As Penelope had said, forty-five years meant nothing. Colt was still real to his younger brother. The loss, the questions, the scandal still resonated in Brandon Sinclair’s life and the lives of his family. This wasn’t some damned lark. This was real.
She had to understand the consequences of her lie. If she’d found Colt and Frannie’s Piper Cub in the woods on Sunday, she had to admit it and take Wyatt there.
No, he thought. Penelope Chestnut’s pretty eyes and whatever trouble she might be in weren’t what he was doing in New Hampshire, weren’t why he was staying. A missing brother, a lost son, an uncle never known—that was what he was doing here, why he was staying. He couldn’t let himself be distracted from what was a clear, uncomplicated mission.
But while he unpacked his bag, Wyatt wondered where Cold Spring’s green-eyed, hot-headed pilot lived, and when he finished, he headed downstairs to see if he could get directions out of her cousin.
Penelope was relieved to be home, a fire crackling in her wood stove, a robin investigating her deck. She’d changed into a soft fleece shirt and drawstring pants and sat at her kitchen table, watching the robin through her sliding-glass doors. The snow had melted off her deck, another sign spring was on its way.
She’d inherited her grandfather’s winterized, lakeside cabin when he’d died three years ago. It was on a narrow dirt road well-removed from the village, and her lake frontage was the bare minimum. The cabin sat atop a steep bank with stairs down to the water, a dock and the little shed where she kept her canoe and kayak. But she also inherited ten acres on the other side of the road. Her woods eventually bled into Sinclair woods, which was how she came to be hunting maples suitable for tapping there in the first place.
The cabin still had a seasonal feel to it. It consisted of a living room and kitchen across the front, overlooking the lake, and two small rooms and a bath across the back. She’d kept her grandfather’s mismatched dishes, his red-and-white checked vinyl tablecloth, his moose head on the wall above the fireplace. His ugly lamps and the vinyl recliner had had to go.
No one had expected her to move here. She’d had a nice apartment in town where she could walk to the Sunrise Inn and have tea and scones with her mother and cousin every afternoon. The idea, of course, was for her to get married before she moved into a real place of her own—at least, that was the idea of most of the women she knew. The men didn’t seem surprised at all by her choice of a home. They showed up to use her dock, invited her hunting and fishing, tossed trout on her grill, shared their six-packs with her on her deck. One of the guys. It wasn’t that she looked like a guy. She wore dresses and makeup and did her hair. She polished her nails.
“They don’t think of you as one of the guys,” Harriet had told her. “They think of you more as a surrogate sister.”
And you didn’t date your sister.
Not that Penelope wanted to date any of them. She shuddered. They were her friends. She couldn’t envision sleeping with them any more than they could her.
Her social life had taken a sharp downward turn in recent months. For a while there’d been a man in Bangor she’d see whenever she flew in that direction. Another pilot. Then she realized he never made the effort to get to New Hampshire to see her, and if she knew anything about herself it was that she didn’t want a one-way relationship. So, exit the pilot. Enter no one to replace him.
Well, she wasn’t pitiful. She had her place on the lake, her flying, her friends, her family. If this was it, this was it. She liked to fantasize about tearing down her grandfather’s cabin and building her own place, with lots of wood and glass. She’d hire an architect to design a house especially for this piece of land.
But that all seemed a long way off. Right now, she was grounded, and she had a Sinclair out to prove she’d lied about Colt and Frannie’s plane.
Which, of course, she had.
She shrugged off a sudden wave of uneasiness. She could almost feel the smooth leather of Wyatt Sinclair’s jacket as he’d sat next to her in her truck. She’d never touched him, but she might as well have.
This was just the sort of effect Colt must have had on Frannie Beaudine. And look where that weakness had led her. Right into the side of a hill.
At least Wyatt wouldn’t be on the loose in Cold Spring, not if he was staying at the Sunrise Inn. Her cousin had been madly curious about Sinclairs for as long as Penelope could remember. The two of them had even wandered through the Sinclair Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a trip to New York. Harriet would keep a close eye on the first Sinclair to step foot in Cold Spring in her lifetime.
Penelope went into the second bedroom, which she’d converted to a study, and turned on her computer. While it booted up, she stared at the framed front page of the Cold Spring Reporter from the first day of the search for Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine. On her bookcase, she had scrapbooks of articles and cassettes of recordings she’d done of interviews with locals who remembered the crash and the ensuing search. She hadn’t developed such a hobby just because Colt and Frannie were pilots, because they’d disappeared in one of her favorite planes or because her father and grandfather and Aunt Mary had participated in the search. She’d come to it because of Harriet, because of the years she’d listened to her cousin fantasize—at first tentatively, then with more certainty—about being the daughter of the handsome, adventurous couple.
Wasn’t her cousin entitled to her fantasy? It was harmless enough. But Penelope pushed such thoughts aside and got on the Internet, going straight to one of the sites devoted to the missing Piper Cub. There was an amazing amount of information, gossip, speculation and junk about Frannie and Colt on the Internet, most of which was useless. Theories about their disappearance ranged from elopement to kidnapping by aliens with a thousand scenarios in between. They were alive and living in Canada, they were Communist spies, they were thieves, it was a suicide pact, it was murder-suicide. Colt was the foppish un-Sinclair, the impressionable college grad, the innocent. Then he was the quintessential Sinclair, the rake, the daredevil, the instigator. Frannie was the beautiful innocent, the bookish refugee from the wilds of New Hampshire, the vixen, the gold digger. Every possible theory from the nutty to the sublime was there.
News of Penelope’s false alarm had reached the enthusiasts. Debate was raging about why she’d changed her story. Had she been forced? Had she found something in the wreckage she wanted for herself? There were, of course, conspiracy theorists. But most believed she’d simply made a mistake, even if her turn-of-the-century dump was an awkward cover for that mistake. They didn’t want to give up their Frannie-Colt fantasies any more than Harriet would want to give up hers. Not every mystery begged for unraveling.
How had she ever thought finding their plane would help her cousin? Seeing her flush and stutter over Wyatt Sinclair this afternoon was unsettling, and now Penelope wished she’d never started down this path. She should have kept her big mouth shut about what she’d found in the woods.
But, as her grandfather would remind her, there was no point crying over spilled milk.
She decided she’d have supper by the fire and read until she fell asleep. The aftereffects of her mishap in the sky and tea with Wyatt Sinclair were taking their toll. She couldn’t think straight.
An instant message flashed on her screen. She jumped, startled, then was pleased for the diversion. She had plenty of friends in faraway places.
Frannie Beaudine was a sweet young thing not unlike you. Yet her bones lie bleached by the elements, her flesh no more, her body and spirit dead and gone. Do you want to share her fate? Behave yourself, Penelope. You know what you’ve done wrong.
She stared at the screen, paralyzed. She didn’t breathe. She didn’t blink. The words blurred, and her eyes stung until tears formed. Finally she hit the key to reply. But the person on the other end was no longer available. She jotted down the user ID. It would be useless, she knew—who would send such a message if it could be easily traced?
<
br /> She typed a reply, deleted it. Maybe she should pretend she hadn’t received the message, hadn’t read it. Just ignore the thing. Don’t do anything to stir the pot.
Her hands shook, and suddenly her whole body was shaking. She gulped for air, felt the bile stinging her throat.
“Well, Aunt Mary,” she said, “you should have your front row seat.” Because she was scared. There was no other word for it.
She returned to the great room, where the warm fire of the wood stove helped to calm her. She could call the police. Andy McNally would roar out here. But what could he do?
It was a kook, she told herself. The Internet was full of kooks. No one took instant messages seriously. She’d once had one asking her if she liked to skinny-dip in Lake Winnipesaukee. The whole world knew she’d claimed she’d found Colt and Frannie’s plane. She should have anticipated such harassment. Andy McNally would tell her as much.
Her stomach ached, and she had to fight dizziness, a pulsing pain behind her eyes. She was Penelope the Fearless, the woman who could live on the lake in her grandfather’s cabin, who loved adventures and thrills and action and scoffed at things that went bump in the night.
Yet as the sky slowly went black and the fire crackled in the stove and she couldn’t even hear the caw of a crow, she couldn’t shake her fear. The reporters, Wyatt Sinclair, a Sinclair investigator, her mishap in the air, her own lie—and now a creepy message on the Internet. It was all too much.
She made herself go out to her woodpile and bring in wood, five trips, five full armloads, until her wood box was overflowing, because she had no intention of letting the fear get to her. She hadn’t this afternoon when she’d realized she was low on fuel. She wouldn’t now.
She dumped the last load into the box. A log rolled off and narrowly missed her toe. She jumped back, out of breath from exertion and too much adrenaline pumping through her system. There were more logs on the floor—five at least. She’d tossed in one load after another, not concerned about neatness, only about the need to force herself to keep moving.
Hearing a car negotiating the pits and ruts of her spring-ravaged dirt road, she prayed it would continue past her cabin.
It didn’t.
She groaned. “Now what?”
Picking sawdust off her fleece shirt, Penelope went to the side door off the kitchen. Maybe it would be her father, telling her he’d changed his mind and she wasn’t grounded, after all.
But there on her doorstep, as if he’d known his timing couldn’t be any worse, was Wyatt Sinclair.
Five
H e wasn’t wearing his leather jacket, as if he expected to go straight from warm car to warm house. Penelope could feel him taking in the bits of sawdust and wood on her shirt, her difficulty in getting a decent breath. “Your road’s nothing but mud,” he said. “I sank up to my hubcaps.”
“It’ll freeze overnight. Of course, it’ll be all mud again by noon.”
“What happens if you have to get out of here in a hurry?”
“I use my four-wheel drive.”
Wyatt paused, studying her. She wondered if she was pale, if she had a wild look in her eyes. He said, “May I come in?”
Just what she needed. “Sure. I’m a little out of breath from filling my wood box.”
He glanced past her into her front room. “Looks as if it’s plenty full.”
She raked a hand through her hair, ignoring the snarls, the bark chips. “I kind of just dropped the last two loads. I’m more tired than I thought.” Changing the subject was her only hope. “Have you eaten yet? I was just about to heat up some chili.”
Wyatt didn’t move. “Penelope, are you all right?”
“Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be? Here, come inside before we let the cold air in.”
He came in without comment, and she shut the door behind him. The quiet thud made her heart skip. What if he’d sent her that instant message and now he’d come to see the results of his handiwork? Except he seemed more direct, more the type to tell her straight to her face that she’d lied.
You know what you’ve done wrong.
She didn’t know! Was it telling about the plane in the first place? Or changing her story? What was so wrong about trying to keep the spotlight off an old hermit and her crazy cousin? They were alive. Colt and Frannie weren’t.
But Colt’s family was, she reminded herself. She shook off the thought. The message was from a nut, someone intent on upsetting her after she’d dashed expectations of ending the mystery of what happened to Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine. Well, mission accomplished. She was upset.
“I’ll fix your wood box,” Wyatt said, his gaze on her, narrowed, wary. “You can heat the chili.”
“Don’t feel obligated to stay.”
He smiled. “Already regretting your invitation?”
She didn’t know if his steadiness was a tactic to throw her off guard or if he was simply trying to be nice. Either way, she found his presence reassuring. Suddenly she could feel the warmth of the fire, and her breathing was less shallow. Wyatt got to work arranging the overflow logs still in the wood box. Penelope caught herself watching him, then quickly pulled open the refrigerator for the quart of chili her mother had given her yesterday. She scooped it into a bowl and heated it in the microwave while Wyatt continued his work.
“Did Harriet give you directions?” Penelope asked.
“Don’t skewer her, but, yes, she did.”
Her cousin would never give such directions to a guest she didn’t know, but if most people in Cold Spring demonized the Sinclairs, Harriet romanticized them. Penelope couldn’t blame her for telling Wyatt where she lived. She chopped onion and grated cheese, got out bowls and spoons, and when the microwave dinged, she put everything out on the table.
Wyatt had the wood box straightened, the extra logs neatly stacked in front of it. He joined her at the table. The hissing and crackling of the fire, the sudden darkness outside, the scratch of her chair on the floor all made her aware of how isolated she was, how far from any help if Wyatt Sinclair was a nastier son of a bitch than she thought he was. She was on her own with him.
“Was there something I could do for you?” she asked, keeping her tone formal and distant.
A darkness came into his eyes that hadn’t been there before, and she took a quick breath, realizing the multiple ways he could interpret her question. But he, too, maintained an outward level of formality. “I’d like you to tell me about your cousin and why she thinks she’s Colt and Frannie’s daughter. It’s not something she made up out of thin air, is it?”
Penelope shook her head. She sprinkled cheese on her steaming chili. She would have to tell him something. If she didn’t, he’d find another source, perhaps not one as devoted to Harriet as she was. “Not out of thin air. Out of a coincidence.”
“Tell me,” he said softly, not making it an order.
“My great-uncle and great-aunt adopted Harriet around the time Colt and Frannie disappeared. Uncle George was a minister here in town forever. He’s my grandfather’s younger brother—he’s almost eighty now. He and Aunt Rachel have retired to Florida.”
“Aren’t there adoption records, some way to disabuse your cousin of this notion?”
“It’s not that simple.” She tried the chili, which was spicy and packed with vegetables. Her mother did like her hot peppers. “Look, this is none of my business or yours. Harriet didn’t ask for any trouble.”
“I’ll be discreet.”
A Sinclair discreet. Penelope almost smiled. “What about your father’s investigator? Are you going to tell him?”
“Jack doesn’t report to me, I don’t report to him.”
“I suppose you’ll find out anyway. Everyone in town knows the story.” She paused, added chopped onion to her chili, saw that none of what she’d said so far had affected Wyatt’s appetite. She forced herself to think, examine her options. They weren’t good. “Okay. Uncle George found Harriet on the church doorstep about
forty-eight hours into the search for Colt and Frannie’s plane. The doctors figure she was between six and eight weeks old. She was wearing a diaper and a sleeper, and she was wrapped in a blanket. She’d been placed in an apple basket.”
Wyatt straightened. “Good Lord.”
“I know. It’s right out of a Dickens novel.”
“There must have been an investigation—”
“A thorough one. The authorities didn’t find a thing, not a single clue as to who her biological parents were, who’d left her there. My aunt and uncle stepped in and adopted her. They were thrilled—they have an older son, but Aunt Rachel couldn’t have any more children after him.”
“They treated Harriet well?”
“They’re a wonderful family. They love her, and she loves them. That didn’t stop her, though, from creating this kooky fantasy.”
“I don’t know,” Wyatt said, “maybe it’s not so kooky.”
“It’s much more likely someone took advantage of the hoopla over the missing plane. Chances are she’s the result of some incestuous or otherwise illicit relationship. But it’s a lot more fun to be Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine’s long-lost daughter.”
“The timing—”
“There’s a narrow window of opportunity. Say Harriet was six weeks old. The Piper Cub disappeared in mid-April. That would mean Frannie would have given birth around the first of March. Right?”
Wyatt nodded, motioning for her to continue. She had his complete attention, every fiber of him focused on her and what she had to say. She felt energized, the fear and creeping exhaustion of an hour ago gone. Yet at the same time, she was keenly aware she was walking out on thinner and thinner ice. Telling this man anything, even something he could find out on his own in two minutes on the streets of Cold Spring, could be a mistake. She couldn’t assume she was in control. He had climbed dangerous, difficult mountains. He was used to capitalizing on whatever foothold opportunity offered him.
Kiss the Moon Page 7
