“Is this were Dr. Stephen lives?”
She checked her smile in the rearview—steady enough for a little girl—then faced her. “Yep.”
Clary unbuckled her harness in the time it took Macy to unhook her seatbelt and open the door. Clary scrambled over the console and the driver’s seat, then jumped to the ground, raising little puffs of dust in the soft dirt. They’d reached Stephen’s door and Clary had banged on the wooden frame of the screen before Macy had time to second-guess coming here. He might be writing. Sunday could be his day to sleep in until noon, or he could be getting ready for church or have plans with someone else.
A welcoming bark sounded inside, then the door opened. It was a toss-up whose greeting was more excited—Clary’s or Scooter’s. Though Stephen’s was much quieter, just a smile that sent warmth all the way to her toes, it persuaded Macy of two things. She wasn’t interrupting his morning, and he hadn’t played some weird mind game with her keys last night. Granted, Mark had fooled her, but she’d learned to be cautious as a result. If Stephen knew about her inpatient care, if he’d moved the keys to screw with her, she was ten times the fool Mark had made her. Something deep inside, something primal and instinctive, said she wasn’t that big a fool. She could trust this man.
Which meant there’d been an intruder—not likely with the alarm always armed—or a ghost or she couldn’t trust herself.
“What brings you two pretty girls to our place this morning?” Stephen asked.
“We wanna do something fun,” Clary replied.
He unlatched the screen door and held it open for them to enter. Scooter hesitated a moment as if he couldn’t quite resist the lure of freedom, but in the end the lure of playing with Clary won out. “I can think of a lot of fun things to do,” Stephen murmured as Macy followed her daughter inside. “We’d have to ditch the little one for some of them.”
This time the intensity on his face ignited the heat. She resisted the urge to fan herself because common sense told her the temperature rise was all internal. With the windows open and the ceiling fan whirring, the small living room was perfectly comfortable.
“No ditching,” she said just as quietly. “My baby said, ‘But I wanna do something fun with yooouu, Mama.’ I was thinking we’d start with breakfast.”
“Hmm. I have protein bars and coffee. I’m not sure I want to see Little Bit on caffeine.”
“It’s not a pretty sight. I thought maybe the four of us could go to Ellie’s, then do...something.”
His laughter was genuine. “Have you forgotten what constitutes fun, Macy?”
“Back in Charleston, we’d go to the beach or to the Battery downtown or visit one of the historic sites.”
“Here we go to the lake or the parks or to the square downtown or visit one of the historic sites. We have an active historical society, the botanical society’s gardens are in full bloom and we even have a couple of museums. Oh, wait, I bet you worked on all of those, didn’t you?”
Because he was standing so close and it had been her standard response to Brent’s teasing, and because he was right, she smacked him on the shoulder. “We could just take Scooter and leave you here, you know.”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t have near as much fun.” He grinned and turned toward the bedroom off the living room. “Just let me change.”
“Into what? Another white T-shirt?”
His only response was a childish tongue stuck out.
He was back in a couple of minutes in a clean white T-shirt and denim shorts that still bore the creases from being folded.
Clary chatted all the way to the restaurant and was thrilled to help hold Scooter’s leash on the walk from the car. They were seated at a wrought-iron table and chairs, patterns mismatched, in the shade of a crape myrtle. It would be a beautiful setting when the tree was in bloom, though the dropped blossoms would make regular cleanup a necessity.
It was Ellie Maricci herself who took their order, greeting Stephen affectionately, making a big deal over Clary and Scooter and hugging Macy. “I’m glad to see you back here. It’s been way too long.”
A strange sensation swept through Macy, both pleasant and alien. She’d gotten dozens of hugs at Mark’s funeral, but since then, physical contact was pretty much limited to her immediate family—and, now, Stephen. Like Anamaria’s embrace at the park her first day back, Ellie’s hug felt nice and genuine.
“Are you here to stay?”
Aware of Stephen’s gaze on her, Macy shrugged. “I don’t really... There’s so much to do before I think about...”
At least it wasn’t a flat, certain refusal. Stephen would probably find optimism in that.
“I can imagine. But it would be a shame to deprive the young boys of Copper Lake the pleasure of knowing Clary. She’s going to be a heartbreaker someday.” Ellie grinned and winked at Clary, who did her best to wink back, then switched from friend to server mode. “What can I get you folks today?”
* * *
Copper Lake on a pretty spring Sunday was at its best. With little to no touch-up, it could more than do justice to the cover of a glossy tourist brochure. Flowers were blooming, the square was neatly manicured, the war memorials gleamed and the river lazily flowed. Cars filled church parking lots, and delicious aromas drifted on the air as restaurants geared up for the after-church crowds. It was welcoming. Peaceful.
It was home, Stephen realized. Because of his mom’s regular moves, he’d never developed a connection to the places they lived. What was the point when he knew they would be moving on before long? But this town... It had been luck that brought him here, and now he wanted to stay. He belonged.
If only Macy felt the same.
They’d done nothing special—a leisurely breakfast, play on the toys at the riverfront park, a walk around downtown showing Clary her hometown. They didn’t call it that to her, of course. She regarded this visit as a vacation, a trip to a strange place to do boring stuff before returning to the only home she remembered.
How would she feel when Macy took her away from that home? She was three. She would miss her grandparents and Brent and Anne, but she would adapt. He was proof that the ability to adapt was a good thing.
As they approached the square, Clary pointed to River’s Edge across the street. “Is that a church?”
“No, sweetie. It used to be a house. Now people have parties there.”
“It’s a big house,” she said dubiously.
“Yes, it is,” Macy agreed. She didn’t mention that Clary owned such a house herself. It would be one more of those things she didn’t understand.
Clary turned her head and sniffed the air, like a hound on a hunt. “I smell cookies.”
Stephen sniffed, too. “I smell fresh-ground Topeca.”
“Can we have a cookie, Mama? And some whatever he said?”
Macy gave them both reproving looks, then faced A Cuppa Joe, and her own nose delicately twitched. “Coffee.” Though she’d had a cup with her when they picked up him and Scooter, plus another cup with breakfast, she practically sighed the word. “Okay,” she said sternly. “One cup, one cookie. And something besides coffee for you, Clary.”
They turned the corner, where a couple of tables and chairs flanked the coffee-shop door. Stephen looped Scooter’s leash over an iron hook set into the wall, then held the door for his girls.
His girls. He liked the sound of that.
There was never anything simple about a coffee run in Copper Lake. Both Joe Saldana and his wife, Liz, were working, and their dogs were patients of Stephen’s. They knew Macy, too, and talked warmly with her while Clary narrowed her choice of treat from the entire refrigerated case to a row of brightly decorated cookies. With Liz’s help, she settled on a sugar cookie as big as her head decorated like a watermelon. As Stephen picked up the tray, Joe tossed on a couple of dog biscuits for Scooter.
“You gotta love a place that takes care of their four-footed customers,” Stephen said as he maneuvered the tray onto
one of the outdoor tables.
“You gotta love a place whose coffee smells this good.” Macy cupped both hands to the ceramic mug—A Cuppa Joe was big into recycling, reducing and reusing—but all she’d done so far was sniff the steam rising. Could he put a similar supremely content look on her face, given the chance?
He’d like to think so, but Joe’s coffee was hard to compete with.
“Did you sleep well last night?” he asked after dragging a chair to the two-person table for Clary. The kid didn’t bother sitting in it but crouched next to it, feeding Scooter his cookies one half at a time—and slipping a few bites of her own in, too, if the green frosting on Scooter’s beard was anything to judge by.
He looked back at Macy in time to see her shoulders stiffen slightly. If he hadn’t spent much of the past six days with her, he might have missed it entirely. But her hands didn’t tremble as she took a sip of Topeca’s Manzano blend, then set the mug on the table, and her face didn’t show any emotion beyond pure appreciation for a cup of El Salvador’s best coffee.
“I did. It was nice having Clary to cuddle with.” She gazed across the street as a couple of teenage boys jogged through to River Road, then met his eyes again. “But when I got up this morning, I couldn’t find my keys. I leave them on the kitchen island. I always have. But we finally found them on the mantel underneath the wedding portrait.”
He faked an accusing look. “Were you planning to scratch out your faces with the keys? ’Cause I’ve got to tell you, car keys weren’t made for destroying canvas and oil. Now that your brother’s here, we’ll get a ladder and have that bonfire you were talking about.”
Her smile was unsteady. “I don’t remember putting them there.”
He wasn’t sure why that was so important to her, but he shrugged. “You forgot. You were preoccupied. It happens all the time. My mom once found hers in the medicine cabinet, and Dr. Yates left his once in a cat’s crate. The cat and his owner were halfway to California by the time she found them.”
“I’m not normally forgetful.”
He curled his fingers around hers. “But this isn’t a normal time for you, is it?”
“No,” she agreed with another weak smile.
Stephen couldn’t help but wonder why the incident troubled her more than he understood. But if there was a subtle way to ask, he couldn’t think of it, so he just went with straightforward. “Tell me why it bothers you so much.”
Her gaze drifted away—not an obvious shift, as if she didn’t want him to see her eyes, just sort of moving off toward the square, but he would bet his first-ever book tour, if it ever materialized, hiding was exactly the reason.
“You’ll think I’m crazy. The hell of it is, I might be.”
His natural snort faded away. She wasn’t laughing, wasn’t teasing. The smile was just barely there, wobbling, and even with her head turned away, he could see the heat in her cheeks and the glistening in her eyes. He tightened his grip on her hand, not too tight, just letting her know he was there. No matter what.
A long time passed before she looked at him again. “You had a front-row seat for the intruder-in-the-guesthouse show. The night we went to Fair Winds, when I got home, I couldn’t find the contract I’d left in the living room. It finally turned up in Mark’s office. A day or two later, I threw a bottle of his cologne into the trash, and it reappeared in his closet, where he’d always kept it. Then my keys...”
So that was all it was. Worry over incidents that probably wouldn’t mean anything if they’d happened anywhere else. But to happen in the house she’d shared with her suicidal husband, while trying to deal with closing that part of her life and opening a new one...
“A couple of incidents don’t make you unbalanced, Macy. Stress manifests itself in strange ways. You probably just forgot because you need to forget. That’s part of what this trip is about for you.” He snorted self-deprecatingly. “I’m not a people doctor, but I’m happy to diagnose and give advice.”
“I’d be happy to accept your diagnosis and advice, except...” She glanced at Clary leaning against the wall, Scooter’s head in her lap, and the tears glistened again. “This is a really bad time to have this conversation.”
“Want to drop her off at home?” Because he really didn’t want to put it off. These kinds of confidences didn’t come easy, and he didn’t want to give her a chance to reassess and decide she didn’t trust him enough to share. He wanted her trust. He needed it.
His mother hadn’t raised him and Marnie in church, but he believed in God, miracles, divine intervention. At that moment it came in the form of Anamaria Calloway and her two children, waving from across the street. “Hey Doc! Hey Doc!” Will called while his younger sister vacillated. “Scooter! Doc!”
Despite the seriousness of the conversation a few seconds ago, Stephen couldn’t have stopped the smile crossing his face if he wanted to. Will and Gloriana, and their mother and father, were among his favorite people in town, and their yellow Labs, Lucky and Ducky, yes, named by the kids, were two of the biggest characters in his practice.
“Will thinks my name is Hey Doc,” he said quietly to Macy as the Calloways started across the street, “and Gloriana couldn’t care less what it is as long as Scooter’s around.” His smile broadened as they stepped onto the curb, released their mother’s hands and rushed over for a hug. “Hey, guys, how are you?”
Gloriana returned his hug, then immediately turned to Scooter and Clary. “I know you. You’re her little girl.” She pointed at Macy.
“Who are you?” Clary asked.
“I’m her little girl.” Now her finger turned to Anamaria.
Fidgeting in front of Stephen, Will claimed his attention. “Hey Doc, guess what? Mama let us skip the boring part of church. She made Daddy stay, though. Said he needed it more.”
From what Stephen had heard about Robbie Calloway’s life pre-Anamaria, that was probably true.
“We’re not being total heathens,” Anamaria said. “We’re having Robbie’s birthday dinner this afternoon, so we’re down here to pick up the cake from Ellie’s. Just the very immediate family, and I think it’s going to be twenty-some people.”
“Sounds like fun. Tell Robbie happy birthday.”
“I will.” Anamaria rested her hand on Macy’s shoulder, studying her intently. People said the woman was a psychic, and Stephen figured it wasn’t his place to say yes or no. There were more mysteries in the world, blah blah. After a moment, she bent to hug Macy. “We have a few minutes before the cake’s ready. Can we borrow Clary and Scooter for a little play in the square?”
Psychic, intuitive or just an insightful woman—Stephen didn’t care. At that moment he adored her.
Macy hesitated until the kids, including her own, started clamoring. Finally she nodded. He thought her reluctance might have as much to do with the conversation that awaited them as it did with letting Clary go off.
Linking hands, the kids headed off with Anamaria, Scooter trotting alongside with his leash in both girls’ hands. Stephen watched until they were in the square proper then turned his gaze to Macy. “You can see her and make sure she’s safe, and she can’t overhear a thing. You believe in fate?”
“I guess I do.” She shifted in the chair then folded her hands together. It took her a long time to start, but he didn’t push. Skittish creatures tended to push back or flee entirely.
“I told you last night that I—I lost the baby I was carrying when Mark died.”
He didn’t need to be particularly insightful to know she’d said those words to very few people. They were still difficult for her. They still tore at the raw place in her heart.
“I also, in a sense, lost Clary. I was hugely depressed. I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, not even to feed or dress my daughter. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel. I didn’t care if I lived or died. The only times I wasn’t depressed, I was in a constant panic, almost manic in my behavior. I would get up at two in the morning and scrub the
bricks in the fireplace because if I didn’t keep busy, I felt like I would explode out of my skin.” She gazed at her hands as if searching for telltale signs of that frantic scrubbing, grimaced, then went on.
“I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t stop imagining horrible things happening to Clary, to my family. I tried to anticipate every disaster, every tiny little mistake. I couldn’t bear to let her out of my sight. Then the anxiety would fade—though it never went away—and the depression would come back. I wouldn’t bathe, wouldn’t eat. It was too much effort to even open my eyes most of the time, but even then, there was a little voice in my head, warning me of all the ways I could lose Clary. I didn’t have the ability to act on it, but it wouldn’t leave me alone.” Her voice trembled, her breath catching. Across the street, Clary called to her, and she looked up, smiling tightly, waving to her daughter.
“Finally, in a rare lucid moment, I asked my parents to hospitalize me, so they did. They committed me to a psychiatric hospital in Columbia.”
Stephen wanted to look away, to close his eyes, to take some time to process her bleak words, but he kept his gaze on hers. The shadows in her eyes were haunted, sad enough to make him need to gather her into his arms and never let go. He settled for tightening his fingers around hers.
“You’d been through a lot, Macy. Your husband’s suicide, losing your baby, Miss Willa’s death, all in a month. It’s no wonder your brain shut down for a while. You needed time to deal with it.”
“I wanted so badly to just go back a few months, a year. To wake up and find myself back in Copper Lake, still happily married to the man I knew in college, because he was definitely not that man at the end. But instead the doctors forced me to move forward—and Clary. She was a powerful incentive. I got out of bed for her. I took medications for her. I sat through hundreds of hours of therapy for her. I knew by then that she might not need me, but I damn well needed her.”
He wanted to argue the statement that Clary didn’t need her. She was her mother; she adored her; of course Clary needed her. But the girl had been barely one and a half when her father died, when Macy was hospitalized. She would have adapted to being raised by her grandparents, or to being Brent and Anne’s daughter.
Copper Lake Confidential Page 16
