He didn’t like peas. Good to know. For what purpose, she had no idea.
It was time to change the subject. To stop being friends.
Because she wasn’t who he thought she was.
They weren’t even halfway across campus yet.
She had to focus on the job she was there to do.
“I read the most incredible story.” She heard herself say the words before she’d fully decided to utter them. “I was looking up professorial ratings, checking out my botany professor.” She altered the circumstances by which she’d found the information on Sunday to fit her current situation. But she needed to run this by someone—to get another reaction. “And that made me curious about the woman at the top of the ratings charts, so I looked her up.” She was skating a fine line. Melding reality with fiction. Adrianna with Adele.
If she wasn’t careful, people would get hurt.
“They have professorial ratings?”
“Yes. I’m not sure all universities do, but I know that Montford prides itself on maintaining the highest levels of academic excellence. I did a lot of research before choosing a college,” she ad-libbed as she floated close to dangerous waters.
And scooted closer to him to avoid a pedestrian crash. The main sidewalk through campus was crowded, with lanes of students hurrying in all directions. It felt like she and Mark were a bubble in the throng, part of the rest, but separate, too.
“So who was the professor with top marks?” he asked. She couldn’t talk to Will. Or anyone. Her job at Montford completely isolated her. Had Will screwed up beyond her ability to help him? Could she be friends with Mark without letting things go too far? “A woman named Christine Evans. She taught English.”
“As in past tense? She’s not here anymore?”
They turned a corner, embarking on another, less-traveled pathway, and Addy shook her head. “She had a sister, Tory, who drove out here with her when Christine was hired to start her new job as an English professor at Montford. Tory was divorced from a rich, influential, abusive older man. He was after her, which was why she was coming out here to live with Christine in Shelter Valley. Christine, the older sister, thought Tory would be safe here. They were still in New Mexico when the ex-husband’s henchmen found them. There was a car accident and, according to the coroner, Tory was killed.
“But it wasn’t Tory who died in the crash. It was Christine. Afraid for her life, and for the lives of anyone around her were it to be known that she was still alive, Tory allowed the mistaken identity to stand and came to Shelter Valley and assumed her dead sister’s life.”
So much about the story bothered Addy. And not all of it was professional. Or to do with the job. Lines were blurring. Which was why she was talking about the case at all. She, like Tory, was living an assumed life.
Doing something wrong—but for good reason.
But she wasn’t taking on power that didn’t belong to her, wasn’t in a certified position, living a life of duplicity in a way that could directly affect other lives. Was she?
“She taught classes?” Mark asked, his tone suggesting that he found the story engrossing.
He didn’t seem to find it odd that she’d allowed her curiosity to drive her to follow the trail, either.
“Yes, she taught Christine’s full load.”
“She had a doctorate degree, then, too?”
“No. A high school education was as far as she got.”
Mark looked at her as they walked. “Wait a minute. This is the teacher that was at the top of the professorial ratings you were talking about? The ones that prove Montford’s high standard of excellence?”
“Yeah.”
“And she was a fraud?”
“Yes.”
“You said you found an article about it, so I’m assuming she was caught?”
That’s where things got really sticky for Addy.
And for Will.
“In a manner of speaking,” she said. “The abusive ex-husband apparently had a lot of money and he hired detectives to watch Christine, just to verify that they hadn’t pulled a fast one and pretended that Tory was dead. When he heard that Christine was doing so well as a professor, he became convinced of her death and, leaving a note to the effect that if he couldn’t be with her in life, he’d be with her in eternity, he shot himself. Someone who worked for him, but was loyal to Tory, got word to her that he was dead and she immediately came clean.”
They were nearing the parking lot.
“Before the end of the semester?”
“No. Word came during semester break.”
“What happened to all of those students who took her class? A class she didn’t have credentials to teach?”
“They received full credit for the courses they took from her.”
“Can you do that?”
Legally, if the institution determined that they’d met class qualifications of learning, they could. It would be the same as though they’d all tested out of the classes. But ethically?
“They did it.”
“Students could have sued, couldn’t they?”
“Yes. But because they all turned in work to exhibit their mastery of the subject matter, their damages would probably have been negligible.”
Addy froze inside for a second. A college freshman who’d only read an article wouldn’t know that. Would she?
“Did anyone try?”
He didn’t miss a beat—either on the sidewalk, or in their conversation. She started to breathe easier again.
“The article didn’t say.”
And she couldn’t ask Will.
“What about Montford? The university pressed charges, didn’t it?”
“No.” Not that she’d been able to find. There’d been nothing filed, that much she knew. And he’d just hit on the other problem she had where Will was concerned.
Not only did Tory Evans get away with her deceit, she was still right there in town. Married to a Ben Sanders, according to the records Addy had pulled up the previous afternoon. She’d adopted Ben’s daughter and the couple had had a child of their own, too, Phyllis Christine, born in 2001. The child would be twelve now.
More damning, though, was that Ben Sanders was a descendant of the Montford family—town founders and Montford University patriarchs.
And based on what she’d found in the local paper, the Phyllis Tory had stayed with when she’d first come to town was one of Becca Parsons’s best friends. Becca Parsons, as in Will’s wife.
“I’d say they’re lucky no one pressed charges.”
Not the words she’d wanted to hear. But exactly the same conclusion she’d drawn.
It appeared to Addy, with sickening dread, that Will Parsons had played favorites. That if his anonymous threats had anything at all to do with Tory Evans, he could have a tough road ahead of him. She figured he had a fair chance of winning—but the battle wouldn’t be easy. And he could lose his job.
Addy was really beginning to regret coming back to Shelter Valley.
For more reasons than one.
* * *
ON THURSDAY, NONNIE volunteered Mark to change Addy’s oil. The truck was due. He’d mentioned taking care of it before work. And before he knew what was happening, his grandmother had called Addy and told her Mark would be changing the oil on her car, too, while he was at it.
He could only hear one half of the conversation, but figured Addy was trying to refuse when he heard the old biddy say, �
�I can’t let you do for me if you won’t let us do favors back,” in a pleading voice that didn’t come naturally to her at all. She’d never have gotten away with it if she’d been talking to him.
“No, really, he’ll have the oil pan out there, anyway. Won’t matter if he lets a little extra drip in.”
Sitting at the table, finishing the tuna sandwich she’d had waiting for him when he’d come in from class, Mark shook his head. He was going to have a serious talk with his grandmother.
Words at the ready, he waited for her to get off the phone. Seeing him, she wheeled down the hall toward her bathroom, assuring Addy that he’d know what kind of oil to get and she could settle up with him later.
By the time she hung up, she was in the bathroom with the door firmly locked behind her.
The ploy might have worked if he hadn’t just helped her change her padded undergarment half an hour before.
“Nonnie.” Standing outside the door, he used his most serious tone on her.
“I’m busy.”
“No, you aren’t. Come out here.”
“Nope.”
“What you do in my life is our business,” he said through the door. “You can’t interfere in someone else’s life.”
“Who’s interfering? I’m being neighborly, is all.”
The toilet flushed. She could be going. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t lift herself onto the seat and back to her chair. On her good days. She just didn’t have the capacity to hold it long enough to get herself there and situated sometimes.
Thinking of the struggle Nonnie had just managing life’s most basic functions, Mark felt his frustration drain away. He waited to make sure that she made it back to her chair okay, and let himself out to run downtown for more motor oil.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“I SWEAR I’M NOT stalking you,” Mark said in lieu of a greeting as Addy stepped out the door Thursday afternoon.
Sitting on the low wall in front of her unit, she watched as he slid a plastic box under her car, used pliers to loosen something up and guided the center of the box to catch the flow of used and dirty oil.
“I know you’re not,” she said, enjoying the break from the personnel files she’d been perusing all afternoon. Pleasingly boring files belonging to well-qualified people.
“I want to warn you, she’s probably cooking up some plan to get you and me together.”
“As long as we know it’s not going to happen, there’s no harm in her meddling. We both understand and accept it for what it is.”
His grin warmed her more than the bright sun shining down on them. She should go in.
But she didn’t feel right leaving him all alone to tend to her vehicle.
“I hate to think what she says about me when I’m not around to defend myself,” Mark said, leaning back against his truck, which was parked in the driveway next to her car.
“I can tell you one thing she never mentions,” she said. “Your grandmother never mentions any of your friends.”
“She didn’t think they were good enough for me.”
“You don’t agree?”
“No. I grew up with them. Some of them are like family to me.”
“Any one more family than the others?”
She handed Mark the glass of tea from the tray she’d carried out and he sipped. “I was closer to some than others.”
“Did you have a woman you were closer to than others?”
It wasn’t her business. Absolutely not her business.
But if she knew, she could stop obsessing about it. Could stop wondering if there were late-night phone calls. If some afternoon she might come home to find a strange woman on their shared doorstep.
If she knew his heart was taken, she could stop imagining him naked.
He crossed his ankles, studied his flip-flops. “I did.”
“As in past tense?”
Squinting in the sunshine, he looked at her. “I asked her to marry me. She turned me down.”
Was the woman daft? “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not sure that I was ready to marry her. I just didn’t want to leave her high and dry.”
“Not much of a reason to marry.”
“I was deciding whether or not to come out here,” he said. “We’d been seeing each other a couple of years. I’d reached a turning point. I wanted her to know that I hadn’t just been using her until something better in life came along.”
“Like a scholarship offer.”
“Like anything.”
“Do you love her?”
“I care about her, yeah.”
She needed him to love the woman—so much that there’d be no chance for anything to develop between them.
So much that she could go to dinner with him as they’d planned and know that this was the only meal they’d ever share.
“Obviously you care or you wouldn’t have spent two years with her. But do you love her?”
She was watching him. Waiting for an answer to a question she had no right to ask.
“I don’t really have anything to compare it to,” he finally said. “But if I had to swear on the good book, I’d probably say no. I’m not pining away for her and it seems like I should be if I were in love with her. If there is such a thing.”
“You don’t believe in love?”
“Not in society’s prettied-up version of it. Television, romance novels, even the classics would have you believe that there’s some magical feeling that’s going to descend upon you and sweep you away to a place where the feeling will never fade and it will sustain you through all things and at all times.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a fairy tale. And before you ask, I don’t believe Cinderella is a true story or that there’s a Santa Claus, either.”
“What do you believe in?”
“Loyalty. When you commit to someone, you follow through on that commitment.”
“Like you do with Nonnie.”
“Like my grandmother has always done for me.” His tone was sharper than usual.
Uncrossing his ankles, Mark straightened, handed her the glass of tea and buried his head beneath her hood.
Taking the hint, Addy told him he could leave her keys in the mailbox and carried her tray back inside.
* * *
MARK CHANGED THE OIL on both vehicles, cleaned up, got ready for work and, after kissing Nonnie on the cheek while she napped, slipped out of the house half an hour early.
The smart thing would have been to head straight for the truck, but he didn’t even make it down the steps. He knocked on Addy’s front door and handed her back her keys.
“I’m sorry,” he said as she took the key ring from him. “I’m not used to talking about myself.”
“Why would you need to? Everyone in Bierly has known you since you were born.”
She had a point.
“Nonnie told me that you had it rough. She said your mother left home when she was sixteen and came back a year later, nine months pregnant with you.”
The skin on his face tightened. Just as he’d feared, his grandmother was spilling all his secrets.
“What else did she tell you about my parents?”
“Nothing.”
“I have no idea who my father was....” The truth stuck in his throat. He’d been sired by a male so irresponsible he hadn’t bothered to wait around to see if he’d been a boy or a girl. Or even born alive.
And if Addy was going to hear about it, he wanted it to be from him. She stood hugging her door and the empathetic look in her eyes drew him right in.
“Nonnie got pregnant with my mother in high school,” he said. “Her dad had been killed on the farm and her mom didn’t have anything extra to give her. It took all they had to live and pay taxes on the farm once it was no longer being farmed. Nonnie had to quit school and start cocktailing to make ends meet.”
“Nonnie said she was a bartender.”
“Mom grew up in the bar.”
“Did you, too?”
“Nonnie never let me inside the place. The one time I disobeyed and marched in the front door demanding to see her, I got a butt whipping that I’ve never forgotten.”
His face completely serious, he shook his head. “Nonnie felt responsible for every bad choice my mother made, and made certain that she made up for every one of them with me.”
“How old were you when you went to the bar?” she asked softly.
“Seven.”
He had to get to work. To quit thinking about this woman and focus on the business of building his temporary life in Shelter Valley. To concentrate on getting good grades and earning the money they needed for Nonnie’s co-payments and general care.
“And your mother. Do you still hear from her? Does she know you’ve moved? Has she ever helped with Nonnie?”
“She wrapped her car around a tree when I was twelve. Drunk driving. She died instantly. Thank God she didn’t take anyone else with her.”
Adele’s silence eased the constriction inside him. Until she said, “This woman you left in Bierly, what’s her name?”
“Ella.”
“Are you still in touch with her?”
This was not front porch conversation.
“Depends.”
Frowning, she asked, “It depends? Either you’re in touch or you aren’t. What does that depend on?”
It occurred to him that for someone who didn’t want a relationship, she was showing a good bit of interest in his love life.
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