Coming Home

by Mariah Stewart

  “Nah. Nothing going on back there in town today. Let’s just take our chances. I know a spot where we can tie up and see if the blues are hungry. If they’re not, well, I’ve never been one to complain about having to spend an hour or two on my boat on a nice day like this one’s turning out to be.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they’d dropped anchor, baited their lines, cast off, and were sitting on a couple of folding chairs Hal brought out of the cabin.

  “Just put your rod right in there”-Hal pointed to a hole near the railing-“and sit back down and wait to see if there are any takers down there.”

  They sat for a few minutes, watching the lines, but nothing was happening.

  “You do much fishing out there in Montana?” Hal asked.

  “Just some lake and stream fishing.”

  “You have much luck with that?”

  “Some.” Grady nodded.

  “You’re talking trout, pickerel, bass…?”

  “Right, but mostly trout.”

  “I heard that can make for a good day.”

  “It can, yes, sir, if the fish are biting. Otherwise, it’s pretty much like sitting right here. It’s a pleasant enough way to pass some time on a nice day, like you said.”

  “So how do you feel about your little sister getting married?” Hal asked.

  “I think she’s made a good choice. Beck makes her happy. That’s good enough for me.”

  “We’re pretty pleased with his choice, too. Mia is good for Beck, in a lot of ways.”

  “I’m still trying to figure out why she needs a full week of events leading up to the wedding.”

  Hal laughed. “You know Mia. She’s always looking for ways to get people together, especially people she loves. She did say that she thought it was important for her family to get to know Beck’s. Of course, we don’t have as much family as you do. It’s just me, Beck, and Vanessa. Mia and Vanessa have gotten real close, you probably know, which is good for Ness. She never had a sister. At least, not one that any of us know about.”

  Hal slanted a glance at Grady. More than once that week, he’d seen Grady watching Vanessa when he didn’t know anyone was noticing.

  “Yup, she’s like a daughter to me, Vanessa is. She’s one hell of a girl. We’re real proud of her, Beck and I are, despite her issues.” Hal bit the inside of his cheek and told himself to shut up. Grady didn’t press, and Hal was grateful for that. He’d already said more than he should have. The last thing he’d want to do would be to scare the boy away. There weren’t any young men in St. Dennis that he thought were good enough for his girl. Mia’s brother, now, Hal thought he might be a possibility, but Hal had opened the door for Grady to talk about her, and he hadn’t, so maybe he wasn’t all that interested after all. Damn.

  “Beck mentioned the other night that you used to play semipro baseball.” Grady glided smoothly right past the mention of Vanessa.

  Hal nodded. “That was a long time ago. I got picked up right out of college. There were some who thought I could make it in the majors. But, like so many of us back then, I got drafted and sent to Vietnam. One minute on the pitcher’s mound, the next minute jumping out of a low-flying plane into the jungle. Spent the next year trying not to get killed.”

  “What happened when you came back? Did you try to reconnect with your team?”

  Hal shook his head. “I wrenched my shoulder a couple of times over there. My throwing arm was never right again. Besides, when I came back, I found the girl I left behind had married someone else. I came home to St. Dennis, got a job with the local police force. Made it all the way to chief.” He paused for a moment. “I hear you were in law, too.”

  “FBI. Jokingly referred to as the family business.”

  “I heard about your dad and your uncle, your cousins, all going into the Bureau. That must have made for some interesting family dinners.”

  “There was never any lack of conversation, that’s for sure.”

  “You have any thoughts about going back?”

  Grady shook his head. “No. I knew what I was doing when I left. I’d had enough, seen enough. I figured I could find something else to do.”

  “Did you?”

  Before Grady could respond, Hal’s line took off, and both men lunged for the rod. A few minutes later, Hal had reeled in a nice-size bluefish. He slipped it off the hook and into the ice chest he’d brought with him.

  An hour later, they still had only the one fish in the cooler and no other nibbles. Hal didn’t really care if the fish were biting or not, but by midmorning, he figured they’d spent time enough on the Bay for one day. He had other things to do, and he suspected Grady might as well.

  The closer he got to 309 Cherry Street, the slower Grady walked. On a scale of one to ten, baking cookies with the girly girl would have been at point-oh-five. But Mia had all but begged him.

  “Why me?” he’d asked after he had been summoned to the house she shared with Beck with a come-quick-I-need-you phone call on the morning after Grady’s fishing outing with Hal.

  “Because I have someone to help me and she doesn’t,” Mia explained. “We need about a thousand cookies for wedding favors by Saturday and we won’t have time to bake them all if we don’t double up.”

  “You’re just now figuring out that you need a thousand cookies?”

  Mia had nodded somewhat sheepishly.

  “So what’s the big deal? I passed a bakery on the way in. I’ll bet they have cookies.”

  “I want Mom’s cookies.” She moved several bags of flour and sugar around on her kitchen counter. “Where did I put those measuring spoons?”

  “Mom’s cookies?”

  “Mom’s lemon cookies.” Mia found the orange spoons under a bag of flour. “Remember them?”

  “The little round ones with the lemon stuff on top?”

  Mia nodded. “I wanted to have something special of Mom there on my wedding day. You know that if she was still alive, she’d be baking them for the wedding.”

  “That’s really sweet, honey, but why don’t you send your someone to Vanessa’s place and I’ll stay here and help you?” He thought that sounded reasonable.

  “Because my someone is Mara, and she’s baking at her house.”

  “So why can’t Mara’s cookies count for half of Vanessa’s?”

  Mia had stared at him as if he’d suddenly gone stupid, then replied, “Because they count for mine.”

  Her eyes began to fill with tears, and he’d given in. What insensitive oaf would make his sister cry over cookies just three days before her wedding?

  “Just go back to Charles Street, then take a left onto Cherry.” Mia seemed to recover quickly but he thought it best not to mention it at that point. “Vanessa’s house is three blocks up. Number 309. You can’t miss it. It’s a white house with a blue door. It has some pink and purple flowers in the front yard.”

  “Yeah, well, no surprise there,” he grumbled as he walked along.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t like Vanessa. They’d run into each other several times over the past few days, and he’d found her to be funny and charming and smart. And yes, as Mia had noted, she was very pretty. He hadn’t needed his sister to point that out. Some might even have described her as beautiful. But it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been around very pretty women before. It was just that there was something different about Vanessa. He couldn’t put his finger on just what that something was, or how to react to it, but it set off an alarm inside his head. He’d been in the FBI long enough to know danger when he saw it, regardless of the form it took.

  Halfway into her block he spotted the house on the opposite side of the street. To say there were “some” flowers out front had been an understatement. There were so many tulips-in every shade of pink and purple imaginable-that it looked as if someone had spilled bags of pastel jelly beans across the yard. It must have taken her days to plant them all.

  But yeah, pink and purple. It figured.

  He walked along the p
ath that wound through the sea of blooms and took the porch steps two at a time, imagining what the house must look like inside. He’d bet that the furniture would be all white with flowery pillows and the walls would be shades of pink. He pictured Vanessa in the kitchen with her pink apron, wearing pearls and high heels as she measured out flour and cracked open eggs to bake Mia’s cookies.

  He rang the bell, not sure whether he was more amused or frightened by the image he’d conjured.

  Vanessa unlocked the front door. “Mia just called to tell me you were on your way. Thanks for coming.”

  He stepped inside and found himself engulfed by the scents of lemon and vanilla. In a flash, he was transported back to his childhood, and could almost see himself sitting on his knees on a kitchen chair, his elbows propped on the kitchen table as he sniffed the air intently while his mother grated lemon rind.

  “Careful,” she’d teased him, “or there won’t be any lemony smell left for the cookies.”

  “Just close the door tightly behind you so that it doesn’t blow open in this breeze we’re having this morning.” Vanessa’s voice brought him back to the present with a thud.

  Her voice trailed away as she disappeared toward the back of the house.

  He followed and tried to will away the memory of the way life had been back then, before their mother died and childhood had changed for all of them.

  The front hall was all polished wood, the walls the color of fresh cream. Grady gave a quick glance at the rooms on either side as he followed her. The living room was a deeper shade of cream, the furniture not at all what he expected. It was all vintage-y looking, in dark jewel tones. The dining room off to the right had deep red walls and an old Oriental carpet. No pink anywhere.

  No pearls, either, he realized as he came into the kitchen several steps behind Vanessa. No cutesy apron, and no high heels. The apron covering her cutoff jeans and gray T-shirt was tan and had DISCOVER ST. DENNIS! in navy-blue block letters. Her feet were bare, and though her hair was pulled back into some elastic thing, enough escaped to frame her face with curls. She wore no makeup and, in spite of her smile, appeared just barely happier to see him than he was to be there.

  The counters were crowded with baking supplies and cookie sheets. An open carton of eggs, half empty, sat on the kitchen table.

  “What can I do to help?” he asked.

  “Do you know how to roll out cookie dough?”

  “I know how to mix it.” He did his best to ignore the cut lemons that lay side by side on a cutting board. It was still his all-time favorite scent.

  “I’m not ready to mix another batch yet,” she told him. “I’ll roll and you cut.”

  “Cut?”

  “With cookie cutters.”

  “Sure.” He nodded. “I can do that. I used to be good at that.”

  “Great. You’re hired.” She waved him over to the table and pressed something into his hand. He looked down at the smooth plastic object, then back up at Vanessa.

  “My mom always used a round cutter,” he told her.

  “Mia wants hearts.”

  “Oh.” What, he wondered, had happened to kick-ass former FBI agent, criminal investigator Mia Shields in this town?

  “You can work over here.” Vanessa cleared a space and tore a piece of waxed paper from a roll. She flattened it onto the counter, took a blob of dough from the refrigerator where it had been chilling, and dumped it onto the waxed paper. She sprinkled a rolling pin with a little flour, then proceeded to roll it out to the thickness she wanted.

  “There you go,” she told Grady. “You’re up to bat.”

  He hesitated for a moment, then realized there would be no escape until the job was done.

  Oh, if only my old friends from the Bureau could see me now…

  He grimaced at the thought. Where once he tracked serial killers and child predators, he was now reduced to cutting out little heart shapes in dough with Miss Fluff. How the mighty have fallen…

  From the corner of his eye he stole a glance at her. He had to admit she wasn’t looking quite so fluffy today. As a matter of fact, she was all business, in an intense sort of way that he found oddly appealing. He struck the thought from his mind as quickly as it had entered.

  “Nice of you to offer to help Mia,” he said to break the ice.

  “Mia’s my friend, and she’s marrying my brother,” Vanessa replied very matter-of-factly. “Why wouldn’t I help?”

  “She has other friends who didn’t offer to hire someone to work for them so that they could help out.”

  “She’d do the same for me.” Vanessa took one batch of cookies out of the oven and placed it on a cooling rack. Into the oven went another tray.

  “What do you want me to do now?” A line of cutout dough hearts lined up across the table.

  “That was fast.” She glanced at his work, then nodded. “They look pretty good. You can put them on that tray on the counter there, as soon as I get a minute to clean it off.”

  “I’ll do it,” he told her.

  He stepped around her and grabbed the tray and took it to the sink and turned on the water. He could feel her eyes on the back of his neck while he washed off the cookie sheet, then dried it.

  “I think we need a sheet of parchment on that tray before you put the cookies on it.” She was at the kitchen table measuring flour. “So they don’t burn on the bottom.”

  “Okay.” He pulled a sheet off the roll and fitted it to the tray. When he finished placing the cookies on the tray, he asked, “What now?”

  “Now we have to wait for another tray to come out of the oven. I should have picked up a few extras but I ran out of time, so we have to shuttle them back and forth.”

  He left the tray on the counter and walked to the table.

  “Hey, my grandmother used to have a table like this.” He tapped his fingers on the blue-enamel-on-metal top. “Does yours have flowers in the corners?” He peered around her. “Yep. Just like Gramma’s.”

  “Mia told me.” She opened a stick of butter and dropped it into a bowl. “It was in the house when I moved in, as was most of the rest of the furniture.”

  “The previous owner just left it all here?”

  “The previous owner was just shy of one hundred when she passed away. She had a grandniece who really wasn’t interested in the house or the furnishings. She did come for the funeral, and while she was here, she took the things she thought had some value, but she just left everything else where it was.”

  “Aren’t you lucky she didn’t have a better eye.” He took a seat in one of the chairs next to the table. “I noticed the stuff in the living room when I came in. That mohair sofa and the chairs with the nail heads look like they’re from the forties, maybe the fifties.”

  Mia grinned. “I figure Miss Ridgeway must have had some kind of midlife crisis right around that time. You know, out with the old, in with the new? Only she didn’t toss the old, thank goodness. There’s still a lot of lovely old Victorian pieces in the attic and in the garage loft. I’m figuring she probably put them into storage when she bought what you see in there now.”

  “I remember my grandparents having a sofa in their living room that was very similar to yours.”

  “Mia said it was even the same color.” She opened the oven door and peered inside, then closed it again. “I asked Nita-she’s one of the antique dealers in town-to look over some of the furniture and the artwork. She said she couldn’t imagine what the grandniece had taken, judging by the quality of the items that were left behind. She either didn’t take the time to really look through the house, or she didn’t know what she was looking at.” Vanessa covered the bowl holding the dough with plastic wrap and placed it in the refrigerator to chill as the recipe directed. “Nita took some pieces that I didn’t particularly like on consignment in her shop.”

  “Did they sell?”

  “Not yet, but she only took them a few weeks ago. She thinks they’ll go quickly once the tourist season
begins for real. We have A Day on the Bay coming up next month, and things will get pretty busy from then right through to the end of the year.”

  “What’s A Day on the Bay?”

  “That’s when everyone brings out their boats and we have races. Sailboats, motorboats… you name it, we race it. People come from all over to compete as well as to check out the boats in the marina that are for sale. They even bring out the old skipjacks to show them off. They used to call it Harbor Fest but last year they changed the name.”

  The timer on the oven buzzed and she grabbed a mitt and removed yet another tray of cookies and set them aside to cool.

  “Mia wants to glaze these for Saturday, but I don’t know.” Vanessa gnawed on her bottom lip. “I’m afraid they’ll stick together.”

  “The glaze is that lemon stuff that goes on top?”

  She nodded.

  “My mom used to do that at night before she went to bed, so the icing would be solid in the morning,” he told her. “What if you put that stuff on them today? Wouldn’t it be hard enough by Saturday to not stick?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I guess we could try a few of the ones that have cooled and see how they are by this evening. I baked several batches last night but they’re in the freezer.”

  He reached past her and picked up the recipe.

  “Wouldn’t this go faster if we doubled or tripled the recipe?”

  “Yes, but we still have to chill each batch for about two hours, and we still only have one oven.”

  “So we’ll stagger them.” He looked around. “Why don’t I wash up all the stuff that you’ll need for the next batch while you roll out that one?”

  “That would save some time.” She nodded. “Thanks.”

  He ran water in the sink and gathered the used bowls and spoons and the beaters from the counters.

  “I hear you went out on Hal’s boat yesterday.” She stood across the room, at the table, and rolled out another batch of dough.

  “Yeah. Nice of him to take me.”

  “Hal Garrity is the nicest man on the face of the earth,” she told him.