As he walked in, Nate was walking out with an aromatic paper bag and a coffee cup. “Call Connolly,” Nate said as they passed, forced to keep going by a crowd in front of the building. “Wants to talk to you this afternoon.”
“Right.” He’d forgotten to return Connolly’s earlier call. What was wrong with him?
“And your mom phoned.”
Just what he needed. “Okay, thanks!”
He called his mother from a table in back while waiting for his lunch. “Hey, Mom. What’s up?”
“Well...” She sounded uncertain, unusual for her. “I’m not sure. But something odd.”
He pulled in a breath to maintain patience. “What, specifically?”
“I took the girls to daycare this morning. Then I went grocery shopping at Fred Meyer.” She hesitated, probably for some assurance that Hunter was listening.
“Yeah?”
“Guess who I saw?”
“Who?”
“Loretta Conway. Hunter, she did not look like a woman who is ill, and she was struggling with a man.”
He straightened. “What do you mean, struggling?”
“Well, she was trying to walk one way and he was pulling her another.”
“Maybe...she just wanted to go to another department.”
“They were arguing.”
“Everybody argues. Did she yell for help? I mean, with all the shoppers who had to be in Freddy’s, someone would have come to her aid, if that was what she wanted.”
“Did you know she was seeing a man? I didn’t, and we talk often. Has Sandy ever mentioned that her mother has a man friend?”
Hunter wondered about his mother’s concern. “Mom, are you jealous?”
She made a sound like a quashed scream. “I am not jealous! I’m trying to make you see that something’s strange. Loretta loves Sandy and the girls, and she wouldn’t just abandon them to someone else’s care for no good reason. Or lie about being sick. This guy had his arm around her in a sort of death grip. I’m wondering if he’s some criminal or something and is hiding out at her place. Honey, please go over there. Take the police.”
He put a hand over his eyes and almost matched her quashed scream. “Mom, I’m sure you’re imagining this.” But she wouldn’t allow him a moment’s peace unless he did what she asked. “But I’ll stop by there.”
“You have to go inside.”
He ignored that. “I’ll let you know what I find out. Meanwhile, try to relax, okay? Sandy’s having a rough day. Her stand-up fridge broke down and I picked up some stuff for her. She’ll need the girls to be mellow tonight.”
“You helped her?” She sounded thrilled. “Oh, Hunter. That was nice.”
“It doesn’t mean anything, Mom, except that she needed help and called me, and I did what I could as a friend.”
“Friendship is a good thing. Don’t forget to phone me.”
“I won’t. Bye, Mom.”
Hunter called Nate and told him he had an emergency. Then he went to the counter to tell Casey, the pretty, dark-haired waitress, to pack his lunch to go. He noticed that the soup of the day on the menu board was chicken noodle. If that didn’t give him an entrée into a presumably sick woman’s home, he wasn’t the conniver he thought he was.
Hunter drove toward Astoria’s South Slope and Sandy’s mother’s place. He parked out front and, carton of soup in hand, strode up the walk and knocked on the door. Loretta’s white sedan sat in the driveway. It took a moment, but he finally heard footsteps, then the door opened a few inches and he saw Loretta peer out inquiringly.
She smiled in recognition and opened the door just a little more. He glimpsed a tailored red jacket over a white T-shirt and jeans and suede boots. She certainly looked well put together for a woman who was ill. And, he thought wryly, if some man had forced her to go shopping, as his mother suspected, he’d let her apply makeup first.
As far as Hunter knew, Loretta was not romantically involved with anyone. Of course, that didn’t mean she couldn’t have a relationship she simply didn’t talk about. Even to Sandy.
He held up the bag, trying to conceal his concerns. “Hi, Loretta. My mother said she was watching Sandy’s girls while you were ill. I thought you might like some chicken soup.”
That sounded lame. She appeared to think so, too. “Well...that was nice of you, Hunter.” She reached out a hand for the bag. He could hear the television in the background. The sounds of automatic weapon fire and male screams floated in their direction. Okay, that was strange.
He felt obliged to plump out his story, now determined to get inside. Loretta had the same aversion to violent TV programs and movies that Sandy had. He felt sure she wouldn’t be watching whatever that was if she was alone. “I was having lunch at the Urban when I talked to Mom, and she suggested I bring you something soothing.”
She nodded and cleared her throat. “How nice of the two of you to worry about me.” She smiled a bit wistfully. “It’s not like we’re family anymore. Well, we were never actually family, but you know what I mean. I was hoping.”
He smiled at that. Not too sick—or distressed—to be a mom.
“Can I do anything for you? Do you need anything at the drugstore?”
“Thanks, no. We— I,” she corrected, “went shopping this morning.”
Hmm. We? He had a thought. “Loretta, may I use your phone, please? I have to call a client.” He smiled winningly. “My next stop, and I left my cell at the office.”
She was clearly reluctant to let him in. “Well...the house is kind of a mess...”
“I promise not to run anything by the white glove test. It would just help me a lot to use the phone. If that’s all right?” He put the onus on her. “Give me a good reason I can’t—particularly since you just expressed a wish that we were still ‘family.’”
She looked over her shoulder, then back at him. Finally, with obvious reluctance and a suggestion of fear that sharpened his senses, she opened the door wider and let him pass. He went to the breakfast bar where she had the cradle for the cordless phone.
“You’ve got to get a cell phone,” he said, trying to distract her while he dialed the weather and glanced around surreptitiously for signs of another occupant in the house. “It’s cheaper than a landline, depending on the program.”
She smiled back, looking a little uncomfortable while she put the soup down on the coffee table, picked up the remote and aimed it at the television to silence it. “So I could leave it behind and have to use someone else’s landline?” she teased.
“Touché,” he said, then pretended to answer the phone. “Hi, Mr. Connolly, it’s Hunter. I got your message earlier, but I’ve been tied up. I was hoping to stop by this afternoon. Does that work for you?” He waited a moment, as though listening to a reply. “Okay, well, I’ll come by, and we’ll talk. About half an hour? Great. Yes, thank you. Bye.” He replaced the receiver, thinking he really did have Actor’s Studio potential.
Loretta watched him with a curious, almost amused expression he couldn’t quiet interpret. She went into the kitchen to fill the sink with sudsy water, quickly placed dishes in it, but not before he saw two plates and two cups. The kitchen smelled of bacon. Apparently the cold wasn’t affecting her appetite.
He went to the sink to thank her, mostly so he could glance out the kitchen window into the yard. Nothing to see there. Unless a man was hiding behind her little garden shed. Hunter had mowed her lawn enough times in the past to know there was no room for anyone in the shed.
“Thanks, Loretta. I appreciate it.” He lowered his voice and asked, “Are you okay?”
She cleared her throat again and turned to him, wiping her hands on a tea towel. “No, I’m not okay.”
His nerves tingled and he prepared to accept her confidence, braced for action.
> “I have the a cold,” she said.
His bristling senses collapsed. He was convinced something was wrong, but since she refused to confide in him, he was unsure what to do. About ready to grab her by the arm and force her out the door and into his car to get her away from whatever the threat was, he stood frozen in place when the basement door squeaked open suddenly, and a rifle barrel appeared, aimed directly at him.
Adrenaline pumping, he grabbed the barrel and thrust it toward the ceiling. Then he yanked the man who held the rifle into the room.
Brown eyes stared at him in shock and disbelief. “Bristol!” the man roared.
Hunter stared back, then demanded, equally disbelieving, “Mr. Connolly! What are you doing here?”
Loretta sank onto a kitchen chair with a weary but taunting grin. “Good question. Especially since you just talked to him on the phone.”
CHAPTER NINE
HUNTER TRIED TO make sense of the scene. The man who was giving Astoria money was staying in Sandy’s mother’s house. With a rifle? He pulled it out of the man’s hand. “Why on earth are you threatening me with a rifle?”
Connolly rubbed a hand down his face and used it to muffle an expletive. “I wasn’t threatening you,” he denied, exchanging a surprisingly resigned and intimate look with Loretta. Hunter glanced from one to the other in confusion.
Connolly dropped onto a chair beside her at the work island. “I wondered if she still had the rifle my father had given me. She said she thought it was in the basement. I was coming up to show her I’d found it...”
“You may as well get the whole story.” Loretta pointed Hunter to the chair at a right angle to her. “Please sit down. But you have to promise to keep what you learn here to yourself.”
Confusion made him a little cross. “I’m not promising anything. At least, not yet.”
“If you can just listen to us with an open mind.”
Connolly sighed. “A really open mind.”
Hunter regarded Connolly’s face and for the first time saw features that were familiar to him—the cocoa color of the eyes, the contentious angle of the chin, a note in the voice that rang clearly, though at a much lower register than the voice it reminded him of.
Oh, no. “You’re Sandy’s father,” Hunter said. He had a bad feeling this was going to mean trouble for him, though he wasn’t sure why.
Connolly nodded approvingly. “I am.”
Hunter willed himself to relax. “She’s a lot like you, though I didn’t see it at first. Why on earth are you here without telling her you are?” His voice rose with each word as he posed the question. There would be hell to pay, and somehow he would be right in the middle. “She remembers you leaving with such...” He stopped himself.
Connolly squared his shoulders. “Say it.”
“Okay. Pain. She remembers with great pain you leaving her and her mother.”
Lowering his head, Connolly groaned. “I can’t believe I let this happen. I staked out the town for a month before I even came to see Loretta. I wanted to make sure she hadn’t found someone else. Then, we’ve been so careful, going out only when we were sure Sandy was at work, trying to stay away from places she frequents. I know. I know. Sheer avoidance, but I needed to talk to her mother first, to see...” He shook his head against whatever was on his mind, as though finding words for it was difficult. He turned toward Hunter as Loretta placed cups of coffee in front of each of them. “So, Sandy’s told you about us?”
“Some.”
Loretta placed her hand on Connolly’s. Well, peace had been made there.
She smiled at Hunter with an expression of apology. “I’m sorry you and your mother were worried.”
“You said you were ill,” Hunter reminded her. “Then my mother saw you at Freddy’s with a man who was trying to pull you one way when you wanted to go another. We thought you wouldn’t lie to Sandy lightly.”
She drew a deep breath and rolled her eyes. “I realize I’m going to pay for this. But I didn’t know what else to do. I should have told Sandy the day Harry came to see me, but she’d just bought the coffee cart. She was up to her neck in learning new things and seriously working herself to a frazzle. Telling her that her father had returned home didn’t seem the right thing to do at the time. And our tug-of-war in the store was simply that he wanted to get ice cream, but I didn’t want to until just before we were ready to check out.”
Everyone looked so strained. Hunter tried to relax the atmosphere. There was a lot he wanted to know. “What brought you home, Mr. Connolly?” he asked.
“Please call me Harry.” Connolly grinned at him. “If we’re going to be in deep dung together, we may as well be on a first-name basis.”
“Yeah. And thanks for putting me there, by the way.”
“Sorry. I was a complete jerk all those years ago. Loretta and I were working opposite shifts at the same restaurant, never saw each other, the money we made wasn’t covering all the bills. Sandy was growing up and needing things. We had to think about college, but there was never money left for anything extra, much less savings. The pressure was so strong that eventually we couldn’t hold a civil conversation.” Harry’s eyes lost focus as he thought back, apparently seeing his troubled family past in his mind’s eye. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just left.”
“He...” Loretta began, but he covered her hand with his and she stopped.
“I left. It was selfish and thoughtless and I should have been shot for it, but that’s what I did. I moved east to Fairhaven, Massachusetts, where I’d lived as a child, and I got a job at a little diner. For a long time, I just got by, then when the owner decided to retire he let me buy it without a down payment. As the owner, I had more freedom to try new things.”
“He was always a genius in the kitchen,” Loretta put in for him.
“I developed a couple of recipes people came back for over and over. When I took charge of the place, I added some special new things to the menu of old favorites and we did well, even when the economy tanked. But thoughts of Loretta and Sandy began to haunt me. I tried to call a hundred times. When it came down to it, though, I didn’t know what to say.”
“Hunter...” Loretta tried again to say something, but Harry kept talking.
“I wanted to come home so badly.”
“Did you really visit Astoria?” Hunter asked, recalling Connolly’s story about being on the cruise ship.
“I did. But that was four years ago. I was going to visit Loretta and Sandy and see if I could do anything to draw us back together as a family.” He shook his head in fatal acceptance. “Would you believe that was the weekend Addie was born? I just couldn’t burst in on that. So I went back to the boat, bitterly disappointed. The stairway to my cabin was well lit, but I was completely distracted and fell and broke my leg. It’s true that people were so kind to me I’ll never forget it. The ship left that night while I was in surgery, having my leg pinned. I was in the hospital for a few days, then the nicest woman—her name was Barbara Stapleton—I’ll never forget it—was responsible for discharge planning—and she arranged for a ride for me to the airport in an ambulance, got me on a flight with no stops and arranged for me to be picked up at the airport in Boston by a medical van that took me home. I couldn’t believe it.”
He stopped for a sip of coffee. Hunter was beginning to wish his own had been laced with brandy.
“I cooked on crutches with a very hardworking and supportive staff. My old boss even came back to help until I could take over completely again. So—to help myself forget that I’d failed in my mission, I started working on a dessert recipe Loretta and I had tried together.” He squeezed her hand, then put an arm around her, as though unable to be that close without holding her. “Remember the whoopie pie recipe I told you about?” Hunter nodded. “It reminded me of how good things had b
een in those days—before it all got so...hard. We’d had a problem with finding a way to thicken the cherry juice without making it pasty. I finally solved the problem. Got rave reviews in gourmet magazines and had patrons coming from all over New England to try the dessert.” He smiled. “À la mode, the pie was absolutely incredible. So Mrs. Walters’s Whoopie Pies eventually approached me about selling the recipe, and when I balked, they offered a price I’d never have imagined in my wildest dreams. I‘ve returned home to share that boon with my family. Or to see if we can be a family again.”
Harry’s story had exhausted Hunter. He smiled at Loretta, who had a look in her eyes never there in the time he’d known her. She seemed suddenly elevated somehow, as though something had been restored to her.
“It appears a part of your family is back together,” Hunter said. “I’m happy for you.”
“We needed time to talk.” Loretta linked her fingers in Harry’s and held tightly. “We had to have time alone together, so I told your mother and Sandy that I was sick. As I said, I couldn’t tell her the truth with all she was going through, and at that point we weren’t even sure where all the talking would lead us. We had a lot to get over.” She turned to Harry with a tortured expression and he gazed at her with such love that Hunter had to look away.
“We’ve come to terms with each other,” Harry said with a big sigh. “Now all we have to do is figure out how to tell Sandy.”
Hunter understood their concerns, and though he couldn’t claim he understood Sandy, he felt fairly sure she’d be furious to find out that her father was home and no one had told her.
“I’d say, just do it.” He sat forward, looking Harry in the eye. “She’s a formidable woman. And my guess is that she’ll be upset, but she’ll come around. I’m sure she’ll understand when you explain how you felt.”
Harry frowned. “Who could understand a parent just leaving?”
Hunter thought about his own father, who would have died in an instant for his mother or him and would never have left for any reason. But seeing inside someone’s heart, understanding what had brought Harry to the point of leaving, was impossible.
Love Me Forever Page 10