by Lexi Eddings
Heather felt gut punched. Michael had told her the truth. “But why didn’t he say anything about it? At first, I mean. All this time he let me think—I mean, let us think . . . well, did anyone here believe he did more with his life than wander around on his motorcycle?”
Everyone shook their heads and gave a collective shrug.
“Why did he hide his success?” Heather asked.
“Maybe you should ask him,” Valentina suggested, her expression shrewd.
“Look, Heather. My brother may not be homeless, but he’s still Mike the Mess. If you’re looking for a new project, well, let’s just say, he’ll give you plenty to work with,” Lacy said. “At the risk of making a very old joke—‘Take my brother . . . Please.’”
“Ba-dum-chhh!” Ian added a paradiddle with his fingers on the table and pantomimed striking an air cymbal.
The club erupted in laughter.
“How ’bout that?” he said. “It worked, even for that lame joke.”
The group laughed again. Heather didn’t join them. Taking Michael Evans was what she really wanted to do.
Chapter 19
There are obvious holes in the reporting about the
death of Jessica Walker. This little town may look
like something out of the Andy Griffith Show,
but a whiff of corruption oozes from the cobbled streets.
—from Judith Hildebrand’s notes for
her exposé on Michael Evans,
dot-com king or heartland horror
“Yeah, that’s good,” Judith said to herself as she scanned her notes. It pleased her that the wording subtly trashed the bricked walkways of Coldwater Cove for ruining her Manolo Blahniks. Of course, in the end, the sacrifice of her beloved stilettos might be worth the trade. Michael Evans was guilty of something. She wasn’t sure what, but it had to be something terrible.
The only fly in her ointment was that she didn’t have a scrap of proof.
Judith had rifled through every bit of newsprint surrounding the unfortunate accident involving that teenaged girl, certain she was on to Michael Evans’s secret. The timeline fit. The scar fit. If he’d been in that submerged car with her, hopefully in the driver’s seat, he could easily have been injured.
Somehow, he was responsible for the Walker girl’s death, and the whole thing had been covered up.
Just because she’d found no proof didn’t make it not true.
She gave herself an inward shake over all those double negatives. Still, the premise of her project was sound.
But she’d exhausted the Coldwater Gazette information on the subject. When she’d tried to pump Michael’s sister for her recollections of that time, Lacy had stonewalled her with general memories of high school angst and grief.
“You know how it is. We took Jessica’s death as a personal slap. When you’re eighteen, you think you’re immortal,” she’d said. “It made all of us realize we’re not. Everything became suddenly more important. More urgent. In fact, if Jess hadn’t died, I might not have found the courage to leave town to study back East.”
After that, Lacy Evans could only talk about the design business she’d built in Boston, and Judith had failed to turn her back to the topic at hand.
But Judith had gained a couple of things from her time spent grubbing in the basement of that two-bit excuse for a paper. She’d arranged to stay with Mrs. Chisholm, a delightfully eccentric old lady with a sprawling Victorian overlooking the town park that bordered Lake Jewel. The woman was a shut-in with a broad picture window.
It was a recipe for a committed snoop.
On the first day Mrs. C’s drudge of a niece left them alone, Judith left her notes in her newly rented room and took the opportunity to pump the old lady for information.
“I expect you see a good deal of what goes on in town from here, don’t you?” Judith adjusted herself to make sure the lapel camera was focused on Mrs. Chisholm in her wheelchair.
“Of course, I do. What else do I have to do but watch?” Mrs. Chisholm’s words spewed out like bullets from a repeater rifle. “Heat up my tea, would you? There, just a little more in the cup. No, no, not too much. Do you want me to scald myself? What was I saying? Oh, yes, I can tell you which mothers watch their children on the monkey bars and who should be investigated for neglect. Honestly, it’s a shame they let some people have children these days.”
“I don’t think anyone controls who can have children.” At least, not in this country.
“Really? Well, more’s the pity, I say. There ought to be a law.”
“Right.” Even to Judith’s ears, eccentricity was edging toward the crazy train, looking for a spot to jump on. But Mrs. Chisholm’s picture window faced out on the exact place where Jessica Walker’s car had entered the lake all those years ago. She had to find out if the old lady had seen anything. “I guess you see . . . well, how can I put this delicately? . . . things that might be considered scandalous.”
“Oh, all the time.” The old lady waved a crabbed hand in the air. “Even more now than when I was a librarian. People thought they were being cagey, with their secret trysts in the stacks, but they didn’t fool me. No one’s that interested in old periodicals.” She tapped the side of her nose.
“It’s clear you’re a keen observer of human behavior, but I was wondering more about your vantage point now.”
“From here, I see plenty of who’s meeting who for a picnic, even if they’re spoken for elsewhere. And if they’ll eat a hot dog on a park bench together out in front of God and everybody, it makes a body wonder what they’ll do when they’re alone. Well, am I right?”
“Surely,” Judith said, making a note to herself never to be caught in Mrs. Chisholm’s crosshairs. “Of course, you probably only watch the park during the daytime.”
“Land sakes, no. When you’re as old as I am, you don’t need more than three or four hours of sleep a night.” She took a noisy slurp of her tea, her false teeth clicking loudly on the china. “I often get up and come into the parlor so I can watch the lake in the moonlight.” The old lady sighed like a young girl. “It soothes me.”
“How nice of your niece to get up with you.”
“That lazy thing? No, Peggy can’t be bothered. At night, I have to get myself up and into the chair.And I don’t mind telling you, that’s no small feat.”
But if she can manage it at night, why does she make her niece lift her during the day? Judith wondered.
“Why, I could fall and be lying on the floor in a pool of my own blood and Peggy wouldn’t hear a thing.”
“That must be so trying for you.” Judith gave a small shake of her head in what she hoped passed as sympathy. Actually, she found herself pitying someone besides herself for the first time in years. As her aunt’s full-time fetch-it girl, Mrs. Chisholm’s niece was stuck in the sorriest situation Judith had ever seen.
“I’ve tried ringing a bell. I even had one of those newfangled baby monitor thingies installed so I can call out when I need her, but nothing rouses her.”
If Judith were in Peggy’s shoes, she’d have the batteries out of that monitor so quick, their little electric poles would spin.
“After midnight, Peggy sleeps like the dead,” Mrs. Chisholm complained. “Or says she does. My cup’s empty. More tea, girl.”
Judith jumped at her sharp tone and obeyed on reflex. “Well, it’s a good thing your bedroom is on the main floor so everything is conveniently located for you.”
“Pish. It’s conveniently located for Peggy, you mean. I’m sleeping in what used to be the dining room. But as we never entertain, she insisted we change it to my bedroom. When she first came to live with me, Peggy would carry me up to the lovely bedroom I had when Mr. Chisholm was alive.” A smile lifted the corners of her mouth and then dropped them back into her usual scowl. “Of course, she was much younger then.”
And perhaps you were much lighter, Judith thought, eyeing the old lady’s ample girth. “I wonder if I’m ren
ting the room you shared with your husband.”
“Oh, we never shared a bedroom. When I was young, it simply wasn’t done. The husband might visit his wife’s boudoir on occasion,” she said with the same expression she reserved for sour pickles, “but proper married people always had their own rooms.”
That explains why Mrs. Chisholm is cared for by a niece instead of a daughter.
“My room upstairs is the one that overlooks the front lawn. It has pretty much the same view as the parlor, but up a level. You’re in Mr. C’s old bedroom.” She arched a wiry brow. “Or at least, you’d better be.”
“Oh, I’m sure I must be. My room overlooks the side yard.”
“Yes, that’s Herman’s room. The one with the gramophone. Peggy sleeps in one of the old servant’s rooms on the third floor.”
Judith turned her lips inward to hide her smile. Mrs. Chisholm’s overworked niece had commandeered her aunt’s coveted upstairs bedroom without her knowledge. That explained why Peggy crept around the space in stockinged feet and closed the door with such care the latch didn’t make a sound. She was trying to avoid being heard by the sharp-eared old lady below.
It was a small bit of insolence, but Judith liked Peggy better for it. The powerless needed to take what they could from their oppressors. And if the oppressors were unaware they’d been plundered, so much the better.
What Mrs. Chisholm doesn’t know won’t hurt Peggy.
But Judith needed to find out what the old lady did know. “In my research of the Coldwater Gazette archives, I discovered an account about the tragic drowning of a teenage girl. It happened about ten years ago.”
“Going on eleven, in point of fact.”
“Oh, then you remember it.”
“I should hope to shout. I’m not feeble, you know.” Mrs. Chisholm leaned forward confidingly. “I watched the whole thing happen right from this chair, but did anyone think to ask me? Not once.”
“Then here’s your chance.” Judith nearly leaped up in excitement, but she forced herself to keep up the calm, detached persona of a visiting scholar. “Tell me about it. Every detail you recall.”
Mrs. Chisholm set down her tea cup. “Well, it was around May Day. I remember because several of the neighborhood children had cluttered up my porch with their tacky little homemade baskets filled with flowers and candy and—”
“Mrs. Chisholm,” Judith said more sharply than she ought. She modified her tone as she went on. “If you could please just stick to an account of the accident . . .”
The old lady gave an injured sniff. “You might have said so in the first place. I thought you wanted every detail.”
“Every detail about the accident, yes.”
“Very well. I had the most excruciating migraine that night, you see. Peggy had left some of the downstairs windows open and the pollen—from those infernal May Day baskets most likely—had unleashed havoc on my sinuses. And—”
“And this is connected with the accident, how?”
“It’s why I was awake that night,” Mrs. Chisholm explained in the same tone she’d take with a not-quite-bright child. “If Peggy had done her job, or if people didn’t allow their children to spread pollen around the neighborhood willy-nilly, why, I’d have enjoyed the sleep of the just that night.” Then Mrs. Chisholm’s indignant expression softened. “Instead, I’m left with the memory of that poor girl’s last moments. Oh, it’s a terrible burden to carry, let me tell you.”
Tell me. For the love of all that’s holy, just tell me! Judith wanted to scream, but instead she said, “Take your time and share it with me. Perhaps the burden will seem lighter.”
Where had that idea come from? Oh, yes. It was something from the silly little paper in the “Words to Live By” column that was authored by all the pastors in town in a round-robin sort of arrangement. Yesterday’s words were: “A burden shared is a burden lightened.”
But however hokey Judith found the saying, it seemed to do the trick. Mrs. Chisholm stared out the window and began speaking.
Chapter 20
Put three sticks of wood into the cookstove
and bake them little cakes until
they’re done. Or maybe longer.
—from Grandma Higginbottom’s recipe
for “Good Enough for Company Cakes”
Shirley Evans was determined to make petits fours from an old family recipe for Lacy’s bridal shower. As maid of honor, Heather was equally determined to make sure her friend’s mother didn’t wear herself ragged. According to Lacy, her mom tended to go after everything “like she was killing snakes.” So Heather had volunteered to help bake and decorate the little cakes.
“Just wait till you taste one,” Shirley said. “So light and airy, they practically float off the plate.”
The only problem was that Grandma Higginbottom had never been very forthcoming about how she made those slivers of heaven. She’d worked hard to perfect her recipes, and it was a point of honor not to share. If she ever wrote anything down at all, it was riddled with vague directions and always left out one or more key ingredients so no one could ever duplicate her results.
And since Grandma Higginbottom had “gone on to glory” years ago, she’d taken her kitchen secrets with her.
“But that doesn’t mean we can’t figure them out with a little trial and error,” Shirley had assured Heather.
The error part was what worried Heather, which was why she was waiting on the Evanses’ front steps that morning.
Shirley had left a note on the door saying she’d run down to the Piggly Wiggly for a few last-minute items they might need—spices and Crisco and whatnot.This morning’s batch of cakes was the trial run to make sure they had the recipe right.
If there was an error, Mr. Evans, like any retired lawyer worth his salt, had volunteered to eat the incriminating evidence. Or in the worst case, take it down to share at his Rotary Club meeting that evening.
“Those fellows will eat anything,” he’d assured them.
Mr. Evans wasn’t at the house now either. If there was experimental cooking going on, he wanted no part of it and had promised he could be found drinking coffee at the Green Apple until his services as “Head Taster and Quality Control” were needed. Heather was glad he’d made himself scarce, when Michael roared into the driveway on his Harley.
Heather waved sheepishly once he turned off the motorcycle. She hadn’t spoken to Michael since being so horrible to him at the hospital. It wasn’t like her. She usually gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. It bothered her that she hadn’t done so with him. “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself.” A slow smile spread over his handsome face as he removed his helmet.
He didn’t seem to be holding a grudge, but he didn’t seem to be walking toward her either.
“Guess you’re waiting for an apology.”
“Nope.” He headed her way.
“Well, I should have believed you. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“It’s worth a lot.” He ran a hand over his dark hair, but he needn’t have bothered. He didn’t have a smidge of helmet head going on. His hair was still longer than it should be, but Heather was beginning to like it that way. “To be fair, I didn’t give you much to work with.”
That was true. He certainly didn’t dress to match his income. Didn’t flash his status around town. Didn’t even tell his family about his success.
And certainly doesn’t waste money on pricey haircuts.
A strange lump glowed in her chest. There was nothing sexier than a man who didn’t know how sexy he was. And a rich guy who acted like he didn’t measure himself or others by their bank accounts was also curl-your-toes hot. Add in the tender care he lavished on his mother, and Michael was a triple threat to Heather’s heart.
“Your folks aren’t here,” she told him, “but your mom will be back from the store soon.”
He nodded. “Gone to buy more stuff for baking, no doubt. Why have two bags of flour on hand when yo
u can have three, or four, or six? Too much is never enough in my family.” He sat down beside her on the steps. He didn’t crowd her at all, but Heather felt warmth emanating from his thigh next to hers.
“Mom asked me to come over to help,” he said.
“You know how to bake?”
“Me? Naw. But I can beat eggs and whip batter into submission all day long. Mom used to coerce me into helping her when I was a kid,” he said. “Back then, my reward was licking the beaters.”
Heather imagined him as a little boy, standing on a chair next to the counter so he could stir the batter. She smiled at the thought. “What did she promise you this time?”
“That I get to see you.”
He looked at her so intently, it was as if he was trying to memorize her. A warm flush spread over her skin. He leaned toward her.
In the romance novels Heather read, they always talked about how the hero and heroine’s attraction to each other was almost magnetic, as if they were drawn together by an invisible force. She’d never believed it could really happen.
Until now.
She closed her eyes.
Oh, my gosh. He’s going to kiss me.
She wanted him to with a fierceness that surprised her. It had been so long since she’d been kissed, she wondered if she’d forgotten how. Her lips tingled in anticipation. His warm breath feathered over her mouth. Excitement shivered over her.
Then a car honked sharply three times, and the spell was broken. Heather’s eyes flew open to see Michael turn away from her as his mother’s van pulled into the driveway.
