“As in, thought you’d want this cat?”
“As in,” she pushed, “thought it’d be a good pairing. She’s handicapped. I’m handicapped. Was that it?”
“No,” he answered honestly. “I didn’t think that. I didn’t take her from Charlotte with you in mind at all. I took her for myself, because she . . . touched me.”
“Because she’s blind?”
“Because she deserves a good home.”
“Because she’s blind?” Poppy repeated with some insistence.
“Yes. Maybe that.”
“Is that how you feel about me?”
He chuckled. “Looks to me like you have a good home.”
“But not a man. Not a relationship. So there you are with the kind of sensitivity that makes you want to give a blind cat a home, and that same kind of sensitivity might be what’s bringing you here to me. I just wanted you to know I’m not that hard up. There are lots of men who’ve been after me since the accident.”
“I’m sure there are.”
“Have you met Jace Campion? He owns a forge over in Hedgeton.”
“A forge?”
“He’s a blacksmith. Well, he only does that once in a while now. It was his father’s business, but there aren’t many people around here with horses anymore. Jace shoes the few that need shoeing, but when he’s not doing that, he forges metal into beautiful pieces of art. His stuff is shown in New York. He’s been written up in all the magazines. He’s rolling in it. I mean, he’s really made it.”
Griffin didn’t respond. He sensed that the way to deal with Poppy was to let her air everything out.
“I’m telling you this,” she obliged, “so you’ll know that I could be with someone if I wanted. I don’t want your pity. I don’t need your pity. Jace is asking me out all the time, and he isn’t the only one. So if you’re here because that soft heart of yours is touched by my situation, I wantyou to know that the situation isn’t what you think it is. I’m not desperate.”
Griffin barked out a protest. “Thanks a lot.”
“That came out wrong.”
“I’m not desperate either, Poppy. I could be dating lots of other women.”
“Why aren’t you?”
“Beats me,” he exclaimed. “They’d be a hell of a lot less prickly than you are.” He thought about that and calmed. “But prickly is fun. It’s interesting. Those others don’t intrigue me the way you do.”
“It’s curiosity, then? Wondering what it’s like to do it with a paraplegic?”
“Oh, come off it, Poppy,” he scolded. “If you don’t have more faith in me than that, there’s no hope for us at all. You intrigue me because you think. You’re a leader. You act. You do what you want. I’ve never aspired to make love to a paraplegic.” His voice softened. “I do aspire to make love to you. I spend lots of time wondering what that’d be like. It’s making me physically uncomfortable.”
“Physically uncomfortable, as in repulsed?”
“As in hard, Poppy. Hard.”
She was silent for the longest time.
He wondered if he’d grossed her out. “Are you still there?” he finally asked.
“I’m here,” she said, but her voice sounded different. He could swear it had a broken quality to it.
“Are you crying again?” he charged, trying to make a joke of it so that he wouldn’t hurt quite so much inside himself.
She sniffled. “It’s been a rough day.”
“Your visit with Heather?” When he heard something that sounded like a moan, he said, “Are you okay?”
“I guess.” But she didn’t sound it. He heard a soft hiccuping.
“I’m coming over.”
“No.” There were more sniffles, and then a half-wailed, “No, I’m okay, it’s just that you say amazing things sometimes, and I have my sensitive side, too.”
“I can be there in ten minutes.”
She gave a nasal laugh. “You can not. You’d kill yourself—skid right off the road into a tree—just like Marcy McCleary—Marcy Smith—Micah’s wife—former wife.”
“Late wife,” Griffin amended. “I get the picture. Now tell me about Heather. Did she say something?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“She might have. Or I might be wrong.”
Griffin waited. When the silence stood, he said, “You’re not gonna leave me hanging like that, are you?”
“I just don’t know,” Poppy cried, and he sensed they’d come full circle. This was where she’d been when he had first called.
Quietly, he asked, “Is she Lisa?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she give you any clues?”
Poppy didn’t answer. And he didn’t want to push. She was independent; he liked that about her. She had lived a long time without him. He had to let her think things through. “Can I come over in the morning and make you breakfast?”
“I can make myself breakfast.”
“I know that,” he acknowledged, “but I like to cook, and the setup on Little Bear is primitive. So indulge me, Poppy. Either that, or take pity on me. Let me use a real stove. Come on. Be a sport.”
“Haven’t I heard that one before?”
“Let me make breakfast.”
There was a pause, then a hedgy, “What do you make?”
“What do you like?”
“I asked you first.”
“Okay. I make omelets. I make pancakes. I make a terrific French toast.”
“Baked?”
“Can be. What do you say?”
“That sounds pretty good. I like French toast.”
“Is eight too early?”
“No.”
“It’s a date, then.” He instantly regretted his choice of words, half expecting her to object. When she didn’t, he was heartened. Very gently, he said, “When we’re done, will you tell me what upset you so about Heather?”
There was a pause, then a quiet, “We’ll see.” And an even quieter, “Griffin?”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you.” It was half whispered.
“For what?”
“Calling. To see how things went with my mother. Caring that I was upset. People don’t usually do that.”
“That, dollface,” he quipped, because his heart was beating up a storm and he had to make light of the moment, “is because you put out messages saying that you’re entirely independent and self-sufficient—and you are those good things. But it’s nice to have someone do something for you once in a while, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she drawled, apparently agreeing that a lightening of emotions was needed. “Drive carefully.”
“I will. Sleep well.”
“You, too.”
* * *
Cassie was working late, though she had little to show for it. Still, she was absorbed, to the extent that she jumped when Mark put a hand on her shoulder. She put a quick hand over his.“Come to bed,” he said.
She smiled. “Soon.”
“You said that an hour ago.” He paused, took his hand away, and straightened. “This is not getting better.”
No. It wasn’t, and it was her fault. The deal that they’d agreed to in couples therapy was that they would go to bed together, at the same time, several times a week, whether it was to talk, to make love, or just to lie close. They hadn’t done it now in days.
She pushed a hand through her hair. The blond curls were totally unruly—moreso than usual, surely reflecting her own lack of control. “I’m sorry. I just . . . need this thinking time.”
He leaned over her shoulder to peer at the papers spread on the desk. “Is this Committee stuff?”
“Some of it is. We really do have to safeguard the lake. We drink that water.”
“I thought you finished the cost work on Friday.”
“I did. Three police officers, one for each eight-hour shift, plus a cruiser, plus testing equipment—it’s not that expensive. It could be covered by a nominal incr
ease in property taxes. I’d say that’s a small price to pay for peace of mind.”
“Who’s saying no?”
“The usual suspects. Alf Buzzell and the lived-here-all-my-life camp say we’re imagining a threat, that Lake Henry is as safe as it’s ever been. Nathaniel Roy and the live-free-or-die camp say we don’t want a police presence. Willie Jake and his camp say that they know what it takes to guard this town, and if we really want to prevent someone from dumping lethal stuff in the lake, we’d have to hire nine guys, so that three can patrol at any given time. That camp says one guy at a time would be so ineffective that it’d be a pure waste of money. And they don’t want the property tax going up.”
“How does the Town Meeting vote line up?”
“In our favor, I think. But it’ll be close, so either way there will be unhappy people.”
“You need to do a PR campaign. You need to educate those people about the dangers.”
“We are,” she said, gesturing toward the papers that a friend in Concord had put together. “Unfortunately, some people are happy burying their heads in the sand. They don’t want to know the risks. They like their lives as they are, right now, today.”
Mark pulled at the corner of a paper that lay at the bottom of the pile. Not a paper, actually. A photograph. Cassie stared at it right along with him. Even after hours of studying it, she was startled.
“This is either Lisa Matlock or Heather Malone,” he said. “Trick question?”
“No trick. It’s Lisa.”
“Oooh. You have a problem.”
“Correct, and Heather isn’t helping. So there’s the possibility that she’s unable to help. I’ve spoken with two psychiatrists who say she may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But if we don’t know what the trauma is, we haven’t a leg to stand on. Either she doesn’t understand the risk of silence, or she is so guilty of this and more, that anything she says will condemn her.”
Mark drew back to study her. “You’re her champion. You’re not supposed to think that.”
“Maybe not,” Cassie said ruefully, “but I don’t know how else to think. I’ve gotten some preliminary stuff from California, and it describes a woman who could easily, easily, easily be Heather. This picture sends the same message as the ones in the newspaper clippings I’ve seen. Okay, so I have expert witnesses prepared to testify that handwriting analysis can be unreliable. But I have nothing else. Nothing. Heather is a dear friend of mine, but I can’t mount a defense.” She could feel herself getting worked up. Again. “She won’t give me anything to work with. What am I supposed to do?”
“Get information on Lisa.”
“That won’t help Heather.”
“It will if she’s Lisa. If she’s Lisa, and she’s also the woman we know, there has to be a good reason why she ran that guy down. The woman we know isn’t a murderer. She isn’t prone to hysteria or to mad fits of anger. She isn’t manic-depressive, and she isn’t insane. So there’s a reason. Up until now you’ve been obsessed with proving she’s Heather—”
“Not obsessed,” Cassie cut in.
“Yes, obsessed, and that’s okay, Cass, because you’re a loyal friend. But maybe now you need to come at it from a different angle.”
Cassie turned to look at him. “And how am I supposed to do that,” she said. It was more a statement of frustration than a question. “What funds do I have? None. Micah’s up to his ears in loans for his new equipment, and even then he offered to take out another—at least, he offered that at the start, but he’s so angry at Heather right now that I’m not sure the offer still stands. So how do I get information on Lisa?”
“Griffin.”
“Griffin’s an outsider and a journalist.”
“He got you this photograph.”
“He got it for Poppy. No, Mark. I need an independent person working for Heather, but that means paying costs for transportation, room and board, time by the hour, plus fees for getting the information, because there are always those. I’d use our reserve, but you say it’s too low. What am I supposed to do?”
“Use Griffin.”
“I can’t trust Griffin.”
“Is it that? Or is it pride?”
Cassie was stung. “That’s not fair.”
“You’re a prideful person. You admitted it last week.”
In therapy. She had. Now she felt defensive. “I said I took pride in what I did and, because of that, I sometimes had trouble letting go of an issue. But that’s different from refusing help out of pride.”
“How?”
“Taking pride in my work is positive. You can find fault with me when I spend too much time on a case, but that’s a good thing for my clients, just like it is for your students. Refusing help out of pride is negative. It suggests that I don’t go all-out for my clients. I’m a better lawyer than that.”
“Forget lawyer. Think person. Think woman. You do take pride in doing things yourself.”
“I like getting things done.”
“By you, and I understand that, Cass,” he argued. “You left town after high school when you should have stayed, so you need to make up for the time you were gone.”
It had only been eight years, through college and law school. But during that time, her father had died of cancer, her sister of drugs, and her mother of loneliness. Cassie hadn’t truly understood what she should have done until she’d married and become a mother herself—and having children had been crucial to her. Creating a family, and doing it right, was one hope for a second chance. Working her tail off as a lawyer was another. And even in spite of these two things, she would livethe rest of her life wishing she had been there for her parents and her sister.
Mark went on. “You don’t need to prove yourself all the time. Do you honestly think that anyone holds the past against you, after what you’ve done for the people of this town in the nine years you’ve been back?”
“Yes,” Cassie said. “I do think so. My parents’ friends remember what I did. There’s always a little dig when Alf makes his lived-here-all-my-life argument to me. Same with Nathaniel Roy. On the surface, he’s pleasant enough. But the truth is, he resents what I did those years away, and resents that I came back and took control. If I call in Griffin Hughes, the old guard will have more to resent.”
“Do you care?”
“No. Yes.” Sighing, she admitted the quandary. “I do care. I want the respect of those people. But then there’s Heather. What do I do about Heather? I’ve never felt so stymied in a case.”
“Call Griffin,” Mark suggested again and stood. “I’m going to bed.”
* * *
Poppy lay in the not-quite dark of a night lit by the moon reflecting on snow. She wasn’t thinking about Griffin, though she had for a while when she had first turned out the lamp. Nor was she thinking about Heather, because she had done so much of that earlier.Now she was thinking about Perry Walker. He had been a handsome guy—six feet tall, sandy hair that flowed to his shoulders, laughing eyes and a wide smile—the life of the party until the very moment of his death. He’d been telling her a joke, shouting over the growl of the snowmobile. The joke had likely been either off-color or politically incorrect, because Perry delighted in being irreverent. She couldn’t remember the words, though. They had been lost in the horror of what had followed.
Moaning at the memory, she threw an arm over her eyes, then quickly lifted it off when she felt a movement at her side. It was the cat. She had been curled up near Poppy. Now she sat, her head aimed at nothing in particular.
“Why are you awake?” Poppy asked softly.
Victoria yawned. She lifted a paw, licked it, ran it over her eyes.
Poppy wondered what she felt behind those lids, whether there was the same lack of sensation Poppy had in her legs. She wondered whether Victoria remembered seeing things and, if so, whether that helped her function without sight.
Memory didn’t help Poppy. It hurt. She started by picturing Perry as he had been
those weeks before he’d died, and the next thing she knew, she was trying to picture what he would be like if he had lived. She figured he would have had a whole slew of kids, not because of any major plan or religious conviction, but out of sheer carelessness. He was a randy guy. He had enjoyed sex the way he enjoyed hockey, hunting, and beer. He would no more have considered using a condom than he would have loaded his rifle with blanks.
Poppy had been six weeks late once. To this day, she was sure she’d been pregnant. She had never had it confirmed—was too afraid—hadn’t been able to begin to consider the ramifications—and then it was a moot point. Her period had come in a rush of blood and cramps.
At the time, she had simply thanked her lucky stars and gone on the pill. After the accident, during those weeks in the hospital when she had nothing to do but think, she decided that divine design was behind the loss. She wouldn’t have been able to mother a child. She had no right to mother a child.
It was just punishment.
Like being confined to a wheelchair.
Like never skiing again.
Like doing nothing so much as even kissing a man.
Then she had a thought. She wondered what it would have been like if the tables had been turned. Wondered what Perry would have done if she had been the one to die. Wondered whether he would have been the one to reform.
Victoria walked to the edge of the bed and, lowering her front paws down the comforter, slipped to the floor. Poppy watched her walk toward the window and sit squarely in a patch of moonshine. There she groomed herself, looking confident and content. At one point, she raised her facetoward the window. It was open a notch, as was Poppy’s habit. She liked to hear what was happening outside. It made her feel less at a disadvantage.
Approaching the wall beneath it, Victoria put her front paws up. With a graceful little bound, she was up on the narrow sill, making herself narrow to match it and settling in like a duck with her nose to the spot where the cool air came in.
Poppy wondered whether she had always been so deft, or whether it came with blindness. The cat was certainly adventurous. And independent. Once she had food and litter, she was also self-sufficient. Granted, having been unceremoniously passed from Charlotte to Griffin to Poppy, she hadn’t had a choice about trying new things, but she had certainly done it with style.
An Accidental Woman Page 20
