by Nora Roberts
“Yes.” She reached for her coffee again. “Nothing that made much sense. He said he was sorry, a couple of times. I don’t think he knew who I was or what happened. I think he was delirious. The paramedics came and . . . and he died. What will you do now? I mean, he’s not from around here. The phone number’s New York. I wonder, I guess I wonder if he was just driving through, where he was going, where he was from.”
“We’ll be looking into all that so we can notify his next of kin.” Rising, Vince laid a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not going to tell you to put it out of your mind, Laine. You won’t be able to, not for a while. I’m going to tell you that you did all you could. Can’t do more than all you could.”
“Thanks. I’m going to close up for the day. I want to go home.”
“Good idea. Want a ride?”
“No. Thanks.” It was guilt as much as affection that had her rising on her toes to press a kiss to his cheek. “Tell Jenny I’ll see her tomorrow.”
His name, at least the name she’d known, was Willy Young. Probably William, Laine thought as she drove up the pitted gravel lane. He hadn’t been her real uncle—as far as she knew—but an honorary one. One who’d always had red licorice in his pocket for a little girl.
She hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years, and his hair had been brown then, his face a bit rounder. There’d always been a spring in his step.
Small wonder she hadn’t recognized him in the bowed and nervy little man who’d come into her shop.
How had he found her? Why had he?
Since he’d been, to her knowledge, her father’s closest friend, she assumed he was—as was her father—a thief, a scam artist, a small-time grifter. Not the sort of connections a respectable businesswoman wanted to acknowledge.
And why the hell should that make her feel small and guilty?
She slapped on the brakes and sat, brooding through the steady whoosh of her wipers at the pretty house on the pretty rise.
She loved this place. Hers. Home. The two-story frame house was, strictly speaking, too large for a woman on her own. But she loved being able to ramble around in it. She’d loved every minute she’d spent meticulously decorating each room to suit herself. And only herself.
Knowing, as she did, she’d never, ever have to pack up all her belongings at a moment’s notice to the tune of “Bye Bye Blackbird” and run.
She loved being able to putter around the yard, planting gardens, pruning bushes, mowing the grass, yanking the weeds. Ordinary things. Simple, normal things for a woman who’d spent the first half of her life doing little that was normal.
She was entitled to this, wasn’t she? To being Laine Tavish and all that meant? The business, the town, the house, the friends, the life. She was entitled to the woman she’d made herself into.
It wouldn’t have helped Willy for her to have told Vince the truth. Nothing would have changed for him, and everything might have changed for her. Vince would find out, soon enough, that the man in the county morgue wasn’t Jasper R. Peterson but William Young, and however many aka’s that went with it.
There’d be a criminal record. She knew Willy had done at least one stint alongside her father. “Brothers in arms,” her father had called them, and she could still hear his big, booming laugh.
Because it infuriated her, she slammed out of the car. She made the house in a dash, fumbled out her keys.
She calmed, almost immediately, when the door was closed at her back and the house surrounded her. Just the quiet of it, the scents of lemon oil rubbed into wood by her own hand, the subtle sweetness of spring flowers brought in from her own yard stroked her frayed nerves.
She set her keys in the raku dish on the entry table, pulled her cell phone out of her purse and plugged it into the recharger. Slipped out of her shoes, out of her jacket, which she draped over the newel post, and set her purse on the bottom step.
Following routine, she walked back to the kitchen. Normally, she’d have put on the kettle for tea and looked through the mail she’d picked up from the box at the foot of the lane while the water heated.
But today, she poured a big glass of wine.
And drank it standing at the sink, looking through the window at her backyard.
She’d had a yard—a couple of times—as a kid. She remembered one in . . . Nebraska? Iowa? What did it matter, she thought and took a healthy gulp of wine. She’d liked the yard because it had a big old tree right in the middle, and he’d hung an old tire from it on a big thick rope.
He’d pushed her so high she’d thought she was flying.
She wasn’t sure how long they’d stayed and didn’t remember the house at all. Most of her childhood was a blur of places and faces, of car rides, a flurry of packing up. And him, her father, with his big laugh and wide hands, with his irresistible grin and careless promises.
She’d spent the first decade of her life desperately in love with the man, and the rest of it doing everything she could to forget he existed.
If he was in trouble, again, it was none of her concern.
She wasn’t Jack O’Hara’s little Lainie anymore. She was Laine Tavish, solid citizen.
She eyed the bottle of wine and with a shrug poured a second glass. A grown woman could get toasted in her own kitchen, by God, especially when she’d watched a ghost from the past die at her feet.
Carrying the glass, she walked to the mudroom door, to answer the hopeful whimpering on the other side.
He came in like a cannon shot—a hairy, floppy-eared cannon shot. His paws planted themselves at her belly, and the long snout bumped her face before the tongue slurped out to cover her cheeks with wet and desperate affection.
“Okay, okay! Happy to see you, too.” No matter how low her mood, a welcome home by Henry, the amazing hound, never failed to lift it.
She’d sprung him from the joint, or so she liked to think. When she’d gone to the pound two years before, it had been with a puppy in mind. She’d always wanted a cute, gamboling little bundle she’d train from the ground up.
But then she’d seen him—big, ungainly, stunningly homely with his mud-colored fur. A cross, she’d thought, between a bear and an anteater. And she’d been lost the minute he’d looked through the cage doors and into her eyes.
Everybody deserves a chance, she’d thought, and so she sprang Henry from the joint. He’d never given her a reason to regret it. His love was absolute, so much so that he continued to look adoringly at her even when she filled his bowl with kibble.
“Chow time, pal.”
At the signal, Henry dipped his head into his bowl and got serious.
She should eat, too. Something to sop up some of the wine, but she didn’t feel like it. Enough wine swimming around in her bloodstream and she wouldn’t be able to think, to wonder, to worry.
She left the inner door open, but stepped into the mudroom to check the outside locks. A man could shimmy through the dog door, if he was determined to get in, but Henry would set up the alarm.
He howled every time a car came up the lane, and though he would punish the intruder with slobber and delight—after he finished trembling in terror—she was never surprised by a visitor. And never, in her four years in Angel’s Gap, had she had any trouble at home, or at the shop.
Until today, she reminded herself.
She decided to lock the mudroom door after all, and let Henry out the front for his evening run.
She thought about calling her mother, but what was the point? Her mother had a good, solid life now, with a good, solid man. She’d earned it. What point was there in breaking into that nice life and saying, “Hey, I ran into Uncle Willy today, and so did a Jeep Cherokee.”
She took her wine with her upstairs. She’d fix herself a little dinner, take a hot bath, have an early night.
She’d close the book on what had happened that day.
Left it for you, he’d said, she remembered. Probably delirious. But if he’d left her anything, she didn’t want it.
She already had everything she wanted.
Max Gannon slipped the attendant a twenty for a look at the body. In Max’s experience a picture of Andrew Jack-son cut through red tape quicker than explanations and paperwork and more levels of bureaucracy.
He’d gotten the bad news on Willy from the motel clerk at the Red Roof Inn where he’d tracked the slippery little bastard. The cops had already been there, but Max had invested the first twenty of the day for the room number and key.
The cops hadn’t taken his clothes yet, nor from the looks of it done much of a search. Why would they on a traffic accident? But once they ID’d Willy, they’d be back and look a lot closer.
Willy hadn’t unpacked, Max noted as he took stock of the room. Socks and underwear and two dress shirts were still neatly folded in the single Louis Vuitton bag. Willy had been a tidy one, and he’d loved his name brands.
He’d hung a suit in the closet. Banker gray, single-breasted, Hugo Boss. A pair of black Ferragamo loafers, complete with shoe trees, sat neatly on the floor.
Max went through the pockets, felt carefully along the lining. He took the wooden trees out of the shoes, poked his long fingers into the toes.
In the adjoining bath, he searched Willy’s Dior toiletry kit. He lifted the tank lid on the toilet, crouched down to search behind it, under the sink.
He went through the drawers, through the suitcase and its contents, flipped over the mattress on the standard double.
It took him less than an hour to search the room and verify Willy had left nothing important behind. When he left, the space looked as tidy and untouched as it had when he’d entered.
He considered giving the clerk another twenty not to mention the visit to the cops, then decided it might put ideas in his head.
He climbed into his Porsche, switched on Springsteen and headed to the county morgue to verify that his strongest lead was on ice.
“Stupid. Goddamn, Willy, I figured you for smarter than this.”
Max blew out a breath as he looked at Willy’s ruined face. Why the hell did you run? And what’s in some podunk town in Maryland that was so important?
What, Max thought, or who?
Since Willy was no longer in the position to tell him, Max walked back out to drive into Angel’s Gap to pick up a multimillion-dollar trail.
If you wanted to pluck grapes from the small-town vine, you went to a place where locals gathered. During the day, that meant coffee and food, at night, alcohol.
Once he’d decided he’d be staying in Angel’s Gap for at least a day or two, Max checked into what was billed as The Historic Wayfarer’s Inn and showered off the first twelve hours of the day. It was late enough to pick door number two.
He ate a very decent room-service burger at his laptop, surfing the home page provided by the Angel’s Gap chamber of commerce. The Nightlife section gave him several choices of bars, clubs and cafes. He wanted a neighborhood pub, the kind of place where the towners knocked back a beer at the end of the day and talked about each other.
He culled out three that might fit the bill, plugged in the addresses for directions, then finished off his burger while studying the printout map of Angel’s Gap.
Nice enough place, he mused, tucked in the mountains the way it was. Killer views, plenty of recreational choices for the sports enthusiast or camping freak. Slow enough pace for those who wanted to shake the urban off their docksiders, but with classy little pockets of culture—and a reasonable drive from several major metro areas should one be inclined to spend the weekend in the Maryland mountains.
The chamber of commerce boasted of the opportunities for hunting, fishing, hiking and other manner of outdoor recreation—none of which appealed to the urbanite in Max.
If he wanted to see bear and deer in their natural habitat, he’d turn on The Discovery Channel.
Still, the place had charm with its steep streets and old buildings solid in their dark red brick. There was a nice, wide stretch of the Potomac River bisecting the town, and the interest of the arching bridges that spanned it. Lots of church steeples, some with copper touches gone soft green with age and weather. And as he sat, he heard the long, echoing whistle of a train signaling its passing.
He had no doubt it was an eyeful in fall when the trees erupted with color, and pretty as a postcard when the snow socked in. But that didn’t explain why an old hand like Willy Young had gotten himself mowed down by an SUV on Market Street.
To find that piece of the puzzle, Max shut down his computer, grabbed his beloved bomber jacket and headed out to go barhopping.
CHAPTER 2
He bypassed the first choice without bothering to stop. The forest of Hogs and Harleys out front tagged it as a biker bar, and not the sort of place where the customers talked town business over their brew.
The second took him less than two minutes to identify as a college den with strange alternative music piped in, and a couple of earnest types playing chess in a corner while most of the others performed standard mating rituals.
But he hit it on the third.
Artie’s was the sort of place a guy might take his wife to, but not his side piece. It was where you went to socialize, to bump into friends or grab a quick one on the way home.
Max would’ve made book that 90 percent of the customer base knew each other by name, and a good chunk of them would be related.
He sidled up to the bar, ordered Beck’s on tap and scoped out his surroundings. ESPN on the bar tube, sound muted, snack mix in plastic courtesy baskets. One very large black guy working the stick, and two waitresses handling the booths and four-tops.
The first waitress reminded him of his high-school librarian, which made him think she’d seen it all and wasn’t too pleased with the view. She was short, heavy at the hip and on the high side of forty. There was a look in her eye that warned him she wouldn’t tolerate lip.
The second was early twenties and the flirty type. She showed off a nicely packed body with a snug black sweater and painted-on jeans. She spent as much time tossing her curly blond hair as she did scooping up empties.
From the way she lingered at her stations, shooting the breeze, Max bet she was a fount of information, and the sort that liked to share.
He bided his time, then sent her a winning smile when she stopped by the bar to call in an order. “Busy tonight.”
She shot a winning smile right back at him. “Oh, not too bad.” She shifted her weight, swiveled her torso toward him in a body-language invitation to talk. “Where you from?”
“I move around a lot. Business.”
“You got southern boy in your voice.”
“Caught me. Savannah, but I haven’t been home in a while.” He held out a hand. “Max.”
“Hi, Max. Angie. What kind of business brings you to the Gap?”
“Insurance.”
Her uncle sold insurance and he sure as hell didn’t decorate a bar stool like this one. Six-two, most of it leg, and a well-toned one-ninety, if she was any judge. And Angie considered herself a damn good judge of her eye candy.
There was a lot of streaky brown hair the humidity had teased into waves around a sharp, narrow face. The eyes were tawny brown and friendly, but there was an edge to them. Then there was that hint of dreamy drawl, and the slightly crooked eyetooth that kept his smile from being perfect.
She liked a man with an edge, and a few imperfections.
“Insurance? Could’ve fooled me.”
“It’s just gambling, isn’t it?” He popped a pretzel into his mouth, flashed the grin again. “Most people, they like to gamble. Just like they like to believe they’re going to live forever.” He took a sip of his beer, noted she glanced at his left hand. Checking for a wedding ring, he assumed. “They don’t. I heard some poor bastard got creamed right on Main Street this morning.”
“Market,” she corrected, and he made himself look puzzled. “Happened this morning on Market Street. Ran right out in front of poor Missy Leager�
�s Cherokee. She’s a mess about it, too.”
“That’s rough. Doesn’t sound like it was her fault.”
“It wasn’t. Lots of people saw it happen, and there wasn’t a thing she could’ve done. He just ran right out in front of her.”
