Kiss the Moon

by Carla Neggers

  But he drew back, said, “We all get in over our heads from time to time. The trick is to know when we need help and when we’re just having fun, pushing the envelope but still in control.”

  She didn’t feel in control at all. Her nerve endings were on fire, and she had no clear notion of whether the kiss was to prove a point or—or just a kiss. With a quick tug on her shirt, she got the spaghetti pot from a low cupboard. “I think I should strain the syrup once more when I switch pots.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  She glanced at him. “What’re you going to do?”

  “Poke around, talk to Jack.”

  “You won’t tell him about the messages—”

  He shook his head. “Not my place. But I think you should at least tell your parents, your aunt Mary—someone besides me. I’m an outsider, an automatic suspect.” He walked to the table, and if he was experiencing any residual effects of their kiss, they weren’t apparent. He pulled his leather jacket off the back of the chair. “If this thing escalates, you’ll want someone on your side you can trust and who trusts you without question.”

  She smiled through her sudden uneasiness. “That wouldn’t be you, huh?”

  “Honey, we both know I don’t trust you.” He opened the side door. The wind was howling, but the snow was subsiding. “However, you can trust me.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  He grinned. “But I do. That syrup will be ready later? I’ll come back. I make great pancakes, you know.”

  “I can see how you ended up scaling tall mountains. You just don’t give up.”

  “Something to remember while the snow flies and the sap boils.”

  Harriet was surprised anyone showed up at the inn on such a miserable day, much less Andy McNally. He brought Rebecca and Jane for afternoon tea—an hour early. They’d been let out of school because of the storm, and Andy had a meeting at three. “You can heat up yesterday’s scones if you don’t have any fresh.”

  “I just pulled apricot scones from the oven.”

  He grinned at his daughters. “Didn’t I tell you we could count on Harriet?”

  They ordered scones and individual pots of English Breakfast tea, and the girls asked Harriet to join them. She did, gladly. Andy wasn’t fond of tea, and scones he could take or leave. The girls, who both favored their mother, loved the elegance and indulgence of afternoon tea and would often stop by on their own when they didn’t have after-school activities or some adventure scheduled with Penelope.

  “Anything from your cousin today?” Andy asked.

  “No, I haven’t seen her.”

  He’d told Harriet about the false alarm last night. She reminded him that he should be relieved, not annoyed. One, because he found nothing. Two, because Penelope had had the sense to call him instead of charging out into the night herself.

  Rebecca, a junior in high school, said, “The sap won’t be running today. It’s too cold.”

  Her father grunted. “Just what we need, Penelope with too much time on her hands.”

  “Lyman’s not going to rescind her three-week grounding—”

  “No. God forbid. The only thing worse than Penelope with time on her hands is Penelope distracted in an airplane.”

  Jane, a freshman, giggled. “Oh, Daddy, you’re so hard on her!”

  “She’s hard on us. Now drink your tea and let me talk.”

  “We’re right here. It’s not as if we can turn our ears off—”

  Andy silenced her with a quick look, then turned to Harriet. “Smart alecks, both of them. It’s Penelope’s influence. But—they can hold their own and think for themselves. I guess she’s been a help there, too. Look, I’ll be straight with you, Harriet. I’m worried about her.”

  Harriet nodded, pouring tea, which she liked dark and strong with just a drop of cream. “I know. We all are.”

  “Why doesn’t she just say she found that goddamned plane and be done with it?”

  “Because she’s stubborn and because she can’t control the consequences.”

  “What consequences? It wasn’t any of her relatives in that plane. Besides, the thing’s been missing for forty-five years. Except for the Sinclair family, who cares? Frannie Beaudine doesn’t even have any family left.”

  “There might be other, less direct, unintended consequences.”

  Andy frowned. He was a concrete man with a good, incisive mind, but he lacked imagination and had a cop’s reluctance to charge too far ahead of the facts. “Such as?”

  “Well…the reporters. Many of them checked in here at the inn, and it wouldn’t have been long before they heard about Bubba Johns and—and me.”

  “You? What the hell—oh.” His mouth snapped shut, and he quickly buttered a scone. “You mean your notion—your claim—”

  “It’s neither a notion nor a claim, Andy. It’s a hypothesis.”

  Harriet sipped her tea, welcoming the heat. She was sounding so much more controlled and sensible than she felt. Most people in Cold Spring, she knew, considered her hypothesis kooky. She couldn’t blame them. She felt kooky. Her. Sensible, plain Harriet Chestnut. She’d applied makeup twice already today, scrubbing it off each time, feeling ridiculous. Jack Dunning had left early and hadn’t returned. Silly to think she could interest such a man. She felt like Rebecca and Jane with their high-school crushes.

  “And Bubba,” Andy said, awkwardly changing the subject. “What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “Oh, you know Penelope. She’d hate to see an old hermit’s life disrupted because of something she did.”

  “She didn’t do anything. She found a missing plane. Now her life’s being disrupted—she’s got Wyatt Sinclair and a PI on her case.” He bit off a hunk of scone, and out of the corner of one eye, Harriet saw Rebecca wince at her father’s lack of delicacy. He might have been eating a pastrami sandwich. “If those two do anything against the law to get her to talk, I’m nailing their hides to the wall.”

  Harriet paled. “They both strike me as professional and quite decent. I can’t imagine either would harass Penelope…” She stopped, aware of Andy’s sharp gaze on her. She added quickly, “That’s just my impression.”

  “Don’t let what you want to be cloud your view of what is, Harriet.”

  She noticed the girls studiously drinking their tea, pretending not to be listening. “Just you do the same, Andy.”

  His easy grin caught her off guard. “I’m a cop. I’m always looking for the dark side.”

  He turned to his daughters, and they changed the subject, luring Harriet into a discussion of their various teachers, many of whom she’d known since childhood.

  After the McNally family left, Harriet did paperwork in front of the parlor fire. She found herself listening for the door, anticipating Jack Dunning or Wyatt Sinclair’s return. Finally, she gave up all pretense of concentrating and stared at the orange flames. Wyatt could be her cousin, her blood. He was so rich, so accomplished, so self-controlled—so much of what she wasn’t. It gave her hope, just thinking they might be related.

  And Jack Dunning…she almost didn’t dare picture him. It had been years and years since she’d had such a blatant, intense crush on a man. Maybe never. He was good-looking, sexy, charming and surprisingly kind. They’d sat up last night, drinking wine and talking about the inn, Cold Spring, the lake. He hadn’t pried into her family or asked a single question about Penelope. Certainly he hadn’t mentioned the tantalizing coincidence of her arrival on her father’s church doorstep and the disappearance of Frannie Beaudine and Colt Sinclair. He had to know about it.

  “Harriet—I thought I saw you in here.”

  His voice. She jumped, papers flying off her lap. “Oh! Jack, hello. I was just doing some work.”

  “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “Oh, no—no, you’re not interrupting.”

  He squatted, picked up the papers and returned them to her clipboard. He smiled, eased effortlessly up. “The snow’s stopped. I thoug
ht you might like to take a short walk, unless you’re busy.”

  “I’m not busy. With the weather, it’ll be a slow night.”

  She got to her feet, feeling a fat lock of hair fall loose from its bobby pin. She wished she’d tried again with her makeup. As she held her clipboard against her chest, she noticed the nicks and scars in her hands from years of remodeling the inn. She could feel the extra pounds around her middle, imagined the kind of women Jack would attract in New York. She was a plain, middle-aged New Englander without style or sex appeal.

  Self-delusion, she thought, had never been one of her faults.

  But she found herself tucking her hair behind her ear and smiling. “I’d love a walk, if we can be back in a half hour.”

  “A half hour it is.”

  “Did you see Penelope this morning?”

  “Yep.” He grinned, shrugged. “I won’t mince words, Harriet. The woman’s a pain in the ass.”

  She laughed. “Yes, but she’s our pain in the ass.”

  “I love how you people think. When I was acting up, my daddy’d give me a cuff to the ear and that’d straighten me out. If it didn’t, there’d be more where that came from.”

  “Oh, my. What a difficult way to grow up!”

  He shook his head, grinning in amazement. “It was a great way to grow up. I knew my limits. Your cousin, in case you haven’t noticed, has no idea of hers.”

  “But isn’t that to the good?”

  “Everyone has limits, Harriet, even Penelope Chestnut.”

  She bit back another laugh, feeling almost giddy at his openness, his irreverence. Nothing bothered him. “You won’t tell her, will you?”

  “Not a chance. Shall we?”

  Ten

  P enelope breathed in the clean, cold air. She could smell a hint of smoke from Bubba Johns’s wood stove. His shack was just ahead through the woods, around a bend and down a gently sloping hill. After finishing the syrup and shoveling her driveway, she’d strapped on her snowshoes and headed through the freshly fallen snow. Hers were traditional wooden bear-paw snowshoes, a gift from her grandfather when she was in college, and although the snow was wet and fairly compacted, the going was still tough. In hard, out easy. That was the old saying. She could follow her tracks on the way back.

  There was no marker indicating she’d crossed onto Sinclair land, no thick black line, no No Trespassing signs. She knew only because she was familiar with the boundaries of her own land. When the old logging road went through a gap in a stone wall, she knew she had left her land. The road narrowed to a footpath, and the stone walls that had once marked off farmland, long overgrown, gradually disappeared. The forest thickened and darkened, the hills were steeper, and there was a greater sense that this was wild land, left to the deer and moose, the occasional bear and Bubba Johns.

  Penelope spotted his crude, rustic one-room shack, nestled amid pine and hemlock on a hillside above a sparkling, winding brook. The winds from the storm had subsided and the only sound was the water rushing over the rocks. The landscape, even the sky, was a soft white, broken only by touches of evergreen and the gray branches and trunks of leafless trees. The heavy, wet snow clung to the trees, weighing them down. A stand of thin gray birches bent almost to the ground.

  The trail twisted along the top of the hill, then wound to Bubba’s shack, a combination of logs, tar paper, plywood and tin. It had two small, mismatched windows he must have scavenged from cast-offs. He’d constructed a simple outhouse and a tiny garden shed, and he’d put up homemade bird feeders, dozens of them, in the trees, on poles, stuck to his windows. They were quiet, the birds waiting to make sure the storm was over.

  On the opposite side of the shack was a small garden enclosed in chicken wire. Animals would be a major menace to gardens this far in the woods. Bubba Johns might not be entirely normal, but he’d fashioned a comfortable subsistence life for himself out here.

  “Bubba?” The snow absorbed her voice, and she tried again, more loudly. “It’s me, Penelope Chestnut.”

  No answer. Just the stillness, the steady flow of the brook.

  She moved forward on the path. There were no other fresh tracks in the new snow. Her snowshoes had left clear, definite tracks that anyone could follow. She couldn’t turn around and sneak home—Bubba would know she’d been here. She peeled off her hat, damp and frozen, the ends of her hair glistening and stiff from an icy drizzle early in her trek. She didn’t have much time. It was already after four, a good hour’s hike back to her place in these conditions.

  Why had she come, anyway? To ask Bubba if she could tell Wyatt Sinclair the truth? To get his permission?

  He’d never asked her to lie in the first place. She was the one who’d decided to change her story. She didn’t even know Bubba. No one did. He was an old man who lived alone, nothing more—or less.

  She stood in the silent, picturesque woods, imagined dozens of reporters and investigators, Colt and Frannie hobbyists, locals and sightseers rushing to the crash site to get the first pictures of the wreckage, the first trinkets from the famous, ill-fated flight. What if they photographed Colt and Frannie’s remains, looted the wreckage, brought back stuff for auctions and tabloids? It was voyeuristic. Wrong. She thought of the tangled heap of metal tucked among the rocks, trees and brush. Undisturbed. Quiet. Peaceful. A grave.

  Her father had talked to her about doing the right thing for the right reasons. Well, she had. The possible consequences for Bubba and Harriet were only part of her reasoning. There were also the consequences to the two people who’d died in that crash forty-five years ago.

  Two scruffy mutts charged from the shadows toward her, barking and snarling. Penelope stood still, heart pounding. Should have brought Granddad’s Winchester. But a voice from inside the shack hollered, “Back off!”

  The dogs obeyed instantly, trotting to the shadows of the shack. Penelope felt her knees go out from under her, and if not for her steady, wide snowshoes, she’d have gone down. Dogs. She’d forgotten Bubba had dogs. They were old and didn’t always travel with him, and he never brought them on his rare trips to town.

  The old hermit emerged from the shack, pulling stretchy suspenders over a frayed brown plaid flannel shirt. His gray and white hair stuck out, and his beard hung to his chest, untrimmed, not particularly clean. He wore black boots with buckles from her grandfather’s era. Maybe they’d even been her granddad’s boots. Bubba Johns wasn’t known for his vanity.

  His gray eyes leveled on her. “What do you want?”

  “I was just—I was out walking—” She took a breath, reminding herself she had no reason to fear this man. She was young, strong, fast. Even if he did go wild on her, she could defend herself. If she had to, she’d take a rock to the dogs. “I was lost on Sunday. I think you saw me. At the plane wreckage.”

  He was silent, eyeing her. He was a tall, rail-thin man. His gray eyes seemed even frostier in the March landscape.

  Penelope didn’t back down. “You know about the wreckage. You know I found it. You were out there—you came to my house yesterday.”

  “What of it? Your business doesn’t concern me.”

  “I wanted to tell you that I changed my mind and withdrew my story about finding the wreckage. I don’t know what you know about it, but it’s a famous wreck—it’s been missing for forty-five years. The two people who died in it—” She stopped mid-sentence, frowned at his obvious disinterest. “Well, I guess I decided to let them rest in peace. I realized what it’d be like for you, having people crawling through the woods.”

  “There’s a plane out there?”

  She sighed. Maybe this was how Wyatt and Dunning felt talking to her. “Yes. I saw it on Sunday when I was lost in the woods.”

  No reaction. He stared at her without expression.

  “If anything in the wreckage has been disturbed in any way—if dogs dragged off the bodies or someone looted their belongings and kept quiet about it—the media and the authorities would be all over y
ou. You’d be their prime suspect, at least at first.”

  “Is this what you came to tell me?”

  She nodded. “I thought you might be worried.”

  “I don’t care about any plane wreckage. I can leave here if people come.”

  “Leave?”

  He shrugged, matter-of-fact. “I don’t have much. The dogs and I can pack up and go anytime.”

  “But you’ve lived out here for years. You shouldn’t have to—”

  He cut her off. “Anything else you want to say?”

  “Wyatt Sinclair’s in town. His family owns this land. I don’t think he’ll bother you. But I thought you should know.”

  Bubba didn’t seem interested. “Okay.”

  He turned and started toward his shack. Penelope felt dismissed. But she said to his retreating figure, “Bubba, that was you in the woods on Sunday, wasn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer. She didn’t know if he hadn’t heard her—he was an old man—or if he was ignoring her. She pushed back a wave of queasiness and turned, suddenly eager for pancakes, ham and hot syrup. She’d eat salads tomorrow. Her second day of grounding, snow, a suspicious PI and a Sinclair in her kitchen—kissing a Sinclair. She deserved to indulge.

  She waited for Bubba Johns to change his mind and come back and chat with her a while longer, explain when he’d found the plane, how, why he’d never mentioned it to anyone. But he said something to his dogs, and they all went inside his shack. He shut the door.

  Dismissed.

  Reminding herself their conversation had gone better than she’d expected, Penelope pulled her hat on and followed her packed tracks along the ridge, and down, then over a low rise, moving fast, getting her rhythm and more flotation than on the way in.

  The path widened, and as she made her way down the last steep hill, she stopped and listened, uncertain what had put her on alert. A soft breeze stirred, whistling in the trees, bare branches clicking. She stood very still, aware of how alone she was. Twisting from her waist to one side and then the other, she managed to do a three-hundred-sixty-degree scan of her surroundings.