by Cara Colter
Her decisions had to be cool and pragmatic, based on fact, not impulse. So, despite her initial reaction, tomorrow she would interview J. D. Turner’s friends and neighbors. She prayed she would find out J.D. was a beer-swilling swine with three ex-wives and a criminal record. And then she could go home and happily marry Herbert, her conscience clear.
Though, she wished, suddenly, wearily, she could put the lid back on that box she had opened, and never find that photo with the name Jed Turner written in her sister’s hand on the back of it.
Chapter Two
J.D., lying flat on his back underneath a car, gave a mighty heave, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, and the rusted bolt finally came loose. He took it off with much more vengeance than was strictly required, and tossed it aside. Then the phone rang and he bumped his head on the oil pan.
Not a good day, so far, he thought, sliding out from under the car. He glanced at the clock. And he was a full five minutes into it.
“J.D.’s,” he answered abruptly, cradling the phone in his ear while he wiped the grease off his hands.
“Stan here.”
Where were you last night when I needed it to be you standing at the door instead of her?
“What do you want?”
“Geez. Nice greeting.”
“I’m having a bad day.”
“It’s five after eight!”
“I know.”
“Well, this should cheer you up. There was this stranger in the Chalet this morning having breakfast. Female. Kind of cute in the librarian sort of way. You know the kind where a guy thinks about pulling the pins from her hair—”
“And this news would cheer me up for what reason?” J.D. cut off his friend before he went too far down the pulling-pins-from-her-hair road. He knew full well that was a path of thought that could make a man spend the whole night wide awake and staring at his ceiling.
Pins from her hair, lace under a sheer damp blouse, eyes an unreal color of indigo, these were all thoughts that ultimately led to heads banged on oil pans first thing in the morning.
“Because,” Stan said with glee, obviously saving the best for last, “Guess who the librarian slash goddess was asking about?”
“Fred Basil?” J.D. asked hopefully. Fred was another town bachelor. He was sixty-two, built like a beach ball and changed his overalls once a year whether he needed to or not. He had politely declined joining the A.G.M.N.W.N.C., saying he would like to get married if the right gal came along.
“Guess again, good buddy,” Stan said, his good cheer bordering on the obnoxious.
J.D.’s head started to hurt. He hoped it was a delayed reaction to hitting it on the oil pan, but he knew it wasn’t. He prided himself on leading a nice quiet life. Simple. Devoid of intrigues and mysteries. A man such as himself did not probe this kind of gossip. He rose above it. Performing at his best, J.D. would have said a firm goodbye and hung up the phone. Maybe he could blame the oil pan for the regrettable fact that he was not performing at his best, and he did not hang up the phone. But he suspected it was more pins and lace and indigo eyes.
“I’ll give you a hint,” Stan said sagely to J.D.’s silence. “You might have to think of relinquishing your membership in the A.G.M.N.W.N. Club.”
J.D. said three words in a row that would have made a sailor blush. Those three words were followed by a terse sentence. “What the hell kind of questions is she asking?” Five minutes later he hung up the phone, fury burning like coal chunks in his stomach. She had crossed the line. It wasn’t enough that she had caught him at a bad moment yesterday, singing his fool head off, wrapped in a towel.
Oh, no, now she had to publicly connect herself with him, provide all sorts of gossip to the eager mongers of the village. She was embarrassing him. She was invading his privacy. Enough was enough. He had no choice.
The sane thing, of course, would be to ignore her, to rise above.
The insane thing would be to track her down and tell her, like a sheriff in a bad Western, that this was his town and there wasn’t room for the both of them. Of course, he did the insane thing, stoking his fury all the way to town.
Of all the nerve! Asking sneaky questions about him to his friends and neighbors.
The Nissan was not parked at the Palmtree and was no longer in front of the Chalet. J.D. felt a moment’s hope that Tally Smith had gone away, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep well until he knew that for sure. Even after he’d confirmed her departure it occurred to him the pins-out-of-her-hair thoughts might plague him for awhile.
He began a slow patrol of Dancer’s eight blocks of residential streets.
Sure enough, there was her little gray Nissan parked in front of Mrs. Saddlechild’s house. He was willing to bet it was no coincidence it was parked there because he had made the mistake of uttering Mrs. Saddlechild’s name when he spoke to her on the phone last night, while that spy had been ensconced in his camp, with his frozen peas on her head.
He went up to her door and knocked hard on it.
Mrs. Saddlechild looked as ancient as the lawn mower he had repaired for her. Today, she was dressed in a flowered housedress, her hair newly blue, her smudged glasses sliding off the end of her nose.
“Just in the garden shed, J.D., thanks,” she said briskly, through a crack in the door. And then she closed her door in his face.
She thought he was delivering her lawn mower!
He frowned. He could go and wait in his truck for Ms. Tally Smith to come out. He could pull all the wires out from under the dash of her car so that she couldn’t escape without answering a few questions, without hearing that he was running her out of town.
He could do all that, but it would be too close to playing her silly little game of cloak-and-dagger.
Plus, there was no telling what Mrs. Saddlechild was telling the insatiably curious Tally Smith. Mrs. Saddle-child had seen him naked, for God’s sake, and it was possible she was old enough and addled enough to forget the all-important detail that he’d been three years old at the time.
The front door had three little panes of frosted glass in it. He glanced up and down the block, and then peered in one of them.
The house seemed very dark in comparison to the bright sunshine outside. Still, after a moment, he could see through to the kitchen, where windows were letting light in.
There was a huge platter of cookies on the kitchen table. Mrs. Saddlechild always had cookies for him when he delivered the mower. As he watched, a slender hand reached out and took one. He was sure he caught the briefest glimpse of bright blond hair before it moved back out of range of his vision.
Just as he’d suspected, Tally Smith was in there! Eating his cookies. Talking to a woman who’d known him since he was a baby, a woman who had personal information about him that could be both embarrassing and damaging.
What the hell did Tally Smith want? He banged on the door again.
Mrs. Saddlechild came, opened her door that same cautious crack, and peered at him, annoyed. “You’re still here, J.D.?”
“Apparently,” he said.
“Oh, your money!”
Yeah, like he’d been standing out here on her porch waiting for ten dollars
“This is not about your lawn mower,” he said with poorly disguised impatience. “I want to speak to your guest.”
Mrs. Saddlechild eyed him warily, and closed the door without inviting him in. It seemed like an awfully long time before she returned.
“It’s not convenient right now,” she said.
“It damn well better become convenient,” J.D. said. “You tell her—”
“J. D. Turner! When she told me you had not behaved like a gentleman toward her, I barely believed it. But here you are on my step, cursing.” She shook her head and made a little sucking sound with her lips.
He could see his future unfolding dismally before his eyes. All the senior citizens in Dancer would be looking at him sideways now. He’d have to do free lawn mower tune-ups for a year to remove
this smudge from his character.
That woman in there was ruining his life without half-trying.
“Kindly tell her I’ll be waiting,” he said tautly.
Mrs. Saddlechild sniffed regally and snapped her door shut. He figured he’d be cooling his heels for a good hour, and so he was relieved when Tally appeared a few moments later.
“Yes?” she said, stepping out onto the porch.
His relief was short-lived. Her hair was in the same crisp bun of the pulling-the-pins-from-it fantasy. She was wearing a crisp white shirt that was not silk, and pressed navy blue shorts that ended at the dimple in her knee. It reminded him of the kind of outfit lady golfers or off-duty nuns wore.
If you did not know there was a lacy bra underneath it, it was the kind of outfit designed to inspire trust and nothing else.
“Don’t ‘yes?’ me in that innocent tone of voice,” he warned her. He looked at her eyes, thinking last night’s fading light must have lent illusion to the color. But no, they were more purple than blue. Amazing.
The cool light in them made him want to pull all the pins from her hair.
“Leona said she’d call the police if you didn’t mind your manners.”
Leona. Great. This was just great. Was that actually a twinkle of amusement warming her eyes? How dare she be amused at his expense?
“I want to know what the hell you think you are doing,” he said, his tone low. He could see Mrs. Saddlechild peering out from behind her front curtain. He smiled for her benefit, but the smile felt stretched and taut, like a wolf baring its teeth.
“I’m having tea,” Tally said, unforthcoming. “And ginger snaps.”
He wanted to grab her and shake her until the pins flew free. Or kiss her again. He tried to remember the last time he had felt this passionate—this uncomfortably out-of-control—but the answer evaded him. “Why are you doing this? Why are you asking questions about me? Why are you so hell-bent on creating problems in my life?”
Her eyes were very expressive, and she looked guilty, a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar, but she said, her tone dignified, “I don’t see how asking a few innocent questions could create problems in your life.”
“Really? Well let me tell you something. When a stranger shows up in Dancer and starts asking if J. D. Turner pays his bills on time, by the next day it’s the talk of the coffee shop that he probably gambled away his life savings in Las Vegas.”
The guilty look darkened her eyes, so he pressed onward, “And if somebody asks if he has an ex-wife or two stashed away somewhere, then the talk in the barbershop and the hairdresser’s for the next three weeks will be about the possibility that he might have a secret wife or two. People will begin to ‘remember’ little incidents that back up this theory. There will be sightings in nearby towns.”
“Surely you exaggerate,” she said uncertainly, and looked guiltier than ever.
“And does J. D. Turner get drunk on Friday night? Or Monday? Or Tuesday? I guarantee you, there will be lookouts outside the New Life Church where AA meets twice a week for the next year trying to catch me making an entrance.” He was enjoying her guilt, immensely, the fact that she had dropped her gaze from him and was now studying the toe of a sneaker so absurdly white she must have polished it.
“And let’s not forget the final question. Does J. D. Turner like children? Good God, that coupled with me tracking you down here will have Mrs. Saddlechild posting the wedding bans in the Dancer Daily News!”
He saw, suddenly, and with grave irritation, she had not lowered her eyes from his out of guilt alone. Her shoulders were shaking suspiciously.
“Are you laughing?”
She glanced up at him, and shook her head, vehemently, no. But it was too late. He had seen the line of her mouth curve up, the mischievous sparkle it brought to her eyes.
“I fail to see the humor in this,” he said sternly. Thankfully, she quit smiling. That smile would make it way too easy to forget she was an uptight menace, and that his mission was to run her out of town.
She looked at him squarely, drew back her shoulders. “You don’t strike me as a man who gives two hoots about what the people of this town have to say about you.”
“Just because you’ve been digging up dirt, don’t assume you know one single thing about me, Tally Smith.”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, and he did not miss her reluctance, “there is no dirt. You appear to be a highly respected member of this community.”
“Your tone implies I have somehow managed to pull the wool over the eyes of an entire town.”
“Apparently most of whom have been spared the sight of you in a towel. And also,” she continued, “as a charter member of the Ain’t Gettin’ Married, No Way, Never Club, it strikes me as bizarre that you would kiss a complete stranger on your front porch.”
Stan had a big mouth. The club was secret!
“Kissing has nothing to do with marriage, unless you read a certain kind of novel, which I am almost certain you do.” He had scored, because he saw indignant red splotches bloom in her cheeks. “Plus, for as fascinating as all this is, you haven’t answered my original question. Why the curiosity in the first place?”
She looked at the toe of her shoe again. So did he. The whiteness of those runners really bugged him. Didn’t she have anything better to do with her time?
Didn’t she have a fellow chasing her around trying to get the pins out of her hair?
He reminded himself firmly, that only one question about her was any of his business. The question that pertained to him. Everything else entered distinctly murky territory.
“Cat got your tongue?” he asked silkily. “I want an answer. I want to know why you’ve been asking questions about me all over town.”
“All right,” she said. “My sister left you a small inheritance. I wanted to see if you deserved it. I’ll mail it to you.”
He watched with extreme interest as the tip of her nose turned red, and then her earlobes, and then her neck.
He was willing to bet she had never told a lie before in her life.
“Try again,” he said, folding his arms over his chest, and giving her the mean look that always made Stan flub his pool shot.
She took a deep breath and looked everywhere but at him. She touched the button at her throat to make sure it was done up tight, not an ounce of her exposed to him.
“I found your picture in my sister’s things,” she said finally, her tone clipped and uneasy.
“And?”
“And I was intrigued. I wanted to know more.” Her glowing red nose and earlobes changed to a shade of beet.
“Don’t even try to appeal to my male ego,” he said. “It won’t work. There is no way you drove all this way because you looked at a picture and found me irresistibly attractive. You could have any guy you blinked your big eyes at back home, wherever that is. You wouldn’t have to drive halfway across the country looking for one.”
“I wasn’t trying to appeal to your male ego,” she said indignantly. “I have a man at home. I most likely will marry him before the year is out.”
Her enthusiasm for her upcoming nuptials was under-whelming. She sounded like a Victorian maiden, in one of those books he was positive she read, who’d been promised against her will. So much for a guy chasing after her trying to get her to let her hair down.
Not that J. D. Turner wanted the details of her excruciatingly boring love life. Not that he wanted to even think why the flatness of her statement made him feel an unwanted stab of sympathy coupled with a desire to kiss her all over again.
“I want the truth. A hard concept for you and your sister, I know, but I’m not settling for anything less.”
“Please don’t say anything bad about my sister.”
The sudden ache in her voice, the tenderness nearly undid him more than her emotionless announcement of her upcoming marriage.
“Elana was sick,” she said quietly.
Ah, the truth, finally
. “Well, you said she died. I assumed she was sick first.”
“No. She died in a car accident. She was sick all her life. She had a mental disorder.”
“Elana?” he said incredulously.
“Sometimes she hurt the people who loved her. She didn’t mean to.”
“Elana?” he said, again.
Tally nodded. “You probably met her in an upswing. Lots of energy? Incredible enthusiasm? Unbelievable zest for life?”
He was staring at her, openmouthed.
“Everybody loved her when she was like that,” Tally said, almost gently.
“I never said I loved her,” he said fiercely.
“I think you did, though.” No glow to her ears and nose, no color blooming at the base of her slender throat now, when he most needed it!
“That’s ridiculous. Why would you think that?”
“Because of the picture I found.” She faltered. “And because of the way you kissed me when you thought it was her.”
If he’d been a really smart man, he would have hung his Gone Fishin’ sign on the shop door after Stan’s phone call this morning and taken off for a week or two. All this would have blown over by the time he got back.
But he had not done that, and now he bulldozed on, determined to get to the truth, more determined than ever to see Tally Smith riding off into the sunset.
“You still seem to be dodging around the question. Let me put this very simply. What is Tally Smith doing in Dancer, North Dakota?”
“I wanted to find out some things about the man my sister loved.”
He snorted. “She didn’t love me.”
“I think she did. That’s probably why she left you. She started to go down. Loved you enough that she didn’t want you to see it.”
He looked at her closely. Little tears were shining behind her eyes. He wasn’t the only one Elana Smith had caused pain to. Tally had said everyone loved her sister when she was up. He suspected very few people had loved her when she was down.
The last thing he wanted to do was see Tally in a sympathetic light because it blurred his resolve. On the other hand, her man wasn’t chasing her trying to get her hair down, and she had coped with a sick sister.