by Anne Tenino
Dude, you have male friends. Lucas and Gabe were his friends. Although he’d kind of wanted to hook up with Lucas in high school, and until about six months ago he and Gabe had gotten it on regularly, so maybe that didn’t count? Whatever. Give it a rest.
Shaking off his jitters, he stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets, balling them up for warmth. They were going to be in this cold cemetery for a while. Tarkus was clearly not done rooting through the undergrowth and generally racing around like a newly liberated dog. Okay, the Legend of Fennimore . . . “Do you want the family-approved version or what I think really happened?”
“How about both?”
Of course he’d want to know everything, not only what Seth believed was the truth. Seth and Nate weren’t so different, really. He’d always been insanely curious too, at least once to his detriment. Nate didn’t seem to mind it, though. He hadn’t balked when Seth had asked all those questions about his sexuality and exes earlier this evening.
Well, there’d been an obstinate flicker in his eyes for a few moments at one point, but the guy had gotten over it and assuaged Seth’s curiosity.
Resting his foot against the plinth of a handy tombstone, he pushed off against it, then let it catch the weight as he fell forward. Over and over, rocking himself. Self-soothing. He probably needed to, in order to tell the sanitized version of the family history. “Fennimore Larson was a very well-to-do businessman, as you probably know.”
Nate nodded when he glanced over. Seth nodded back, then returned his attention to his fidgeting. “He was a timber baron—”
“The Timber and Stone Act of 1878, right?”
“Wow, you really do your homework don’t you?” Seth grinned. “Anyway, so he was in the habit of buying the tracts of land other people had picked up for next to nothing under that act. He of course paid a fair price, unlike all the other timber barons of the time, who took advantage of people who didn’t have the money to get out west on their own.” It had been common practice to pay someone’s way out and then front the $2.50 per acre the tracts cost. Later, as soon as it was legal, the person who’d put up the money got the deed signed over to them, while the bogus settler got a free relocation to America’s frontier and a nominal cash payment.
“Mmm.” Nate wandered closer to him, his brow creased in concentration, although he was watching Tarkus more than Seth. Definitely listening intently, though.
The guy made a great audience. Flatteringly attentive to Seth’s story. “Fennimore built a mill on the West Twin River when he had enough capital, and after that, when my great-great-grandfather would make a land deal with a homesteader, he’d offer less cash up front in return for a guaranteed job at the mill. And eventually, that became no cash in return for a job and a house near the mill. He’d had the houses built, and owned them, of course, but his employees could live there as long as they worked for him and paid him rent.”
“Quite the philanthropist.”
Seth snorted. “I don’t know about that. Fennimore had his own little kingdom, with his own little castle overlooking it—that’s why they called it Sentinel House, by the way—so he could keep an eye on his serfs.” But that was part of his version of history. He needed to finish the rest of the family-approved legend before he started going off on that. “They—Fennimore and his wife—had a Chinese maid. That’s all anyone ever says about her, that she was Chinese. Anyway, she worked for them for years, until one day my great-great-grandmother caught her stealing the family silver or something, and they ‘let her go.’ Months later, she crept back into the house in the middle of the night, confronted Fennimore in his study, then stabbed him. His wife heard the body hit the floor or him screaming, I don’t know, but she came in and caught their former maid ‘red-handed,’ as they say.”
The murder wouldn’t come as a surprise to Nate—that part was well documented. He didn’t react, didn’t say anything, just rubbed his chin, passing his finger over and over that small dimple, and stared at some underbrush shaking in a suspiciously Tarkus-like manner. “So, I take it you don’t buy that story? Or not all of it?”
“Do you?” Just then the dog burst out from behind a clump of salal, bounding toward them with a stick in his mouth about twice as long as his body. Panting happily, he dropped it at their feet.
“It does seem awfully convenient they had a Chinese maid to pin it on at a time when Chinese immigrants had almost no rights on the West Coast.”
Well, that was kind of embarrassing—he’d hardly considered that angle, mostly thinking about the more personal, familial, details. “That’s only the first clue that it isn’t right. The biggest for me is, why the hell would she come back months later and kill him? It was Fennimore’s wife that dismissed her, and who she had a relationship with.” Unless, as he’d pondered more than once, the maid had had a more personal kind of association with Fennimore. If so, that could be why she’d been dismissed.
“Are you sure it was the wife she had the closer relationship with?” Nate asked with a faux-serious expression. Mouth turned down but eyes crinkling. And maybe twinkling. It was too dark to tell out here.
Seth smiled and shrugged his brows as an answer—they really did think alike. Or maybe it was that anyone would think of that. “Which is why I think his wife killed him.” His pulse picked up noticeably. He’d never told anyone that and hadn’t realized it was that big a deal until the words had come out of his mouth. But, yeah . . . he’d just accused his ancestor of murder.
“So. A cheating bastard offed by his long-suffering wife—who was then willing to let someone else take the rap, getting rid of her rival at the same time?” Nate’s tone was dry, but not disbelieving. “Seems at least possible, given the little you’ve told me. Although if that was the case, Fennimore wasn’t the only bad apple to drop off your family tree.” He studied Fennimore’s monument. “I don’t remember seeing the wife’s headstone. Did they memorialize her there too?”
“No. She’s not even buried in Bluewater Bay. She stayed on in Sentinel House until her oldest son came of age, then remarried and moved to Victoria.”
“Who’d she marry?”
Seth shrugged. “Who knows?”
“You’re kidding. With the great Cult of Fennimore, I’d expect your family to know all the details.”
“Oh, but she wasn’t a real Larson, don’t you know,” Seth said in his fake-posh voice. “In fact, I found a picture of her once and someone had written across her face—in pen—‘Had three children and ran off with another man.’”
“She was a widow with at least one adult child. How does a perfectly legal remarriage constitute ‘running off’?”
“That’s my family for you.”
“Weird.”
Seth nodded, not sure what to say now that he’d let out his big suspicion and it had been accepted. He looked down and made eye contact with Tarkus—who’d been flicking his gaze between him and Nate—and the dog immediately zeroed in on him, wagging his whole back end. Picking up the stick, Seth threw it in a great, looping arc. Tarkus raced after it, nearly somersaulting in his eagerness. Either his night vision was better than Seth imagined, or he didn’t really care about finding the damned stick, just chasing after it. “He’d love the beach.”
“Tark?” Nate’s voice held obvious fondness. “Yeah, he does.”
“I should take him with me next time I fly kites.” He squinted playfully over his shoulder at Nate. “I guess you could go too.”
“He’d love it. I’d suffer through it, as long as I don’t have to venture onto the water.”
Smirking, Seth turned back to the direction Tarkus had disappeared. He could hear crashing and snuffling on the far side of the cemetery, like an excited dog with only one good eye was searching for a stick.
“You hear stories sometimes, you know?” Assuming Nate would realize he had gone back to the original subject, Seth didn’t wait for an answer. “A friend of mine—you probably don’t know him, Gabe Savage?”
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br /> “I recognize the name. Another founding family, right?”
Seth nodded. “Gabe’s grandmother has some alternate versions of the great deeds of Fennimore Larson. She heard them from her parents, who were kids when Fennimore was killed.”
“What about her legends rings truer than your family’s?”
“Other than I know my Uncle Kirk puts a spin on everything? He’d stuff and truss a ham and try to pass it off as turkey on Thanksgiving.” He sighed. “The Larsons and the Savages both came here for the timber, but the Savages did it the way it was meant to work. Two brothers each homesteaded a tract, side by side. That same land is Savage Tree Farm—and marijuana producer—today.”
Tarkus came loping up again, another stick in his mouth, but it was forked and shorter. This time after he dropped it in front of them, he flopped himself down next to it.
Must be done. Good. Seth hunched his shoulders and turned toward the entrance to the graveyard. “I thought you were going to feed me. I might have to insist on it if you want the real story.” He’d been joking, but he was cold enough that his voice came out harder than he’d meant it to. He tacked on, “I have something to show you back at your place anyway,” to try to erase any nerves he’d jumped on.
“Ah, bribery.” Nodding knowingly, Nate reached down to clip the leash back on an unsuspecting Tarkus. The dog stood and jerked his head back, giving his master what Seth would call a glare if he were a human. “Sorry, Tark, but we have to be hospitable to our guest. Otherwise he won’t trot out all the skeletons in his family’s closet.”
Seth laughed and started walking when Nate did. Ambling, really. “Okay . . .” Nate began as they passed out of the graveyard and started across the deserted road. “So, the Savages were loggers.”
“Mm-hmm. Are still. Well, Gabe is, he’s about all that’s left.” Unless he and Lucas had kids, which Seth couldn’t picture.
“Your family, though, they’re timber owners.”
“My grandfather sold all the timber before I was born, but, yeah, mostly.” He shrugged. “Me and a couple of my cousins were loggers for a while. Our rebellious phase. Their mothers liked it as much as my parents did.”
Nate stopped in his tracks to gape at him. “You’re a logger?”
Yeah, that always threw people off. In gay bars, it tended to turn guys on. Nice to know it worked in platonic relationships too. “I wouldn’t say I’m a logger, just that I could be, and I’ve occasionally worked as one. Lately only if Gabe needed another sawyer on his farm.”
“A sawyer.” Studying the ground, Nate began walking again, slowly. Seth fell into step beside him and waited for him to ask. “Meaning what? You cut the trees down?”
“Exactly that.” He didn’t like to brag, but it was considered the most macho of all jobs on a falling crew. His cousins had always grumbled about that, but the truth was that Seth wasn’t burly enough for some of the other positions, plus he had a knack for getting a tree to land right, so that it didn’t bring down others or violate riparian zones. The fines for destroying the environment were high enough to trump the fact he was gay for every crew foreman he’d ever met.
“Not a skill set I’d normally associate with a bartender.” Nate sounded vaguely impressed, which led to Seth’s vague embarrassment. He couldn’t swear his cheeks hadn’t flushed a little, and he didn’t have a clue why he was squirming inside. Confused and uncertain, he didn’t say anything else, and neither did Nate, not until they’d climbed his porch steps and Nate was opening up the house.
“You’re full of surprises.” Nate’s tone was amused, and for the briefest second, as Seth walked through the doorway, he thought he felt the touch of Nate’s hand on the small of his back.
Regardless of whether the touch happened, Seth found himself as flustered as a teenager on his first date for the next ten minutes. He fumbled the salad as he was setting it on the table, and nearly tripped himself with his own chair when he pulled it out to sit down.
Maybe he was a teenager on his first date—he’d never actually dated as a teenager. Or really as an adult. Not like this. Two guys spending time together in each other’s company with no intention of capping off the evening with mutual orgasms.
Yeah, he really was rusty when it came to this friendship thing. Bad Seth. Focus. Nate was talking, for God’s sakes.
“—do you like it?”
“Uh,” Seth sipped his beer, then decided to come clean. Setting the bottle down, he offered Nate an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I zoned out for a minute there.”
Nate had just taken a bite of the food he’d dished up for himself, so other than waving one hand in the air, he didn’t respond. While Seth waited for him to finish, he finally forked up his own eggplant parmigiana.
His experience with eggplant was limited to the few times his mother had made it when he was a kid, so he was pleasantly surprised when it was not only delicious, but firm and not at all mushy. “This is great,” he blurted, still chewing.
Nate’s table manners were better than his own, as he demonstrated by wiping his mouth with his napkin before saying, “Thanks. That’s exactly what I was asking.”
After they’d taken the edge off their hunger, Nate started telling him a little bit about work—stories of the actors behind scenes, and prop and set anecdotes. Ways to make it look as if someone were getting the shit kicked out of them without actually harming them. Much.
“Sounds like a hella fun job. So is that what you’re doing for the Frankenstein production? Wreaking havoc without actually doing it?”
Nate’s grin took on a hint of slyness, and Seth recognized that little gleam in his eye. Not from having seen it in Nate’s before, but because he knew how that twinkle felt—it was joy in messing with people. Not harming or humiliating them, but spicing up life a little. Yeah, they really had a lot in common.
“Oh yeah,” Nate said.
“What are you doing?”
“No way.” Nate waggled a finger at him. “You’ve got to come see it if you want to know.”
Looked as if Nate expected them to spend a lot of friend time together. Which reminded him. “Hey, I have something to show you.” Reaching around the back of the chair, he found his coat pocket and the fished out the knife he’d found the other night. “We can look at it while we eat.” He was only halfway through dinner, and he sure as hell wanted to finish what Nate had cooked.
But maybe this wasn’t a great idea after all, because it looked dirty as hell. Rustier and more disgusting. He’d dug it out of a rodent’s den for God’s sakes, what was he doing pulling it out at the table?
Nate whistled softly, and when Seth looked, there was a different light in the guy’s eyes. Interest.
“I found it in Grandma’s garage. It had to have been Fennimore’s.” Carefully, he set the knife down between them, then stood, wiping his palms on his thighs. “That thing’s filthy. I’m going to go wash my hands again.” Should he have put it on a napkin?
“Mmm.” Totally absorbed in inspecting the knife, Nate was leaning forward and peering intently at it. He didn’t seem to feel it violated the sanctity of his dinner table or anything.
When Seth got back, Nate was still squinting at it. Chewing, so he must have continued to eat, but totally focused on what Seth had brought him. Seth understood—there was something about the thing. He’d barely looked at it since he’d found it, not until right before he’d left tonight. It was much more intricately worked than he’d realized at first. It had a pommel, or whatever that knob at the end was called, which was decorated with designs chased into the metal.
“Are those someone’s initials?” Nate’s voice was hushed, as if they were in a library.
Seth nodded. “That’s what it looked like to me. I can’t really make them out, though.” It also had a mother-of-pearl handle, which he didn’t know how he’d missed. Fennimore had liked to show off his wealth. A knife like this would be right up his alley.
“So, why are you showing
me it again?” Now Nate was peering at him intently, head tilted just so. Completely absorbed. It gave Seth a little bit of a thrill, capturing the guy’s attention so completely.
Swallowing his bite quickly, he responded with his planned answer. “I thought you might have an idea how to research it. Find something out about it.” Stupid—it sounded like an excuse, now. An excuse to spend more time with him.
Nate’s expression wasn’t scornful though, or patronizing. Nate’s plate was clean, and he pushed it aside and used his napkin to pick up the knife and set it down right in front of him. “It’d help if we could make out these initials.”
“You don’t think they’re Fennimore’s?” He hadn’t really considered that, other than rejecting the fleeting thought.
Pointing at the handle, Nate shook his head. “There’s so much dirt encrusted in the monogram that it’s hard to tell, especially with that chip in the mother-of-pearl. Makes it look more like a T than an F.”
Well, yeah, he’d seen that himself, but he’d assumed it was just distorted. “Huh.” Seth scooped his last bite of food onto his fork. It was the one he’d been saving, laden with sauce and toasty cheese and a solid cube of the eggplant. Always save the best for last—his personal motto, but a lot of the world worked on the same principle. It was why orgasms came at the end of sex.
Stop bringing everything back to sex. This is just platonic. If nothing else came from tonight, he’d figured out one thing: he didn’t know how to do “strictly friends” with a guy. That was plain old sad at this point in his life.
“I take it that means you like my cooking.”
Nate’s voice surprised him out of his thoughts, and he opened his eyes, which made him realize he’d closed them to savor the flavor of the food fully. He couldn’t help but laugh at himself a little. “I love your cooking. Please don’t tell me if you’re one of those people who can only do one dish well. I want to pretend everything you make is this good.”