A Valentine Wish

by Gina Wilkins

  “The inn isn’t even open. It won’t be for several months.”

  “Then she can cook and clean for you and your aunt while you prepare to open. I’ve worried about your aunt doing all that heavy cleaning she’s been taking on. Did you know she was up on a ladder yesterday, dusting fixtures?”

  Dean scowled. “No. I didn’t know that.” He would definitely have to talk to Aunt Mae. She had no business being on a ladder with her bad knees. Of course, he’d have to figure out a way to tell her how he knew about her behavior without having actually seen her.

  It occurred to him that he was taking Anna’s presence much more for granted now. It no longer even startled him when she made her appearances. And he spent entirely too much time anticipating her doing so.

  “I like your aunt. She seems very kind.”

  He nodded. “She is. She raised my sister and me after our parents died in a car crash when we were kids.”

  Anna’s face lit up. “You have a sister? Is she a twin?”

  He shook his head. “She’s eight years younger. She was here with me once, when I was looking over the inn.”

  “I must have missed her. Are you close to her?”

  “Yes, we’re quite dose.”

  Anna smiled. “That’s nice. Ian and I have always been best friends. I can’t imagine being separated from him.”

  “About this woman you coerced me into hiring—”

  Anna giggled. “I didn’t coerce you. How could I?”

  He gave her an expressive look. “You have your ways. But what if you’re wrong about her? I know nothing about her. She could be a thief, a con artist, a drunk, a lazy sponger.”

  Anna was shaking her head. “She’s none of those things. She’s only a nice woman who’s fallen onto hard times.”

  “Do your supernatural powers include mind reading?” Dean asked.

  She looked at him reprovingly “Of course not. I just—”

  “—have a feeling,” he finished with her.

  She smiled again. “Exactly.”

  He shook his head.

  Anna laughed. The musical sound made his chest tighten. God, she was beautiful when she smiled. Or when she frowned. Or when she looked angry. Or sad.

  Anna searched his face, and her smile faded. He didn’t know what she saw in his expression, but she took a gliding step closer. “Dean?”

  “Dean?” Mae called his name as she made her way carefully down the partially cleared walkway “Lunch is ready. What are you doing out here?” she asked, looking curiously at what was now empty space beside him. “What are you looking at so intently?”

  Dean drew his gaze reluctantly away from the spot where Anna had stood. “Sorry, Aunt Mae. I was just thinking about how much more has to be done out here.”

  “You’ve made quite a lot of headway since I was out last,” his aunt said approvingly. And then she lost interest in the landscaping and faced him again, wearing a rather smug smile.

  “I knew you would hire her,” she said without bothering to clarify who she meant. “As soon as I saw her and that dear little girl, and heard her explain that she needed a job and a home, I knew you wouldn’t be able to turn her away.”

  “I must have lost my mind,” Dean muttered. “This is the worst possible time for me to hire a maid. And as for the kid, heaven only knows what we’ll do with her.”

  “We’ll take care of her—of both of them. They need us, Dean. I knew that immediately. The little girl reminds me of Bailey, when you and she first came to live with me. She looks a little sad, and a little lost. So very vulnerable.”

  In resignation, Dean realized that his softhearted aunt had just adopted two more strays into their family.

  And he’d thought being a small-town innkeeper would be a nice, easy, “normal” lifel

  MARK WINTER was expected for dinner that evening. When Cara heard that Mae and Dean were anticipating a guest, she immediately volunteered to prepare and serve the meal.

  “There’s no need for you to start working so soon,” Mae protested. “You just got your car unloaded.”

  Dean had spent a couple of hours after lunch hauling furniture, setting up twin beds and a large chest of drawers in one of the empty, but freshly painted downstairs bedrooms, helping Cara bring her few possessions in from the aging, battered vehicle in which she’d arrived. Cara had worked right by his side, reserved, but eager to do her share, while little Casey had hovered close by, watching intently.

  He knew Cara had to be tired; frankly, she didn’t look as though she’d had a good night’s sleep in quite a while. “Aunt Mae’s right, Cara,” he told her. “There’s no need for you to start today. Why don’t you join us for dinner as our guest? You and Casey both, of course,” he added with a smile for the child, who smiled shyly in return.

  Cara shook her head, her face taking on a stubborn set that Dean predicted would soon be very familiar to him. “I earn my way,” she said quietly. “And I like to cook. You and your aunt enjoy your evening with your friend. Casey and I will eat in the kitchen.”

  Nothing either Dean or Mae could say would change her mind. They finally conceded when it looked as though Cara was becoming upset with them.

  Mark arrived promptly, carrying a thick manila envelope, which he handed to Dean. “I made you a copy of everything I had about the Cameron twins,” he explained. “It’s not much, I’m afraid, but it’s a start.”

  “Thanks, Mark. I’ll go through it later.”

  “Sure.” Having already greeted Mae, Mark turned back to her with a smile. “It’s very nice of you to go to the trouble of having me for dinner, Mrs. Harper. It’s been a coon’s age since I had a home-cooked meal. I’ve been looking forward to it all day.”

  Her multiple bracelets tingling merry, Mae patted him on the arm in a naturally maternal gesture. “We’re delighted to have you. As for the meal, it’s been no trouble for me at all. Dean’s new housekeeper prepared it.”

  Mark lifted an eyebrow. “You’ve hired a housekeeper already?” he asked, looking pointedly around at the unfinished lobby.

  Dean shrugged. “She showed up on the doorstep, asking for a job. My, er, conscience insisted that I hire her.”

  Across the room, Mary Anna Cameron laughed softly. Glancing at her warningly, Dean wondered how long she’d been there.

  If she did anything to make him look foolish this evening, he would—he would—well, therewasn’t a hell of a lot he could do about it. But he’d damned well let her know it if she made him mad.

  “Is the new housekeeper someone from town?” Mark asked.

  Dean shook his head. “She said she’s new in these parts. She looked for a job in Destiny, but couldn’t find anything. Someone at the diner sent her here.”

  “There aren’t many jobs in Destiny these days,” Mark commiserated. “Unless you’re related to the Peavys, of course.”

  Dean and his aunt led their guest to the dining room, explaining that they would eat first and then move to the sitting room for an after-dinner visit. Mark heartily concurred with the plan.

  Cara was just putting the finishing touches to the table setting when they walked into the small, private dining room. Dean noted immediately that the table looked beautiful; Aunt Mae’s best silver, china, linen napkins and lace tablecloth, burning tapers, fresh flowers in a heavy crystal bowl. Since he and his aunt had been dining very casually—paper-plate casually—the past few weeks, it was a pleasant change.

  Mark looked suitably impressed. “Hey, you’ve got this room looking really nice,” he said. “If this is a sample of what you’ll be doing in the rest of the inn, you′ll...″

  His voice suddenly faded away.

  Dean realized that in response to Mark’s voice, Cara had straightened and turned toward him. Mark seemed to have forgotten what he was saying.

  Dean.smothered a smile. It was apparent that Mark had been startled by Cara’s delicate blond beauty. No surprise. Dean might have been struck speechless, himself, had he
not become recently obsessed with a dark-haired, dark-eyed vision.

  “Isn’t that sweet?” the vision in question murmured from close to Dean’s side. “He looks as though someone just hit him over the head with a club.”

  Ignoring Anna, Dean stepped forward to make the introductions. “Cara McAlister, this is Mark Winter, the owner and editor of the local newspaper.”

  Cara had smiled politely when the others had entered the room. Her smile suddenly faded, leaving an expression that Dean thought was a mixture of consternation and distaste. “You′re a journalist?” she asked.

  Mark nodded with a wry smile. “‘Fraid so. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.”

  She didn’t return the smile. “Dinner is ready if you’d like to be seated now,” she said to the room at large. And then she turned and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Oh, my,” Anna murmured. “I don’t think she cares for journalists.”

  “No kidding,” Dean muttered, having already reached that inevitable conclusion.

  Mark closed his mouth and looked at Dean. “Er, was it something I said?”

  Dean shrugged and motioned toward the table. “Have a seat,” he said without answering Mark’s rueful question.

  Dean held a chair for his aunt, then took his own place.

  “Well?” Anna demanded in teasingly feigned outrage. “Aren’t you going to hold a seat for me?”

  And wouldn’t my guest love to see that? Dean thought wryly. He could imagine the next day’s headlines: Town’s Newest Resident Dines With Imaginary Friend.

  Or worse: Cameron Ghosts Make Reappearance. Wouldn’t that bring out the lunatics and tabloid hounds?

  “Never mind,” Anna said with a laugh. “I can see you’d rather pretend I’m not here at all.”

  That wasn’t true, actually. Dean would very much like to acknowledge her presence. He just wished he could do so under normal circumstances.

  “Will Ms. McAlister be joining us for dinner?” Mark asked, his eyes straying toward the kitchen door.

  “We asked her to, of course, but she and her daughter prefer to eat in the kitchen this evening,” Mae explained. “I suppose they’re tired after moving in today and then preparing our meal.”

  “Her daughter?” Mark repeated.

  Mae nodded. “She’s a single mother. Her little girl, Casey, is ten years old. Pretty, like her mother.”

  Mark looked thoughtful.

  “Do you think he likes children?” Anna asked Dean.

  He shrugged faintly. Anna seemed to have a bit of matchmaking in mind. Why couldn’t she be content with haunting him? If she thought she was going to sweet-talk him into helping her get Mark and Cara together, she had another—

  Cara entered the room then, carrying a heavy tray. Mark almost broke his neck jumping out of his chair to help her. She thanked him coolly, never meeting his eyes.

  Dean risked giving Anna a wry look. Couldn’t she see that Cara wasn’t interested in Mark?

  She gave him a smile in return that he couldn’t begin to interpret.

  Conversation flowed easily enough during dinner, though Mark seemed rather distracted, his gaze often straying to the closed door that led into the kitchen.

  Of course, Mark wasn’t the only one having trouble keeping his mind off a woman. Dean had his hands full carrying on a coherent conversation with his aunt and Mark without visibly reacting to Anna’s frequent observations. She drifted around the room throughout the meal, first in one corner, then another, making Dean dizzy with her movements. He wished he could order her to stay in one place.

  Mark told them about the newest computer equipment he hoped to buy for the newspaper soon, his conversation becoming quite technical after a while.

  “Do you actually understand what he’s talking about?” Anna inquired incredulously, staring at Mark as though he were speaking Greek. Dean supposed “campuspeak” must sound like a foreign language to a young woman who’d lived at the turn of the century. Even Aunt Mae seemed hard-pressed to follow the conversation, and she had some familiarity with modern technology, though of course, not nearly as much as Mark and Dean had.

  He nodded subtly, then tried to pay attention as Mark changed the subject to world events. An avid TV-news junkie, Mae was clearly much more at ease with this conversation, and soon she and Mark were enthusiastically debating national politics, rapidly finding points on which they agreed and cheerfully disagreed. Dean added a word or two, but spent most of the time watching Anna’s changing expressions as she tried to follow the conversation.

  “Goodness,” she said with a shake of her dark head. “Things surely have changed.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Dean risked murmuring into his water glass.

  Her expression became wistful. “I’d like to see more of this new world.”

  Dean couldn’t reply—even if he had known what to say.

  They moved into the private sitting room after dinner. Though they’d asked Cara to join them, she had politely refused, conspicuously avoiding Mark’s eyes. She explained that she was tired, and as soon as she finished clearing away the dishes, she and Casey were turning in. Mae insisted on going into the kitchen to help with the cleaning, though Cara protested.

  Dean smiled. Cara would soon learn how useless it was to argue with his aunt when she wore that particular look on her sweetly lined face.

  “So tell me about Cara,” Mark said as soon as he and Dean were alone in the sitting room, steaming mugs of coffee in hand. “You say she just appeared out of nowhere and asked for a job?”

  Dean nodded. “That’s right. No references, no history. Just a little girl at her side and a needy look in her eyes.”

  “She’s running from something,” Mark murmured.

  “An abusive husband, unless I miss my guess,” Dean agreed.

  Mark winced. “Yeah, most likely.”

  “I figured it isn’t any of my business, unless some jerk shows up and starts making trouble, of course.”

  Mark’s face darkened. “If that happens, give me a call. I’ll help you take care of him.”

  Dean murmured something noncommittal and took a sip of his coffee.

  “He’s very taken with her,” Anna commented, standing close to Mark and studying his face. “Do you think she is married?”

  Dean had wondered if Anna was going to join them in the sitting room. He lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug, gave her a look to remind her that he wasn’t at liberty to talk freely to her, then turned back to Mark.

  “I appreciate your bringing those notes by this evening,” he said, knowing Anna would be interested. “Are you sure you never found anything to indicate that events here happened any differently than everyone says?”

  As he’d expected, Anna moved closer, listening intently.

  Mark shook his head. “What I found was very sketchy,” he admitted. “I interviewed a few locals, dug up some old newspapers, tried to get my hands on some official documents.”

  “And...?”

  “And—not much,” Mark said. “The locals all gave me various versions of the same story, with some individual exaggerations. The newspaper articles were oddly uninformative, considering the scope of the story. And no official documents appear to have survived.”

  Dean frowned. “Surely there are some old police reports. Something.”

  “Not according to what I was told. Most of the records were apparently lost in a tornado back in the fifties.”

  “And the newspaper articles?”

  “Simply stated that Ian and Mary Anna Cameron, local residents, were killed in a shoot-out with Deputy Stanley Tagert when he tried to arrest them for bootlegging and other suspected crimes. Their stepfather and Mary Anna’s fiancé both declared themselves too grief-stricken to be interviewed, their friends clammed up, a couple of attention-grabbing neighbors claimed they’d known all along that Ian Cameron was a criminal.”

  “Lies!” Anna exclaimed. “All lies.”
>
  “There has to be something more,” Dean muttered. “Someone had to know what really happened.”

  “Stanley Tagert knew,” Anna insisted. “As well as whoever pulled the trigger on Ian and Buck and me.”

  “Stanley Tagert died on a hunting trip about a year after the shootings. That left only the third man alive,” Dean told her, forgetting just for that one moment that he shouldn’t be speaking to her. “He’s the one we have to identify, though I don’t know how we’re going to do it.”

  “Third man?” Mark looked in bewilderment from Dean to the apparently empty corner toward which Dean seemed to be staring. “What third man?”

  Dean frowned, embarrassed with his gaffe. “I, er, have reason to believe that Tagert may have been in on the crime and that Ian and Mary Anna died because they saw something they shouldn’t have.”

  Mark looked skeptical. “Why do you think that? How could you possibly know anything about this, especially since you’ve only lived in these parts a short time?”

  Dean groped for something to say, looking to Anna for suggestions. For once, she was quiet, shrugging apologetically.

  “You have found something, haven’t you? A diary? A journal? What is it, damn it?”

  “I—” Dean started to deny it, then changed his mind. “I have come across something,” he admitted. “But I’m not at liberty to tell you about it now. Not until I have more evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Evidence that the Peavy family fortune is founded on murder. Probably bootlegging.”

  “Oh, man,” Mark groaned. “You are going to stir up a hornet’s nest if you start making that claim around here. You don’t know how prickly Margaret Peavy Vandover is when it comes to her family honor. Not to mention the senator, the mayor and the chief of police. These people have power around here, Dean. You have no idea how difficult they can make things for you if they set their minds to it—especially Margaret.”

  “I’m aware of that. Why do you think I’m looking for more proof before I say anything?”

  “Even if you find the proof,” Mark said, “why would you bother to bring it out now? Isn’t it possible that you’d be harming innocent descendants of wrongdoers, rather than exacting justice? I know this is a strange question coming from a so-called journalist, but why would you want to break a story like this when there’s no one alive who really cares?”