by Kara Lennox
They paused at a particularly difficult spot, where the trail narrowed and climbed almost straight up for several yards. Russ pushed Nero up ahead of him, then doubled back to give Sydney a hand. As she scrambled up, a branch knocked her hat askew.
When she reached the ledge where he was standing, he straightened her hat. And there was that lone curl, dammit, dangling against her cheek.
If anything her face turned a darker shade of pink. Suddenly all he could think about was how it would feel to kiss her, to crush those full, soft lips with his and kiss her until common sense was nothing but a dim memory.
And then he did it.
She responded like a flower to the sun, open, soft, pliant. Her arms went around his neck, her fingers twining in his hair as his mouth plundered hers. He pulled her slender, lithe body against his, feeling the heat of her, smelling the essence of her, the incredible texture of her lips.
He wanted to feel more of her hair. He plunged his hands into the thick, black mass, knocking her hat off.
She made a noise in her throat that could have been excitement, or it could have been the beginnings of an objection. Whatever, it brought him to his senses. When he ended the kiss, her reaction was immediate. She pulled away from him as if he were a hot branding iron.
“I didn’t mean—”
“That wasn’t supposed—”
They both started speaking, broke off, then laughed nervously. Russ took a couple of steps back, almost falling over a rock. He needed to get out of touching range.
“I didn’t plan that,” he finally said. “It was that damn curl that fell over your cheek. It drove me temporarily insane.”
She shoved her hair behind her ears self-consciously, then retrieved her hat. It wasn’t altogether useless, he realized. At least it had a small brim that shaded her face from the sun. She repositioned her pack on her shoulders and set her gaze on the trail ahead. Russ realized the subject of the kiss was closed.
“The cabin’s not much farther.”
During the next ten minutes, Russ kept an anxious eye out over his shoulder, but Sydney seemed to be doing fine. Still, he was relieved when they made the final creek crossing. Another hundred yards and they reached a clearing with a cabin in the center.
“Oh, wow,” Sydney said, and he couldn’t tell whether she was impressed or appalled.
He remembered his own thoughts the first time he’d seen it. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, made of rough-hewn logs with a stone chimney and two porches that ran the length of the whole cabin, front and back.
But no one had been up here in a few months, so it was overgrown with weeds and the front porch was covered with dead leaves. At least he didn’t spot any broken windows, which inevitably led to an invasion of critters.
He climbed the stairs to the porch and unlocked the front door. The cabin smelled winter-musty, but everything appeared in order. “Take your boots off and leave them on the porch,” he instructed. “No sense tracking mud everywhere.”
Sydney looked at the dog, which was standing just outside the threshold, waiting for permission to enter. His feet were coated in mud. “What about him?”
“Nero, go lie down. You can’t come in like that.”
With a sigh that sounded decidedly human, as if he’d understood every word Russ said, Nero lumbered to a sunny spot on the porch and plopped down. He looked over his shoulder at Sydney, silently imploring her to show some sign that she didn’t hate him. For whatever reason, the dog had taken a liking to her.
Sydney entered the cabin in her stocking feet. “It’s really rustic.” She gave a glance to the mounted deer head over the fireplace, the braided rug, the granny-square afghan on the ancient sofa. She shrugged out of the backpack and let it fall with a clunk. “You don’t actually hunt, do you?” She glanced again at the deer and wrinkled her nose.
“Nah.” Not since he was a kid, anyway. Bert had taken him a few times when he first moved to Linhart, but it wasn’t really his thing. “I fish sometimes, but really this is just a place to get away from everything.”
“I would think Linhart is far enough away from everything.”
“Now you’re dissing my town.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to. Linhart is beautiful, really. And quiet. I just don’t see why a person would need to get away from it.”
“It’s not so quiet during tourist season. Spring through early fall, it’s wall-to-wall people.” And sometimes he just needed to get away from Winnie. When she got a moneymaking idea in her head, she would pester Russ about it endlessly. She would never follow him here, that was for sure. The former Las Vegas showgirl didn’t much care for walking on dirt, either.
“Do you want to see the boxes?” he asked Sydney. “They’re upstairs in the loft. If my cousin ever got that space cleared out, we’d have another bedroom.”
“I’m not sure why you’d need another, if you come up here to be alone.”
“Maybe I won’t always be alone.” Maybe someday he would have a wife and kids who’d want to rough it here with him. Although, given his track record, that was becoming less and less of a possibility. He’d yet to convince any of his girlfriends to tromp up here with him—not even Deirdre. Then again, she’d worked in the governor’s office in Austin and would have looked as out of place in the woods as a flamingo in a desert.
None of the other women from his past would have fit in, either. Melanie What’s-Her-Name, the oil company lobbyist, had broken out in hives when he’d taken her on her first and last canoe trip. Elizabeth, the hotel events coordinator—well, he’d never even tried to picture her anywhere in the great outdoors.
Sydney was probably the only female to see this place in fifty years and she had come under false pretenses.
Still, he couldn’t deny she classed the place up. Something about her was different from those ultrasophisticated women he’d been involved with in the past. Or perhaps he was merely trying to rationalize his attraction to her.
“All right, let’s have a look at those boxes,” she said briskly.
He led her up a narrow spiral staircase to a loft bedroom. As soon as Sydney reached the landing, she let out a soft “oh” of surprise.
The room was literally full of boxes, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, and every one of them filled with yellowed papers, photographs, scrapbooks, letters, postcards and who-knew-what.
“It would take me a month to go through all this stuff!”
“You can take as long as you want,” Russ said mildly. “There’s enough food, between what’s in the backpacks and the kitchen cabinets, to last you several days. I’ll come back to get you whenever you say.”
“You’re going to leave me here alone?” Panic edged her voice.
“I have a business to run.”
“I can’t stay here overnight,” she objected. “I didn’t bring clothes or a toothbrush or—”
“There are plenty of clean clothes in the bedroom closet and dresser drawers, and I packed a few toiletries in the backpack. But if you don’t want to stay, I understand. We have to start back within a few minutes, though, if we want to make it home by dark.”
She looked at the boxes, then back at Russ, weighing how badly she wanted to find Sammy Oberlin’s heir against how badly she didn’t want to spend the night in the woods.
“Fine,” she ground out. “I’ll stay one day, and if I can’t find anything by then, forget it. I’m going back to New York.”
Exactly what he’d been hoping to hear. But as he looked at her, standing in the loft staring forlornly at all the boxes, he felt nothing but guilt. He didn’t want to leave her here alone with her work, which wouldn’t lead to anything anyway. He wanted to take her downstairs, bundle her into the feather bed, burrow under the down quilts and make love to her until neither of them could move.
“I guess I better call the B and B and let the sisters know I won’t be back tonight.” Sydney looked around for a phone but didn’t spot one. “Let me guess. N
o phone.”
“I do come here to get away from everything,” he reminded her.
“Good thing I remembered to bring my cell phone.” She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled it out. She’d just bought it a couple of weeks ago, the latest and greatest on the market.
Russ eyed it with interest. “I’ve never seen a phone like that.”
She held it out for his inspection. “Cool, huh? I can use it to read e-mail, do research on the Web, listen to music—it’s an mp3 player, too. With this thing I’m always connected, always at the office. I never miss a call.”
“Um, yeah, well, hate to break the news, but unless it’s a satellite phone, you won’t get service out here.”
“What? That’s ridiculous. Everyplace has cell coverage these days.”
“Not these woods.”
She checked the screen more closely. Sure enough, her phone wasn’t receiving a signal. “My father will be worried sick about me if I don’t call him tonight.” Sydney gnawed on her bottom lip, then reminded herself to stop. It was a nervous habit she thought she’d conquered years ago.
“I can let both the B and B and your dad know where you are,” Russ said.
She could just imagine. Some strange guy calls and claims Sydney is stuck in the middle of nowhere and can’t be reached, but don’t worry? “Why don’t you call my aunt instead?” Sydney suggested.
“Sure, no problem.”
Aunt Carol would be cool about it. She could keep her father calm if he got worried.
Russ wrote down the number Sydney gave him and stuck it in his pocket. “Have fun, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She couldn’t believe he was leaving, just like that. But she couldn’t very well beg him to stay.
Russ started a generator, so she would have electricity. Then collected the dog from the porch and started the hike back to the car. Sydney watched him until he was out of the clearing, disappearing into the trees.
She felt abandoned and forlorn. When she’d first visualized herself going through all these boxes of historical papers, she’d thought Russ would be helping her—identifying people in photos or the authors of letters. It had sounded like so much fun, a treasure hunt.
Doing the job alone wasn’t nearly as appealing. But she kept the goal in mind—verifying the identity of the Oberlin heir. Maybe one of those boxes held a ten-million-dollar clue.
But before she could do anything, she had to use the bathroom. She wandered into the single downstairs bedroom, but the only door led to a closet which was, as Russ had promised, filled with spare clothes. Changing into a comfy pair of jeans and a sweatshirt sounded like a good idea—after the bathroom.
But there was no bathroom.
Sydney inspected every inch of that cabin. There was no bathroom. She ran out to the front porch.
“Russ!” she yelled as loud as she could. “Russ, come back! I have a problem!” But he must have been too far down the trail, because he didn’t return. Either that or he had chosen to ignore her.
That was when she spotted a small building off to the side, shielded by some sapling trees. “Oh, no.” It couldn’t be. Surely she was just missing something, a hidden door or something. Surely he didn’t expect her to…But, yes. As she drew closer to the small building, she saw the quarter moon carved into the door.
Chapter Six
When Sydney saw Russell Klein tomorrow, she was going to kill him. She gritted her teeth and opened the door to the outhouse. This experience would make for an amusing anecdote to tell her father, she realized with a faint smile. If it made him laugh, picturing his purely urban daughter stuck in the boonies without a flush toilet, the inconvenience would be worth it. Almost.
In the closet back in the cabin she found a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt that were miles too big but warm and comfy. She would have to remember to take a picture of herself with her phone. The snapshot of her dressed like a hillbilly would go well with the anecdote.
Finally, she climbed the stairs to the loft, eager to get on with her task. It was hard to know where to start, so she grabbed a box at random, sat cross-legged on the floor and started digging.
The first box appeared to be filled with receipts, all dated from the 1940s. The name on each and every receipt was Bert Klausen.
Bert Klausen? She’d heard that name before, she thought with a surge of excitement. Had it come up in previous research? Then her hopes fell as she realized Bert was the elderly gentleman who’d greeted her at Russ’s store, the one with the pickle.
Bert was the cousin?
She wondered what all these receipts were kept here for. Had Bert actually lived here? Obviously, because she couldn’t envision anyone hauling boxes of junk through the woods just for storage.
Other boxes yielded similar fare—mail, most of it of a business nature but a lot of it just purely junk mail. Why would anyone keep junk mail? She shuddered as she thought about those people who never threw anything away, the ones who let old newspapers, magazines and empty cans stack up in their houses floor to ceiling, until only a narrow path remained leading from room to room.
Actually, her father could easily grow into one of those people if someone didn’t keep tabs on him. He wanted to keep everything; he was always sure he might need it someday. In the first months after her mom died, his house and the office had become unbelievably cluttered and Sydney had to fight him every step of the way as she’d tried to purge the junk.
Lowell Baines never would have fought his wife—he knew Shirley had the business sense and had deferred to her. But Sydney was his little girl, who obviously knew nothing. He didn’t trust her to make decisions about his affairs. In fact, he was still trying to make decisions about her life.
Finally she found a box filled with old photo albums. She loved looking at old pictures, even if she had no idea who was in them. It always made her sad when she saw photo albums at estate sales or antique shops. Hadn’t some family member wanted those photos? She had loads of old albums that had belonged to her mother, each picture meticulously labeled, and she knew the stories behind them, too.
But not everyone shared her love for recording the past. These albums, for instance, were falling to pieces. Many of the old photos were faded and few had captions. The subjects that were identified featured first names only. But she did see a few photos, dated from the 1930s, with a little boy whose name was Bertram Jr. She could only guess this was the pickle-eating Bert and that the receipts had probably belonged to his father.
But no Kleins. No Oberlins. No Winnies or Winifreds or Sams.
The deeper she delved into the boxes, the more positive she became that these boxes had all belonged to Bert and had nothing whatsoever to do with Russ or any other Kleins.
She’d been had.
Why did he want her out of town so badly? What was he trying to hide?
She wasn’t going to kill Russ, though. That would be too quick and easy. Somehow, she was going to make him suffer for dragging her up here for no good reason.
“DO I REALLY HAVE TO buy that expensive shampoo?” asked Sylvia Grimes. She was one of Winnie Klein’s best, most regular customers. But she also asked the same question every time she walked into Winnie’s hair salon, the Cut ’n’ Curl.
“Darlin’,” Winnie said as she used a soft brush to sweep away the last few stray hair clippings from Sylvia’s shoulders, “you can use any kind of shampoo you want—if you want to be back here in a week begging for a new dye job because you look like Bozo the Clown. I know this all-natural stuff is pricey, but it’s the best shampoo I’ve found for preserving color.”
Winnie patted her own deftly highlighted locks. She did the best color this side of San Antonio, if she did say so herself. But a cheap shampoo would ruin everything and Sylvia knew that.
“Oh, all right,” Sylvia grumbled, stuffing the bottle of shampoo into her bag along with one of each freebie Winnie put out for her customers—a refrigerator magnet, a key chain, a pen, an emery board an
d a letter opener. Sylvia must have had dozens of each by now, but every two weeks she loaded up again.
Sylvia was Winnie’s last customer, thank goodness. Her other two stylists, Betty and Glory, were just finishing up with their clients.
Winnie did a tidy little business. Just about everybody in Linhart came to the Cut ’n’ Curl to get their hair and nails done. Her customers tended to be extremely loyal; a few who had moved away even made the trek back to town just to have Winnie work her magic on their locks.
As Winnie changed out of her uniform, Betty and Glory swept up, readying everything for tomorrow. Winnie was straightening up the dressing room when the bell over the door rang.
“Tell whoever it is, we’re closed,” Winnie called out from where she was gathering used smocks to run through the washer.
“Winnie, honey, it’s not a customer,” Glory informed her. “It’s that handsome son of yours.”
Glory Dickerson had been lusting after Russ since the two of them were in high school. In fact, Winnie suspected Glory had gone to beauty school strictly so she could get a job with her, Russ’s mother, and foster a connection. But it hadn’t worked. While Russ was always pleasant to Glory, he’d never shown any signs of being attracted to her, despite the fact Glory was curvy in all the right places, with big green eyes and piles of long red hair.
Winnie stuffed the smocks into a laundry bag and emerged from the dressing room with a smile for her son, who offered her a dutiful kiss on the cheek.
“What’s the occasion?” Winnie asked. Though she saw Russ on a fairly regular basis, he seldom dropped by the shop. The ultrafeminine decor and the perfumed air made him uncomfortable, she suspected.
Not to mention the cow eyes from Glory and every other woman under the age of fifty. But he never dated local women, preferring the glossy city girls he somehow managed to meet.
“No particular reason,” he said. “I just wondered if you wanted to go out to dinner.”
“Well, Russell, aren’t you sweet. Of course I would love to have dinner out with my favorite son.”
