“He helped. His father was the official builder, from what I heard. Charlie was just one of the crew. But still...” She used the corner of her T-shirt to rub at the glass. “Daisy managed to get the boat here, to Comeback Cove. Charlie’s family took her in. Charles Junior was my Poppy.”
“But Daisy never lived here?”
“Hmm? Oh, no. She lived in the house my mom has now. The bed-and-breakfast.”
An easy quiet settled around them, broken only by the creak of the swing and the cheery song of a robin. Kate was exquisitely aware of Boone’s nearness—his knee brushing hers, his arm stretched along the swing behind her—but for once, surprisingly, it wasn’t torture. Maybe it was because they were talking about her family. Maybe it was because they were doing something so everyday and homey, sitting together, rocking and looking at the same thing. But for that moment, she didn’t feel aroused as much as she felt relaxed. Comfortable. Like they had sat this way hundreds of times before.
Like they expected to sit this way hundreds of times again.
“I think about Daisy a lot,” she said quietly. “How it must have been for her without Charlie. She was so young. She didn’t know anyone here. And you can bet there would have been talk about her, even though she told everyone she was a widow and called herself Daisy Hebert.”
“Did you know her?”
“Sort of. She died when I was, oh, maybe five. Before Mom married Neil, I know that. All I remember is her sitting in a chair with blankets over her legs.” She wrinkled her nose. “And knitting. I definitely remember her knitting.”
“Mittens for her great-grandchild?”
“Maybe.” Kate thought some more. “Her big thing was quilting. Mom still has a couple of Daisy’s quilts on display. I’ll have to show you when we finally make it there for dinner.”
“Don’t hurry on my part,” he said with such horror that Kate couldn’t hold back the laughter.
“I’ll tell you a secret. There’s a secret passage in Mom’s house. If she gets to be too bad, I promise I’ll show you where—”
She stopped abruptly.
“We have to go upstairs.”
“Stairs? Are you out of your—”
“Boone. The other day, right before I hurt my ankle, Allie and I found something. In the room beside yours.” She grabbed her walking stick. “We thought it might be a cupboard that someone painted over, but now I wonder if—”
“A secret passage?”
“Smugglers do love their hidey holes,” she said.
* * *
TWENTY MINUTES, ONE set of scraped knuckles, and a whole lot of swear words later, Boone had the cupboard ready to open.
“I can’t believe you forgot about this,” he said as he wedged a utility knife into the crack and gave it an experimental wiggle.
“What can I say? I was busy making sure you didn’t smother me with kindness.”
He glanced over at the spot where he had ordered her to sit. She was, of course, standing.
“You sure you weren’t busy thinking of ways to get around my orders?”
“Maybe.” Her expression was all innocence. “Is it opening up?”
He slid the knife higher, then lower, loosening the door enough that it wouldn’t take effort to pull it open. When he was satisfied that it would cooperate without needing to be yanked, he stepped back and crooked his finger at Kate to have her move closer.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what’s in there.”
“You want me to open it?”
“Your house, your family, your history. It only seems right.”
Her expression softened. Huh. He hadn’t put a lot of thought into his statement, but it seemed he’d said the right thing. Bonus.
“I would be honorable and tell you that you did the work and have just as much right as I do.” She clomped over. “But I’m too excited to waste time arguing.”
He wanted to tell her that was one of the things he liked best about her—that refusal to delay when she knew she really wanted something. But there was no way he could say it without it sounding like a come-on, and since that was probably closer to the truth than it should be, he opted for silence.
There was no handle, of course. There was a hole in the center of the right edge that looked like it might once have held a knob, but whoever had decided to paper over the space had undoubtedly removed it. He watched as Kate slipped her fingers into the opening he’d created, gave a small tug...
And stopped.
“Problem?”
“I’m nervous.” She shook her head, laughing, like she couldn’t believe her own words. “Though that’s not exactly right. It’s like...remember when I said I didn’t want to find out if Jamie was a boy or a girl, because I wanted to keep both options open as long as possible?”
He did. It had struck him as a surprisingly whimsical response from a woman who was usually so practical. Whimsical, and endearing.
“It’s kind of the same way now,” she said quietly. “As long as I don’t open this, anything could be behind it. Old photos. Trash. A time capsule.”
And then he got it.
“Or your grandfather’s treasure?”
This time, her laugh was accompanied by the faintest blush.
“I know it seems silly. I mean, probably the only thing I’m going to find behind there is a mouse skeleton.” Her nose wrinkled. “But yeah. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat. As long as I don’t open it, there’s no limit.”
“You don’t have to look.”
“Oh, hell yes I do. You seriously think I have the strength to resist this?”
Since she was doing way too good a job resisting him, he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to answer that.
She curled her fingers a little deeper, opened the door a tiny bit wider. “Logic tells me that Charlie didn’t really find anything, or at least nothing more than what he used to cut his deal with the Americans. Those islands have all been mapped and explored countless times in the last hundred years. Not to mention that the entire shoreline changed when they created the Seaway. The shipping channels were dug up and deepened, they widened the river so much that a whole whack of villages were lost... I mean, the odds are that if the stories were true, the treasure would have turned up by now.”
“But you still want to believe it.”
“It makes about as much sense as a kid wanting to believe in Santa even after they know he’s not real, but yeah. A part of me wants to believe that there’s something. And while I don’t think it would be in here, I guess I’m hoping for a map. A clue.” She laughed again. “GPS coordinates.”
“That would certainly simplify things.”
“Yeah.” She pulled a little more. “Have you ever felt like that? Like there was something you knew was totally make-believe, but you wanted it anyway?”
A family.
He blinked, barely keeping himself from blurting out the words. To tell the truth, he wasn’t exactly sure where they had come from. If anyone else had asked, he would have said, “Nah, I’m fine. There’s enough in the real world not to waste time or energy wondering about things that never will be.” Especially since he knew that he was absolutely okay on his own.
But this was Kate. And they were a sort-of family. And even though their marriage was going to end, he still felt closer to her than anyone else he’d ever known.
She was looking for someone to share her life, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t share his secrets with her right now.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “That kind of describes my whole childhood.”
“Oh, Boone.” One hand to her mouth, she twisted to face him, compassion filling her face. “Oh, crap. I totally... God, I’m such a clueless...”
Before he could figure out what she was doing, she leaned forward and kissed him.
It
was light. Fleeting. Not an invitation, he knew, but a comfort, an apology. It was so quick that he scarcely had time to register what was happening before she was gone, hand to her mouth again. But this time her eyes were squeezed closed.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have... That wasn’t fair.”
“It’s okay.”
She shook her head but said nothing.
“Kate. Really. I know you were just trying to make things better.”
“Hell of a stupid way to do it.”
Hang on. That was his line.
He searched his memory for the things she used to say to him.
“How many times have you told me that everyone messes up sometimes?”
She scowled. “It’s a lot easier to believe that when I’m not the one who blew it.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Well, at least that got a grin out of her.
“Tell you what. I’ll forgive myself for that if you’ll stop blaming yourself for this.” She pointed to her ankle. “Deal?”
“That was different.”
She waved a finger in his face. “Deal or no deal.”
Could he do it? He wasn’t sure. His brain knew that beating himself up didn’t help anyone, but to actually forgive himself?
On the other hand, would he want Kate to do that to herself?
“Deal,” he said. “But on one condition.”
“What?”
“That you open up that damn cupboard before I turn into Schrödinger’s worst critic.”
This time, her grin was almost normal. “Sir, yes sir.”
With a deep breath, she wedged her fingers under the door and pulled. He sent up a silent prayer that there not be anything dead within.
“Oh.” She reached forward and pulled out the sole contents of the cupboard. “It’s a...a painting?” She breathed in deep, coughed, then blew dust from the surface. “It is. A painting of this house.”
“Seriously?”
She nodded and held it up so he could see. It was about the size of a sheet of printer paper, maybe smaller. “At least, I think it is,” she said. “The shape is the same.”
“There’s no turret.”
“That was added later. I remember Poppy talking about it being built.” She frowned. “The colors are different, too.”
“People probably painted the outside over the last century.”
“True, but do you think the porch was ever really silver? And it’s more than that. It’s like...look...there’s nothing around it. No trees or anything. Like it’s unfinished.”
“You mean someone painted a picture of it before it was done?”
She held the painting toward him. He took one side and studied it while she gripped the other.
She was right.
“You know how people take before and after pictures of projects?” he asked. “Maybe this is the equivalent.”
“It’s a lot more work to paint a picture than to snap a photograph.”
“True. But if pocket cameras hadn’t been invented yet, it’s not like that would be an option.”
She mock scowled at him. “That’s entirely too logical.”
“I try.”
They studied it in silence for a few moments. There was no signature, nothing to indicate why it had been hidden away. It had probably been forgotten. Overlooked in the rush of getting wallpaper up.
On the other hand, whoever removed the handle from the cupboard door would have seen the painting. Assuming the handle was removed when the room was papered, of course, and not simply broken off years earlier.
“Well, it’s not what I expected,” Kate said. “But it’s pretty. And it will be a nice memento after I sell this place.”
He was pretty sure she was trying to hide the longing in her voice. It wasn’t working.
He might not have found her great-grandfather’s treasure. But damn it to hell, he was going to find a way to help her keep the house.
* * *
FOUR DAYS AFTER going through the porch floor, Kate buckled Jamie into his Jolly Jumper, joined Boone at the lunch table, and pulled a digital recorder from her pocket.
Boone did the one-eyebrow thing.
“I have a project that needs your help.”
“You mean something other than this whole house?”
“Cute. I spent a lot of time updating Jamie’s baby book while I was resting my ankle, and it got me thinking. I know we can call you anytime, but I want to have lots of stories about you to share with Jamie. You know. ‘When Daddy was your age, he lived here and went to school there, and his favorite thing to do was watch TV.’ That kind of stuff.” She pushed the recorder toward him, choosing to ignore his expression of disbelief. “Keep this in your pocket. While you’re working, you can tell stories. Then we can transfer them to my laptop for Jamie to listen to whenever he wants.”
“Are you sure you didn’t hit your head when you went through the porch?”
She hadn’t expected him to be ecstatic over the idea, but she’d thought he might be a bit more open to it. “Boone, I know you didn’t have a great childhood, but—”
“Let’s see. Eight or nine foster families, a handful of relatives who made it clear I was complicating their lives, and a mother who never missed the chance to let me know that I was the cause of everything that ever went wrong in her life. Yeah. That’s really something I want to share with my son.”
Holy—she had known it was rough. She hadn’t realized the extent of what he’d lived through.
For a few never-ending moments, the only sounds were the squeaks and squeals coming from the doorway, where Jamie kicked and bounced like an Irish dancer on steroids.
At last, Boone rubbed his hand over his face. He sighed. And then he picked up the recorder.
“I can’t talk about when I was little, okay? But I know what you’re trying to do. I get it. So I’ll talk about other stuff. Like Peru.”
“That works.” She scrabbled for a way to save this. “You, um, never told me the whole story of how you ended up there. I know you went with Craig and Jill, but not the details. Why don’t you start with that?”
“You mean right now?”
It wasn’t like either of them seemed hungry anymore. “Why not?”
He eyed first her, then the recorder, as if determining which was more dangerous. Then, decision seemingly made, he hit the power button.
CHAPTER NINE
KATE WAITED. FINALLY Boone spoke.
“I went to Peru when I was twenty-one, after I finished university.”
“And?”
He shrugged. “What else do you want me to say?”
She knew this ploy: pretend to cooperate, but do the task so incompetently that the other party gives up in disgust. It was a favorite of children everywhere.
Since she made her living wrangling kiddos, he might as well have saved himself the effort.
“And how did you meet them?”
He sighed and bit into his sandwich. Stalling, no doubt. “You already know.”
Her answer was to point one finger toward Jamie dancing in the doorway.
“Fine.” He added a little more drama to his sigh. “They were my teachers in high school. Jill taught me math in grades nine and twelve. Craig was...well, they called it tech back then, but I think it has some other name now. Jill did her best to drill algebra into my head, but Craig really pushed me.”
“Like how?”
“Like, I’d be building something—say, a clock—and I’d run into a problem I didn’t know how to handle. And even though he would usually just tell the other kids how to fix things, with me, it was a cross-examination. What had I tried already? What happened? Why did I think nothing had worked yet? Could I come at it from another angle?” Boone le
aned back with a half smile. “At first I thought he was a giant pain in the ass. Then it got to be like a game. How many questions would it take before I figured out what he was really asking?”
“Did you ever get it in less than ten?”
“Don’t remember. But years later, when we were in Ollanta, and we had a leaky roof in the office, he started in again. And it hit me that all those times, he wasn’t trying to get me to the right answer. He was trying to get me to think outside the box. To rely on myself, not on the standard answers.”
“What did he say when you figured that one out?”
The grin widened. “He said if I were any slower on the uptake, a dead man could have beaten me to it.”
Somehow, Kate didn’t think Boone had taken it as an insult.
“So how did you end up living with them? Were they ever your official foster parents?”
“No. And thank God for that.”
Jamie let out a laugh and kicked like he was auditioning for Riverdance.
“I agree,” Kate said, nodding to her son. “Why thank God?”
“Well, by that point, it was like I was programmed to hate my foster family, no matter who they were.”
Defense mechanism, she thought, but she knew better than to say it.
“If they had gone through the official channels, I would have had to push them away.”
“Why?”
“Because they were part of the system.”
Of course.
“So how did you—”
“The day after I turned eighteen, Craig asked if I wanted to come live with them.”
Ah. The happy ending was in sight.
“But,” Boone hurried on, “I was Mr. Tough back then. I said thanks but no thanks. I had some jackass idea about finishing out the year and then getting a job, a place of my own, all that shit that sounds so possible when you’re eighteen and stupid.” He twisted to face Jamie. “Stay in school, kid. You hear me?”
“Don’t worry. If I have to Super Glue him to the seat, I’ll make him stay.” She leaned forward, fascinated. “Don’t stop there. What changed your mind?”
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