“What do you mean ‘for the most part’?”
She grinned at him. “Well, I’ve tapped a few maples and got lost up there a few times. You might get a hunter or two, but most people just leave it alone. We don’t want to push our luck and have your family sell it to developers.”
Wyatt let that one go. “You have a proposed route?”
“I tapped about a dozen trees up just beyond the field. I thought we could loop around and catch them on our way back. You can help me bring down the buckets. There aren’t that many.” She cocked him a look, her eyes impossible to read behind the dark lenses. “Or are you going to make me untap the trees?”
He’d noticed a blue plastic holding tank in the bed of her truck. A hell of a hobby. He knew it was, by her measure, un-Sinclair of him, but he said, “I hardly feel I have the right to make you pull your taps. And I can help empty the buckets.”
She gave him a mock bow. “Thank you kindly.”
“Presumably this route won’t take us anywhere near your dump site?”
That took a bit of the cockiness out of her. “Even with one of Harriet’s lunches, we’re not prepared to go that deep into the woods—provided I could find that particular ravine again, which I can’t.”
“You weren’t prepared on Sunday.”
“I was lost.”
That much Wyatt believed. “Lead the way, then.”
She started through the field, where the sun had melted the snow to just a few inches deep, and there were wide patches of sodden, gray-green grass. Wyatt noticed the shape of her bottom, the length of her legs. She’d pulled an anorak over her rugby shirt but hadn’t bothered with a hat or gloves. She was fit, athletic and strong in a hundred ways and places that were all female, plenty to give him pause. From his brief conversations with people in town, he’d deduced they regarded her with exasperation and affection and had little hope she’d ever find a man who could take her on her own terms—and damned if she’d go flitty just to get one.
She turned, impatient. “Are you coming?”
Wyatt grinned. Yep. This was a woman who wanted her share of the cookies.
She led him onto an old logging trail at the edge of the field. It took them through a young forest and up a gently sloping hill that offered stunning views of Lake Winnipesaukee. It was beautiful country, Wyatt acknowledged. Out of nowhere, he remembered hiking Mount Washington with Hal on a bright, clear autumn day. What had they been, nineteen, twenty? Now Hal was gone. Penelope had a point. He was as difficult and dangerous as she believed, if not in the precise ways she believed.
They walked down that hill and up another, and eventually the logging road narrowed to a wide path that gave the feel of being deeper in the woods than Wyatt knew they were. It ran parallel to the field and dirt road on the edges of Sinclair land. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind, which he suspected Penelope knew—and could mean she was deliberately keeping him away from something.
When they came to the top of another hill, she paused, breathing hard, and looked at the landscape of gray trees, white snow and blue sky. She was obviously in her element. “You can see so much this time of year. Gorgeous, isn’t it?”
Suddenly Wyatt understood how she’d come to be lost on Sunday. It wasn’t because she didn’t know her way around in the woods or because she was out looking for the Piper Cub or even maple trees for tapping. She hadn’t paid attention. She’d let things distract her—the prospect of a better view of the lake, anything that caught her eye—and she’d wandered off until eventually she realized she didn’t know where the hell she was.
He could picture her looking around, and all of a sudden there was no trail, there were no familiar landmarks, and no matter how adept she was in the woods, how skilled a hiker, how mortifying it was, she was lost.
It was a damned dangerous way to live.
Still, he was confident that once she found her way home, Penelope would be able to find her way back to where she’d been.
“I’m starving,” she announced. “Do you want to eat lunch out here or wait until we get to the truck? We could always go to my place and sit by the fire.”
She spoke matter of factly, apparently unaware of any romantic overtone to her suggestion. She pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head and raked her blond curls with both hands, surveying the possibilities of lunch in the woods. Wyatt pointed to a boulder just off the trail. “I like that rock there, myself.”
She unzipped her anorak. “Perfect.”
It was a good-size boulder, tucked between two hemlocks, about five feet tall with a broad, flat top. The side closest to the trail sloped gently, with a straight, steep drop into brush and pine on the other side. Penelope grabbed a thin birch, climbed onto the boulder and plunked down. Wyatt followed. All he needed to do was fall on his ass, but he managed to settle beside her without incident. His climbing skills were getting rusty. A two-year hiatus and a New Hampshire rock gave him pause. He shuddered, could hear Hal’s snort of laughter mixed with disgust. Get on with it, he’d say. Live your life. Take risks. It’s who you are.
“Well, this is a nice spot,” Penelope said, pushing up the sleeves of her anorak and rugby shirt. She had great hands, with long, feminine fingers and short, well-kept nails. “Rock’s a little cold on the behind, but otherwise we’re in good shape.”
Wyatt didn’t say a word. There’s your risk, he thought grimly. Having lunch on a rock in the middle of the New England woods with a woman who was oblivious—beyond oblivious—to her own appeal. Maybe she figured she wasn’t a Sinclair’s type. Or maybe, right now, he was just a hiking buddy. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking about her fanny on the cold rock and everything else he was thinking. If she knew the twists and turns his mind was taking, she’d summarily boot him headfirst in the snow.
Then again, it might be fun if she tried.
He shook every stupid thought out of his head. Yes. It was a cold rock.
“The temperature’s warming up nicely,” she said, handing him his plastic bag of cheese, ham and bread. “At least the sap won’t be frozen in the buckets. It’s about all I have to keep me from going nuts over the next three weeks.”
“Three weeks isn’t so long.”
“It’s forever. Another eleven hours and I’ll have made it through day one. I’m hoping I can wear Pop down, get him to ease up. A week should do the trick.” She dug into her lunch, eating the bread first. “Maybe I’ll buy a jigsaw puzzle. That ought to help me pass the time.”
With the warm curve of her hip against his, Wyatt thought of a variety of ways he could help her pass the time. He quickly bit into the crusty bread, faintly squished from its trek into the countryside. Wall Street felt very far away. He breathed in the crisp, clear air, smelled the damp moss and pungent hemlock, and with Penelope so close, the scent of her hair, citrusy, clean.
Enough, he told himself. “Are there any Beaudines left in Cold Spring?” he asked, needing a distraction from his dangerous train of thought.
“No—her father died when she was four, her mother when she was ten. They were hard, poor hill people with lousy health and no health care. Her grandparents tried to raise her, but they weren’t much good. They’ve been dead forever—they both died several years before she disappeared. She had no reason to come back here. In fact, she had more reason never to come back. But I guess this was her home, and people say she always meant to come back to stay.”
“No brothers and sisters?”
“Just her. She’d always been bookish, sneaking off to the library to read everything she could. An art teacher at the local high school took an interest in her and helped her get books, taught her what she knew. Supposedly Frannie just gobbled information. She took up flying when she was fifteen and became quite the sensation, then headed off to the big city. She was beautiful, daring, smart, and people just loved her.”
“You seem to have a good sense of her.”
“I don’t know, sometimes I don’t think I have any
sense of her at all. I’ve talked to all kinds of people who knew her. I drove down to Concord to the nursing home where her art teacher is living, and she remembered every detail about Frannie—I think she just had that kind of effect on people.”
Wyatt nodded. “It’s a shame she died so young.”
Penelope returned her leftovers to the plastic bag, got out her cookies and handed him the plastic bag with the W. “That mix of art historian and pilot fascinates me. I guess it’s because of my own situation. I’ve been flying for so long. For years it’s pretty much all I wanted to do.” She shrugged. “Well, you’re not here to talk about my problems. My personal theory is that what Frannie wanted more than anything—more than flying, more than being an art historian—was to be loved.”
“Why?”
“That’s what comes out when I talk to people who knew her. She was desperate to love and be loved. She ached for it. In a way, that could be why she excelled at two such seemingly disparate disciplines, flying and art.”
Wyatt tried one of the cookies, also squished. He was intrigued by how a woman she’d never known had captured Penelope’s fancy. “In what way?”
“I’m just speculating, but I think when she was flying, she could love herself—she could experience the thrill of being the star. Her old teacher says Frannie brought an emotional sensibility to her art studies that would have embarrassed or terrified someone else. She didn’t over-think or overanalyze. She trusted her instincts, turned her vulnerability into strength.”
“Until Colt came along,” Wyatt said.
She nodded. “Frannie was ripe for someone like him to come along and sweep her off her feet. He was rich, good-looking, just as daring as she was. And he wanted love as much as she did.” She popped her last chocolate chip cookie into her mouth. “Sex, too. I mean, I’m not naive.”
“He was five years younger than Frannie.”
“Ah, but he was a Sinclair.”
As if that explained everything. Wyatt glanced sideways at her, watched her lick chocolate off her lower lip, felt a jolt of pure, unabashed lust and wondered if she didn’t have a point. “He was a twenty-one-year-old kid.”
“You think Frannie swept him off his feet?”
“I think they saw in each other what they wanted to see.”
Penelope gave that some thought. “They were in love.”
“And you think that’s why they ran off together? Because they were in love?”
She seemed mystified. “Why else?”
“Because that’s not enough,” Wyatt said, looking into the snow-covered woods, the silence and isolation settling deep into him. “Love’s never enough reason for a Sinclair to do anything.”
“Well, that’s a heck of a legacy.”
“So it is.”
She seemed to realize his seriousness and started to speak, but he stuffed the remains of their lunch in the hip pack Harriet had supplied and shot off the boulder. “We’d best get to your sap buckets.”
She nodded. “Sure. I think I just gave you the introduction to The Biography of Frannie Beaudine, which, by the way, I have no intention of writing. But I don’t mean to imply that your uncle’s death was any less a tragedy. They were both so young.”
“That they were.”
He could see her reluctance to drop the subject. She pushed her sunglasses on her nose and climbed off the rock, slipping slightly in the snow. He caught her elbow, and she thanked him politely, formally, which told him she hadn’t been unaffected by her talk of sex and the Sinclair nature.
With visible effort, she started along the path, looping to the field and the series of maples she’d tapped. She explained that she’d stuck to buckets instead of gravity tubing because it was old-fashioned and she didn’t have a big operation, not like her mother, whose sugar house apparently attracted scores of tourists on weekends. Maple sugaring occurred during the off-season for the inn, so it worked out well.
Wyatt helped her consolidate the various buckets into two buckets, one for each to carry to her truck. Some of the trees had two taps, some four, and she explained the number of taps was determined by the size and age of the tree. “You really shouldn’t tap a maple until it’s about forty years old.”
He was learning more about maple sugaring than he’d ever imagined knowing.
On the far side of a fat, way-older-than-forty maple, he spotted distinct footprints in the dense, wet snow. “Whose are these?” he asked, pointing.
Penelope came next to him. “They must be ours.”
“We didn’t come this way.” He squatted and examined the prints. “They’re a different kind of boot.”
“Then they’re mine from the other day—”
“Foot’s too big.”
She wrinkled her face at him. “I would get a flatlander who knows footprints. It’s probably just someone out walking. Tourists like to take pictures of sap buckets.”
“There are dozens of buckets close to the road. They wouldn’t have to traipse all the way up here.”
“Maybe it’s a reporter or your investigator, Jack Dunning. He was sneaking around my house this morning.”
“He’s not my investigator, he’s my father’s. What was he doing sneaking around your house?”
“Actually, he just came by to talk to me. I don’t want you reporting to your father and getting him fired. Spooky guy.”
“Penelope…”
She stared at him, the sunlight catching the ends of her blond hair. “Hmm?”
“Whose prints are these?”
She thrust her hands onto her hips, feigning indignation. “You know, it must be a pain to be as suspicious-minded as you are. You make life a lot harder on yourself than it needs to be.”
“That’s the pot calling the kettle black. I can’t imagine the effort it must take to keep all your lies straight.”
Her mouth snapped shut, and she spun around, huffy.
Wyatt shot to his feet, grabbed her by the elbow and turned her toward him, firmly but not harshly. He stood very close. Too close. Way, way too close. He wished he could see her eyes behind her sunglasses. But her wisps of blond hair, her mouth, her throat were distractions enough. He should have stayed in New York. But he was here, and so was she. “Before I leave town, you’ll tell me the truth.”
Her brow furrowed, but there was no fear in her, unlike last night—something else that still needed explaining. “Is that a threat?”
“No. It’s something I know.” She licked her lips as if his mouth was on hers, as if she were thinking about it. He lowered his voice. “I don’t know why you’re lying, Penelope, but you have no reason to hide anything from me. I only want to put my father’s mind at ease about a brother he lost a long, long time ago. That’s all. I have no other interest in being here.”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“Look, people up here are closemouthed. I understand that. They don’t like strangers, and they particularly don’t like Sinclairs. I understand that, too. But just because you all don’t like to talk out of school doesn’t mean you’re any damned good at lying.”
“I’m not closemouthed. I blabbed one little thing about thinking I might have found Colt and Frannie’s plane, and I end up with half the planet’s media and a Sinclair on my case. And a private investigator. Why on earth would I want to look like an idiot to the entire world? Why would I want you and Jack Dunning breathing down my neck? If I were lying, I could do a better job.”
Wyatt shook his head, seeing it now, understanding. “That’s not it. The truth is, you don’t give a damn what the entire world thinks. You care about Cold Spring. You care about your family and your friends.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve spent most of my life figuring out ways to get out of here. Why do you think I fly?”
“I’m right,” he said with certainty.
She sputtered. “So you know that much about me already?”
“I do.”
She couldn’t get the buckets down the hil
l and poured into her holding tank fast enough. Wyatt helped, but she was like a whirling dervish. Finally, she grabbed the two empty buckets and marched through the snow. He waited at the truck, figuring she’d run out of steam. But she was still charging when she came across the field, the buckets presumably back on their taps.
Wyatt leaned against the truck, watching her, his hands warming in his pockets. He could see hers were freezing. Her nose was red, and her hair was flying around in a light breeze. All that restless energy, all that movement, just to keep from thinking about what she was going to think about no matter what. Which was him, and those footprints she didn’t want to explain.
But she pretended to be all business. “Rebecca and Jane McNally will be at my house any minute. They’re the chief of police’s daughters.” A warning. She gave him a second to get it. “They’re helping me boil sap.”
“Good. I’ll help, too. I’m not in a hurry. You can take me to town after you’re done with your sap boiling.”
She exhaled at the sky and raked her fingers through her curls, pushed up her sunglasses, chewed on her lower lip and finally fastened her gaze on him. “I want rid of you, Sinclair. Damn it, I don’t need you staring at me with those doubting black eyes.”
“Doubting black eyes. I like that. You do have a flair for the dramatic.” He eased his hands under hers, which were red and cold and stiff, and she immediately curled her fingers into tight fists as if steeling herself against him. “You don’t believe in gloves?”
“I didn’t think I’d be emptying sap buckets. I just—”
“Relax,” he said softly, her hands slowly warming in his, “I’m not going to force you to do anything or say anything.”
Kiss the Moon Page 10
