The Tiger in the House

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  J Bird Café was three blocks from Willard Beach. After collecting a reluctant Baxter from his personal paradise, she toweled him off and drove to the café. There was more painting to be done and she could put in a day’s work. Painting would help her think. Or not think, which might be better. Greg wouldn’t be coming by until noon so she’d have a few hours to herself.

  She started with the last unpainted wall, the one closest to the street. Everything was a hard gloss. “Easier to clean,” she’d told Delia. That’s why it felt good to be here. This was Juniper’s world. This was the place where she was more than the little sister, more than the looked-after one.

  Juniper had worked in cafés since her first year of college. She knew the best baking ovens, how to buy them used, where to get the best winter wheat, when to buy Canadian flour, and how to negotiate bulk items. She knew that the walls with high gloss paint stood up to the heavy traffic of a café and the constant moisture of baking.

  She relaxed into the brush strokes around the door trim, edging it with a steady hand. Her favorite blue scarf held her hair in a wild pile on top of her head, a style that Delia called retro gypsy. She was safe here, amid the paint, the ovens, the new café tables and chairs, the wet dog by the back door. She opened the front door to freshen the air as she painted. The front bay window was still covered in brown paper, with declarations of the opening day drawn in bright red letters.

  A car drove by so slowly that she at first thought the driver was lost, not unheard of in the curving streets of South Portland. A black car, four-door Nissan Maxima standing out like a Maserati against all the Subaru and Honda four-wheel drives and GMCs that muscled through the Maine winters. Before the man had even put one foot on the sidewalk, Baxter was at her side, then as the man approached, in front of her. The man stopped and smiled, looking at the dog.

  “That must be Baxter,” he said. “Delia told me about him. I’m Mike. And you must be Juniper.”

  Baxter trotted forward and sniffed the man’s outstretched palm. Mike gave every indication that he knew about dogs, that he understood his access into the pack was allowed only with a formal greeting. Baxter put the guy’s scent through his master snout and immediately relaxed so much that he found a discarded tennis ball next to the sidewalk and pushed it into Mike’s hands.

  He tossed it lightly into the backyard, and Baxter took off at full speed, returning it before Mike had finished wiping the ball goop off in the grass. “Sorry, boy. I’m working. I just stopped by to see if Delia was here. She and I are collaborating on an abandoned child situation.” He took a few steps and extended his dog-scented hand to her paint-speckled hand.

  This was the detective? Delia had failed to mention that a breeze could jostle the top hank of his deep brown hair, that dogs liked him, that his eyes lit up when he mentioned Delia’s name. Of course, because her sister wouldn’t have noticed. J Bird knew men, felt the warm edges of his palm that swallowed her hand, noticed the hair along his arm that emerged from the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt, the breadth of his shoulders. Why didn’t Delia go for a guy like this?

  “She’s working today, traveling out of state, something about bringing a child from Denver, but she’ll be back tomorrow,” she said.

  Mike stopped. His forehead furrowed. “Oh. I thought she was . . . never mind. Nice to meet you. Say hi to Greg. You’re in good hands with him.” He turned to go.

  She understood what ingredients blended perfectly, how to keep butter at room temperature for most baking but ice cold for pie crusts, how to add a few flakes of Maldon Sea Salt to chocolate to heighten the experience, and how to torch the top of crème brûlée so that the sugars caramelized into a glassy brittle. Food was her finest expression of love, not unlike sex, yet longer lasting and more abundant. If she were going to purchase ingredients to enhance her sister, she’d buy a fifty-pound sack of Mike.

  Baxter sat on the front step with the tennis ball between his jaws and watched Mike walk away. He gave a canine sigh of disappointment and dropped the ball.

  “Wait a minute, Mike. Nice to meet you too. You can call me J Bird,” she said. She reserved J Bird for family, boyfriends, and friends. The kind of people she wanted to keep in her life. He wouldn’t know all that. It was too bad that Delia lacked mating instincts.

  She needed to know one more thing about Mike. “I forgot to ask you something important. What’s your favorite thing to eat?”

  Mike looked at her across the roof of his car. “I’m sorry to say this, J Bird, but I’m a pasta man. Bread and pasta.”

  She knew it. “We’re going to need a taster when we open. Delia’s perfecting lemon pasta. She learned to make it in Italy.” J Bird felt eerily like an Old World matchmaker selling the attributes of a young woman. But she knew men. Mike would remember this about Delia.

  “You mean she makes the actual pasta? It doesn’t come out of a box?” He smiled and put his hands over his heart. “Be still my heart.”

  J Bird put her hands on her hips, jutting one to the side. He was a tall man and even with the car between them, she saw the sturdy spread of his shoulders. “That’s right. You’d be surprised what she can cook up.” She knew when to stop, when a homeopathic dose of romantic promise was enough.

  “I’m learning not to be surprised by Delia,” he said. There it was, the thread of longing and attachment, the reference to the future. “And put my name on the list of pasta tasters,” he said as he gave a wave. He ducked into the driver’s seat.

  J Bird turned around to walk back, until she heard the whir of his car window. “J Bird? Put me on the top of the list.” For a woman who had to be dragged into online dating, Delia was attracting a lot of attention today.

  The flirtatious encounter buoyed her mood. Watching Mike and Delia discover each other was going to be fun.

  She resumed painting for another hour, putting the last touches on the doorframe to the back deck, lost in the details of opening the café, giving her time to think about Ben. Who did she know who could help him? She stopped in midthought, paintbrush held high. Tyler! He might be verging on weird old boyfriend behavior, but he was an ER doc. They saw addictions every day.

  Juniper wrapped her paintbrush in a plastic bag and washed up in the new stainless steel kitchen sink. She did not want to be surprised about anything in Tyler’s West Coast background so she tapped away at her phone, Googling the daylights out of Tyler Greene, MD. Their newly installed Wi-Fi connection opened up a window of reassuring employment references about Tyler. A photo of the young doctor at a fundraiser for a homeless shelter in San Jose. No news articles about stalking. She had to be able to trust him completely if she was going to pull Tyler into Ben’s world. He wasn’t right for Delia anymore, but she needed to know if she could depend on him with her next most important person.

  She called his cell. “Tyler? Can I see you today? Yeah, it’s J Bird. I need your fancy medical brain for something important. Can we find a time? Great. I’ll meet you out in front of Bayside Bakery in Portland around noon.”

  Greg should be on hand for the last oven delivery and could also take care of the sign painter who would arrive later today. Had Greg arranged for the plumber to arrive today so the stove could get hooked up to the gas line? Was it too early to put in an order for cleaning supplies?

  * * *

  A car pulled into the small parking lot of Bayside Bakery in Portland with the bright cheerfulness of California license plates. Tyler. Juniper hadn’t seen Tyler in his blue scrubs before. Dark circles cupped his eyes. Exhaustion etched lines on either side of his face. Despite that, blue was a good color for him.

  They settled onto a park bench that bordered the parking lot. Small birds, accustomed to a bounty of crumbs from baguettes and croissants, hopped by their feet in anticipation. She had not yet returned Baxter to his solitary confinement at home. Called to duty, the dog rose from a spot outside the bakery door and greeted Tyler with a hand sniff and settled in between the two people.

>   “What’s up? Is there something wrong with you or Delia? I called her phone but she hasn’t answered yet. I couldn’t sleep last night and I’m going to have to pull a double today. Most days we don’t really get a lunch break but I talked someone into covering for me.”

  “She’s doing a quick transport of a child from Denver. I guess Ira has her doing the extreme stuff that no one else with full caseloads can handle. She’s never had to do this before. That’s all I know. The gasket on Delia’s confidentiality jar never leaks. I learned never to press her for details about her work.”

  Tyler’s shoulders drooped. Was Tyler the same handsome guy Juniper had had a secret childhood crush on, the guy her big sister dated back before their world blew up? Or had he changed, pushing Delia too hard, trying to please her in a manner that reeked of desperation, and generally acting like the kind of guy who’d earn the overbearing boyfriend badge? But the man in front of her right now was deflated and exhausted.

  He pressed his hands together. They were scrubbed clean. The fingernails were clipped and filed to perfection. He covered his face and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Thanks, J Bird. I’m not doing so great today. I made a huge mistake and I don’t know what to do. I know you want medical advice, but I’ve blown it with Delia, haven’t I?”

  This had to be her day for male mentoring. Baxter wedged his damp body closer to J Bird.

  “When I first saw Delia at The Daily Grind, I couldn’t believe it. I knew I’d probably run into her, but I didn’t know it would feel like a collision with the past, and all of a sudden I was a kid again. I haven’t felt that kind of sweetness since . . .” He paused. “Before the fire.”

  Since the fire? Were they talking about the fire or Delia? “I was only a kid. But you and Delia seemed so into each other. I always wondered what happened. Your family moved across the country, but that didn’t have to end the relationship.”

  “No, but it made a perfect excuse. I couldn’t live with what I had done. I couldn’t face Delia.”

  A chill ran through her. “What? Did you cheat on her?”

  Tyler wedged his elbows into his thighs and lowered his head into his hands. “No. I never would have cheated on her; there wasn’t anyone like her.” He lifted his head and looked puzzled. “Didn’t she ever tell you?”

  What the hell were they talking about? “Tell me what?”

  “About the fire, that I tried to reach your dad, I could hear your mom. Delia was on the floor. A wall of fire shot up between the living room and your dad’s office. I had to choose. . . .”

  Tyler squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his lips together until they were a hard, flat line. When he opened his eyes, the bloodshot lines created a red and white mandala around his irises. “After that, I kept my head down, finished college, and tried to forget that I had ever lived here. I tried to forget Delia. Medical school and the training after it had a profound way of obliterating anything else. And then a homing beacon went off in me, like one of these blinking lighthouses. When I saw the job opening for emergency medicine in Portland, I wanted to come back. I wanted to rewrite the past,” he said. Tyler stood up and rubbed his hands along the back of his neck. “I saw Delia. And you. And I got this idea that I could make it all better.”

  Baxter stood up and pressed his body against her thigh. What could she say to Tyler that would penetrate his guilt?

  “I’m going to talk straight to you. I looked up to you when I was a kid and you were Delia’s boyfriend. When you showed up here again, I was glad to see you. But then you started acting like a weird semistalker, asking Delia to check out houses with you, pick out furniture. And then you showed her a table that looked just like our table in our old house and freaked her out. You’ve been back for a few weeks and in anyone’s world, that is too fast.”

  Baxter’s ears twitched.

  Tyler raised his hands in surrender, palms out. “I know, I know. I feel like an idiot. We have to slow down, that’s what I want to tell her.”

  “I don’t think the both of you have to slow down. You have to slow down. And tell her what’s going on with you, tell her why you left. It will be hard but you can do it,” she said. Juniper didn’t have a lot of experience giving advice to people who had once seemed older and wiser. She had left all psychological advice to Delia. But she had already run into one addiction calamity with Ben and one emotional superstorm with Tyler, and it wasn’t even noon. She was in new territory.

  She felt a sudden surge of compassion for this man, one more wounded survivor of the disaster that left two sisters orphaned. “She’ll be home tomorrow, probably late,” she said. “And I probably shouldn’t be the one to tell you this, but I’m pretty sure Delia isn’t going to be your girlfriend, all grown up. Not that Delia knows yet, but this is my area of expertise. I’m saving you from heartache. You saved Delia from being killed along with my parents. I’m grateful beyond belief. If I didn’t have my sister, I don’t know if I would have lasted. You couldn’t save my parents and neither could she. Give yourself a break.” She reached out and took his hand. “Thank you for saving my sister.”

  He wiped moisture from his eyes and looked at his watch. “You really are officially grown up, aren’t you?” He patted her hand. “But you shouldn’t speculate about Delia and me. Now that I’ve said all that about the fire out loud, it’s still hideous, but we can’t all be at blame. Can we?”

  “No. If I could change anything, I’d wish my parents here, mental disorders included. But that’s not the way it went down and here we are.” Her voice trembled. Baxter lifted his head and looked up at J Bird. “But I have a problem brewing where you could really help.”

  He rearranged his body, shoulders pulled back, face relaxed. This was Tyler the doctor, not the guilt-ridden, love-confused man of a few seconds ago.

  “I have a family friend who is addicted to pain meds. You might remember him. Ben. He’s a vet, a big hero in the animal community. He’s addicted to opioids and he doesn’t know where to turn. He had a knee surgery six months ago. He’s advanced to street oxy and he’s in a world of hurt.”

  “Send him to the ER and tell him to ask for me. It’s what we do in emergency medicine. Plus all of the accidents and poor life choices related to alcohol.”

  He stood up.

  Tyler smiled for the first time. “Finally something that’s in my ballpark. I might finally be able to do something useful for you and Delia. I have to run.”

  She watched him jog back across the parking lot, lighter and more put together. The teenage Tyler had less of a stranglehold on him. But how would Delia take this? It was clear to Juniper that his interest in Delia had been driven by absolving his misplaced guilt. Delia could be crushed again.

  CHAPTER 42

  How could she get lost with GPS? Wasn’t the sky filled with satellites, circling the planet and beaming down directions to motels and restaurants? Delia wouldn’t give Ira the satisfaction of knowing that she traveled without a paper map. At this very moment, his beloved road atlas sat idle on her kitchen counter in Portland. Despite GPS, she had circled the outskirts of Nashville in a misguided attempt to find her motel halfway between Dalton and the city.

  A sack of fried chicken, coleslaw, and french fries sat on the nightstand near the bed of the Quality Inn. Not the kind of image she imagined for a soon-to-be baker for J Bird Café.

  It was past nine o’clock. Delia had to override the misplaced sympathy for Courtney. Yes, she was broken. Yes, Ray had manipulated the daylights out of the girl. Yes, she was swamped with guilt. But Delia still had to turn her in. She tapped in Mike’s number.

  “Hello.” He had a good voice. Solid, sure. His form of hello was a statement, not a question.

  “It’s Delia.” She knew her name had come up on his phone. It was hard to say what she needed to tell him.

  “I called your office and heard you were taking a sick day. Is this a mental health day or are you really sick? I’m wondering if you�
�re okay. Are you?”

  The hints of tenderness made her wince, caught in a lie.

  “I found out some information. Hayley’s mother’s name is Claire. Her father could be a pharmacist,” she said, letting the information rush out from the burst dam of her chest. “And the naughty place is a tobacco barn somewhere between New York and Connecticut or Massachusetts. That last part is more conjecture on my part. And Claire and Hayley were kidnapped sometime in March. Six months ago. And yes, Raymond was trying to build a heroin empire.”

  She was greeted by silence on the other end. “Wait a minute, I have to go into another room.” She heard a door closing. “My daughter just went to bed. You gathered all of this from Hayley when you took your dog to visit? That’s one incredible dog. Why didn’t you call me right away?”

  The smell of oil from the white KFC bag went from soothing to disgusting. Delia stood up and dropped the bag into the plastic-lined wastebasket. “I didn’t get this from Hayley. I’m in Tennessee.”

  “This must be a bad connection. It sounded like you said Tennessee.” Mike’s voice dropped into a new layer of concern.

  “I’m flying home early tomorrow morning; my flight leaves early but I won’t be in Portland until early evening. I wasn’t able to find a straight shot from Nashville to Boston on short notice. No direct flights,” she said, still dancing around what she needed to tell him.

  “Stop avoiding my questions and tell me what you’re doing there. You told your boss that you needed a sick day and you told your sister that you were accompanying a minor on a flight from Denver. What’s going on?”

  Delia sat back on the bed and pressed her back against the headboard. “You talked to my sister? You don’t even know my sister.”

  “I was driving past your café. It’s not that far from Erica’s house, which is under heavy surveillance. So I stopped and introduced myself to Juniper. I asked how you were feeling. She said I should call her J Bird.”