A book. Clever of Angela. In fact, not a bad idea at all. He’d always wanted to write a searing social novel, but had never found the time. Now time was all he had. Thanks, Angela.
He scanned his column, which was a compilation of the commentaries of several columns, with the outdated social-sightings gossip omitted. That was fine with him. He scanned the rest of the paper, breathing easier now that his reputation wasn’t going to take a nosedive.
After finishing with the paper, he decided to check out some electronic and computer books, since he had to maintain that stupid story about being a computer expert.
He found the best ones in the children’s section—simple language, lots of pictures. Perfect. He restrained himself from grabbing them all.
It was past noon and he was keeping Beth from closing. “Sorry.” He stacked the books on the checkout counter.
“Not a problem.” Beth hesitated, then reached beneath the counter and withdrew a form. “You’ll have to fill out an application for a library card and I’ll need to see some identification.”
Damn. His new identity papers hadn’t arrived yet. Stalling, he patted his pockets. “I don’t have my driver’s license with me.”
“That’s okay. Fill out your address and telephone number and you can show me your license another time.” She laughed softly. “It’s not like I don’t know how to find you while you’re here.”
Innocent words, but they sobered Jaron. He stared at the form. Did he know what address Quigg had devised for him? No. Did he even know his phone number? No. Business address? No. He should have memorized the one from the Web site. He could put Twin Oaks, but she already knew that. He could put his mother’s address, but what if Beth checked? He couldn’t have anything of his connected to Jay Drake. And his mother lived in New York, not Syracuse.
He could put a fake address, except he didn’t know the zip code for Syracuse without looking it up.
Jaron had taken far too long writing the name “Jay Drake.” Think. Finally, on the address line he wrote “Twin Oaks” because he had to write something.
And miraculously, wonderfully, blessedly, she took the card and attached a plastic tab with “Drake” written on it, and filed it.
His knees were jittery. His knees were actually jittery! He swallowed dryly as she wrote out a wallet-size card in Jay Drake’s name and added a three-digit number.
Jaron watched in fascination as she used the old-fashioned stamp-and-card method of checking out the books. She pulled the blue card from the pocket, wrote his number, then stamped the due date on the remaining white card. No scanning wand for the Cooper’s Corner library.
“I can’t believe you don’t have a computer.” He could have bitten his tongue.
“I’d love one, but the library is small enough that I can get along without it. And I’d have no idea how to computerize the checkout procedure or the catalog.” She smiled up at him. “Maybe you could teach me.”
“Maybe.” Why hadn’t he told Quigg to make him an accountant? “But I’m more of a software writer.”
She pulled the card from The Friendly Little Computer and stamped the due date. “Doing some brush-up work?” She smiled as she asked, but to Jaron, it was a loaded question. And unfortunately accurate.
“One of the reasons I’ve taken so much vacation is that I’m collaborating on a children’s computer book. I thought I’d check out the competition.” Would she buy it?
She would. “Very wise.” She pushed the stack of books toward him. “I’ll see you at tea.”
Once Jaron was back in the car, he gripped the steering wheel and took several deep breaths. That had been close.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, they focused on a quaint—there was no other word for it—
tavern. Maureen hadn’t pointed out the tavern yesterday. Jaron wondered if he dared stop in there for a...beer, probably, but he’d make it an imported one. He started the car, intending to do just that, but stopped. It was barely past noon. He could already hear the talk about Bonnie’s fiancé drinking in the middle of the day.
Nope. No beer.
He gripped the steering wheel and nosed the car across the street toward Bonnie’s parents’ store. If her parents weren’t busy, he supposed he was going to get grilled again. Grabbing the grocery list Maureen had written, he got out of the car.
Man, he hated small towns.
He hated them even more once he stepped inside the store. The general hum of conversation stopped at the sound of the bell clanging. In the few moments it took for Jaron’s eyes to adjust to the light, the people inside had the advantage.
Volunteering to come to the only grocery and hardware store in town on a Saturday was not the best decision he’d ever made.
Volunteering to come without Bonnie might become a fatal mistake.
Was the entire population in here? Did they travel in packs, or what? Did he imagine that the smiles were smaller—when they were there at all—and the gazes harder? No, he didn’t imagine it.
“Greetings, all.” He reined in the wide Jaron smile, substituted one that was all-purpose pleasant, and went up to the counter, where Philo had spread out an assortment of drill bits.
Jaron was very glad that he hadn’t lied on his library card application. These people would have already called for a credit report and had the sheriff, or whoever passed for law enforcement here, check his record.
“Hello, Jay,” his future faux father-in-law said. “What can I do for you?”
Jaron was very conscious that everyone in the store—
mostly men—was unabashedly watching and listening. He placed the list on the counter. “I’m picking up a few things for Maureen.”
Philo glanced at the list and gestured with a nod of his head. “Phyllis is at the grocery counter.”
“Ah. Thanks.” Retrieving the list, Jaron walked down the center aisle until he’d crossed over into the grocery store. He felt the gazes of each person on his back the whole way.
The conversation was higher-pitched at this end of the building, but the women reacted exactly as the men had. They stopped in midsentence to eye him.
He tried his wide Jaron smile, but only received casual ones in return.
Wow. Without Bonnie as a shield, the villagers weren’t as openly friendly. They were reserved and polite, but there was no sign of the open-armed welcome he’d received yesterday.
They couldn’t have found out anything about him, could they?
“Hello, Mrs. Cooper.” Bonnie’s mother was at the cash register, a handsome old-fashioned one—but next to it she had a thoroughly modern credit card swiper and bar code scanner hooked up to a box that printed receipts. Jars of penny candy—actually selling for a penny—were displayed kid height in front of the counter.
“Jay! How delightful to see you!” And she looked determinedly delighted, too.
He figured it was all for show, but wondered why it required such an effort. “Maureen needs a few things and I volunteered so I could have an excuse to see you and explore the town.” Don’t oversell it. Behind him, he could smell different perfumes. The women were drawing closer. Trapping him. Ready to pounce.
“Twin Oaks is lovely, isn’t it?” asked a female voice.
“Yes.” Jaron wondered where they were going with this.
“Maureen and Clint are doing so well,” commented another. “I hear they’re completely booked for the whole season.”
“Sometimes there are cancellations,” Phyllis said.
“Now...” one woman put her finger to her cheek “...I believe I heard her say she had a full house this weekend.”
“Are you in one of the rooms, Jay?”
Oh, so that was it. The morality police were on patrol. “No, I’m temporarily in the attic.”
; “Bonnie’s redoing the attic, isn’t she?” The women were coming closer and closer, like jackals circling their prey.
“Yes.” Jaron glanced over at Phyllis, but she was fiddling with something behind the counter and wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“And she’s rented her house out, too,”
“That’s right.”
It was as though they were a Greek chorus, taking turns speaking.
“So where is Bonnie sleeping?”
The million-dollar question. His best defense was the truth. “She’s camping out in a room in the attic.” A floral-lined room.
Eyebrows rose as if they were choreographed. “With you?”
They practically held their breath, waiting for an answer.
He tried his best to look scandalized. “No. I’m in the attic, but I’m in the other room.”
There was a collective exhaling of coffee-scented breath.
“Or I was in the other room. Once the renovations start, it’ll be too noisy, so today we’ve been fixing up an old shed. I haven’t met Seth yet, but I understand he’s going to check the electrical wiring.”
The smiles were wider now. Jaron’s wasn’t. What right did they have to judge where he and Bonnie slept? What right did they have to even ask?
“Tell us again how you met,” an elderly woman in a silk jogging suit asked.
“Jay, this is Mrs. Dorn, Dr. Dorn’s wife,” said a relieved-looking Phyllis. “You didn’t get a chance to meet them yesterday.”
Gently, Jaron took the blue-veined hand in his. “You are a very lucky young man,” Mrs. Dorn said. “Bonnie is a special woman.”
“That she is.” Jaron eased his hand away.
“So how did you meet?”
“Mrs. Cooper’s sister and my mother are old friends. They introduced us.”
“When?”
Jaron had an inspired thought. “I can’t remember exactly when it was...I was dating another woman at the time. Sydney Pendleton, the gallery owner. In fact, Clint and I were talking and discovered that I’d met his wife when she used to critique showings there.”
Conversation exploded. He was brilliant. He’d given them not one, but two pieces of juicy information to gnaw on.
He smugly put the list on the counter, but as Phyllis went to get the supplies for him, his self-satisfied smile faded, to be replaced by a leaden feeling in his stomach.
Jay Drake had never dated Sydney Pendleton.
Jay Drake had never met Kristin Cooper.
Jay Drake had spent an awful lot of time in New York City for someone who lived in Syracuse.
Jay Drake was sunk.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HOW COULD BONNIE ignore Jaron when he wasn’t around for her to ignore?
It was just so typically annoying of him. After she’d worked so hard all Saturday—and Bonnie had worked very hard, since listening to Jaron’s even breathing on the other side of the sheet was interfering with her sleep—Jaron had moved into the shed-cum-future guest cottage. Seth had strung wiring and connected the shed to the main house’s power line, and Jaron had made himself a nice little nest. Then he’d gone to ground and hadn’t been seen since. Even his meals had been eaten on the sly, or when Bonnie wasn’t there.
He certainly hadn’t been to tea. It had been four days now, and people were beginning to talk. At first, they were all sympathetic concern. Was everything all right between them? Was he ill? Then they were curious. Where was he? Why didn’t he put in an appearance at tea? Had they offended Jay in some way? And then they began making pointed remarks about big-city folk who snubbed locals. And they didn’t even know he was really from New York and not from Syracuse.
Beth had told everyone he was working on a book, which mollified them somewhat. Except Bonnie. She wasn’t mollified. She hadn’t known about the book. Shouldn’t he have told her something that important?
Maureen had decreed that all noisy renovation work be done when her guests were not present in the house so as not to interfere with their stay. That meant that Bonnie and Seth got about four to six hours of work time in the attic. She was finished by teatime every day, which allowed her to respond to the occasional private distress call from Cooper’s Corner residents—and skip tea, which she’d done yesterday.
But today, Seth and Clint were adding supporting braces and cutting notches in the wall studs for the DWV pipes—
the drain-waste-vent system. Bonnie didn’t have to be there.
She had plans. The renters had left her house and she had planned to clean it herself before the next family arrived, saving the cost of the professional cleaners the rental agent would hire. Bonnie was going to roust Jaron from his lair and make him go with her. It was just the sort of supportive domestic activity of which Cooper’s Corner residents would approve. Bonnie didn’t expect him to do any of the actual work, but he could use her phone line to get on the Internet, or work or whatever, as long as he stayed in the house.
Bonnie marched down the inn’s steps, across the drive and down the gentle slope to the future guest cottage. She knocked on the door.
And waited.
She knew he was awake; he’d finished his shower about thirty minutes before.
“Jaron?”
She heard a scraping sound. “Nobody here by that name.”
“Very fun—oh.”
The door opened and he looked down at her.
Somehow, probably because she’d been irritated with him, Bonnie had forgotten that he’d adopted native dress. She’d visualized the old urban, black-clad Jaron, the one with the goatee obscuring his strong jaw. It was easier to dislike the old Jaron.
Instead, she was faced with the new and attractively improved Jay, but with Jaron’s eyes. Dark eyes that stared at her without a hint of welcome.
“Let me in before somebody sees us.”
Silently, he stood away from the door and Bonnie walked in. Two space heaters chased the chill from the fall air. Beneath the window, the precise spot where she wanted to put her double claw-footed tub, he’d placed a folding card table and chair. On the table were a stack of books, his laptop, a desk lamp and...was that a soldering iron? A bright yellow extension cord—the only note of color in the place—ran the length of the room to the newly-working plug, courtesy of Seth.
She could see new plywood patching areas of the roof, and several beams had been replaced. “Very nice.”
“What do you want?” He crossed his arms over his chest.
Bonnie remembered his chest. Very well. Pretending to be interested in Clint’s handiwork so she didn’t have to look at Jaron or his chest, she issued her invitation with all the grace of a draft board. “You haven’t been seen lately, and people are beginning to talk.”
“Talk about what? I’ve been keeping out of sight.”
“That’s what they’re talking about.”
“This place—” He bit off something she knew wasn’t complimentary. “Don’t you people have lives? How can you stand it?”
Bonnie didn’t like the “you people” crack. “It’s my home. They’ve known me all my life and are just concerned.”
“They’re not concerned. They’re small-minded, petty and judgmental.”
Bonnie felt her jaw drop. “They were so nice to you!”
“Ha!” He stabbed a finger at her. “You weren’t around on Saturday. Once they got me alone, it was open season. I was practically accused of stealing your virtue and—” He broke off, shaking his head.
“And what? And what?”
“I thought I’d distract them by—”
“Distract? Why didn’t you just tell them we weren’t sleeping together?”
“Because—” he bit off the word “—they wanted to know precisely where we were laying our heads a
t night. I told them we were both in the attic in separate rooms. I didn’t tell them the walls of the rooms were made of sheets.”
“They actually asked you that? I figured Lori Tubb would have scotched that rumor.”
“Not only that, they asked in front of your mother. And if I hadn’t given the right answer, your father was standing by with the lynch mob.”
Bonnie ruthlessly suppressed a smile. “It couldn’t have been that bad.”
Jaron just looked at her.
“Well, I apologize for them.”
“I’m not as angry with them as I am with myself,” he said. “I started to tell you that I tried to distract them with a couple of facts to chew on. I told them I’d dated a gallery owner and that I’d known Kristin Cooper.”
That even distracted Bonnie. “Did you really know Kristin?”
“Jaron Darke did.”
Bonnie considered the risk. “They’re not going to know that.”
“All someone has to do is talk to Sydney Pendleton and ask her if she dated a Jay Drake.”
Sydney. He’d dated a woman with a chichi man’s name. Sydney was a rich and thin name. She’d owned an art gallery, so that made her thin, rich, cultured, and a business woman.
Bonnie was a business owner. But her name was round and down-to-earth and practical. One out of four wasn’t going to cut it. “Nobody is going to check up on your past love life.” Except Bonnie. She might—no. He could have dated a hundred Sydneys. She didn’t care.
“I think your father was taking notes.”
“He doesn’t want me to be hurt. That’s his job.”
Jaron made a noise. “I also nearly blew it at the library. I had to fill out an application for a library card and the address part stumped me. My nifty new driver’s license hadn’t come yet.”
Bonnie gestured to the books. “So what did you do?”
“Sweated a lot and wrote Twin Oaks. She took it, but wants to see my driver’s license later.”
“So you’ve got it now. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that I nearly slipped up. I’ve told so many half-truths, I can’t keep them all straight. And if that’s not enough, that kid knows more about computers than I do. He kept asking me questions.”
After Darke Page 15