“I’ll go with you.”
“What,” she sputtered in surprise. “You can’t leave. You have a business to run.”
“That’s the good thing about being the boss,” he said with a devilish grin. “I can take off whenever I like.”
“Isn’t that irresponsible?” She was desperate for an excuse, any excuse, to keep him from accompanying her.
He shook his head. “All our current projects are at a stage where my crews can complete the installations without me.”
“What about the Hearthstone Project?”
“I need to think about it more. I realized last night I’m not ready to put ideas on paper yet. Some time, travel and other diversions will help get my creative juices flowing.”
Marissa had no idea what he meant by “other diversions,” and she wasn’t about to ask. “What about Bo? He’d be miserable in a boarding kennel.”
“Pete and Diane will take care of him. He loves staying at their place. They spoil him.”
Marissa opened her mouth, ready to utter another excuse to make the search alone, but her rampant hormones had apparently fried her brain. No other reasons came to her. She pressed her lips together and sighed, conceding defeat.
Blake glanced at his watch. “Meet me at the house in fifteen minutes. I won’t take long to pack. We can grab a sandwich, drop off Bo and hit the road after lunch. Okay?”
Still clueless for a reason to travel solo, Marissa nodded.
Blake headed back toward the house, then halted and swiveled toward her. “By the way, where are we going?”
“Cedar Key,” Marissa said.
He nodded. “See you in a few minutes.”
Marissa walked toward her car. Her problems had just doubled. In addition to trying to find Annie’s parents and brother, Marissa was now faced with guarding her heart. Harry had already broken it once. She wasn’t about to allow Blake to shatter it again.
Chapter Nine
Mile after mile of dense slash pine forest lined the narrow two-lane road to Cedar Key. The winter sun hung low in the west, and Blake turned down the visor to block the glare. They hadn’t encountered another vehicle since making the turn off the main highway.
Humming along with Toby Keith on the radio, Blake tapped his fingers to the tune on the steering wheel of his pickup.
“I didn’t know you liked country music,” Marissa said.
“Does it bother you? I can turn it off.”
“It’s okay. And it may be the only station you can pick up out here in the boonies.”
Blake flashed her a grin. “One of my crew foremen plays this stuff continually on job sites. He got me hooked.”
“Next thing you know, you’ll be putting a gun rack in the back window.”
He cut her a glance and judged from her expression that she was teasing. “Already got me a dawg,” he drawled.
“You seem awfully happy.”
“That I am. This is like playing hooky.”
Marissa sighed. “I wouldn’t know. Mom would have skinned me alive if I’d ever tried.”
A temporary cloud descended on Blake’s mood as he recalled his last set of foster parents. They hadn’t cared what he did, as long as their check from the state arrived on time.
He pushed bad memories away. He had every intention of enjoying this trip. He hadn’t had a vacation or more than a couple days off at a time in years. Ever since he’d decided three years ago to expand his business to include commercial, as well as residential landscaping, he’d barely had enough hours to sleep and eat, much less an opportunity to get away. Although the purpose of this trip was serious, he intended to enjoy it to the fullest.
And having Marissa along definitely added to the possibilities. He’d forgotten how much fun female company could be. Especially Rissa’s. He’d never had to worry about impressing her when they’d hung out together as kids. She’d accepted him as he was. Other girls had looked down their noses at a boy from the other side of the tracks—and from a foster home, as well—but to Rissa, his origins had never been an issue. He’d been a fool to lose touch with her all those years.
“So, Sherlock,” Marissa said, “what’s our plan?”
“According to Blackie’s notes you showed me, there’s only one Ryarson listed in the Cedar Key phone book. We look them up and see if Andrew James lives there.”
Marissa nodded. “Blackie found an Andrew James Ryarson in a recent Cedar Key high school yearbook, so they have to be the ones.”
“We’ll have to tread carefully,” Blake warned her. “Andrew James may not even know he’s a father, if the twins’ mother took off to Clermont without telling him.”
“Or he could be an innocent bystander,” Marissa said, “one whose name Melanie Smith drew out of thin air when asked to identify the twins’ father for the birth certificate.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. It’s pretty devious.”
“Desperate’s probably the better word. I can’t imagine what it would have been like, seventeen and pregnant with twins. I hope when she moved to Clermont, her family went with her.”
A hodgepodge of emotions assaulted him. The question Blake had longed to have answered was where his own mother had gone and why she had left him. Years ago, when he’d made enough money to afford a search, he’d hired private investigators and contacted national agencies that reunited children with their birth parents. After four long years and more money than he cared to count, Blake had accepted the inevitable. He would never have a response to his question, never know the circumstances of his desertion. From that point, he’d tried his best always to look forward, never back. He realized with a jolt that his decision had been a factor in not contacting Rissa all those years.
But as he gazed sidelong at her, caught the porcelain curve of her check, the gleam of her hair and breathed the faint but heady fragrance of wisteria, he admitted his mistake. His friendship with Rissa had been the one consistently happy element of his formative years. Having her back in his life was enough to make him cheerful. Time off from work for a trip together was just icing on the cake.
Picturing a romantic dinner at sunset on the Cedar Key waterfront with Marissa across the table from him sent desire flickering through his groin. The reaction made him realize that Marissa was more than a friend. She was a beautiful, desirable woman. A woman he’d love to take in his arms, in his bed and—
He reined in his lust along with his galloping imagination. Marissa wasn’t a love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of gal. To her, sex meant commitment, and commitment meant marriage. And Blake was about the worst possible candidate for marriage on the planet.
Except for Marissa’s jerk of an ex-husband.
But not having sex didn’t mean he and Rissa couldn’t have fun. They’d always had good times together, and this trip should be no different. He found himself humming with the radio again, and soon the pine forests gave way to broad salt marshes and glimpses of the distant Gulf of Mexico. After crossing a narrow bridge onto firmer ground, they began to spot modest homes.
“Cedar Key’s really an island,” Marissa said. “That bridge back there is the only way in and out, except by boat.”
Blake slowed for the posted speed limit. “Hurricane season must be a nervous time around here.”
“The original town, on an island farther out than this one, was destroyed by a hurricane in the early 1900s. They rebuilt the town here, but not the pencil factory.”
“Pencil factory?”
“There was a huge sawmill and factory on the original island where they shaped cedar wood for pencils,” Marissa said. “But today the town’s fame is mainly as an artists’ colony.”
“I knew you were smart,” Blake said, “but I had no idea you’re a walking encyclopedia.”
Marissa slugged him playfully on his upper arm. “You know better. When we studied state history in high school, I did a term paper on Cedar Key. You’ve just heard the sum total of what I remember from that twenty-page monstr
osity.”
“Good,” Blake said with a smile. “You were giving me an inferiority complex. All I remember from state history is that ‘Suwannee River’ is the state song.”
He pulled into a gas station and stopped the truck. “Let’s ask directions.”
Marissa clutched her heart in mock distress. “Good grief, you didn’t tell me you had a sex change!”
He was glad to see her sense of humor reemerge. She’d seemed edgy and distracted when they left Dolphin Bay. Now she was acting more like the Rissa he remembered. “Don’t be a smart-ass. Men do ask directions sometimes. Especially when they’re playing detective.”
He grabbed the folder with Blackie’s notes, entered the gas station and spoke with the attendant. A minute later he was back in the truck.
“We take the main drag through downtown and hang a right,” he explained.
Driving along the island’s main street was like entering a time capsule. Almost every building dated from the early 1900s. Old hotels and restaurants, along with ancient homes deep in the shade of moss-covered live oaks lined the walkways of crushed shells. On one corner stood the town museum.
“Our turn’s at the next block,” Blake explained.
After leaving the main street, he noted that the ground began to rise.
“A hill on an island?” Blake observed in surprise. “What happened to Florida flatlands?”
“It’s an Indian mound.”
“How do you know?”
“I remember from my term paper.”
“You said you’d told me all you remembered.”
“I lied,” Marissa said with a smile.
The winding road worked its way toward the center of the island, past small houses scattered randomly, unlike the carefully platted subdivisions in newer developments throughout the state. Blake spotted a rusty mailbox with Ryarson barely visible in fading white paint and pulled to the side of the road.
Marissa leaned forward and gazed past him at the ramshackle house surrounded by a picket fence that hadn’t seen paint in decades. Weeds flourished on either side of the crushed-shell front walk, but hadn’t yet completely covered piles of old tires and a delapidated metal glider. The house, too, needed painting, and the screen hung in shreds from the front door.
“Looks deserted,” Marissa said.
“Only one way to find out.” Blake opened the door and hopped from the truck.
Marissa joined him and followed him up the walk. He stepped carefully on the weathered boards of the porch, then nodded to her that they were safe. She climbed the steps and waited while he knocked on the door.
No one answered.
Blake knocked again. “Mr. Ryarson?”
A faint but unintelligible voice sounded inside the house, followed by a thumping sound that grew gradually closer. After several long minutes, someone threw a bolt on the front door and tugged it slowly open.
An elderly woman, at least in her early eighties, dressed in a faded, shapeless cotton duster, stood just inside, gripping the sides of an aluminum walker.
“If you’re selling something,” she said in a voice amazingly strong for such a frail body, “you’re out of luck. I haven’t any money.”
“We’re here to see Mr. Ryarson,” Blake explained.
The woman shook her head. “Then you’re still out of luck. Frederick’s been dead for eleven years.”
“We’re not looking for Frederick,” Marissa chimed in. “We’re here to talk about Andrew James.”
“Andy?” Emotion caused a hitch in the old woman’s voice.
“You know Andrew James?” Blake asked.
The woman peered up at him with eyes clouded by cataracts. “I’ll have to sit down. There’s chairs on the porch.”
She shoved at the door with her walker. Blake held the screen open, and Mrs. Ryarson made her way with painful slowness onto the porch to a cane-backed rocker and sat down. She motioned to the other rockers. Marissa pulled one beside her and perched on the edge of its seat. After gingerly testing the stability of the porch’s balustrade, Blake propped one hip on it across from Mrs. Ryarson.
“Now,” the old woman said, “what do you want to know about Andy?”
“Where to find him,” Blake said.
The woman lifted a hand gnarled by arthritis and pointed up the hill.
“He lives up there?” Marissa asked.
The woman turned her head, eyes wide as if in amazement. “You don’t know?”
Marissa and Blake exchanged a look, and he knew she was wondering the same thing, whether the old lady still had all her faculties.
“Don’t know what?” Marissa asked gently.
“The cemetery’s up there,” Mrs. Ryarson said. “That’s where you’ll find Andy.”
Blake’s bewilderment grew. The boy was only seventeen. Maybe the old woman was confusing him with Frederick, her dead husband. “Does Andy work there?”
Tears brimmed in the old woman’s eyes. “He’s buried there. Has been for over a year now.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ryarson,” Marissa said, “but we’re confused. The Andrew James Ryarson we’re looking for is a seventeen-year-old boy.”
“He was seventeen when he died.” The old woman shook her head as if weighed down by heavy sadness. “Sometimes I think this family’s cursed. First my nephew and niece were killed in that horrible accident on U.S. 19. That’s when little Andy came to live with us. Just a few years later Frederick had his heart attack. And last year, Andy was taken.”
Marissa placed her hand on the old woman’s. “What happened to Andy, Mrs. Ryarson?”
Suspicion drove the sorrow from the woman’s eyes. “Why do you want to know?”
“We’ve been trying to locate him,” Blake said, “for an old friend of his, Melanie Smith.”
His answer appeared to ease Mrs. Ryarson’s mistrust. “Andy and Jeff Blodgett took a Jet Ski out one weekend last winter. The fog rolled in. They got lost. The craft capsized. Both boys died of hypothermia before the Coast Guard could find them. Now Andy’s buried next to Frederick. Won’t be long before I join them.”
“Do you have other family?” Marissa asked.
“I’m the last,” she said. “Not a single living relative, not even in-laws. But my church is my family. They take good care of me.”
“What can you tell us about Melanie Smith?” Marissa asked.
“I don’t keep up with the young folks like I did when Andy was alive.”
“Does Melanie live on Cedar Key?” Blake asked.
The old woman jerked her head. “On the other side of the island.”
“Did you know Melanie?” Marissa said.
Mrs. Ryarson shook her head. “Not well. She sometimes came here with Andy’s other friends.”
“Do you know her parents?” Blake asked.
“Not personally. But I know who they are, Frank and Estelle Smith. It’s a small community.”
“We’re sorry to disturb you,” Marissa said. “Is there anything we can do for you before we leave?”
“You’re a sweet child, but I’ll be fine.” Mrs. Ryarson paused a moment. “How come Melanie doesn’t know Andy’s dead?”
“Melanie moved to Clermont,” Blake said quickly.
The elderly woman shook her head. “Awful young to be out on her own.”
“On her own?” Marissa said.
“Must be. Her folks are still here. Didn’t she tell you?”
Blake sidestepped her query and hopped from the balustrade. “We’re going to visit them now.”
Following his lead, Marissa rose from her chair. “Thanks, Mrs. Ryarson.”
She preceded Blake off the porch and hurried to the truck. Blake wasted no time climbing in, starting the engine and pulling away.
“Poor woman,” Marissa murmured. “And poor kid.”
“Seventeen’s too young to die,” Blake agreed.
“You’re right, but I was thinking about Melanie. Bad enough being seventeen and pregnant with t
wins, but to have their father die…she must have gone through hell.”
“Maybe that’s why she kept the boy, to remind her of Andy.”
“If she kept him,” Marissa said.
“There may be one way to find out.”
“Melanie’s parents?”
Blake nodded. “Be on the lookout for a public telephone.”
“I have my cell if you need to make a call.”
“I want a local phone book to look up their address. I’m hoping Frank and Estelle Smith can answer our questions.”
MARISSA STOOD on the sheltered balcony of the second-floor condo they’d rented for the night and gazed across the harbor at the twinkling lights of shops and restaurants built along the pier. A rising moon cut a swath of silver on the dark waters in the distance. Although surrounded by other condos in the complex, the cleverly designed balcony was an oasis of privacy, free from prying eyes, yet open to the magnificent vistas.
Earlier, she and Blake had eaten dinner at the restaurant on the dock’s end, gorging themselves on the sinful pleasures of fried grouper and key-lime pie. But the laughter of other customers, the cheerful beat of Reggae music on the sound system and the delicious food had failed to erase her melancholy over what they’d learned from Mrs. Ryarson that afternoon.
“It’s a tragedy,” Blake had said about Andy Ryarson’s drowning. He was silent for a moment, as if lost in thought. “When I was seventeen, I never thought about dying, did you?”
Marissa toyed with her key-lime pie, her appetite suddenly gone. “All I thought about at that age was the future. Growing up, moving out and being on my own.”
Blake nodded. “Me, too.”
“And now we are.” An oppressive sorrow filled her.
“What?”
“Grown up and on our own.”
The explanation for her sorrow had struck her suddenly, almost taking her breath away. She was totally on her own. In her dreams as a teenager, and later when she’d married Harry, she’d always pictured herself as part of a family of her own. Just as she’d never considered her death, she’d never pondered the possibility of a single existence. She’d expected a life much like her mother’s, with a loving and adoring husband and several children, who would eventually give her grandchildren.
Verdict: Daddy Page 11