Passionate Kisses

by Various

  She told herself to stop being so dramatic. Maybe Lucas was right. She hadn’t come here to fall in love or put down roots. So her father had turned out to be the Baby on the Beach. So her relatives, at least some of them, had grown up here and gone to school here and been buried here. So what? She wasn’t going to fall for the first local guy she met, give up her career and end up married with two-point-five babies living down the street from his parents. Sophie sank into the pillows and closed her eyes.

  Lon had already texted her once and called her twice. We need to talk. Call when you’re back in the city. Talk? Call? Sophie wanted to tell him to go straight to hell. That he’d known about her father hurt enough. That he’d chosen not to tell her, in hopes she’d find out for herself and bleed on camera, hurt far worse.

  She yanked at a loose string in the bedspread until it came unraveled in her hand. The thing was, there didn’t seem to be a lot of sense in hanging around Lindsey Point. Her apartment, freshly cleaned and echoing with familiar city noise, waited for her. Her two best girlfriends had standing spa appointments for them all as soon as she returned. And she craved sushi from Kiki You’s, whose front window she could see from her living room. Her eyes moved over the birth certificate again. She thought of the box at Marcia and Lila’s. The view at night from the top of the lighthouse. Lucas’s arms tight around her.

  It belonged to her. Some of it, anyway. Pieces of it.

  “Damn.” Some kind of tie, like invisible silk spinning out from the center of this mysterious, maddening town, tugged at her heart. She couldn’t leave, not today and maybe not tomorrow either. She still had things to figure out here. Like what had happened the night her grandparents died. And what part, if any, a hidden treasure had played in it. Sophie yawned and slipped down on her pillow. She was good at unraveling puzzles and finding answers. And working on her own reduced the chances she’d hurt anyone else in the process.

  There. Decision made. Later on, after a nap, she’d throw herself into research mode. And she knew exactly where she’d go and who could help her.

  * * * *

  The baseball cap and sunglasses worked, at least on Katie Oakes. “May I help you?” she asked, without a trace of recognition in her voice.

  Sophie lowered the glasses half an inch. “Mrs. Oakes? It’s Sophie.”

  “Oh!” Katie put down her pen. “I didn’t even recognize you.” She smiled. “That’s the point, isn’t it? It must be a little tiring, being recognized everywhere you go. We don’t get a lot of celebrities in Lindsey Point.”

  Sophie waved a hand. She wasn’t a celebrity. But for a moment, she wondered what Katie meant. Celebrity as in host of Small Town Secrets? Or celebrity as in granddaughter of the Smiths? Did Katie even know who Sophie was?

  “I wondered,” she began. She stopped and looked around. Two white-haired women sat at a table in the foyer sorting books. A pre-teen plugged into his iPod hunched on the floor, flipping through a magazine. Otherwise the Lindsey Point Library was wonderfully empty. “I don’t know how much Lucas told you.” To her relief, she got the words out without attaching any emotion to them. Even his name.

  “About what, honey? I know what happened to him this morning.” Katie Oakes’s mouth tightened, and a look of anger flashed across her face. Anger. Worry. Then something else, though Sophie couldn’t quite read it.

  “Chief O’Brien’ll figure out who did it,” she said, her mouth set. “He’s got a good department of cops. I went to school with him. Smart guy, even back in those days. Always skating on the wrong side of trouble, but I guess it makes him a good policeman now.” A pair of reading glasses hung from a beaded lanyard around her neck, and she picked them up and put them on. “Oh, gosh. Here I am blabbing on, while you needed something from me. What can I help you find?”

  How did Sophie answer that?

  “Listen, I know there’s been a lot of talk about the Baby on–I mean, about Peterson Smith being my father.”

  To her credit, Katie didn’t blink. Nothing in her expression changed at all. “Yes. I’ve heard the talk. But people tell a lot of stories. Doesn’t mean there’s truth to all of them.”

  Sophie worried at a cuticle, not caring how her hands looked. Filming was over for the season. “It turns out he is.”

  “Ah.” Pause. Katie looked around. “And you know this for certain?”

  “I got my birth certificate this morning.” She had other things too. The picture. Lon’s confession. “Yes. I know for certain.”

  Katie tilted her head to one side, brows lifted the smallest bit. Sophie tried to read her expression. It wasn’t surprise. Curiosity? Resentment? But that didn’t make sense. For a long few seconds, neither woman spoke.

  The heavy front door opened, and a mother with her toddler daughter walked into the library.”Hallo, Katie!” The woman waved a greeting, and the odd moment between Katie and Sophie vanished.

  “Hi, Mrs. Oakes,” the girl chimed.

  “Hello to you, Mrs. and Miss Howell.” Katie’s smooth librarian expression returned, and she opened a drawer and pulled out a bookmark with a long red feather attached to the top of it. “Look what I have for you, Annie.”

  The girl trotted to the desk. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She took the bookmark and ran the feather over her cheek. Her eyes closed and her lips turned up in a smile.

  “Sh!” her mother said. “Inside voice, Annie.” She glanced at Sophie, blinked a couple of times, but said nothing. Taking her daughter by the hand, she walked into an adjoining room with brightly painted walls and posters. Children’s books and enormous stuffed animals lined the walls.

  As Katie typed something into her computer, Sophie looked around and took in the details the way she hadn’t before. A little disheveled, but cozy. Welcoming. Not like the sleek lines of her library back home, filled with small, discreet spaces where people could plant themselves and steal a few minutes to read the Times or flip through a romance novel without getting caught. No, this library was wide and open and messy in places, with books piled precariously on shelves and kids leaving toys behind in corners where they must have curled up the day before to page through Dr. Seuss books with sticky fingers.

  Sophie waited until Katie looked up at her. “I’d like to know more about him. My father. I mean, I’ve read the articles about the night of the murders. Of course. But I–” She fumbled to a stop and hoped Katie could fill in the blanks.

  She did.

  She came from around the desk and motioned Sophie to follow her to a small room past the bathrooms. “Private–Staff Only” read a sign on the door.

  “To be honest, I don’t know how much we have,” she said as she flipped on a light. “I haven’t looked at these files in years.”

  Inside were a table and two chairs, surrounded by shelves of old-looking books and folders. Three file cabinets sat in the far corner, their drawers labeled by decade all the way back to 1900.

  “This is where we keep archives and rare materials.” She ran a hand over the spine of one volume. “Small, isn’t it? Not too much in Lindsey Point needs to be kept in here.” She pulled open a drawer, removed three folders, and laid them on the table. Then she pointed to one shelf lined with identical thin red books. “This is everything we have on the Smiths. And your father. All the articles, from the day after the deaths to about the year after your father passed away.” She paused. “I’m so sorry, Sophie.” She patted her shoulder. “I didn’t know him personally. He was younger than me by a few years. But Lindsey Point is small. We knew of each other.” She met Sophie’s gaze, blue eyes locked to hers. “He was a good man. Even after he left, everything I heard was always good. Solid.” She rubbed her eyes. “That sounds funny, maybe. But even with everything that followed him, he was a regular, ordinary man people liked.”

  A funny feeling filled Sophie up. “Thank you.”

  Katie nodded. “The shelf over there has all the yearbooks from Lindsey Point High School, back to about 1950 or so. Your fa
ther’ll be in there. You know when he graduated?”

  Sophie nodded.

  “I’ll leave you alone. Take as long as you want.”

  Chapter 32

  Lucas woke four hours later with a hell of a headache. Despite the pain pills he’d taken earlier, every muscle from his waist to his forehead reminded him he’d gotten beaten up but good a few hours earlier. His hands curled into fists. When he found the bastard, he’d kill him. No question. Losing a fair fight was one thing. Getting hit over the head from behind? That was a chicken-shit way of getting rid of someone. He pushed himself up on one elbow, grabbed a glass of water and dumped two more pills into his mouth.

  He eyed the clock beside his bed. Three-thirty. When had Sophie left? Ten. Maybe later. She hadn’t even said goodbye, just walked her straight, proud back down his driveway and out of his life. Guess he shouldn’t have said all those things to her. But she shouldn’t have said half the things she had, either. What did she know about losing her best friend and spending the next ten years trying to figure out life without that person?

  He sat all the way up. Couldn’t sleep the rest of the day away, much as he wanted to. He pushed back the covers, then thought better and stripped all the linens off, balling them up in his laundry basket in the corner. He sure didn’t need Sophie’s perfume on the pillowcase beside him. Lucas scowled and pushed himself to a shaky stand.

  He’d take a shower. Maybe get something to eat downtown. He checked his cell and found no fewer than eight messages from people who’d heard about the morning’s fiasco. He returned only two of them–one from the police chief, who wanted him to stop down and give a statement, and one from Finn, who wanted him to come over later for a barbeque with the guys. He deleted the one from Shannon, saved the rest, and tried not to care that Sophie hadn’t left any messages at all. Two missed calls before she’d come over in person. And nothing afterward.

  What did he expect? After what he’d told her, she probably couldn’t wait to put this place in her rear view mirror.

  “Hello?” Someone knocked on his door. “Lucas?”

  Shannon? She was about the last person he wanted to see today. He contemplated ignoring her. Maybe she’d go away if he didn’t answer.

  “Hey, Finn told me you’re here.” Another knock. He could picture her expression: a little puzzled, a little hurt. He knew what her knocking hand would look like, too, tiny fingers folded in on themselves with short, unpolished nails. “I just...”

  Her voice trailed off, and it was the uncertainty outside his door that finally made his decision. She’d made a mistake and owned up to it, five long years ago. He couldn’t forgive her? Sure he could. Shannon knew him better than anyone. Letting her in would be like pulling the warmest, oldest blanket up to his chin to keep out the chill of someone like Sophie. He could use that right about now.

  “Hang on,” he called. He rummaged through his dresser for a t-shirt and a pair of clean shorts. “Be right there.”

  “Hey,” she said when he opened the door a minute later. “I heard what happened. I wanted to stop by and–” She stopped, raised a hand to touch the bandage at his neck. “Oh, babe.”

  He jerked away as if he’d been burned.

  “Does it hurt?”

  No. But he didn’t want her touching him. Or calling him babe. “You want some water? Diet soda?”

  She shook her head and looked around the living room as she stepped inside. “Nice place.”

  “It’s all right.” His gaze moved to the balcony before he could help it. Sophie had been an idiot to go jumping around out there. She could have fallen. She could have hurt a lot more than an ankle. He shook away the thought. “What are you doing here?”

  Shannon bit her bottom lip. “I’m not sure. I wanted to see you. I mean, I heard about what happened. Everyone has by now.” Her eyes filled. “You could have been killed.”

  “Shan, please. Little hit on the head isn’t gonna kill me.”

  She came to him again, put a hand on his arm, and he didn’t move this time. “It wasn’t a little hit. It knocked you out.”

  “Stop.”

  Her hand moved down his arm until it found his fingers. “I’m glad you’re not hurt too bad.”

  He licked his lips and stepped away. “I’m gonna be fine.”

  “Lucas.” The gaze. Oh God, he couldn’t take that gaze, the one that had pinned him to his knees in high school and made him fall like a fool in the years after. The gaze he’d woken up to morning after morning thinking he was the luckiest man in the world. Kind eyes. A tiny glimmer of desire behind the kindness. The beginning of a dimple hinting at the smile that, if he was lucky enough, she’d flash on him like the August sun, brilliant and beaming and warming him straight through.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “Please. I need to say it.”

  He laced his hands behind his head. All the muscles in his neck and shoulders bunched up, and an ache shot down his spine.

  “I am so, so sorry for what I did.” She blinked back tears. “I was stupid. God, I don’t know– I wasn’t thinking. I was scared, I guess, and I thought–“

  “You thought if you slept with someone else, that would make things better?”

  “No. I don’t know.” The tears found their way out and slipped down her cheeks. “I don’t have any reason, except I was young. I guess maybe I thought I wasn’t supposed to feel that way, so strongly I mean, at whatever we were, eighteen, nineteen years old.”

  “You’re saying it was a mistake?”

  “Of course not. But the way we came together–”

  “Because of Sarah.”

  “It wasn’t only because of her.”

  No, but that was a major reason, and they both knew it.

  “Besides, you were twenty-four when you cheated on me,” he said. “Not eighteen or nineteen.”

  “And I’d never been with anyone else, Lucas. You were my high school sweetheart. My first love, my first everything. You were with me when everything in my life fell apart.”

  “What the hell’s so wrong with that?”

  She shook her head and looked at the ground. “Nothing,” she whispered. “But I didn’t know it then. Some people said– I mean, I thought if I was never with anyone else, and I married you, in ten or twenty years I’d feel like I had missed out on something. I’d get this terrible urge to cheat on you and then I’d be ruining a marriage and a family.”

  “So you figured you’d nip it in the bud, get it out of the way before we even walked down the aisle.”

  “Something like that.” She gulped in another breath. “And I know this doesn’t make sense either, but I think I was scared because you were so close. You knew everything I’d been through. I wanted to be with someone who didn’t know.”

  “So you could forget.”

  “More like I could be someone else. Escape my life for a little while.” Her eyes shined with tears. “Like I said, it might not make a lot of sense.”

  “Nope.”

  She rubbed the end of her nose–another goddamned gesture he remembered so vividly it kneed him in the gut–and sniffled. “I don’t expect you to take me back. I’m not even sure I expect you to forgive me.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “But I needed to come here and say it, so you know I’m not that person anymore. I’m not scared of what might happen if I fall in love again. I think I’m stronger. I know myself better.” She looked up at him. “I haven’t, by the way. There’s never been anyone else after you. Not even close.”

  He didn’t want to hear that. He didn’t want to be looking at his ex-girlfriend’s tears, listening to her apologize, thinking maybe he’d been too harsh and people did change and hell maybe they’d end up friends, because look at her. Shannon O’Brien was more beautiful now than the day she’d walked out of his life, and here she was in his living room telling him in no uncertain terms he could have her back if he wanted it, her and them and everything good they’d always bee
n together.

  She took a few steps closer. “I went to counseling, Lucas. A whole year of it. And I figured out some things. I know myself a lot better now.” She lifted both palms. “That’s all I wanted to say.” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. “I miss you, babe. So, so much.”

  Chapter 33

  “Here.” Finn popped the tops off three beers and handed them around. Behind him on the cement patio, the grill sent up snakes of smoke. “Now tell us again what the chief said.”

  Lucas savored the beer, going easy down his throat. “Not much. They dusted for prints in the house, but the TV crew’s been all over there this week. Got a clean set of footprints by the lighthouse, but almost guaranteed those belong to Francine.”

  “Why the hell would they be hers?”

  “She’s the one who’s been walking around at all hours of the night.”

  “No shit.” Neil leaned back in his chair and studied the sky. “No ghost, huh?”

  “Told ya,” Lucas said.

  “I don’t know. Still a lotta noises over the years people can’t explain,” Finn said. “You oughta see the tourists that come into the bar fourteen shades of white, knees knockin’ and pupils all lit up ’cause they saw a light or somethin’ and when they got to the spot ain’t nothin’ but a dark lighthouse. Or a stone. Or a sand dune. And remember that knock-off cable show out of Providence a couple years back? Spent the night down there with all kinds of equipment, measuring heat flashes or some such shit?”

  “I remember. What about ’em?” Lucas said.

  “Said they got readings, like, off the charts in this one spot. Right outside the keeper’s house.”

  Lucas snorted.

  “You believe that shit?” Rich asked.

  Finn shrugged. “Why not? Stranger things in the world than a couple of ghosts hanging around.” He drained his beer and put the empty in a cardboard box. “Luc? What else did the chief say?”

  “Got some white car they’re checkin’ into. Sophie said she saw it the night someone was chasin’ her.”