The man bent to shake his hand and greeted him with the same polite reserve he’d shown Agatha. The action moved him up one notch in her estimation, but the man who’d played a part in dear Maggie’s unhappiness a year before still had quite a long way to go.
“Corinna and I brought Maggie a little welcome-home gift of cinnamon rolls this morning. We were so sorry to hear about her accident and are so glad to see her back in her house. She did a wonderful job on the old place.”
“Yes, she did.” He sounded stiff. Guilt over the accident? Resentment that she’d referred to the house he’d paid for as Maggie’s house? Or perhaps just plain old wariness about discussing his wife with a total stranger?
“We issued an invitation to Maggie to join us for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s such a big meal to prepare for only two, and with her just getting discharged from the rehabilitation center yesterday … Well, we’d love to have you both. What do you say?”
He looked uncomfortable. “I—I don’t know. Maggie’s a little self-conscious about meeting a lot of …”
“Strangers,” Agatha said with a gentle smile. “We know she’s forgotten everything about the town, but we haven’t forgotten her. We were her friends a year ago, and we’d like to be her friends now. There will be plenty of people there to make her feel at home—Corinna’s children and grandchildren, Brendan’s family, the Thomases, the Walkers, Holly McBride. We’d love to have you both.”
His smile was polite but insincere. “I’ll tell her, Mrs. Winchester.”
“Oh, it’s Miss. Miss Agatha will do fine.” She gave him her brightest smile. “We’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing. Come along, Brendan. Nice meeting you, Mr. McKinney.”
Agatha rather liked doing things for people, helping them solve their problems, making life a little easier, a little better. Last Christmas it had been Nathan Bishop and Emilie Dalton who’d needed her and Corinna’s help.
Emilie had been up in Boston, doing the best she could for the three little angels placed in her custody, when catastrophe struck. She’d been cheated out of an entire month’s paycheck by an unscrupulous employer and evicted from her apartment because she couldn’t pay the rent. Desperate to keep her family together, she’d taken them from the homeless shelter and would have fled to Atlanta, her hometown, if a snowstorm and car trouble hadn’t stranded her in Bethlehem.
At the time, Agatha remembered with a smile, Emilie had thought getting stuck there was one more disaster in the string of disasters that had become her life, but now she saw it for what it had really been: the beginning of a miracle. For if the snow hadn’t stranded her there, she never would have met Nathan. They wouldn’t have married last New Year’s Day, and they wouldn’t be so incredibly happy and so blessedly in love.
Agatha liked to think that she and Corinna had played a part, just a small one, in getting those two together. Maybe they could play another small part in fixing whatever was wrong between Maggie and Ross McKinney. At the very least, they could be Maggie’s friends. She needed friends, needed to be surrounded by people and happiness and life—needed it for her heart, needed it for her healing.
And, she rather suspected, Ross needed it too.
• • •
Gripping the envelope along with the contracts, Ross went into the office and seated himself behind the desk. It wouldn’t take more than a few minutes, twenty at most, to go over them, and then he could let Tom know that he was sending them back. As long as he had him on the phone, he could also make sure that whatever had set Lynda off had been resolved and—
Or he could remember that he was on vacation and set them aside for now, the way someone really on vacation would do. Later he could come up with a plan for dealing with the inevitable intrusions from Buffalo—a once-a-week schedule, something he could stick to, something that would leave the rest of his time free—and he could make sure that Tom and Lynda understood and respected it.
Reluctantly he slid the contracts back into the envelope, left it on the center of his desk, and returned to the hall. For a moment he simply stood there, listening for some hint of Maggie’s whereabouts. The old house was too solid for creaks and squeaks. The only sounds that broke the quiet were the ticking of the mantel clock in the dining room and faint music from the back of the house—a lone voice, singing softly.
He hadn’t heard Maggie sing in months, probably years, even though she’d always loved music. She’d cleaned house to it, cooked to it, seduced him to it. More times than he could remember, what had started as innocent fun—singing along with the radio during after-dinner cleanup, followed by a dance or two around the kitchen table—had ended in erotic pleasure in their bed.
They hadn’t shared that in months either, and they never would again.
The thought unsettled him.
She was sitting on the bench in front of the kitchen windows, cookbooks scattered around her. Her shoes were kicked off, and one socked foot tapped the air, keeping time with her out-of-tune tune.
She wouldn’t stay single long, he thought suddenly. Some smart guy would grab her up, and before long she would be well on her way to having those four or five babies she’d talked about. Before long she would have everything she’d ever wanted—a home, a town, a place to belong. A husband and kids to belong to. He hoped the guy came from a large family, all settled around there, and that they would welcome her as if she were their own daughter.
He hoped she got it all. Every hope. Every wish. Every dream.
Everything he hadn’t given her.
She looked up. “There you are. Have you been talking to the deliveryguy all this time?”
“No. Miss Agatha came by.”
“ ‘Miss’ Agatha? How sweet. What did she want?”
“To be neighborly, I suppose. Maybe to see for herself that I really do exist.”
“You do tend to be a bit invisible when you get away from Buffalo,” she said matter-of-factly. “Usually, the hotel housekeeping staff are the only people who see you.”
The comment was too true to disagree with, so he ignored it. “She also wanted to repeat the invitation to Thanksgiving dinner. I told her you’d be there.”
Maggie stared at him. “You what?”
“You said just this morning that you wanted to go.”
“Yes, but—”
When she didn’t finish, he did. “But you thought you wouldn’t give them an answer either way so that if you wanted to back out at the last minute, you could.” Her wide-eyed and wary nod made him relent. “Well, you still can. I told Miss Agatha that I would talk to you about it. But I think you should go. These people are your friends, and they’re going to be your neighbors. Thanksgiving will be a perfect time to start getting to know them again. And who knows? Thanksgiving dinner with a crowd might be fun.” Like being away from the office with nothing to do was fun. Like living even temporarily in a small town that offered none of the attractions of the city was fun.
“It might be.” Finally her startled look dissolved into a yawn. “Sorry. It’s warm and I’m tired—a perfect recipe for an afternoon nap.”
“Why don’t you take one?”
“Actually, I was hoping you would bring the Christmas stuff out from wherever it is. I want to start decorating after Thanksgiving, and I’d like to go through it first.”
The request made him stiffen. If his instructions had been followed, the stuff, as she called it, was in the basement. The ornaments, lights, angels, Santas, and all the presents that had been left unopened last Christmas.
Plus one that had been opened. One that he needed to get rid of before Maggie saw it. Before she wondered about it.
“I can do that,” he agreed, his voice remarkably empty of the tension inside him. “If you take a nap.”
She yawned again. “All right. I’ll lie down for a while, but you have to bring up everything. Okay?”
“Okay.” He escorted her to the top of the stairs, then made his way to the basement door at the re
ar of the house.
A switch just inside the door turned on lights above a flight of stairs and every eight feet through the cavernous space. The boxes he’d had delivered from Buffalo were stored there, just a few feet from the bottom of the stairs. All the Christmas things were there too, in cardboard cartons clearly marked GIFTS, ORNAMENTS, or DECORATIONS. Underneath those labels, some incredibly organized person had been even more specific: ANGELS. SANTAS. MUSIC BOXES. If a person knew exactly what he was looking for, he could find it in one of the three dozen boxes in minutes.
What he was looking for was in the stack of boxes that held last year’s presents. As his business prospered and grew each year, his gifts to Maggie had become showier, costlier. Five years ago he’d gotten so busy that Lynda had taken over the shopping for him, buying outfits Maggie refused to wear, handbags she refused to carry, trips she refused to take. The only gift he had continued to choose himself was the jewelry, always something to take away the breath of the most avaricious woman around—and always something that failed to impress Maggie.
Last year he’d bought two pieces of jewelry—an emerald pendant in the deep, rich shade she favored, and a bracelet of two-carat round diamonds alternating with matching sapphires. They were both dazzling pieces, but only the bracelet had made an impression on Maggie—one hell of an impression.
Soon after he’d made arrangements with Alex Thomas to oversee the reopening of the house, the lawyer had called him about the bracelet. The cleaning service had found it on the living room floor and turned it over to him. What did Ross want him to do with it?
Give it to your wife had been Ross’s first response. He didn’t want to see the bracelet again as long as he lived, and he sure as hell didn’t want Maggie to see it.
But Alex had refused, and finally Ross had told him to pack it with the rest of the gifts. He would dispose of it later, before the time came to pull out the decorations for this Christmas.
This was probably his best chance at “later.”
He opened the top carton and found the bracelet exactly where Alex had said it would be, in its velvet-lined box in the corner. Even under the less than adequate lighting, the stones glowed. From the first gems he’d bought—emerald studs to the last, this was the most stunning, the most exquisite—and the one piece Maggie had hated most. He and this bracelet had almost killed her.
After sliding it into his pocket, he headed upstairs to the office. He sealed the bracelet in an envelope and addressed it to Tom, with a terse note instructing him to get rid of the piece. Keep it himself, give it to a girlfriend, sell it, flush it down the sewer—Ross didn’t care, just as long as he never had to acknowledge its existence again.
Leaving the envelope on the hall table, he returned to the basement for the boxes. By the time he made his final trip up the steep steps, Maggie had enough boxes to keep her busy for days. He was tired but he still had one more thing to do before he could relax.
He flipped through the phone book until he found the address for the delivery service, only a half dozen blocks away. He could be there and back before Maggie realized he was gone.
Ten minutes later, as he watched a clerk toss the padded envelope into a bin of overnight packages, relief settled over him. Tom would get rid of it as requested, no questions asked, and Maggie would never know of its existence.
Unless she remembered.
He wouldn’t wish her memory lapses on anyone. He’d seen too clearly how it frustrated and haunted her. But the old saying was true. Some things really were better off forgotten.
Chapter Five
Thanksgiving day dawned bright and sunny, with a chilly reminder that Christmas was less than a month away. While Ross was still in bed, Maggie slipped downstairs, started the coffee, and pulled out her favorite cookbook. Originally intended for use as a photo album, the book held recipes instead of snapshots—some handwritten, some cut from magazines, others collected from friends. These were all her old favorites, her reliable standbys that everyone loved most. Some were fairly simple, others complicated. The one she wanted that morning was on the simple side.
Grandma’s pumpkin pie. She didn’t remember where the recipe had come from and didn’t have a clue who Grandma was—certainly not her grandmother. Though her father’s parents had lived little more than an hour away, she’d seen them only three times after the divorce. As for her maternal grandmother, Maggie remembered her from the annual summer trips she and her mother had taken to Ohio. To a little girl, her grandmother had seemed far older than her years. She’d been crotchety, cantankerous, and critical of everything Maggie or her mother did, and the week-long visits had ended with relief all around.
The last visit had come when Maggie was ten, when they’d gone back for the old woman’s funeral. It was winter, with six inches of snow on the ground and not a hint of genuine sorrow to be found. She’d worn a navy blue dress, white socks, and black shoes, and kept her hands in her coat pockets because her gloves were too gaily red for such a somber event. She’d thought she would freeze to death before the graveside service ended.
That the memory was so clear was ironic. She could remember all the details of a—sorry to say—relatively minor event more than twenty-five years ago, and yet major things from only a year before were wiped clean from her mind. Dr. Allen and her psychiatrist, Dr. Olivetti, had warned her that might be the case. People who suffered generalized psychogenic amnesia often had fantastic recall of distant events and yet knew nothing of their lives in the weeks or months preceding the amnesia.
She slid the pumpkin pie recipe from its plastic sleeve and laid it on the counter. She and Ross had gone to the grocery store the day before, and she’d purchased all the necessary ingredients. She hated to show up at the Winchesters’ empty-handed and had thought her super-easy, never-fail pumpkin pie was her best bet.
After pouring herself a cup of coffee, she sat down on the nearest bar stool and read over the instructions. She could do this. She’d bought a refrigerated crust—she knew not to push her luck too far—and the rest was a simple matter of measuring, mixing, pouring, and baking. All she had to do was concentrate for a while.
All she had to do …
Some days she’d have more luck turning back the hands of time than concentrating. Some days thinking was so hard that it gave her a headache, and on the really lousy days, she got dizzy too. So far, she’d been spared that since leaving the rehab center. She’d had a few sleep disturbances—restlessness, wakefulness, a vague recurring dream—but for the most part she was doing all right. Better than expected. Maybe better enough that when Ross returned to the city, she would be able to live completely on her own.
If she needed live-in help, she could accept it. But she wanted the choice. She needed to know that she could be totally independent if she wanted to be.
Her gaze fell on the recipe card. Was her mind wandering because of the post-traumatic syndrome? Or was she delaying the moment of truth by delaying the pie baking?
In this instance she preferred the former to the latter.
Sliding to the floor, she circled the island and gathered the ingredients she’d left on the counter yesterday. She spread everything out in the order the recipe called for, gathered measuring cups and spoons, bowls and utensils, and her favorite pie plate. She read the instructions on the pie crust box just to make certain there was nothing more vital to do than fit the crust into the dish, and she carefully measured the ingredients—spices into one bowl, cream and eggs into another, pumpkin into the third.
“Good morning.”
She looked up as Ross came through the doorway. He wore jeans and a ragged sweatshirt proclaiming his long-forgotten college loyalty. His feet were bare, his jaw dark with stubble, and his hair looked as if it’d been combed with his fingers—and he was still too damn appealing for any woman’s good.
“The coffee’s hot,” she said in greeting. “It’s … you know, the almond stuff.”
“Amaretto.”
“What are you making?” Ross asked, taking a seat across from her with coffee and a pinched-off piece of cold bread.
“Pie.”
“To take to the sisters’?”
“If it turns out.”
“It’ll be fine. Why wouldn’t it be?”
She gave him a dry look. “Because nothing else I’ve cooked has been.”
“The stuffed potatoes last night were good.”
“They were frozen. All I had to do was put them in the oven and remember to take them out when the timer buzzed.” And that was a good thing, because the rest of the meal had been barely edible. The chicken cutlets were overcooked, the broccoli was mushy, and the simple cheese sauce had been thick and rubbery.
“So? The first meal you cooked was all bad. Last night you got one dish right.” He grinned. “You’re making progress.”
She simply stared at him, at that dear, familiar grin, before abruptly turning away. Her hands shook, and she spilled cream on the counter. After cleaning it, she went back to mixing with less force.
“Why don’t you teach me to cook?” Ross suggested.
“Why would you want to learn that? You have one of the best cooks in Buffalo as your personal chef.”
He shrugged. “I happen to have some time on my hands.”
“And you think you have a better chance of getting good food if you’re doing and I’m merely reading from the directions.”
He had the grace to sound guilty, if not contrite. “You said yourself that sometimes you can’t follow directions because your concentration’s out of whack.”
“And I’ve got to learn to deal with those times.” She used a spatula to scrape the mixture into the crust, and was about to place the pie in the oven, when Ross apologetically spoke.
Some Enchanted Season Page 8
