Aunt Lucy didn’t say a word. She turned and walked back to her grocery sack, pulled out another silver tube and returned to the table. I saw her exchange a look with Jake before she reached out and gently eased my shirt collar away from my neck.
“This should make it so there won’t be a scar later,” she said. “What did the police say?”
I looked at Jake. No help there.
“Did anything happen while I was gone?”
“No,” Aunt Lucy answered. “What did the police say?”
This time my cell phone saved me.
“Hey,” Nina said. “Are you guys coming up here to lunch? I think we found some information. I’m not sure it’s what you want, because I don’t really know what we’re looking for.”
Aunt Lucy was poised over me, two silver tubes in hand and a determined look on her face.
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll be right there. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. I just thought—”
I flipped the phone shut, stood up and felt the room swim around me for a moment.
“Gotta go,” I said. “Nina doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“Like that’s new,” Jake muttered.
I gave him the evil eye and stuck out my hand. “Keys, please.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you forgetting the new policy?”
“No. I didn’t think library work was your forte, that’s all. I figured you were on bodyguard duty here.”
Aunt Lucy glared at the two of us. “Do I look like I need a bodyguard?” she demanded. She inclined her head toward the big gun on the counter. “I’ve got your bodyguard right over there. If Jake leaves his cell phone I can call for help if I need it. But you,” she said, directing her attention to me, “don’t look like you’d be a help to anybody. Anybody stupid enough to think I’m gonna believe they fell down a flight of steps and accidentally landed on a cigarette doesn’t need to be rushing off to help anybody else. You should lie down.”
The air in the beach house suddenly felt too thick to breathe. The dark-paneled walls were closing in on me and no amount of natural or artificial light was enough to brighten the house’s atmosphere.
“I’m fine, really. I’ve got a couple of bruises and…”
“And a lot you’re not telling me,” my aunt finished.
She frowned at Jake. “Looks like Stella needs more caretaking than I do. You gonna be the one responsible for her?”
Lloyd padded out into the kitchen, took one whiff of my jeans and went into a sudden doggie-lust frenzy. He jumped up and pawed at my pants, his pink tongue lolling out of his mouth as he drooled all over me.
“Lloyd, get down.” I grabbed Jake’s keys off the kitchen counter. “Aunt Lucy, Jake doesn’t need to take care of me. I’m responsible for me. I don’t need a keeper.”
“Well, I don’t, either,” she snapped. “I may be old, but I’m not half beat to death, and I’ve got a gun. Where was yours?”
She had me there. I’d never walk on the beach again without it.
“Do I get a say in this?” Jake interrupted.
“No!”
It was the only thing Aunt Lucy and I agreed on at the time. Neither one of us felt much like having a baby-sitter or taking it easy. I was too mad to slow down and be careful. I wanted to wipe Joey Smack off the face of the planet. I wanted to take action, not read about it later. Apparently, Aunt Lucy felt the same way.
“I’ve got work to do,” she said. “If you don’t want to take care of yourself, then you’re certainly old enough to suffer the consequences.”
I looked at the mess of bowls and pans she’d scattered across the kitchen counters and realized Aunt Lucy had created a make-do laboratory.
Jake peered into a stainless-steel bowl and inhaled deeply.
“Mmm, this smells good. What is it?”
He dipped a finger into the bowl, swiped a sample and was about to taste it when Aunt Lucy slapped his hand away.
“Get out of there! It’s stain remover. Eat that and you’ll be blowin’ bubbles outta both ends for days.”
I slipped toward the door and was almost gone before they noticed. Jake wiped his finger on his jeans.
“Lock the door after us. We’ll be back as quickly as possible,” he said, and was right behind me as I started down the steps.
He grabbed the keys from my hand, pressed the remote to unlock the doors and waited until I’d climbed up into the truck before he lost his temper.
“Stella, what is it with you? Do you think you’re the only person on the planet with a stake in the outcome? Do you treat your friends like they’re idiots, too, or just your aunt and me?”
He started the car and backed out of the driveway. The tiny muscle in his jaw twitched and he wouldn’t look at me.
“I just felt like moving so I wouldn’t stiffen up. I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t start, Stella, all right? Just don’t start. What do you take me for, huh? You think I’m just some dumb car mechanic or the boy you left behind ten years ago?”
“Eleven,” I corrected. “And you left me first.”
Jake veered into the driveway of a vacant beach house, slammed the car into Park and stared at me.
“You see? You’re doing it right there. Stella, let’s get a few things straight, all right? Number one, we were seventeen when I asked you to elope with me. We were too young to get married and we were just lucky your uncle stopped us. It would’ve been a terrible mistake and you know it, don’t you?”
I opened my mouth to agree with him, but he wasn’t looking for an answer.
“Okay, so I’m guilty of avoiding you after that. What can I say, Stella? Your uncle was the closest thing I had to a father back then. I let him down. I let you down. I was embarrassed. No, I didn’t handle it well, but did you? You’ve carried your grudge against me ever since then and you want to talk about mature?”
“Now, just wait a minute,” I said, but Jake was too intent upon emptying his cup to even hear me.
“Number two. If you hate me so much, what are you doing in business with me?”
He looked at me then, and I felt he could see things inside me that even I couldn’t see. If I’d felt claustrophobic in the beach house with Aunt Lucy, I now felt absolute panic. I wanted to run away, fast and forever. What was I doing in business with him?
“You’re so busy trying to run me off, but your body tells me you want me, Stella.”
I came at him like a trapped animal.
“Stop it, Jake.”
“You want me, Stella, and you’re afraid. What’s so bad about that?”
“You’re wrong. I don’t want you. I’m in business with you because you have a lot of skills that would make us a good team, and because you were good to my aunt and uncle. It makes good business sense,” I finished.
“Good business sense?” he echoed. “Was it good business sense when we were up in your bedroom yesterday?”
Now I couldn’t look at him. I smiled coolly and focused on a spot just below his right earlobe.
“That was just…instinct,” I said. “Probably a reaction to all the stress of the night before. It was an unconscious way to remind myself that I was still alive, that’s what Freud would say. Lust should not be mistaken for a relationship.”
His response threw me.
“Who said anything about a relationship?” he said. “Stella, I’m not looking for a serious relationship. I just got out of a bad marriage, why would I want to get bogged down again?”
“Bogged down?” I threw up my hands. “See, you haven’t changed one bit. You were afraid of commitment when you were a kid and you’re afraid of it now.”
“Oh, I get it,” Jake said, nodding. “You haven’t changed either, no pleasure without pain. No sex without marriage.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, isn’t that how it is? Isn’t that why you come on to me one minute and run away the next?”
I gla
red at him. What kind of person did he think I was? I wasn’t like that, was I?
“I’ll have you know, Jake Carpenter, that I’ve had plenty of sex without feeling the need to get married.”
“So it’s just me, then. You don’t want to sleep with me unless I marry you. Why, Stella, I’m flattered.”
Damn, how had we gotten here?
“No, I don’t want to sleep with you because I’m not attracted to you.”
“So you were faking it yesterday?”
Hell and double damn!
“No… I mean…”
“So you did want me.”
He grinned and relaxed back against the driver’s-side window.
“I have my own theory,” he said. “I think you’re afraid that if you let down your hair, you might enjoy yourself and that scares the hell out of you because you wouldn’t be in control. Marriage isn’t a guarantee, Stella. I learned that the hard way.”
He tapped one finger against the steering wheel and seemed to be considering something.
“You know,” he said at last, “you haven’t really changed. You were an uptight, Goody Two-shoes when I first met you. The only difference between then and now is you’re a woman and not a little girl. Women have a harder time with temptation.”
I struggled to stay calm. He didn’t know me, not really. All Jake had known was the grieving girl who had tried to be good enough to make up for causing her parents’ deaths.
“You don’t tempt me, Jake,” I said.
“Don’t I?”
He leaned toward me, grabbed my arm and pulled me toward him.
“Prove it.”
I started to melt into him and hesitated. I was pretty much damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. If I gave in, he’d be right and if I didn’t, well, he’d be right again.
He reached up and gently stroked the side of my face, ran his fingers through my hair and settled his hand at the base of my neck.
“One minute at a time, Stella,” he whispered. “Just one minute at a time.”
I felt his lips meet mine and relaxed into the waves of warmth that welled up inside my body. One kiss, one moment. Was there really anything wrong with that?
I brought my hand up and touched the side of his face, felt the sandpaper stubble along his chin and memorized the angle of his neck with my fingertips. I met his tongue with my own, explored all that was to be discovered in that one kiss, before slowly pulling away.
“We’d better go,” I said. “It’s one. They’ll be waiting at the diner.”
“Scared you, huh?” Jake said.
“Nope.”
But I was lying. Jake Carpenter terrified me. He was like free-falling out of an airplane and trusting my parachute to open.
Chapter 8
No one even bothered to look up as we entered the diner; they were all watching Nina. She sat front and center at the lunch counter, Spike by her side, regaling her fellow diners with some apparently fascinating tale.
Marti stood across from Nina, eyes sparkling, mouth open in a wide grin of amazement.
“No way,” she said.
“Way,” Nina answered. “So I said, oh my God, I was in love with him, like passionately all through middle school. I mean—” she turned and patted Spike’s knee “—before I knew I was, well, you know, like, in love with her. I mean way before I met her.”
I froze, waiting to see the construction workers erupt into a homophobic frenzy, but to my surprise, they seemed unfazed by Nina’s revelation. They were hanging on her every word.
Spike’s face slowly turned from bright pink to crimson, and this delighted two elderly women sitting at one end of the counter.
“So what happened then, dear?” one cried. “Did you ever track him down?”
Nina almost levitated off her stool. “Not until I just happened to go to the library. Who knew? Oh, my God. He was like, a freaking recluse. Nobody knew anything about him. I mean, like he did book signings but never anywhere anybody had ever heard of. They were only in little foreign countries or something. Like, I mean, one time he had a signing in a drugstore in Nevada. I mean, do people even live there? Hello?”
She dropped back onto her stool. “Oh, but he was like a God. He was cool. I mean—” she looked at the construction workers “—I wanted to be his virgin bride or something, you know? Or maybe bear his children? I mean, I’d be famous then, too, you know, like I’d be the other half of his super-intellectual children.”
Jake and I slid into a vacant booth and watched the show.
“Nina,” Marti said, apparently now on first-name terms, “I can’t believe Fred May is your hero. He’s such a…”
“Yeah,” Nina sighed. “A nerd.”
“Woody Allen looks like the Terminator compared to Fred May,” Marti added.
Nina rolled her eyes. “Well, yeah, but that’s ’cause Fred’s dead now. Nobody looks good dead.”
One of the construction workers blew his soda all over the counter and collapsed in a heap into his buddy. The entire diner was laughing, or trying not to, but Nina was oblivious.
“I think I’m jealous of a dead guy,” Spike said.
Nina looked stricken. “Oh, baby,” she said. “Now, that was a long, long time ago. I don’t sleep with him anymore.”
“What?” It was hard to pin down how many of us asked that question.
Who was Fred May and when was he Nina’s boyfriend? I thought back and couldn’t remember any pimple-faced boy by that name.
Nina had the good grace to blush. “Not like that!” she said. “I always slept with his most recent book jacket under my pillow. He was my hero!” Her face fell, and for a brief moment I thought Nina was about to cry. “I just can’t believe he’s really gone. He was so like, young. I mean, forty-two is young to die of a heart attack, isn’t it?”
Everyone sitting at the counter nodded and for a moment the diner fell silent. How did Nina do this? She never met a stranger. Everywhere she went, Nina drew them in, regardless of her appearance, her sexual preference or, God help us, her opinions.
Nina sighed and seemed to brighten. “Well,” she said, “at least now I know he lived in Surfside Isle. I can always come here and just, you know, feel him in the air.”
One of the construction workers leaned toward Nina’s end of the counter and said, “I worked on his house when he redid his kitchen.”
This prompted a flurry of comments from the others, all vying for Nina’s attention with remembered pieces of personal information about her beloved. Jake and I might’ve gone unnoticed had Marti not looked up and spotted us.
“You two need menus?” she called.
This drew Spike’s attention and she in turn nudged Nina, who reluctantly gave up her passionate discussion and moved to sit with us by the window.
“Well, it just goes to show you,” she said breathlessly, “the universe has a cosmic reason for everything. I was supposed to come here to get stuck in a boring old library. How else would I have found out about Fred…?” Nina stopped, frowned at me and said, “Hey, what happened to you?”
Spike’s expression mirrored Nina’s. “It looks like somebody punched you.”
“Slapped,” I corrected. “The Concerned Citizens Against Sleigh Repossession paid me a visit. It’s not as bad as it looks,” I lied, “but I think we’d better all watch our backs.”
“All this because you repossessed his sleigh?” Spike asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
I shrugged, wincing because even that small movement hurt, and told them everything, from my encounter with Joey Smack’s people to the phone call from Mia.
“She’s got an old family picture?” Spike asked. “Well, maybe it’ll save us some time. So far, I have a list of all the boy babies born in Surfside Isle between 1959 and 1962. I figured this would give us a range to work with since Mia thinks he’s around forty. Then I started cross-checking the parents’ names with death records.” Spike looked apologetic. “I figured it would b
e a piece of cake, but even after I narrowed down the list to two possibilities, it didn’t give me what I needed. I’m going to spend some more time searching this afternoon.”
Marti walked up to the booth carrying fresh drinks for Nina and Spike. She looked much less tired than she had the night before and there seemed to be a fresh sparkle in her eyes. I wondered what had happened between her and Tom after I’d left the diner in search of my beach cottage.
“These two already ordered,” she said, and then stopped, noticing the welt on my face. “What happened to you?”
Her eyes flashed suspiciously to Jake, then back to me.
“He do this?”
“No. I had a little run-in with a pair of steps. I tripped and fell down the steps to the boardwalk.”
Marti’s eyebrows shot up. She looked hard at my face, frowning, apparently deciding whether or not to believe me.
“I’m recommending the special,” she said finally. “Homemade vegetable soup and tuna sandwiches. You want menus?”
Jake shook his head and gave her the thousand-watt-smile treatment. “If you say the special’s the best, I wouldn’t have anything else.”
Marti rolled her eyes and gave me a pitying look. “I’m watching you,” she told Jake. Turning to me she said, “And you gotta work with this guy?”
“It’s like chicken pox,” I told her. “Once you have it, you’re immune for life.”
Jake wasn’t listening. His attention had been drawn to the front of the diner where Tom stood talking to a uniformed police officer.
“Excuse me a sec,” he said, and left us to stare after him.
“I don’t know,” Nina murmured. “I’ve heard cases of people getting chicken pox twice, you know.”
I turned my attention away from watching Jake and caught Marti staring at me again. She crooked her head in Jake’s direction.
“You know, I believe I’ve heard the same thing about that chicken pox. You sure you’re not itching, Stella?”
I felt my cheeks begin to burn. “Nope, I’ve got the antibodies. That chicken pox won’t strike me twice.”
Marti flipped her order pad shut. “Yeah, and there’s plenty of people who’ll tell you lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice, too, but I don’t never see them outside in a thunderstorm. There’s pressing your luck and then there’s asking for trouble.”
Stella, Get Your Man Page 12