by Carole Buck
“Ex.”
“What?”
“Ex-junkie. Ex-whore. Ex-convict.”
Dee’s eyes had widened as though she’d been shocked that Leigh was able to utter the word “whore” without choking on it. Leigh had let the reaction pass unremarked. The explanation for her equanimity—that she’d heard herself labeled much worse the night the man to whom she’d given her heart had been taken from her—was something she hadn’t been able to share.
“This is some kind of pity thing, right?” the redhead had accused, taking another tack. “You feel sorry for me and my ‘dysfunctional’ background.”
“I don’t think I’d dare.”
“Then why the hell did you hire me?”
Leigh had lifted her chin, accepting the challenge by offering one of her own. “Why not, Dee? Did you answer my Help Wanted ad because you thought you were unqualified?”
“No!”
“Did you accept my offer intending to screw up at the first opportunity?”
“Of course not!” Dee had flushed violently, her eyes turning glassy with anguish and outrage. “I wanted this job so much I could taste it! And not just because my only other choice was slinging hash at some stupid roadhouse, either. I like books. I didn’t much when I was in school, but I do now. Books take you places. They teach you stuff. They make you believe you can change the world if you try hard enough. And as for screwing up—God! I’ve been working my butt off for you, lady! I come in early. I stay late. I bring home the inventory lists to memorize so I can know everything you have in stock. I even read reviews so I can tell people what’s good and what’s garbage. You couldn’t have somebody better than me working for you, and you damned well know it!”
“You’re right,” Leigh had concurred, unruffled. She’d understood that the outburst was proof of the intensity of Dee’s feelings. “I do know it. I knew it when I hired you.”
The redhead had stared at her mutely for several seconds, shivering visibly as the residue of her anger drained away. Finally, her face milky pale, her voice fragile as a blown-glass bubble, she’d asked, “R-Really?”
“Really.”
“You’re not bull—uh—fooling me?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I was the b-best applicant you had?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Let me guess.” Dee’s mouth had twisted. “The other ones were so dumb they couldn’t spell AT & T without a dictionary.”
Although the hurt she’d heard lurking behind the humor had made it difficult, Leigh had smiled. She’d’realized it was expected. Then she’d replied, “The competition was pretty tough, actually. I think the deciding factor was your listing the Bible, To Kill a Mockingbird and Green Eggs and Ham as your three favorite books.”
“I…almost crossed the last one out.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. It made me certain everything else you wrote down was true.”
“Oh, it was.” Dee’s expression had turned pleading. Almost desperate. “It is. Every single word on my application is God’s own truth, Ms. McKay. I swear it.”
“Leigh, please. Call me Leigh.”
“Are you…sure?”
“Very.”
“All right. L-Leigh, then.”
Things had improved considerably after that episode. But now…
“Dee?” Leigh began softly, chiding herself for not picking up on her assistant’s agitation earlier. “Is there something you’d like to talk about?”
“No,” the redhead said flatly, shuffling a rack of paperbacks into alphabetical order. She was obsessive about keeping the store’s merchandise properly organized.
“I can see you’re upset—”
“Can you?” The question, was accompanied by a short, sharp glance.
Leigh recoiled from the accusation in her assistant’s eyes. Dee had looked at her as though she felt she’d been betrayed at some fundamental and unforgivable level.
But why?
“Dee,” she tried again, doing her best to keep her voice steady. Whatever was going on, it clearly was a lot more serious than one of her assistant’s periodic attacks of self-doubt and ultradefensiveness. “I’m sorry. I realize I’ve been…distracted…today. I didn’t mean to be insensitive toward you. If you’ve got a problem, please, let me try to help you.” She made a gesture of supplication. “I think we know each other well enough—”
“I don’t.”
“Don’t…what?”
“Know you well enough. I thought I did, but I was wrong.”
The look of accusation was back in Dee’s eyes. And there was something else, as well. It was disillusionment, Leigh realized with a shock. Bleak, bitter disillusionment.
“I don’t understand,” she said after a few moments, deeply shaken. If truth be told, she hadn’t believed her assistant capable of being disillusioned. Of being hurt, yes. Dee was vulnerable in a great many ways. But she didn’t seem to trust anyone or anything. And if a person didn’t trust, he or she couldn’t be let down or disillusioned.
Or so Leigh McKay had assumed.
Dee’s thin face contorted. She looked terribly young, yet horribly used up. For a moment she appeared to be on the verge of tears. Then she swallowed convulsively and said in a halfstrangled tone, “I never thought you were like me, Leigh.”
“Like…you?”
“Y-yes.” Dee jerked her head up and down. “You know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“With men!”
Men?
“You had him at your house Saturday night, didn’t you?” Dee blurted out. “That John Gulliver. You had him. And Andy was there!”
Leigh felt the blood drain out of her cheeks. She swayed slightly, her vision blurring as though she might black out. As she fought against the swirling dizziness, a complex combination of emotions buffeted her. Anger was part of the equation. So was shame. Not so much because of what she’d done; more because of what she’d contemplated doing.
“No,” she managed to choke out.
“Yes!” the other woman disputed, growing more distraught. “I thought you were good! In all the time I’ve worked for you, you n-never once—I never saw or heard—never, Leigh! Never any men. And I wanted—You were my model, don’t you see? When I went through rehab, the counselors said we should find p-people to look up to. So I found you. From the first day I came into the bookstore, I wanted to be like y-you. Just like you. Only now I find out you’re just like m-m-me!”
There was a disastrous silence.
“Oh…Dee,” Leigh finally said, her throat tight and aching. The impulse toward swooning had passed. She now felt as though she’d been dropped into an earthquake zone equipped with nothing more than a dented teaspoon and an order to restore the landscape. “Oh, honey. I…I had no idea. No idea at all.”
The redhead had begun to cry. Huge tears rolled down her cheeks. “You weren’t—” a sodden hiccup was punctuated by a long sniffle “—s-s-supposed to.”
Another silence.
“Okay,” Leigh said at last, slipping a supportive arm around her sobbing assistant. “Shh. Shh.” She patted and stroked the younger woman in much the same way she’d patted and stroked Andy when he’d broken down in the clinic examining room after his playground accident. Had that been just one week ago? she questioned fleetingly. Lord! It seemed like a lifetime. “It’s okay, Dee.”
“N-n-no…it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.” Leigh glanced toward the front door, coming to a snap decision. Some things were more important than busi- ness. “Look, honey. I want you to go into my office, all right? I’m going to lock up the shop. Then I’ll come back to you and we can talk.”
“There’s nuh-huh—” another hiccup “—nothing to t-t-talk about.”
“There most certainly is.” Leigh patted the other woman again, instinctively slipping into her mom-in-charge mode. “Now, go. There’s a box of tissues in my bottom right-hand drawer. Use all you need.”
While
Dee had pretty much stopped crying by the time Leigh joined her in the back office, her emotions were still obviously raw. Leigh sighed inwardly, bracing herself for the possibility of another outburst. She also prayed for the wisdom to undo the harm she feared she’d unwittingly caused through her failure to comprehend what had been going on inside her assistant’s head.
Deirdre Bleeker had chosen her as a role model? she thought, still stunned by the notion. Lord! What a mess!
“I’m…s-sorry,” Dee apologized, blotting her nose with a damp wad of tissue. She was hunched over in Leigh’s desk chair, trembling like a whipped puppy. Her eyes were red and puffy. Her skin was blotchy. She looked as bad as she’d ever looked, and that was saying something.
“Sorry for what?” Leigh countered gently, gesturing the shaky redhead back into the chair when she started to get up. She’d tried to formulate some kind of agenda while she’d been locking the shop. She’d decided that her first task was to make an effort to explain why John Gulliver had spent Saturday night—and a good chunk of Sunday—at her home. Second on her list was finding a way to deal with Dee’s distorted image of her. Telling the truth would help her in terms of the former. But when it came to the latter…
“Sorry for everything.”
“I think that’s a bit much, honey.”
Dee snuffled moistly into the tissues and glanced toward the television on the corner of Leigh’s desk. “You’re missing your show,” she remarked irrelevantly.
Leigh glanced toward the set, startled to see it was on. The amnesiac bride-to-be was on the screen, apparently suffering some kind of flashback. Her prospective groom—or was it the prospective groom’s evil twin?—was arguing with her.
“Oh. That.” She reached over and turned off the TV, genuinely indifferent to the melodramatic proceedings. “Who needs soap operas?” she asked rhetorically, leaning against the edge of the desk.
Dee blew her nose. “People with lousy lives?” she suggested, balling up the tissues she’d been using and tossing them into the wastebasket to the left of the desk.
Leigh stiffened slightly, but decided after a second or two that the response had been prompted by misery, not malice. “Could be,” she agreed in a neutral voice, then drew a steadying breath. “Let’s start with John Gulliver, all right? Where did you hear about his spending Saturday night at my house?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does.” Although Leigh made the assertion firmly, she was inclined to think Dee might be right. Still. She wanted to know. She figured she might as well start with the most obvious suspect. “Was it from Wes Warren?”
The redhead’s eyes filled again. She grabbed another handful of tissues and swiped at them with clumsy strokes. “Not…exactly.”
“What does that mean, Dee?”
“Well—” she gave a sniff “—I went to church yesterday morning, just like I always do. There weren’t as many people as usual because of the snow.” Another sniff. “And things got started a little late because Father Purcell had to find a replacement altar boy. While I was waiting for the service to begin, I heard these two women behind me talking. I’m not sure who they were. I…I didn’t want to turn around and look.”
“These woman were talking about me?”
“Yeah. One of them said she’d seen you and Andy having dinner Saturday night with a man who had scars on his temple and neck.”
Leigh didn’t bother trying to puzzle out the identities of the churchgoing gossipers. She’d spotted about a half-dozen women she knew—or at least vaguely recognized—at the restaurant.
“How did you make the leap from my having dinner with John Gulliver to his staying overnight at my house and doing…whatever?” she pressed.
“You don’t really want to hear.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Okay.” Dee heaved a weary-sounding sigh and dabbed at her nostrils. “I went back to church for my fellowship meeting about seven. We’ve been collecting old toys and fixing them up to give away at Christmas. Last night we were supposed to finish wrapping them. Thalia Jenkins from the preschool was there. So was her cousin, Edith. She’s a housekeeper at that inn on the outskirts of town.”
Leigh grimaced, beginning to sense where this meandering monologue was heading. The local grapevine. Her relocation inspector had warned her about the dangers of getting ensnared in it. Small-town gossips should not be underestimated, he’d said, then suggested that more than a few of them could give the FBI lessons in effective interrogation techniques and intelligence gathering.
He’d smiled slightly when he’d made this observation, but Leigh hadn’t gotten the impression that he’d been joking.
“Anyway,” the redhead continued, “Thalia started talking about Andy’s accident, going on and on about how this dynamic stranger—John Gulliver—had shown up out of nowhere and saved the day. Then Edith chimed in to say that he’s been a guest at the inn for about a week. He only got a room because somebody canceled out at the last minute. He said he’s intending to stay through Christmas, only he arrived with nothing but an overnight bag and a very fancy laptop computer. I guess that seemed sort of suspicious. Then he flashed one of those platinum credit cards and ID proving he owns this travel agency down south somewhere, so it was all okay. A day or so later he got about a dozen overnight deliveries from a bunch of catalog places. Clothes, mostly, according to Edith. And not cheap stuff, either.”
“I see,” Leigh responded slowly. She gnawed on her lower lip, temporarily diverted from her exploration of the question of how Dee—and, she suspected, most of the people in townhad discovered that she’d had an overnight guest to a consideration of the information she’d just been given.
While her assistant’s recitation hadn’t contradicted the sketchy explanation John had offered for his presence in the area in any substantive way, there was something…odd about it, she reflected with a trace of uneasiness. Then again, maybe John Gulliver’s investments were lucrative enough to underwrite the kind of impulsively eccentric behavior she’d just heard described.
Nicholas Marchand had had an extravagant streak, she suddenly recalled. Accustomed to living on a budget that had been calculated down to the penny, Suzanne Whitney had found his free-spending ways more than a little shocking. Although being on the receiving end of the generosity that had earned him the sobriquet “Saint” Nick had been exciting—
Stop it! Stop it right now!
“Wh-what?” Dee asked uncertainly, the wad of tissue she’d been wielding falling from her fingers and into her lap.
Leigh clenched the edge of the desk with white-knuckled force, hoping she hadn’t spoken her panicked self-command aloud.
“Nothing,” she said after a moment. “Go on.”
“Are you—”
“Please, Dee. Just finish your story.”
“All right.” The redhead retrieved the tissues she’d dropped and began shredding them. “There’s not that much more, anyway. Edith doesn’t usually work Sundays but she got called in for a few hours because the inn was short-staffed. She said she didn’t mind because she could use the overtime, what with Christmas coming and all that. When she let herself into John Gulliver’s room—Thalia had asked her to make a special point of looking after him, you see, because of Andy—she realized it was exactly the way it’d been when she’d turned down the bed the evening before. She got worried and phoned the front desk. The manager said Mr. Gulliver had called earlier to explain that he’d had car trouble and got stuck spending the night someplace else.”
“And you assumed that it was my house, with me and my son.”
Dee averted her face, her pasty cheeks flooding with color. “I saw W-Wes this morning. I stopped in at the café to get a muffin and he was there. He…he mentioned something about having to come out to your place with a tow truck.”
“John really did have car trouble, Dee.”
“Yeah.” The flush got darker. “Wes…said.”
“
And he spent the night downstairs, on my sofa.”
“Wes said that, t-too.”
“Wes said?”
Dee looked at her again. “That…h-he said.”
“‘He’ being John?” Leigh frowned, thinking back. Andy had tromped into the house right after Wes had arrived. He’d been grumbling about something, but she hadn’t really paid much attention. John had come in a few minutes later and announced that he was going to ride back to town with Wes. He’d seemed edgy. Very different from the man who’d taught her son how to make crispy pancakes with shredded potatoes. And when he’d kissed her goodbye…
She brought her right hand to her lips, a tremor running through her. John’s kiss had been brief but unexpectedly potent. It had also been imbued with a possessiveness that had provoked a very confused response from her. She hadn’t known whether she’d wanted to succumb to the embrace or struggle against it.
John had lifted his mouth from hers before she’d arrived at the point where she would have had to make a choice. Gazing up into his dark eyes, she’d experienced that same disorienting rush of connection she’d first experienced in the clinic’s examining room less than a week before. Who are you? she’d almost asked. And why do I feel as though I know you?
“Thank you…Leigh,” he’d told her, his raspy voice a note or two lower than it had been, his inflection of her name exquisitely careful. “For everything.”
And then he’d left.
“‘He’ being…J-John,” Dee confirmed, beginning to tear the shredded tissues into even tinier pieces.
“Wes didn’t believe him?”
“I…uh…”
“You didn’t believe him.”
Dee’s fingers froze. She dipped her head, her throat working. “I s-saw how he looked at you,” she muttered. “That day at story hour. And I saw how y-you looked at him.”
“Which means you don’t believe me.”
The redhead looked up, her face pale again, her eyes huge and haunted. “I want to, Leigh.”
“But if I’ve been with a man I can’t be trusted?”
“I’m s-s-sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” Leigh said, a rush of compassion welling up within her. She’d realized that her assistant had been damaged by what she’d done and had been done to her, of course. But she hadn’t until now understood how bad the damage was.
