So Peter changed tactics—she saw him switch mental tracks by the way he straightened up and hitched at his belt. “Well, maybe he managed to score himself a job or two but what on earth were you thinking by taking him into your home, Sophie?”
“That is very definitely none of your business,” she shot back.
“What about your kids?” he demanded. “Didn’t you stop to consider the dangers in taking a stranger into your house? Christ, did you even bother to get any references?”
Anger bubbled up in her veins, because Peter was right on that score—taking in Martin, a stranger, looked like an incredibly foolish undertaking. How the hell was she supposed to explain that she’d trust Martin with her life—had entrusted her life to him, in fact? That she had felt more secure and happier about her kids’ welfare when he was in the house with them than she had for the years when Georgia and Morgan’s only guardian had been tiny, crippled Jinni?
I slept through the whole night without once waking up last night, Peter. Not a creak, not a single scratch in that old, ratchety house made me wake up with my heart in my mouth and my hand reaching for the baseball bat under the bed. That’s a priceless feeling but you’re not going to settle for a feeling, are you?
Peter was shaking his head. “You sometimes amaze me, Sophie. You do the craziest things. But I’ll sort it out—”
“Sort it out how, chief?” Jack asked. He’d glided over to the counter while Sophie had stood casting about for an answer. Even Peter hadn’t heard him, for he spun quickly, clearly startled. His hand did that odd back-and-down jerk toward the baton on his belt. Then he thought the better of it and settled for planting his hands on his hips again.
Jack’s as tall as him. I’d never have thought that.
Peter was such an imposing figure while Jack’s leanness deceived the eye. They were, in fact, eye-to-eye right at this moment.
Sophie’s pulse gave a start. What was this? Two dogs fighting over a bone? And she was the bone? Was it that basic? That…medieval? If it was, she’d boot both of them out.
Peter was the first to break the man-to-man stare. He grinned, almost a sneer. “Sophie’s a sensible woman, mostly. I have to wonder what promises you handed out to make her take you in like that.”
“That’s between Sophie and me,” Jack answered quietly. “Unless there’s a business relationship you have with her that gives you an interest in my qualifications? Are you a silent partner, perhaps?”
“And if I am?” Peter demanded.
“No, he’s not a partner,” Sophie slid in.
Jack lifted a brow. “You’re not a partner,” he repeated.
“I could make it my business,” Peter said softly. He tapped the badge on his chest. “This gives me the right to question anything I think is a threat to the peace of this community.”
Jack smiled a little and crossed his arms. It was almost like he had relaxed, as if he’d sensed he was on safe turf now. How could Peter threatening to make him his professional business possibly allow Jack to put down his guard? Jack was a man of secrets, the mysterious dark man that she knew so little about…
“Have I threatened the peace, chief?”
“There’s time, yet,” Peter assured him.
“Have I broken any laws that you know of?”
“I bet I’d find plenty if I looked a little harder.”
“Yes? Or no? Any laws, any obscure by-laws I don’t know about. Ignorance is no defense anywhere in the world and god knows there are some curly by-laws out there. Butting out cigarettes on garden gnomes, for instance. Have I?”
Peter’s face was turning an interesting shade of red. Sophie had never noticed the full extent of the tracery of veins in his forehead before.
When he didn’t answer straight away, Jack added, “Yes or no, chief?”
“You don’t want to get on the wrong side of me, Stride,” Peter shot back.
“I thought I was already there,” Jack said coolly. “I’ve got nothing to lose by clearing the air here, so let me finish up quickly, because I’ve got a full night’s work ahead of me and I want to get back to it.” He held up his hand and touched the end of his forefinger. “One—I’ve broken no laws and shattered no peace. Two—” he touched the next finger. ”I’m not destitute, homeless, or a vagrant. I’m holding down two jobs as Sophie pointed out. Three—if you were to make me your business as you threatened a moment ago, then the only reason you’d be doing it is because personally, I piss you off. Using your department’s resources to take up a personal grudge is against the law, chief. On top of that, it’s not ethical. It’s also an abuse of my rights as a citizen to privacy and personal freedom. And finally, number four, chief and this is the biggie for you—if you were to make this personal grudge into an official matter, thereby breaking the law and ignoring the constitution, you would be demonstrating to Sophie here, to Cal and to the pretty young ladies sitting behind me listening to every word we’re saying that you’re not an honest, upright citizen of this community.” Jack smiled again. “I’m sure that’s not the impression you want to give everyone. Especially Sophie.”
The red in Peter’s face was now turning purple. The extremities were white. Sophie held her breath.
“And lastly, chief,” and Jack’s voice dropped very low, so that Sophie had to strain to hear it and the pretty young ladies behind him would certainly not hear it at all. “If you really do want to follow up on this personal grudge, then I have absolutely no problems with that at all. I can accommodate you at any time. All you have to do is give the word. Only, don’t send your goons. Be a man and fight your own fights, huh?”
Peter vibrated. It seemed that he was holding in an explosion that would flatten the whole store. He straightened up—trying to be taller?—and pointed his finger at Jack. His finger was shaking. “This isn’t the end of it,” he said and his voice was thick and blurred.
“I’ll be here when you’re ready,” Jack assured him.
Peter turned and strode out of the shop. His hand hit the plate of the swing door with a thud that must have bruised the butt of his hand. It made the door shudder open to the point where the automatic closing arm was extended to the fullest. There was enough momentum in the door that the abrupt stop made the bell jangle sharply and bounce up to hook itself over the bracket it hung from.
Peter climbed into the patrol car and pulled out of the diagonal parking slot with a roar, spitting blue metal everywhere. She watched him scream up the street. The force of his exit hadn’t surprised her in the slightest. She had been expecting it. It was almost a disappointment that Peter’s reaction had been so clichéd.
Cal was chuckling again, an old man’s breathless wheeze that went on and on as he shook his head.
Jack walked to the door and untangled the bell so it could close properly.
“Martin, no offense but inviting him to pick a fight with you… Peter must weigh fifty pounds more than you. He’ll kill you,” Sophie said.
“He won’t fight.” He came over to the counter and sat on a stool. “I’ll have what’s left in that coffeepot, if I can.”
“It’s cold.”
“It’s room temperature. That’ll do,” he answered.
She poured and pushed the cup over to him. “Why won’t he fight?”
“Because for guys like that, it’s all about face. Appearance. I just set it up for him so that he can’t make a move without losing face.”
“What if he decides he can live with the loss of face if he gets the fun of creaming you in a dark alley one night?”
Jack smiled a little, that same wise smile he’d used on Peter. “What’s wrong, Sophie? Do you think I can’t look after myself?”
“No, it’s not that, it’s…” She bit her lip. “Peter can be sneaky.”
His grin broadened. “So can I.”
“He handles mean guys all the time. He knows tricks.”
Jack was nodding. “Not as many as I do, I guarantee it. I’m not worried about
Peter trying to take me on. He likes other people to do his work for him, so I had to take that out of the equation. He’ll leave me alone now.”
Jack’s confidence, his easy composure in the face of an enraged law enforcement officer—it struck Sophie with the brilliance of a thought that should have been obvious long ago. Was Jack a cop, once?
But Jack was already turning away, picking up his tools once more, saying goodnight to the girls as they left. For as long as he was Martin, she couldn’t ask that question.
Would she ever get to ask those sorts of questions?
And how long would Peter be content to leave Jack alone? She knew Peter, knew his doggedness. Look at how long he persisted in asking for dates despite endless refusals and prevarications she dished out. Peter had been ready to explode. If it really was about face, hadn’t Jack just publicly humiliated him?
No, Peter wouldn’t leave him alone for long at all.
Chapter Thirteen
Sophie was in her favourite spot on the back verandah, enjoying the minimal warmth of a sunny December Sunday.
She sometimes came here to rest in the quiet moments and lulls between kid crises and loads of laundry, which wasn’t nearly as often as she would have liked. Life seemed to speed up with each succeeding year.
Except that this year, the gears had changed down a little. No, to be perfectly frank, the slowdown had happened just in the last few weeks.
Since Martin came.
She sat on an old cane-bottom rocker, which had been there when she’d bought the place. It was really old, with enormous curving rockers and no arms. The kids had tried it once and found its uncontrolled motion alarming and never been tempted to play on it again. She found a gentle rocking on it soothing. She had grabbed a blanket from the old linen closet at the bottom of the stairs to cover her legs.
She was enjoying the peace, while the kids were in the lounge watching The Grinch and stringing popcorn. Or eating it, most likely.
The rocker’s reclined chair tilted her back, so that the verandah railing was the perfect place to rest her feet. She could look up into the sky above the firs without craning her neck.
She gazed into the pale blue sky and soaked up the small sounds of a quiet day—the firs whispering in the tiny breeze that didn’t touch her in her sunny corner, the muffled sounds of the movie and noises in the kitchen as Jinni went about her business. The odd car on the street in front of the house, the sound traveling down the gap between her house and the next one, a good thirty yards to the right. She listened, her mind in neutral, while she rocked.
It took a while before she realized that the chair wasn’t squeaking the way it always did. Martin must have oiled it or tightened up screws or something.
Martin had been here six weeks. Six weeks. The time had slid by on well-oiled wheels. The lack of squeak in her rocker seemed to be a good sample of how the rest of her life had eased up, straightened out and just seemed to be running smoothly.
In part that was why she was out on the verandah, watching the wisps of cloud move by. She had very little she had to get done today. That was such an enormous change from what life had been like before. The small evolution that had made it possible deserved recognition. Acknowledgement.
It wasn’t just the wiring that Martin had silently taken care of. It was tiny things like this rocker and the floorboard on the front verandah that for years everyone in the household had learned to step around, or over or else risk a black eye when it flipped up and slammed them in the nose. The basement was now free of dust and grime, a well-lighted workroom where furniture and appliances got fixed and beloved toys mended.
There was a small part of her that wanted to be annoyed. She wanted to be offended that it had taken the arrival of a man in the household for all these little efficiencies to start to happen. Yet, in the drowsy warmth of the sun, she found it was easier to face the truth squarely. The fact was, she had been holding onto the reins of her life so tightly, just barely keeping it on the rails, that she had been incapable of taking care of the little things, like squeaky rockers. She just hadn’t had time, or if she had found the time, she was so exhausted from the endless round of her days that falling into bed was a much more appealing alternative to digging out the oil can.
Life had speeded up and she had been just holding on. If it had gotten any faster, her grip would have started to slip. How long could a house stand up without even minimal maintenance? How long before a health inspector came to the store and shut her down because she hadn’t cleaned her freezers that month? How many more blenders, hair dryers, microwaves, lamps and space heaters would have joined the pile of broken, unusable equipment in the basement before their lives became completely unworkable?
If something essential began to play up, like the refrigerator in the store which had mysteriously begun leaking water and losing its chill, her reaction was always a tired, sinking feeling of dark clouds closing in on her. She couldn’t afford repairs and certainly couldn’t afford a new fridge, even though she desperately needed one. And she didn’t know how to start fixing something like that. So she would ignore it, working around the inconvenience, like she worked around so many other small inconveniences in her life, hoping it would not get worse.
She’d learned to take care of a great many things for herself that she would never have considered turning a hand to when she worked in the law firm in Los Angeles. That person was a completely different person. As a single mother, she’d learned to fix toasters and change tires and oil, and sew and repair clothes, tents and backpacks. She’d learned how to do her own dry cleaning and had taught herself to lay bricks and mortar out of a book. She had learned a great many things in the last few years but the biggest thing she had learned was that there was a price for all that frugal independence.
You started to run out of time.
If she’d had the time to take a course on repairing refrigerators, she would have. If she’d had the wherewithal to pay someone to do it, she would have. The wiring in the shop threatened her livelihood, forcing her to attend to it and that had been, in the end, how her life started to unravel. Her time had narrowed down until she could only attend to the most urgent crises. The minor ones were ignored.
What was that saying? The squeaky wheel gets the oil.
How close had she been to losing it all? No one would ever be able to answer that. She may have gone for years holding it all together with spit and positive thinking, everything marking time. And the car engine could have blown out tomorrow and it all would have hit the fan.
Until Martin came along and suddenly, things were being taken care of. The fridge had been fixed, toys restored. The rocker no longer squeaked.
The screen door behind her opened. No squeak there, either, she thought, smiling a little.
Martin stopped by her chair, holding a cup of coffee and looking out at the firs.
“Sit a while,” she offered. “It’s nice here.”
He pulled the old chrome and vinyl kitchen chair closer to the railing and sat, staring out. “It is nice,” he agreed.
The silence settled between them again, a comfortable one. Sophie let her head drop back against the rocker, looking up. Martin sat just in the corner of her vision, sipping.
The mountains were starting to turn blue already, she realized. The snow caps would drop soon and the dark gray walls would get a sprinkling of icing sugar powder clinging to the rough sides. She’d sat many times watching them tower over her, so big and ageless…
Something grabbed at her throat then, tight and hard. She realized she was within an inch of crying as memory doubled her vision. She was recalling the guardians of her five days on the ledge. Jack had sat next to her just this way. When she had thought he was dying, she had drawn comfort from the mountains that watched over her.
How long had she drawn comfort from these mountains before her now, never realizing the parallel?
She looked at Martin, blinking back the stinging tears and tryi
ng to clear her throat of the hard hot lump there. Did he know? Had he seen it? Yes, he would have seen it. He had missed none of the details of her life, had been there for her for the last six weeks. There wasn’t a single other person on this planet who could have slid under her guard the way he had. Had he known that too?
You’ll have to let go the controls, Sophie. Jack’s voice, a whisper in her memory.
Yes, he’d probably seen how tightly she was holding on.
She looked away, at the long grass at the back of the yard and the little hillock there that in winter became Morgan’s favourite toboggan track. She should cut the grass before the snow settled in for the winter. They’d already had a thin layer drop the week before but it had melted and gone. Winter was holding off a bit this year. Morgan was wild for snow, though and even Georgia was praying for a white Christmas.
Gradually, the hot lump in her throat eased and was gone.
She glanced at Martin and saw that he was watching her. How much had he seen in her face? Well, there was one way to find out.
“What’s up?” she asked, prompting him to comment.
He shook his head a little. “Not a thing.” He sipped from his coffee.
Stalemate.
She’d tried a few opening gambits like that over the last few weeks. All of them had ended where they had begun. Nowhere. It seemed the man who went by the persona of Martin was more comfortable staying behind that façade. He was polite, considerate, hardworking and laconic. He treated everyone with respect and all women with a courtliness that seemed almost southern in its universal application. It had the added benefit of keeping people at a distance too. He treated Sophie no differently from anyone else.
She had grown so used to this aspect of him that she thought of him more often as Martin and her mind had stopped tripping over the name.
So, while Martin went back to his coffee, Sophie returned to her silent appraisal of the mountains. Today, she decided, they were being standoffish. When the air was just right, sometimes they seemed to be standing in her backyard—big, warm, friendly neighbours who were in the mood to reveal everything. The crevasses and crags close to the summits were clearer, the snow caps brilliantly white. On those days, it was even possible to pick out goats and sheep roaming the lower slopes and birds swooping along the faces, catching thermals.
Dead Again: A Romantic Thriller Page 15