Cider Brook

by Unknown

  “If you don’t object, since it’s your land.”

  “Now she cares,” he said with a wink.

  Samantha ignored his remark. “Staying out here feels like unfinished business for me, somehow. I suppose it’s because of the fire, but I feel safe now.” She smiled. “Bears or no bears.”

  “Suit yourself. I have no objection.” He stood back, his expression hard to read. Deliberately so, it seemed. “Going to do a little treasure hunting while you’re camping?”

  “I suspect if a pirate had hidden treasure out here, someone would have found it by now.” She kept her tone steady, if a little cool given his scrutiny. “It feels remote to me, but I keep in mind that much of this land was once cleared for farming, a cider mill operated successfully here for decades, and you, your brothers and who-knows-who-else partied out here. That’s a lot of people for buried treasure to have gone unnoticed for three hundred years.”

  “Who would treasure found here belong to?”

  “Eighteenth-century treasure? It would belong to you. It’s your property.”

  “You could sneak off with it and say you found it in a spot where you could legally keep it.”

  “I couldn’t do that, Justin, and I wouldn’t. It’s not how I operate.”

  He didn’t look as if he regretted his comment in the slightest. “So, what’s this pirate to you, Sam?” he asked, picking up another stray stick. “Why Benjamin Farraday?”

  “His fate is a puzzle—a mystery I’m interested in solving. It’s what I do.”

  Justin flung the stick across the brook. It hit a tree, then disappeared into the browning ferns. “Did you think Duncan would solve the mystery of your Captain Farraday first, before you could?”

  Samantha forced herself to take a breath before she responded. “That he’d beat me to it, you mean? I hadn’t reached that conclusion. I just wanted to know why he was in Knights Bridge.” And that was before she’d discovered The Mill at Cider Brook and The Adventures of Captain Farraday and Lady Elizabeth. “When I realized Duncan’s presence had nothing to do with Benjamin Farraday, I didn’t say anything about having come here myself. It never occurred to me he would find out and think I’d been spying on him.”

  “But you had been spying on him,” Justin said, blunt.

  “It wasn’t spying-spying. I never had plans to steal secrets from him or anything like that.”

  “What if he had been out here because of Farraday?”

  “He wasn’t, but I’d have asked to work with him on whatever project he had in mind.”

  Justin looked unconvinced as he moved closer to her tent, which hadn’t collapsed or sunk since she’d pitched it—she must have gotten it right. He glanced back at her. “Mad at me for telling him about you?”

  “As if you care if I am.”

  He grinned. “I care.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I think I like you better taciturn.”

  He leaned in close to her. “I think you like me best kissing you.”

  “Maybe that, too.” Her head was spinning now. “Anyway, there was no reason for you not to tell Duncan about me, so, no, I’m not mad at you or anyone else—except myself.”

  Justin put a hand on the top of her tent, as if to test if it would collapse. “You went to work for him for legitimate reasons?”

  “Totally legitimate.”

  “Nothing to do with Farraday?”

  “I didn’t say that. I wanted to learn from Duncan—and I did—but I also envisioned getting him interested in Farraday and perhaps helping to sort out what happened to him, the rumors that he’d fled west, the fate of his last ship.”

  “Somehow it figures that both you and Duncan McCaffrey ended up in Knights Bridge. A couple of treasure hunters here for different reasons.” Justin turned back to her, the shadows bringing out the sharp lines of his face. There was no humor in his eyes now. “Meant to be, you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  He stepped closer and traced her lips with his fingertips, then kissed her softly, just long enough to leave her with no uncertainty whatsoever of what he wanted. More, she thought. Much more.

  “Go ahead and camp out here tonight, Sam.” He tapped her chin and grinned, the humor back as fast as it had disappeared. “If you get cold, you know where to find me. You can always head up to my folks’ place. By the way, they’ve invited you to a post-wedding brunch up at the house tomorrow.”

  “A brunch—”

  “Loads of people will be there. Not as many as at the wedding, but plenty. Rain or shine, there’ll be volleyball. It’ll be good. Gran and my mother think you’re cute.”

  “Cute?”

  “It’s the eyes. Your eyes are cute as hell, Sam.”

  She couldn’t get a decent breath. “Right. Didn’t I say weddings addle people’s brains?”

  He laughed as he started up the driveway, his boots crunching on the gravel. “Everyone’s going to think you’re camping out tonight because things got too hot between us last night at my place.”

  “How does ‘everyone’ know I stayed at your place last night?”

  “I’ll leave that one to your vivid imagination. In the meantime, one bit of advice.” He turned, walking backward as he pointed at her makeshift campsite. “Zip up your tent.”

  She frowned. “I’m getting the new-tent smells out of it.”

  “Suit yourself, but I’d rather put up with the new-tent smells than bugs and critters crawling into my sleeping bag.” He turned around, waving back to her. “’Night, Samantha Bennett. Sweet dreams.”

  She waited until he was out of sight before she dived into her tent, scoured every inch for any bugs and critters, and then zipped it up tight.

  * * *

  Dinner wasn’t an issue. Samantha had eaten plenty of Maggie O’Dunn Sloan’s incredible food at the wedding. She had energy bars if she did get hungry, but she doubted she would.

  The cold, miserable rain, however, was an issue.

  It started twenty minutes after Justin left, while she was investigating the stonework around the mill’s foundation. She ran to her tent, slipped inside and zipped it shut again as raindrops splattered on the slanted top.

  No thunder, no lightning, no fierce wind.

  All was well.

  She took off her shoes and smoothed out her sleeping bag and slipped inside, stretched out in her stocking feet. She wouldn’t bother with flannel pajamas tonight and instead would just sleep in her clothes, but it was still relatively early. She wondered what Justin was doing. Drinking beer and telling stories in front of another campfire? Watching football? Helping his folks prepare for tomorrow’s brunch?

  She didn’t have to be alone, but it was good that she was. Smart.

  The rain stopped, then started again, hissing in the woods, pitter-pattering on the brook. Samantha listened, cozy in her tent, warm and dry in her sleeping bag. Totally safe. She thought she could smell the faint odor leftover from the fire. She hadn’t been safe then. Her mind was catching up with what her body knew, the denial lifting that she somehow had been fine, within her limits, unexposed to serious danger.

  She took out the copies of the pages she had found in her grandfather’s house. They were getting beat up, but they were still legible, even in the gray, fading light. She pictured her grandfather in his later years, still feisty and formidable—but also aware he was dying.

  “I want you to have grand adventures, Samantha. It doesn’t have to be to Antarctica. It can be to the clothesline with a basket of laundry. It’s all in how you look at your life and your choices, and what you make of them.”

  She hadn’t known, exactly, what he’d meant and why he’d brought up hanging laundry, even as a metaphor. He had loved that his eldest grandchild was interested in pirates and pirate shipwrecks, not for any monetary treasure but for the history, the mysteries, the clues and the pure adventure.

  He had encouraged her to take up digging into Benjamin Farraday and his exploits, but Samantha wished she ha
d an explanation for why he hadn’t mentioned the cider mill painting and the unfinished story of Lady Elizabeth and Captain Farraday in his Boston office closet. Had he forgotten about them? Had he planned to show them to her but hadn’t had a chance before he died? Had they come into his possession at different times?

  Her grandfather had kept terrible records, so Samantha wasn’t surprised that she hadn’t found a note describing where the painting and manuscript had come from, whether he’d bought them or they’d been gifts.

  She snuggled deeper into her sleeping bag. She wondered what would have happened if she’d gone back to Justin’s sawmill with him. Would she have stayed on his couch through the night?

  Now, there was a distraction from her long-ago pirate.

  Justin hadn’t worked too hard to persuade her to go back with him. Maybe the wedding—being with his family and friends—had jerked him back to reality.

  Or he could have his own ideas about pirate treasure out here on Cider Brook. It’d been gnawing at her since he’d thrust her journal at her Thursday night—this notion that he knew more than he was saying.

  That he was hiding something from her.

  Samantha listened to the rain and kept her eyes open as darkness overtook her tent. She put the pages of her mysterious story away and got as comfortable as she was going to get on the hard, cold ground. She touched her lips and shut her eyes, reliving Justin’s kiss.

  “You’re a true blackguard, Captain Farraday.”

  “Aye, Lady Elizabeth, I am.”

  Twenty

  Loretta took a bumpy, interminable red-eye flight from San Diego to Boston and arrived way too early. It was the middle of the night at home. She wanted to collapse onto the floor in baggage claim but figured some overzealous security type would arrest her. She didn’t even have a bag to claim. She’d rolled up a few things and stuffed them into a small carry-on. She didn’t know how long she would be staying on the East Coast. Not long, she hoped. She didn’t want to have to deal with laundry at Carriage Hill. She could just see herself asking for some Woolite so she could wash her undies.

  She wheeled her bag to the rental car counter.

  “How was your flight, ma’am?” the middle-aged guy behind the counter asked.

  “Flight from hell, but I got here alive, so no complaints.”

  He got right to taking care of business and telling her where she could find her car. Even so, she almost got lost. The car was a heap. She must not have specified “no heaps” when she’d rented it online. She shoved her bag onto the floor in front of the passenger seat and got behind the wheel and did all the checks. Blinker, headlights, wipers, emergency brake. She didn’t know if she was up to driving, but she was good to go and figured she would find out.

  “If I crash into the side of a tunnel, it’s your fault, Duncan McCaffrey.”

  She could almost hear his booming laugh as she started the car and inched her way out of the rental garage. She should have at least had coffee before venturing onto Boston roads. Weren’t there books about the pure hell of driving in Boston?

  She’d slept in fits and starts on the flight, but the intervals of sleep had all been bad to awful. She’d kept dreaming about Duncan. Not sexy dreams. Sexy dreams would have been fine. These had been guilt-ridden dreams. She’d awaken with tears in her eyes, her heart pounding, and she’d choke back a cry of distress—absolutely not like her at all—and look around her to see if anyone had noticed. Of course, no one had.

  “She’s Harry Bennett’s granddaughter. She’s Malcolm Bennett’s daughter. She lied to you, Duncan. You can’t trust her. You just can’t.”

  “Right, right. I know.”

  “My advice is just to get rid of her. Don’t ask a lot of questions.”

  “Where are you now, Loretta?”

  “What?”

  “I want to picture you. Where are you?”

  “Pacing in my kitchen in a bathrobe I’ve had for fifteen years.”

  Loretta remembered how he’d laughed. He’d always gotten such a big kick out of her. He’d been so filled with life. She’d thought he had time—that they had time—and she’d wasted too much of those last weeks bugging him about Samantha Bennett. Duncan would have dealt with her in his own way, in his own good time. He hadn’t needed a La Jolla lawyer to harangue him about all the potential negative consequences of his impulsive hiring of a young woman who had followed him to a small Massachusetts town and omitted a few pertinent facts about herself.

  Was Julius right? Was Samantha in Knights Bridge now to redeem herself?

  Did she blame herself for Duncan’s death?

  Loretta felt her throat tighten and pushed back the flood of questions, the memory of her unsettling dreams. She concentrated on getting through some maniacal Boston tunnel alive.

  She needed coffee. A bathroom so she could wash her face and brush her teeth.

  A decent breakfast wouldn’t hurt, but her body was convinced it was four o’clock in the morning. Whoever had thought red-eyes were a good idea, anyway?

  The tunnel dumped her out in the city, and she missed her turn. Or maybe she’d already missed it and just hadn’t noticed. GPS wouldn’t do her any good if she didn’t turn it on. She always got lost in Boston. She hated the damn place, as attractive a city as it was. There were several different routes west, and she hadn’t taken any of them.

  When she found herself on the city streets, she decided getting lost was a sign to take a break before continuing on to Knights Bridge. She parked on a promising-looking street, fed a meter a fortune and wandered into a small restaurant crowded with business people. She’d dressed all in black for her interminable flight and fit right in.

  She sat at a small booth with romanticized pictures of Paul Revere on the wall above her. “He’s the ‘one if by land, two if by sea’ guy, right?” she asked her waiter, who looked like a bored college student.

  “Who is?”

  “Paul Revere.”

  The kid obviously drew a blank. No idea the guy on the wall was Paul Revere, or probably even who Paul Revere was. College or no college. Loretta gave up and ordered a three-egg omelet with cheddar cheese, spinach and tomatoes, whole-wheat toast, orange juice and coffee.

  “Do you want butter?” the kid asked.

  “Yes, I want butter, and I want cream for my coffee.”

  While she waited, she checked her phone and saw she had an unread text from Julius. He had Harry Bennett’s address in Boston. Beacon Street.

  The man was a ferret. She wouldn’t want to try hiding anything from one Julius Hartley, Hollywood-Beverly Hills-Los Angeles private investigator.

  She checked the map on her phone and saw Bennett’s address wasn’t far from her restaurant. She could pour some more money into her meter and walk over there after breakfast. Take a peek and then get back on the road. She examined her map further and realized it wouldn’t be that difficult to get out to Storrow Drive from Harry Bennett’s house. At least on the map.

  And it would be a good idea to get a sense of Samantha Bennett’s roots—to better understand what she was like, what her motives could be, what made her tick.

  Loretta almost wished she’d brought Julius with her, since he was better at that sort of thing than she was, but she knew she’d needed to come out here alone. He knew it, too.

  The kid brought her plate. “That’s one massive breakfast,” she said.

  He made no comment and withdrew. Next to her, two men in dark suits were discussing the Red Sox. Behind her, two women in dark suits were also discussing the Red Sox. Loretta smiled, feeling better already. She poured cream into her coffee, spread butter on her toast and settled into her booth for a good, long, enjoyable meal and then a leisurely walk to Harry Bennett’s Back Bay house.

  Really, she was in no rush to get to Knights Bridge.

  Twenty-One

  Justin woke up early and decided to get to work. He ripped out part of a wall in his bedroom. He’d needed to get a look behind i
t, anyway, and there was nothing like wielding a crowbar to ease his frustrations. Normally he planned his work and didn’t end up with wallboard dust all over everything, but not much about the past few days had been normal.

  He left the mess, took a shower, pulled on clean clothes and headed out. Because he’d been best man yesterday, he was off the hook for bringing anything to brunch. He figured that meant he would be on cleanup duty. Fine with him. Best to have things to do, given his restless mood.

  Last night’s rain had passed quickly, no real threat to the otherwise perfect weekend weather. With the crisp air and the changing leaves, autumn felt more and more locked in, summer a memory. It had been a summer of nonstop work for him. That was good, but it could also explain why he’d latched on to Samantha the way he had. Maybe it had nothing to do with pirate talk and his gold coin, or even the tempting curves of her fit little body. Maybe he just needed a damn break.

  He parked on the dirt road and walked down the driveway to the cider mill. He hadn’t wanted to arrive too early and have Samantha think he had been up half the night picturing her alone in her tent. Even though it wasn’t that far from the truth.

  He found her sitting cross-legged on her sleeping bag inside her tent, the flaps open. She gave him an unapologetic look. “The bugs and critters can have their way with me. I don’t care. I got claustrophobic.” She sighed, smiling at him as she climbed out of the tent. “Harry Bennett’s granddaughter. Claustrophobic. It’s just wrong.”

  Justin stood between her and the sparkling brook, noting that her hair was sticking out in odd places, as if she hadn’t had that great a night herself. She was dressed, at least. No distracting flannel pajamas. “Is this your first time getting claustrophobic?”

  “And the last, I hope. I’m more accustomed to tight quarters on a ship than tents. I called it a night earlier than I had anticipated because of the rain. That didn’t help. At least it was only a passing shower, and my tent held up okay.”

  “Did you get cold? You look cold right now.”