in the pantry. With any luck it hasn’t held anything toxic.”
Greta eyed the cooler dubiously. “The cooler’s more suspect than the basket. It looks like it was used to transport organs.”
He grinned. “The cooler’s mine. No organ transport, but it’s been in a few rough spots around the world. Came through fine, so far as I can tell.”
“Oh.” Greta swallowed. “Well, good.” For some reason she seemed to be putting her foot in her mouth much more regularly now than she had been earlier. Maybe it was the weather.
He pulled a threadbare quilt from the side of the basket. “Don’t know how big this is, but it should be enough for a meal.” He flipped it open, spreading it across a grassy patch near the trees.
The late afternoon sunlight caught flecks of gold in his hair, turning his skin golden as well. For a moment, his muscles were outlined in shadow as he smoothed the blanket across the grass.
Greta took another in a series of deep breaths, then picked up the picnic basket and joined him.
“I hope we’ve got enough food. If I’d had more warning, I could probably have come up with something better than this.” She set the basket on the blanket, kneeling beside it, careful not to look at Hank. “I’ve got sandwiches and carrot sticks. And some cherry tomatoes. There’s some chips too. Would you like pickles? Because I brought some along.”
Stop talking. For the love of god, just stop.
She licked her lips, taking a slightly shaky breath.
“Here.” He handed her a beer bottle. “Have some. Relax. Whatever we’ve got to eat is fine.”
She took a quick sip of beer, wishing it were something stronger or possibly weaker. The last thing she needed was something that would make her babble more than she was already babbling.
“So what have we got here?” He began lifting packages out of the basket—sandwiches, chips, veggies. “Looks good.” He paused, then lifted the final package out very carefully, positioning the rose geranium cake reverently at the center of the blanket. “My god, did I say good? This looks sensational.”
“Thanks. It’s pretty tasty. Usually. If everything worked out the way it was supposed to.” Stop talking, Greta Anne. Just stop talking.
He arched an eyebrow. “My guess is everything worked out. And even if it didn’t, I’m willing to make believe it did.”
Greta grabbed a ham sandwich, pushing it in his direction. “Here you go. Dinner.”
“Dinner. Right.”
For the next few minutes, she managed to keep her mouth full of food, which seemed to be a good antidote to babbling.
Hank took a swallow of beer, watching her as he did. “So have you had enough time in Casa Dubrovnik to be ready to pass on a little information about yourself? Or are you still finding your footing, so to speak?”
“What do you want to know?” All of a sudden, Greta found she had no urge to babble whatsoever.
“Well, we could start with where you’re from.”
“Promise Harbor.”
He waited for a moment, maybe to see if she’d say anything else, then shrugged. “So you live in Promise Harbor?”
She shook her head. “I’m from Promise Harbor. I live in Boston. Or anyway I used to.” She wasn’t entirely sure where she lived anymore. She’d given up her apartment in Boston at the same time she’d left for the wedding—not that it was much of a loss. “That is, I lived in Boston for a while.”
“Okay.” Hank narrowed his eyes. “I’m sort of confused right now. If you don’t live in Promise Harbor or in Boston, where do you live?”
She ran a finger through the condensation on the side of her bottle, trying to come up with an answer that made sense. “Casa Dubrovnik?” she said with an attempt at a smile.
He frowned. “You’re going to move in there permanently?”
“Probably not. I don’t know. I just…it’s another possibility. I’m not sure exactly where I live at the moment.” Yet another decision she hadn’t managed to think through before she left Boston.
Hank turned toward the lake, taking a contemplative swallow from his beer bottle. “I really thought that was one of the easy questions.”
“I was sort of upset when I came here,” she hedged. “I was supposed to be a bridesmaid at my brother’s wedding, but then his fiancée’s old boyfriend showed up at the wedding, and the two of them left together. There was a lot of chaos. My mom was having a meltdown. I decided to go for a drive until things calmed down, sort of. And then I found you in the hole and pulled you out, and it was like I saw this new direction I could take.”
“Right. You already told me a little about that wedding. So did you call your mother?”
She nodded. “Twice. I haven’t heard back from her, though. At least not since the last message I left.”
“Okay, so we’ve been over the whole wedding fiasco a couple of times. How about telling me something about yourself you haven’t mentioned before?”
She took a deep breath, staring down at her beer bottle. The minefield stretched before her. “I never graduated from college. I was a philosophy major at Boston University, but I started cooking for my housemates and I figured out I was happier doing that than I was doing anything else. So I switched to culinary school. My mom was furious. It took her a few months to forgive me.”
“Why? Didn’t she think you were a good cook?”
“She thought I rushed into it. And she was sort of right—I didn’t give it a lot of thought, not like I should have.”
“How long does it take to get a culinary degree?”
She shrugged. “In my case, a couple of years, plus an externship. I got my associate’s degree, though. My mom had to admit I followed through on it in the end.”
“So then did you get a job in a restaurant or what?”
Too late she saw the trap opening beneath her feet. Oh well.
“No. I’ve never worked as a chef. Well, not until Casa Dubrovnik anyway.” She took a hurried sip of beer, wishing it were colder.
Hank rolled to his back, propping his head on his hands before he glanced over at her again. “Okay, you’re dancing around something here, so before I start pressing you for details, just tell me—is it really bad?”
She blew out a breath. “Define really bad.”
“Well…” He shrugged. “Have you been in prison? Were you on trial for murder in some Central American country? Are you actually a well-known stripper in the greater Boston area?” He grinned. “Actually, that last one might not qualify as r
eally bad.”
“I’ve never done anything like that,” she said stiffly. She took another deep breath and blew it out. “I just got married.”
He froze, the beer bottle halfway to his lips. “You’re married.”
She shook her head sharply. “Divorced.”
“Oh.” He shrugged. “Why dance around it then?”
She picked up a carrot strip, nibbling at the end. “Have you ever been married?”
“Nope. Nobody ever considered me promising marriage material.”
“Did you ever think about it?”
He turned his head again to look at her, green eyes suddenly dark. “Sure. I’m a functioning adult who’s over thirty. If I hadn’t thought about it occasionally, I’d be some kind of mutant.”
“But you didn’t do it.”
He shook his head. “Getting tenure in archaeology isn’t exactly a walk in the park. I spent a lot of years bouncing around from one archaeological site to another. I never met a woman who seemed like she’d really enjoy steaming jungles with large insects and Maoist guerillas for comic relief.”
“But you’re not in a steaming jungle now. You’re in Massachusetts.”
“Really?” He glanced around the lake. “No kidding? I thought I was in Guatemala.”
Greta snorted, then rubbed her nose. “Very funny. But if you specialize in Latin America, what are you doing here?”
“Found a wall. Decided to dig it up. Got somebody to give me money. The rest is history. Or anyway, archaeology. It’s all Mesoamerican anyway.” He grinned again, his teeth flashing in the dimming light. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed the discreet way you changed the subject.”
She shrugged. “Here’s another new subject, then. Want some rose geranium cake?”
He rolled back to a sitting position. “I thought you’d never ask.”
“Okay,” she cautioned as she lifted the pieces of cake out of their container and onto paper plates. “This is a really different kind of cake. And disaster is always possible since it sort of depends on the quality of the rose geranium leaves. I figure this early in the summer they won’t be quite as strong as they would be later on. But there’s always the possibility that they’ll be so strong they’ll take the cake over the top and it’ll taste like bad perfume.”