“Em, is that you?” Noland gazed up at her. His intelligent, green eyes shined with emotion.
“It is,” she answered, dropping back to her knees.
He reached out and touched her face. “You’ve changed,” he said. His displeasure with her heavy eye makeup was written all over his face.
She chuckled. “So have you, Mr. MacCarron.”
He took her hand. “I’ve always loved that hymn. Your father and I used to sit on your front porch and listen to you play it over and over. Didn’t we, Bill?”
Em glanced over her shoulder and saw her father, his nostalgic expression mimicking Noland’s.
Bill put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “We sure did, Noland.”
“Michael’s missed you, Em,” Noland said, glancing up at his son.
Michael gave her a weary smile. “Come on, Dad. We should get you back to your room.”
Noland nodded but returned his attention to Em. “You’ll come to visit me soon, won’t you? Maybe with a little less of that?” He gestured to her eyes. “You don’t need it, honey. You’ve got nothing to hide from.”
Em swiped a tear from her cheek and nodded.
Michael released the brake on his father’s wheelchair.
She glanced up and met Michael’s gaze. The sharp edges of her anger didn’t cut quite so deep when she looked at him. Instead of the careless teenager she had held frozen in the dark recesses of her heart where time stood still, she now saw a man carrying a heavy burden. His green eyes spoke of deep loss, anguish, and remorse. It was easy to paint Michael and Zoe as villains. Black and white. Right and wrong. Sinner and saint. After her injury, she had needed to compartmentalize every part of her life into rigid categories to survive.
He must have sensed the shift in her response, but before he was able to respond, Anita Benson emerged from the crowd.
“Michael, dear, we should be getting your father back to his room.”
Em’s skin prickled as she watched Michael and Noland follow Anita out of the ballroom.
Tom and Mindy Lancaster were speaking with students and parents trickling out of the ballroom. Noland’s outburst forgotten, families were gushing about the group performance of the hymn.
Tom worked his way through the families and waved. “Em, Bill, it’s so good to see you both! That was something, Em. How did you know that song would help Noland?”
“I didn’t know,” she answered. “It felt like the right thing to do.”
The teenage owner of the violin walked over looking starstruck, and Em handed her the violin and bow. “A little more rosin on the bow next time. But other than that, you’re taking great care of your instrument.”
The girl beamed and gazed at her violin lovingly before excusing herself.
Tom glanced over at his wife who was busy helping children put their violins and sheet music inside their cases. “Are you in town for long, Em?”
“I’ll be here through the holidays,” she answered. Her post-performance fingers trembled, and she clasped them together.
A hopeful look crossed Tom’s face. “Can I ask a favor of you?”
She shared a glance with her father. “Sure.”
“Would you mind helping out with the music at the Senior Living Campus? Mindy usually handles all the musical needs at the SLC during the winter holidays, but she’s injured her wrist. I’m still with the symphony, and the performance schedule is crazy over the holidays. Otherwise, I would have taken over for her.”
“Tom, I’m not sure—” Em said, shifting her weight from foot to foot.
But Tom cut her off. “There are a few family members of SLC residents who usually help out. You wouldn’t be stuck doing this alone. It would really help Mindy and me if you did this for us.”
“You should do it, kiddo,” Bill said. His eyes shined with emotion.
Tom’s face brightened. “It’s mostly background music for a few holiday events. Give me your email address, and I’ll send you the details.”
What was she supposed to say? She had sworn off ever playing again, except she just performed in front of a packed ballroom.
She mustered a weak smile. “Of course, Tom. I’m happy to help.”
12
Michael slid headphones over his ears and settled into his chair tucked in the far corner of the carriage house. He stared at the screen of his digital audio workstation. His run in with Em at Sadie’s Hollow and his father’s outburst during the recital left him hollowed out. He ran his hand over his jaw. It was tender, but no real damage was done.
Noland’s behavior was becoming more erratic. Maybe they needed to reevaluate his meds again?
Michael closed his eyes and released a weary breath.
It was a shit idea to bring his father to the recital. The doctors had mentioned that behavior problems could occur more frequently during the late afternoon and evenings as his father’s Alzheimer’s progressed. Sundowning, that’s what they’d called it. And it was exactly what happened this evening—until Em played the violin.
Michael rubbed his eyes. Christ, he was tired. He was close to nodding off when Cody, who had been sleeping blissfully on the futon, jumped down and wagged his tail.
“You need to go out, boy?” Michael asked, shaking off sleep.
The old retriever pranced and turned in excited circles as the door to the carriage house opened.
Em stepped into the carriage house and crouched down. “Cody, you’re such a big boy now.” She scratched behind his ears, and the dog leaned into her.
“Last time I saw Cody, he was a puppy,” she said.
Michael set his headphones on the table. He rubbed at the tense muscles in his neck. “I don’t have it in me to fight with you, Em.” He had gone into lawyer mode. His tone was curt and void of emotion.
“I didn’t come here to fight.”
He watched her pet Cody. No ripped tights or stamp-sized skirts. She was dressed comfortably in yoga pants and his hoodie. Her red hair fell in loose waves past her shoulders. He wanted to gather the strands into his hands and twist his fingers in the auburn waves. He pushed the thought out of his mind and met her gaze. His stomach clenched.
Her eyes weren’t filled with the simmering ferocity he had come to know since she arrived back in Langley Park.
Her eyes were brimming, but not with kindness or even the lust he’d seen when she tried to seduce him. There was no mistaking what he saw in her sapphire blue eyes: pity. He clenched his jaw.
She could keep her goddamn pity.
“I know what you’re going to say, Mary Michelle, and I don’t want to hear it,” he said, coming to his feet.
He could spot pity coming from a mile away. Five years ago, when his father’s health declined, he could barely step foot into the Langley Park town center without someone giving him that look.
So sorry to hear about your father, Michael.
I’m sure this is very difficult for you, Michael.
“I didn’t know about your dad,” Em said, giving Cody one last pat on his head before she stood to face him.
“Your dad didn’t tell you?” he asked, still in lawyer mode.
Em twisted the hoodie’s sleeve. “My dad and I never talked about Langley Park. After the accident, after I left for Australia, we didn’t talk about anything from the past.”
Michael nodded. Em had completely cut him and Zoe out of her life. It wasn’t a far stretch to imagine she wanted to forget everything about this place.
Em took a step toward him. “Talk to me.”
He crossed his arms. “Quid pro quo.”
Em frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He maintained a neutral expression. “You answer one of my questions, and I’ll answer one of yours.”
She crossed her arms. “Fair enough, what happened to your dad?”
“I figured your father would have filled you in on all that after my dad’s outburst at the recital.”
Em broke eye contact. “He told m
e Noland was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He said your dad’s health declined quickly.”
Michael ran a hand through his auburn hair. “It started about six years ago, after my mother’s death.”
Em flinched, and Michael knew why. She hadn’t come back to Langley Park for his mother’s funeral. Her mother had traveled across the ocean to attend, but she had remained in Australia.
Her finger twisted into the cuff. “I’m so sorry, Michael. I felt awful. I wanted to come back. I just couldn’t.”
He nodded then stared at a scuff on the wall just past her shoulder. “It was little things with my dad at first—forgetting a meeting or a client’s name. But the disease progressed quickly. I sold my place in Kansas City and moved in with him. But I couldn’t run the office and take care of him.” He swallowed back the emotion and held tight to the neutral mask of indifference he had been hiding behind for the last five years.
“My dad said that, sometimes, he doesn’t recognize you,” Em added softly.
He let out an incredulous huff. “If you already knew about my dad, why the fuck did you ask?”
She met his gaze head-on. “I wanted to hear it from you.”
He shifted his weight. “My turn. Quid pro quo, remember?”
“Go ahead,” she said, lifting her chin.
“What were you doing at Sadie’s Hollow?”
Her creamy cheeks bloomed crimson. “I was trying to remember. Trying to jog my memory.”
“Why?”
She released the twisted cuff. “Because I need to know what happened that night at the hollow. Maybe it was just some stupid accident like everyone’s always said, but something inside me knows there’s more to it.”
“Did you remember anything else?” he asked, his question barely a whisper.
He had gone over and over that night for years, trying to remember if he’d seen anything suspicious. But those thoughts always came to the same shameful conclusion: He’d been too busy playing music and wasting time with Tiffany Shelton to have noticed anything.
Her pained expression answered his question.
“My turn,” she said, eyes flashing. “We’re still playing the quid pro quo game, right?
He nodded. She would have made one ballbuster of an attorney.
“Is Zoe still in love with Sam?”
This caught him off guard. “Is Zoe, what?”
“Don’t act like you never knew, Michael. I saw her at Park Tavern. I saw the way she was looking at him.”
Fury shot through his system. “Are you jealous? Have you been pining away for Sam all this time?”
“Are you out of your mind?” she shot back. “Sam was like a big brother to me, for Christ’s sake.” The red bloom was back ripening her cheeks.
Michael turned toward the punching bag hanging in the opposite corner. The thought of Em with any guy nearly drove him to violence. Flashes of her dancing with that tool at the bar sent hot streaks of jealousy coursing through his veins. He needed to lace up his gloves and spend the next few hours pummeling the punching bag. Maybe then he’d be able to release the mountain of tension that was building inside him.
“I didn’t come here to fight with you, Michael. I shut everything about Langley Park out for so long. Twelve years have passed. But to me, it’s like I’ve stepped back in time.”
He couldn’t see her, but he could feel her. Her energy. Her spirit. He kept his gaze locked on the punching bag. Thoughts of her pressed up against her house calling to him to run through the rain and join her echoed through his mind. He felt that same pull now, that same urge to run through any obstacle to be by her side.
“Let me help you,” he said.
“With what?” Em asked.
Michael turned to face her. “With remembering.”
Em’s fingers were back to twisting the hoodie’s cuff. “I don’t know how you could help. After you left me…”
Guilt and desire twisted inside his chest. Em didn’t have to finish her sentence for him to know what she meant. After he left her, he never came back. He never went to find her.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t help her now.
“You said it yourself, Em. You’ve been gone a long time. I can help you. We can search the area around the hollow, visit the nearby towns. Maybe you’ll see something that will help you remember.”
She parted her lips to speak, but nothing came out.
Michael pressed on, “I’ve always had this feeling that you must have been taken somewhere that night. I can’t put together how you could have been injured so badly without somebody seeing or hearing something.”
“I’ve thought the same thing.” Her words were barely a whisper.
“Let me help you,” he said and took a step closer.
She shook her head, but the furrow in her brow told him she was considering his offer.
“Maybe it’s a stupid idea—a wild goose chase,” she said. “I’m supposed to be helping my dad—”
“Sell the house,” Michael said, finishing her thought. “I know your dad needs to sell the house to pay for the cottage at the Senior Living Campus.”
Anger blazed in her eyes. “How do you know that?”
“Who do you think helped him get into the campus in the first place? Who do you think has handled all the legalities and paperwork? Who do you think made sure he had money set aside to update his Foursquare?”
Her fingers twisted the cuff of the hoodie.
“I’m not telling you this to hurt you, Em,” he began as an idea came to him.
The fire in her eyes dialed down a fraction.
“You can work on the house during the week, and we can spend the weekends searching the area around Sadie’s Hollow.”
Em wasn’t fiddling with the cuff anymore. She remained stock-still, the blue of her eyes now deceptively serene like the calm before the storm.
The attorney in him pressed on, eager to make his case. “I know your house needs some work done. I can put you in touch with an architect who knows the homes of Langley Park like the back of his hand. And, more importantly, you can’t be speeding around the back roads of Kansas in your dad’s old Mercedes coupe. That car was not made to traverse snow or ice-caked roads. You know how unpredictable the Midwest weather can be this time of year. We can take my old Range Rover. It can get through anything.”
Em flicked her gaze to the Rover. “Quid pro quo?”
He nodded. He’d lost track of whose turn it was to ask a question. But at this point, it didn’t matter. Em was close to accepting his help. He could feel it.
Her eyes traveled over the digital workstation. A keyboard, bass guitar and drum pad sat propped next to a pair of speakers. The screen was illuminated with a track he’d been mixing.
“Why didn’t you study music in college?”
He looked at the instruments and released a breath. “Because I didn’t. An accident may have derailed your life. Obligation derailed mine.”
Michael met her gaze. It was like standing before a dam of memories seconds before it was about to give way. He remembered the smile on her face and her sweet, bubbling laughter as he sprinted through the rain toward her. He remembered drifting off to sleep to the sound of her playing the violin late into the night as the music escaped through her open bedroom window and fluttered over him like whisper-soft kisses.
“I should go,” she said. But she didn’t move.
He knew she felt it, too. Their history filled the space between them. Memory after memory popped and cracked like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
He took her hand. “Em, let me help you.”
She inhaled sharply. He was holding her left hand. He could feel the smooth, raised scar that ran along her ring finger—both a tactile and a visual reminder of the night she lost everything. A zigzagged scarlet letter proclaiming her greatest loss. He grazed his thumb across her wrist eliciting another sharp breath. Her hand relaxed, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“I know you d
on’t trust me. But I promise, I’m not going to let you down again.”
Her hand tensed, but she didn’t pull away.
“I’ll be at The Drip in the town center tomorrow morning at eight.” She knew the place. He had watched her drive by his office each day this week holding a giant to-go cup from the local coffee house. “I’ll park the Rover out in front. She’ll be all gassed up and ready to go. We can leave from there and start looking anywhere you want.”
“I don’t think—” she whispered, but he didn’t let her finish.
“You don’t have to decide anything right now. You know where I’ll be tomorrow. It’s up to you, Mary Michelle.”
13
Em locked the door to her childhood home and glanced over at Michael’s house. The sun glinted off the second-floor windows like they were tossing her shiny, knowing winks.
“That’s really Michael’s house,” she whispered, squinting her eyes as a far-off wind chime clanged in the breeze.
Of course, she remembered Michael’s home. She remembered the entire town. But after all this time away, Langley Park had morphed into someplace almost make-believe.
But this place was no work of fiction.
The picturesque Tudors and bungalows lining the streets, the quaint town center thriving with mom-and-pop shops, the botanic gardens, serene with leaves littering the ground, were all as real as the sun shining from above.
She inhaled the morning air. The cold and sleet from yesterday were a distant memory. The sun met the day unencumbered by the heavy clouds that greeted most fall Kansas days.
She had pulled on a pair of jeans and a fitted T-shirt then finished off the outfit with a cropped leather jacket. Before leaving the house, she’d stopped in front of the mirror hanging in the foyer. She had scrubbed her face clean in the shower and neglected even to open her makeup bag. A smattering of freckles kissed the skin of her cheekbones. But it was her eyes that drew her attention. Without the heavy eyeliner, the color encasing her pupils burst like a field of deep blue hydrangea no longer shrouded in a dense fog.
The Complete Langley Park Series (Books 1-5) Page 34
