Whispers and Lies

by Diane Pershing

  He kissed me.

  And so what? she told herself sternly, as she had been all day. He’d been honest with her, found her attractive—for all she knew, he probably found all women attractive—but didn’t want to start something that had nowhere to go.

  Before getting back to her patients, she snuck one last look at herself. Yes, she most definitely was not the same old Lou McAndrews. And however ambivalent she might feel about the change in herself, at least now she would be able to do her best friend a favor—wear a dress that actually fit and maybe even look good in it. Hey, after opening her house and her arms to her last night, whatever Nancy needed, Lou was here to make sure she got it.

  Will’s bedroom had last been updated in high school. At that point, as he’d sprouted up nearly five inches in one year, the twin bed he’d slept in while growing up had been traded in for a full one. There were large posters of Aerosmith and Bruce Springsteen on one wall, a movie poster from Top Gun on another; along a third stretched a huge banner for the Susanville Sluggers, his baseball team. The shelves of two narrow bookcases were filled with schoolbooks, some fiction and a lot of history and biography. There were CDs and tapes, even a few old LPs, although the needle on his record player had long since gone south.

  At the moment, Will was pounding away on his laptop, which was sitting on the small corner desk in his bedroom, trying to sculpt some of his notes together into a loose first draft. But he was missing too much information.

  He glanced at his cell phone, now recharging on the corner of his dresser. He’d tried Lincoln again this morning, at all three numbers, and there’d been no answer. He’d also tried a few other contact numbers for him—two ex-wives, his daughter Gretchen, a drinking buddy. No one knew where Linc was.

  For a brief moment, Will considered calling the man’s brother, but the last time the senator and Will had spoken, Jackson DeWitt had let him know he wasn’t thrilled about this article that would draw more attention to his brother and, by extension, to himself. From what he could tell, the senator both cared deeply about and was exasperated by his younger brother.

  Will made the decision to wait a while; he’d call over to Capitol Hill only as a last resort.

  The clinic’s Saturday hours were from eight till two, but it was three o’clock before Lou, using the inner staircase that connected the two floors, was able to go upstairs to evaluate her living quarters. As she stood in the doorway to the living room, she surveyed the sight. It was still a major mess; what Will had said last night about being invaded resonated more today, now that the initial shock was gone. Everything was out of place, all her mother’s homey little touches destroyed. Even a plant had been upended, and dirt strewn all over the faded area rug that covered most of the wooden floor. She felt anger welling up inside, anger at the intruders’ lack of feeling for their victims.

  She shook her head. It was obvious that rich people did not live here, so what in the world had they been looking for?

  Slowly, she walked over to the sideboard and closed the drawers. Then she picked up one of the overstuffed couch pillows and replaced it on the sofa.

  Suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue, she sat down on the couch and leaned her head back. She would close her eyes. Just for a moment or two.

  “Lou?” The voice and the sound of knocking on the front door woke her up. “Lou? Open up, it’s Will.”

  She’d been dreaming about floating plants and dust motes. She sat up straight, rubbed her eyes.

  The knocking continued, unabated, echoing off the walls of the room. “Lou? Are you all right?”

  “Coming,” she called out. Rising, she walked to the door and opened it. Will stood there, concern on his face, carrying a dress bag on a hanger.

  “You’re okay?” he asked.

  “Yes. Sure. I just fell asleep. Come in.”

  He walked in and gazed around. “Are you putting it all back together again?”

  “Only got to a couple of things in the living room before I conked out.” She ran her tongue over her teeth, then made a face. “Excuse me, I really need to brush my teeth.”

  Will laid the dress across an armchair and paced a little while he waited for her to return. He was feeling edgy, not sure of what to do with himself. The long run he’d taken this morning hadn’t helped. He was anxious to get back to D.C., do some more digging. Two more days here and he wasn’t sure what he’d do with all his excess energy.

  Then Lou came back into the room, and he knew where he’d like to expend some of that energy.

  “Much better,” she said with a smile. “I hate that taste in your mouth just after you wake up.”

  “Yeah.”

  She noted the dress bag lying on the chair, so she walked over to it and picked it up, unzipped the bag and withdrew a gown of a pale peach color, sleeveless and scoop-necked. There was some beadwork around the neckline and the hem, which was fairly long. “Not bad,” she observed, “as far as bridesmaid dresses go.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Shoes,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’ll have to find some shoes to wear.”

  “They’re in the bottom of the hanging bag.”

  She reached in and pulled out a pair of high-heeled sandals, then peered closely at them. “A size too large.”

  “Nancy said to tell you they’re ‘dyed to match,’ whatever that means.”

  “Girl talk. I’ll come up with something. Thanks for bringing it over.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She was telling him it was okay for him to leave now, but he didn’t want to. “How about I help you clean up?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t really want to go back home. The place is in total chaos. My aunt Miriam has descended and Bob’s tux is the wrong color and Nancy’s trying to calm everyone down, but she’s just as nuts as all of them.”

  “And then this thing with Molly came up.”

  “And then this thing with Molly,” Will concurred.

  “Poor Nancy. I should be over there helping her.”

  “No, it’s a zoo. You’re better off here, trust me. Come on, let’s do this thing.” Without waiting for agreement or even permission, he headed into the kitchen, which had been pretty much trashed. “Tell me where things go.”

  Instead of answering him, Lou opened the refrigerator and took out a can. “I need some coffee,” she said. “Interested?”

  “Coffee,” he repeated. “Sounds good.”

  He didn’t need it. He’d had enough caffeine this morning to power a small ship. Maybe that was why he was so edgy.

  Not getting ahold of Lincoln was really bothering him now and, seeing the results of the break-in again had him more and more convinced that, somehow, Lincoln was involved. Did Will have any proof? Not a smidgen. A home robbery when the owner was out was sadly all too common in the modern world, and that was the most reasonable explanation for what had happened. And on the surface, Lincoln’s being incommunicado seemed like no big thing. The man was allowed not to answer his phone—hell, sometimes Will went for days without answering his, letting the messages pile up while he was on deadline.

  Even so, there was his reporter’s sixth sense buzzing in his brain. He needed to find out what he could from Lou, and he also wanted to stop keeping information from her.

  Not about her paternity, though—it was simply not his job to break that kind of life-altering news to her. If she’d known that there was a question about her paternity, if she’d been seeking her biological father, he would have offered a possible solution, a suggestion. But Lou wasn’t seeking; she didn’t even know that there was a question about the man.

  “Lou,” he began, watching her fill the coffeemaker. “Mind if I ask you a couple more questions about your mother?”

  “Why are you so curious about her?”

  He told her the truth. “My investigative nose is still sniffing around, and I can’t stop thinking about why your place was b
roken into.”

  She glanced at him briefly before pouring water into the well. “Isn’t that Kevin’s job?”

  “Of course it is, and I’m sure he’s good at it. This is just for me. I’m a reporter, I’m curious about a lot of things. It’s who I am. When something bothers me, I always need to track it down to its source. I can’t seem to rest until I do.”

  “Wow. Mr. Relentless.”

  “C’est moi,” he said lightly.

  She fussed with the filter. “I guess I should be flattered that you’re taking an interest in my little home break-in.”

  Now he felt like a rat. Yes, he was interested in her and what had happened to her. And yes, he was beginning to care about her—hell, forget about beginning to care; he was already caring full bore. Before yesterday morning, she’d barely existed in his consciousness.

  But he was still working on his story about Linc, and his curiosity arose from that, rather than what Lou thought.

  He tried to toss it off. “Hey, call it a restless mind that can’t relax. And yes, what happens in your life and to you is important to me. I see how deeply you felt about your mother, so she must have been a special woman. I just want to know.”

  Her face took on a pinkish tint, and he knew his words had made her feel good. “All right. What do you want to know?”

  “What did she tell you about her background, her childhood, your father?”

  Lou punched the on button of the coffeemaker, then walked into the living room. Will followed and watched as she took down a picture—miraculously untouched—from the fireplace mantel and stared at it. He came around behind her and gazed at it. The picture depicted a bearded, unsmiling man in a pea-coat. It was obvious the man, even photographed in black and white, had curly red hair similar to Lou’s.

  “This is all I have of him. As I child, I would study this and invent all kinds of stories about him. Mom didn’t like to talk about him, told me the loss was too painful for her to speak of him. As I got older, I wondered if maybe he was too insignificant to be given much thought. Till the day she died, I still didn’t know which was the true story.”

  Resting an elbow on the mantel, Will gazed down at Lou, still staring at the framed picture in her hand. “So your dad was a mystery to you.”

  “So was Mom, to tell the truth. She was really into ‘this is now, today is all that’s important, the past is nothing’ kind of thinking.”

  “I see.”

  Janice McAndrews had had big, dark secrets, Will couldn’t help surmising. Shadows. Possibly painful ones. Had she been involved in a one-nighter with Lincoln, only to find herself pregnant later? Had there been many lovers or very few? Was she a party girl or someone out for a single, reckless evening of fun?

  From the picture that had run in the Courier, Lou’s mother at fifty-three had been a quietly pretty woman, thin, with tired eyes, conservative and neat. In the other photo, showing a younger Janice, her face had been fuller, but she hadn’t appeared much different, just less careworn. There had been nothing flashy, nothing seductive about her. Nothing compelling, either. Not an outgoing person. Not a full smile in either picture, only a hint of one.

  Yes, a woman with secrets, most definitely. Keeping a child’s paternity a secret wasn’t that uncommon. What other secrets did Janice McAndrews have? Whatever they were, she’d gone to her grave without revealing them.

  So, back to the original question: were Janice’s secrets the cause of the break-in? Somehow, he didn’t think the paternity issue was the problem. Lincoln had admitted to a lot worse societal and legal infractions—a previously unknown illegitimate daughter at this stage of the game wouldn’t ruin his reputation, which had never been pristine, anyway.

  Then what had the two men been looking for? Something about one of Lincoln’s nefarious business schemes? He’d skated on thin ice as far as the law was concerned, but the influence of his older brother, the “good” brother, had kept him out of jail.

  But Will also couldn’t rule out the theory that the break-in had to do with Lou herself, with her life, not Janice’s. She’d dismissed that hypothesis, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a valid one.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing in your background that you’ve kept hidden or secret that someone needs to make sure stays that way?”

  Instead of appearing insulted, she smiled. “Oh, Will, I wish,” she said with a small chuckle. “It would be glamorous. But there’s nothing, I promise.”

  “Then how about a relative who might have been involved in something fishy?”

  “I don’t have any relatives, Will. Mom said there were some folks back in Ireland and we talked about going over there one day, but we never got to do it. There was a sister, but she died.”

  Lou replaced the picture of the man she thought was her father and picked up another, this one of her and her mother. Lou was about eight, with a huge grin and a missing tooth. Janice had her arm around her, but, again, no smile. “I used to ask Mom about her sister, about all of her family. But it was like with my father—she must have had some deep heartache in her past and didn’t want to talk about it, so eventually I stopped prying.”

  “I don’t suppose she said anything before she died? No last-minute revelation?”

  Shaking her head, she put the picture back. “No. She was pretty much comatose that last week or so, and then she just…slipped away.”

  Fat tears suddenly brimmed along her lower lids and slowly traveled down her cheeks. Lou swiped at the tears with the heels of her hands, then made an angry face at herself. “When does it stop? I never cry, I’m not one of those weeping women, I mean not at all. But with Mom, I can’t seem to stop. The littlest thing will set me off.”

  Will felt guilty as hell. His questions had made her sad again. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pried.”

  Lou heard what Will said and through the blur of her tears, gazed up at his stricken face. Setting her hand on his arm, she said, “No, no, it’s not about you prying, I promise. I’ll be walking along the street and I’ll see a shop where Mom and I went to buy a scarf, or another where we stopped in to get doughnuts, and I’ll start sobbing away. Or I’ll smell something—she was a great cook—and it will smell like one of her recipes and I’ll start bawling. It hits at odd times—” again Lou tried to rub the tears away “—and it makes me mad.”

  “Why?”

  She threw her hands up in the air in exasperation. “Enough. How long does mourning have to go on?”

  “I don’t think there’s a time limit on mourning.” Will caught her two small hands between his much larger ones and squeezed. “When I lost my mother, I felt bad for a long, long time. A couple of years. But then, I didn’t have the luxury of tears.”

  “Why not?”

  “A guy thing, I guess,” he admitted ruefully. “I cried, a little, and not often, maybe three or four times, and only when I was alone. The rest of the time, it sat around inside me—” he pointed to his chest “—and it just hurt.”

  Her heart softened at his admission. “So you know.”

  “Yeah.”

  The understanding in his eyes made her produce more tears, until she found herself quietly sobbing. Will—dear, dear Will—took her in his arms, pulled her close.

  His body was warm, his arms strong. She could smell the clothes-dryer freshness of his well-worn sweatshirt, clean and old at the same time. She buried her face in the fabric and let it rip.

  He held her tightly. He didn’t pat her the way some men did, didn’t say, “There, there.” Proactive comfort, she’d come to call it; they felt they needed to do something instead of just be. No, Will knew how to hug, how to just stand there and be a fortress, a safe place, a warm, strong, utterly masculine shelter.

  And when at last the storm of emotion was over, Lou raised her head from his chest, knowing her face was smeared with tears, smiled up at him and said, “Thanks.”

  The look on his face was…a lot of things. Sadness for her, maybe for himself
, too. Also puzzlement. A touch of guilt? And then there was a hint of something warmer and darker, something like…desire.

  Releasing his hold on her, he stepped back. And just like that, all the messages his face had been transmitting were gone. Wiped clean. “Better now?” He sounded casual, uninvolved.

  “Much,” she said, not sure what was going on, but suddenly feeling foolish. “Um, look, you probably have other things to do. I’m going to finish straightening up.”

  “What things do I have to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m keeping you, I’m sure.”

  “Nope.” Grinning, he rubbed his hands together. “What room do you want to work on next?”

  If she lived to be one hundred years old, she would never, ever understand men. He’d held her, then pushed her away. She’d told him he could go; he’d decided he didn’t want to. And they said women were the flighty sex.

  “The back bedroom, I guess. It’s Mom’s room. They didn’t touch mine.”

  Together, they removed the sheets and blankets, got new ones and made the bed, Will on one side, Lou on the other. Tucking in the blanket, each made his way around to the foot of the bed and when they met there, their hips bumped momentarily. As one, they straightened up and faced each other.

  Way too aware of him, she averted her gaze to her feet, but felt his eyes on her. Neither of them spoke. Heat emanated from Will’s body. She was aware of it, just as she was aware of that pine-shaving-soap smell of his and the fluttery sensation in various private parts of her body.

  Shyly, tentatively, she raised her gaze to meet his. This time, his eyes weren’t sending any mixed messages. The word smoldering came to mind as he looked at her. In the next moment, he’d pulled her to him and was kissing her, all over her face, forehead, eyelids, neck, and she was groaning as she felt her body’s lightning-quick sensual response.

  “Lou,” he murmured, capturing her mouth and devouring it.