“I’d like to see that,” she said softly. Maybe next winter, if he was still here, he would show her. Maybe next winter he would have no interest in her. Maybe she would have to be satisfied with this: snow on the distant peaks, slopes covered with a thousand shades of green and dotted with massive outcroppings of stone and, nearer, the delicate colors of wildflowers.
For a time he held her, and she let him. She didn’t lean into him, didn’t snuggle closer, but stood motionless, arms at her side, and savored the feel of him.
“Juliet?”
“Hmm.”
“Want some lunch?”
He could have asked a dozen questions that wouldn’t have disturbed her warm, enveloping sense of well-being— Are you comfortable? Do you like this? Can I touch you? Can I kiss you? Something so mundane as lunch, though, disrupted the coziness of their position. So did the sudden growl of her stomach.
His chuckle stirred her hair. That was all it was—not a brush of his cheek against it. Not the touch of his mouth to it. Just the rush of breath when he laughed. “I’d call that a big yes.” He released her and started to the ground.
Before following, she turned for one last look. She would come back here in the summer and the fall. She would bring a blanket, a picnic and a wish for an artist’s talent to capture the scene.
Martin jumped the last few feet to the ground, then offered her a lift down. For a moment his hands lingered at her waist. For a moment his gaze met hers and she thought he was going to kiss her. She was wrong. He released her and turned toward the car. Stifling a disappointed sigh, she went after him.
They ate lunch in town, then swung by the church so he could borrow the tools necessary to install the locks. She had wondered, when he’d brought it up that morning, if she wouldn’t be better off calling a locksmith, but, in spite of his teasing, Martin knew what he was doing. She helped, if standing there handing him an occasional tool could be considered much help. When he was finished, he gave her the new keys, then went out into the backyard to take a look around. “You need a dog.”
“A dog.” She said it as blankly as if he’d just advised buying a machine gun. Never in her life had she considered owning a dog—or any other kind of creature, for that matter. The lack of pets was a long-standing Crandall family tradition. “Why in the world would I want a dog?”
“For protection.”
“I don’t want a mean dog.”
“He doesn’t have to be mean, just noisy. No burglar wants to deal with a barking dog.”
Was that just common sense or did he know from experience? She pushed the thought from her mind. “I don’t want to deal with a barking dog.”
“Well, of course he’s not going to be barking all the time. You’ve got a great yard for him, and he could keep you company in the evenings, and he’d keep an eye on both you and your house.”
She would prefer that Martin keep her company in the evenings and look out for her safety, but, of course, he wasn’t always going to be there. But a dog just wasn’t her idea of a companion.
She looked over the yard. It was great—fenced all around, not too wide but deep, with lush grass that would require mowing soon. It was one of the reasons she’d bought the house, and she had big plans for it—shrubs along the back fence, bulbs and perennials on one side, more bulbs and annuals on the other, a brick patio with room for a grill, a table and chairs and maybe even a fountain close to her bedroom so she could open the windows at night and sleep to the sound of bubbling water.
She didn’t have room in those plans for a dog who would poop on the lovely grass, dig up the flower beds and probably pee in the fountain, all while annoying both her and the neighbors with its incessant burglar-warning bark.
Considering the matter closed, she opened the screen door and waited. “Are you ready to get back to work?”
They went inside, finished the job of sorting, then merged their two sets of papers. “Now what?”
He sprawled in the chair beside her. “When you checked the other night to see if Roy Jr. had a listed phone number—can you do it the other way?”
“You mean a reverse search? Put in a number and ask for a name? Sure.”
“Why don’t you take the most recent phone bills and check her long distance calls? I’ll start with the bank records.”
She went online and pulled up the site she needed. Checking Olivia’s long distance calls for the last year of her life wasn’t much of a task. Business calls had been made at the office on the city’s bill, and personal calls were few and far between.
At least until the March preceding her death. Once a week for three months there was a call, usually between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m., lasting an hour or more, to a number in Miami Beach, Florida. Curious, she typed in the number, hit the enter key and waited. “You ever hear of a Jason Scott?”
Martin shook his head.
“Olivia called him regularly for three months. The last call was the week before she died.”
“Call him.”
She picked up the cordless phone from the china hutch and dialed the number. “And say what? ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I was just wondering what your connection to Olivia Stuart was?’ As if any sane person would actually tell me.”
He grinned. “If he’s a red-blooded man, he will, if for no other reason than to hear you talk some more.”
On the second ring, a recording came on. The number you have dialed has been disconnected…. She went back to the website and tried a search for Jason Scott in the Miami area. There were a number of hits, but the addresses were different. “So what do we do? Call every one and ask if he’s the Jason who used to live at that address?”
When he shrugged, she printed the listings, then began dialing. It didn’t take long to hit a dead end. After the last wrong number, Martin took the phone and placed one call. Eve Redtree had never heard of Jason Scott and knew of no reason her mother would place so many calls to Miami.
“Maybe Scott is a private investigator and she had hired him to find Roy Jr.,” Juliet mused. “Maybe he is Roy Jr. Maybe when he ran away from here, he knew his mother would try to find him, so he changed his name.”
“She left him more than fifty thousand dollars. Don’t you think, if she knew he’d changed his name or had known where to find him, she would have mentioned it to her attorney, her children or the insurance company?”
“Probably. Anything interesting in her bank statements?”
“Maybe. She wrote a couple of large checks to Hal, one a year before she died and one five months later. Repaying a loan?”
“Or maybe making one.”
He shook his head. “Hal’s a lawyer. He makes decent money. He’s not married, has no kids and no obligations besides himself. Why would he need to borrow twelve thousand dollars from his widowed mother, who certainly wasn’t rich herself?”
“You don’t drive a car like his or wear clothes like his on a decent salary. Hal’s got very expensive tastes. Maybe that’s how he pays for them—Olivia gave him his inheritance while she was still living.”
“Then, in all fairness—and Olivia was a fair woman—there should be similar checks to Eve, but there aren’t.”
Perhaps she’d given Eve her share in cash—and Martin hadn’t come across the withdrawal yet—or in property. The money could have been Olivia’s contribution to Hal’s ill-fated wedding, or he could have gone in debt buying those expensive things and his mother had bailed him out. There were plenty of possibilities.
“Wouldn’t you like to see a credit history on Hal?”
Of course she would. She was as nosy as anyone else. “You think you can talk one out of Stone?”
“I doubt it. I’m not a suspect, but as long as we don’t know who or what I am, I’m not a trusted confidant, either. Besides, he’d probably just tell us to mind our own business and leave the police work to the police.” He grinned. “You think you can sweet-talk one out of that computer?”
She had the contacts to
accomplish it, but it would be illegal and probably wouldn’t have any relevance whatsoever to Olivia’s murder. If they both didn’t dislike Hal, the subject never would have come up. “Only as a last resort. This isn’t real, remember? We’re playing.”
He grinned again, a slower, lazier, make-a-woman-weak grin. “I can think of a lot better games to play, darlin’, especially with you as my playmate.”
If she were a braver woman, she would duplicate that wicked grin and the husky bedroom voice and issue an invitation no red-blooded man could refuse. But she wasn’t brave or wicked. She was blushing and fluttery, flattered and skittish. She was no temptress.
But, oh, how she wished she was.
* * *
Dragging a thirty-gallon trash can, Martin made his way to the Dumpster out behind the church Monday afternoon. He hefted the can, filled with debris from the remodeling job, to the lip of the Dumpster and was about to up-end it when movement inside caught his attention. Slowly he let the can slip back to the ground, then moved a chunk of Sheetrock to better see the puppy who’d been scrounging inside.
He wasn’t the sort of cute, lovable and oh-how-adorable puppy who would easily find a home. He was skin and bones, more than half starved. His coat was filthy, coarse and marked with scars from his nose all the way back to his rump, and he looked likelier to bite a hand than lick it.
“Hey, buddy.” Martin removed his gloves, then rested his arms on the edge of the Dumpster. He didn’t reach out. “If you’re looking for food, pal, you picked the wrong place. This is a church. The only time you’ll find food in this trash is when they have their annual bean supper, and that’s not for another six months.”
The dog backed into the corner, settled his rump on a two-by-four and gave him a wary look. Black and tan, he appeared to be a mix of Lab and hound and about six or eight months old.
“I have a sandwich inside. If you’ll wait here, I’ll get it.” He’d stopped at the deli on his way to work and picked up a club sub for lunch, but then he’d run into Stone and Jack, who had invited him to the diner with them. He’d decided to save the sandwich for dinner, but the dog needed it more than he did.
When he returned, the puppy was standing near the Dumpster, watching him with dark brown eyes. As soon as he crossed the invisible line of the dog’s comfort zone, the pup darted away, then turned to watch again.
Martin sat down on the ground, his back against the trash bin and unwrapped the sandwich. At the first whiff of food, the dog became still, his gaze riveted on it. Martin fed him slowly, tearing the sandwich into pieces, tossing them a few feet away. When it was all gone, he and the puppy watched each other for a time.
“Life hasn’t been too kind, has it?” He wasn’t an empathetic person, he’d told Juliet, but he could certainly relate to this scruffy, scarred creature. All the puppy wanted was food in his belly and a safe place to sleep. All he’d gotten was hunger, fear and abuse. All Martin wanted was a name of his own and Juliet. All he had was nothing.
He hadn’t seen Juliet since Saturday evening. They had finished working late, and she had stood at the door and watched until he was out of sight. He had stood in the shadows and watched until she locked up, until the lights went off in the dining and living rooms, until only one dim light had burned in the front hall. He had remained there in the dark, imagining her getting ready for bed—brushing her blond hair, washing her face, unbuttoning every tiny button on her long, flowery dress, then sliding it off her shoulders and letting it drop to the floor, leaving her wearing damn near nothing, all pale delicate skin, small breasts, narrow waist—Squeezing his eyes shut, he forced air into his constricted lungs. And so he had stayed away Sunday. He had given her a day’s peace to do all the things she’d normally done before he’d intruded in her life. He had stayed locked up in his apartment, but his thoughts had been two and a half blocks away. His desire had damn well been with her. He’d considered himself lucky to survive the day.
“Hey, Martin, what’s taking so— Oh. You found a mutt.” The preacher walked straight toward the dog, extending his hand.
“Don’t—”
The dog went still, the hair on his back rising, and a low, threatening growl rumbled through him. Before Martin could finish his warning, the puppy snapped at the preacher, closing his jaws only a breath away from the man’s hand.
“Hey, he tried to bite me!”
“If he’d meant to bite you, he would have. That was a warning. Don’t ever approach a strange dog with your hand out like that. He could take your fingers off.”
“Well, don’t encourage him to stay around here. The kids play outside after the service, and he might seriously injure them.”
“I won’t. If he’ll come, I’ll take him home with me.” As if he needed a dog in his apartment…but he knew someone who did need one in her backyard, even though she didn’t realize it yet.
After emptying the can, he left the dog with a backward glance. Back inside he picked up more rubbish while Reverend Murphy double-checked measurements for the new wall they were building. “This carpet used to be burgundy,” Martin remarked as he scooped up Sheetrock and insulation.
The preacher looked down at the plastic-covered carpet. “It’s been green since I came here, and that was fifteen years ago.”
“Then maybe before that.”
“If it’s important, I can ask some of our long-time members. A number of them got married here. It might show in their photographs.”
“Do you have a list of members from twenty years ago or so?”
The preacher shook his head. “We’re a small church, and we’re a little informal. Other than marriages, births and deaths—and our financial records, of course—I doubt we have anything going back more than ten years. I’d be happy to put you in touch with some of our older members, though.”
“Thanks.” Though, frankly, Martin wasn’t sure it would help. Finding out when the carpet was changed from burgundy to green would narrow the time span when he had visited or lived in Grand Springs the first time, but probably not significantly, not in a church that kept the same carpet fifteen years or longer. He already knew he must have been young, for no one to recognize him now, but old enough to remember.
When they finished work for the day, Martin emptied one last load of trash, then looked around for the dog. He was still there, curled in a tight ball with the Dumpster at his back. Martin crouched a half-dozen feet from him, folded his fingers tightly and offered the back of his hand. The puppy didn’t wag his tail or come close to sniff.
“Okay, pal. I’m going home now. If you want to come with me, feel free. If you choose to stay here, I’ll bring you some lunch tomorrow. It’s your choice.”
He’d gone more than a block before he heard the scratch of claws on the sidewalk. A glance back showed the dog twenty-five feet behind him. He stopped when Martin stopped and walked when Martin walked.
At home Martin gave the mutt water and a bowl of the only food he could find: canned green beans with a slice of bread torn over the top. The dog wolfed it down, turned in a circle three times underneath the steps, then wedged himself into the corner where the stairs met the outside wall.
They were two of a kind, Martin thought as he went upstairs to clean up for his evening with Juliet. Scarred, nameless strays, allowed to stay only through the kindness of strangers. The dog was luckier, though. Juliet would take one look at those big brown eyes of his and change her mind about having a pet. She wasn’t as easily taken by Martin’s blue eyes.
Oh, she was interested, but everyone who knew he had amnesia was interested. From her he wanted infatuated, in lust, maybe more. Maybe the rest would grow out of the interest. After all, when he’d put his arms around her up on the mountain Saturday, she hadn’t pulled away. Granted, she also hadn’t moved any closer or laid her hands over his or leaned against him. She had stood stiff and unyielding, but she hadn’t pushed him away, not even when he’d kissed her hair.
And what if she
did come around? What if she decided that she wanted the same things he did—a real relationship, intimacy, sex, possibilities? He still didn’t know who he was, whether he was free to feel anything for her, whether he was deserving of anything with her. Was he willing to overlook the fact that he might be married, a criminal or crazy?
He shouldn’t…but he’d been alone a long time, more alone than any man should ever be. He would like to be strong and noble and keep a safe distance from the world until he discovered the truth about himself, but that might never happen, and while he waited, he still had to live. He couldn’t do it alone.
But he could with Juliet.
When he was fairly sure she would be home from work, he left the apartment. The dog immediately jumped to his feet and waited. “You know, you need a name. The ER nurses named me after a character on television. I guess we could name you after a TV dog, but you don’t look like a Lassie or a Rin Tin-Tin, and you’re the wrong color for Old Yeller. And those are the only Hollywood dogs I know. Hell, if you’re going to live with Juliet, maybe she should name you.”
He circled the garage, and the dog trotted along behind, keeping a safe distance for two and a half blocks. Juliet—wearing one of those pretty, flowing dresses and no shoes—was just going into her house with the mail when she saw him. She held the screen door open for him, and the dog shot around Martin, raced inside and disappeared down the hall.
“Hey! He can’t just come in here!”
“Looks like he already did, darlin’.”
“Find him and make him leave.”
Stepping inside, Martin whistled, but there was no response. He figured the little mutt had headed for the kitchen—something certainly smelled good there—but the room was empty. Along the back hall only one door was open, and it led to Juliet’s bedroom. “Smart dog,” he murmured as he walked through the door. Over his shoulder he said, “Romeo’s found himself the most comfortable bed in the house.” Exactly the same bed Martin had his eye on.
You Must Remember This Page 10
