Hideaway Cove (A Windfall Island Novel) (19 page)

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Benji looked down again, then up, sheepishly. “I guess my mom is worried about me.”

“See? You’re a genius. I know grown men who don’t understand the women in their lives so well.”

“She’s my mom,” Benji said, eyes rolling. “I’ve like lived with her my whole life.”

Hold nodded solemnly, but Benji could tell he was trying not to smile. “I’ll tell her you’re okay, but you know what would really make her happy? You getting some sleep.”

“Yeah,” Benji said, sliding down in the bed. “She’s always worried about me sleeping. Don’t know why,” he added around a yawn. “I sleep a lot.”

“She’s your mom. Worrying is what they do.” Hold tucked the bedclothes up around him, and the squishy feeling in Benji’s stomach went away almost entirely.

Must be what it felt like to have a dad, he thought again. “I wish you would marry Mom,” he murmured as he drifted off, never identifying the feelings bubbling through him as hope and love, or realizing that the man lingering in the doorway to watch him sleep felt the very same way.

Y
ou’re sure?”

“Yes, Mom,” Benji said, trading a look with Hold over the back seat, a look that was pure male tolerance for the unnecessary fretting of females in general and mothers in particular.

Jessi didn’t let it put her off. “There might be some talk.”

“There’s always talk, Mom.”

“About us, I mean. Me and Hold and you. And your dad,” she added as an afterthought.

Benji gathered his backpack and got out of the car, stopping by the window she rolled down. “It’s okay, Mom. Me and Hold talked about it while you were in the shower.”

She slanted Hold a look. “And?”

“People are dumb,” Benji said with a shrug.

“Not the way I put it,” Hold muttered when she glanced at him again.

“They get bored and they talk about other people so they won’t have to think about what’s wrong in their own lives.” Frowning a little, his eyes went to Hold. “Right?”

“That’s exactly right.”

“And I’m supposed to feel sorry for them.”

Hold nodded.

Benji nodded too, aiming for the same pious expression he saw on Hold’s face. “And if they won’t shut up, I just walk away because they’re just trying to get me to react, and I’m not supposed to give them the satisfaction.” He grinned. “And if they hit me, I can hit back.” And off he ran, leaving Jessi only one target for her wrath.

“He can hit back?”

Hold hunched in his seat. “Kids are mean.”

“He’s a kid, too. One who’s recently been told he can punch other kids.”

“Only in self-defense.”

“Most of the other kids are bigger than he is.”

“Which means they shouldn’t be picking on him in the first place. And all the more reason for him to let them know he won’t be pushed around.”

She looked out the window again, searching the knots of kids and adults until she found Benji. He’d dumped his backpack on the frozen ground so he could play with a couple of the other boys, including Bobby Cassidy, who considered Benji a sort of honorary little brother. That might worry her in a few years, but for now she could be grateful he had someone looking out for him.

“He’ll be fine,” Hold said. “He’s a great kid. Who’d mess with him?”

“No one. Not physically, anyway.” But that didn’t make what Hold had done right.

Hold shifted around to half face her. “I was a little boy once,” he said, “and small for my age. I know that’s a stretch, considering the fine specimen of manhood I grew into.”

“Your point would be?”

“School’s a scary place when you’re the little kid on the playground. I just gave him the advice I wish someone had given me when I was his age.”

“Yes, well, I’m not sure I’m grateful.”

“It won’t be an issue, sugar. It’s a small school. Every kid knows every other kid, and more importantly, their parents. It’s not going to come to fistfights.

“But knowing he can stand up for himself, that’s a confidence booster, and kids aren’t apt to harass someone who’s sure of himself.”

She supposed he had her there, and since he did, she put the car in gear and pulled away from the school. “I don’t imagine the break-in has gotten around just yet anyway, let alone that you spent the night at my house.” That, however was about to change.

Jessi pulled up in front of the Horizon, slumping a little when she saw Maisie Cutshaw going in for breakfast. Maisie stopped with her hand on the door, peering through the Explorer’s tinted windshield. A smile blossomed on her plain face, and Jessi figured she must have identified the big shadow in the passenger seat.

“Great. First you corrupt my son, now you’re ruining my reputation.”

Hold reached over to cup her cheek, rubbing his thumb over her lower lip. “Are you sorry?”

She covered his hand. “No.” Then patted it briskly. “Go get a change of clothes. You can shower at Maggie’s.”

“I’ll just be a minute.”

A minute on Windfall could be an eternity, Jessi thought with a sigh.

Maisie followed Hold in, reappearing less than a minute later with a cigarette-puffing Helen Appelman in tow.

Maggie wouldn’t have opened the window; Jessi wished she could be that rude. When Helen tapped on the glass, she rolled her window down, listened to them pepper her with questions—and save her from answering by talking over each other. They devolved into a verbal shouting match as Helen and Maisie tried to outdo each other getting the scoop on Jessi’s relationship with Hold. Name-calling followed, and finger wagging. Maisie gave Helen a little shove, Helen shoved back, then AJ burst through the Horizon’s door, Hold hot on his heels.

“You can thank me later,” Hold said as he climbed into the passenger seat.

“I’ll thank you now.” Jessi backed out of the parking place and pulled away. “Considering you’ll have to face Helen tonight, you probably don’t want to think about later.”

“You’re in early,” Jessi said when she and Hold walked into the office and found Maggie already there.

Maggie looked over at them from where she sat with her backside on the edge of Jessi’s desk, contemplating the big wall calendar. “I’m going over my schedule for the next week or so.”

Which was probably true, Jessi allowed, but a three-hundred-pound Italian tenor could have packed everything he needed for a month in the bags under her eyes.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t alert. “I can leave if you two want privacy,” Maggie teased.

Hold grinned. “Would you be so kind?”

Jessi shooed him away. He lingered, though, ran a hand down her arm and linked his fingers with hers, lifting them to brush a kiss over their tips.

“Aw, aren’t you two cute?”

Jessi shot her a look.

Still smiling hugely, Maggie picked up a pen and clinked it on the side of the little pottery vase Benji had made and which she’d put on her desk to hold pens. In case that wasn’t annoying enough, she made smooching noises—loud and obnoxious ones.

Hold dropped a kiss on Jessi’s lips, winked at Maggie, and headed for the little office.

“Payback is a bitch,” Jessi said.

“You can be, too, at times.”

“Exactly.” Jessi pointed at Maggie. “Keep needling me and see what happens when Dex gets back.”

Maggie turned back to the big wall calendar.

“I’m sorry,” Jessi said immediately. “You must be missing him so much.”

Maggie, not one to talk about her feelings, kept her eyes on the chart. “Both my birds are due for maintenance,” she said, tapping a finger on the big red X in the square for that day, meaning Maggie had run up against FAA regulations for flying hours, both for her and her machinery. “As much as I love flying, I’m happy to have a day off.”

“I never thought I’d hear you say that.”

“Me, either, but God, Jess, I’m so tired. And not just because…” Maggie let it go, but the hand she rubbed over her chest, the hand adorned with her engagement ring, made Jessi’s heart ache for her.

“This keeps up and you won’t be able to wait for Benji to grow up and learn to fly,” she said, going for light and cheerful.

Maggie didn’t notice. “I’ll have to think about replacing the Piper, too,” she said, referring to the plane that had been sabotaged only weeks before in an attempt to kill her.

Maggie had ditched in the water about ten miles off the coast of Windfall Island. Dex had saved her, but the plane had been lost to the icy depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

“It’s good news,” Jessi said when Maggie only shook her head. Business was growing fast, but that meant they needed to keep up. Maybe, she thought, it would push Maggie past the inertia that seemed to be weighing her down since Dex had gone to Boston. “I can make a couple of calls, see what’s available.”

“Thanks, but that’s my end of the business, Jess. You do more than your share as it is, keeping everything else running.” Maggie dredged up a small smile. “We might have to think about getting you an assistant before long.”

“It’s the slow season, so neither of us has to worry too much at the moment.”

Maggie sighed. “If this is the slow season, we’re going to be in trouble come Spring.”

“Spring is a long way off,” Hold said. When they both turned to him standing framed in the doorway of the little office, he added, “I think we should talk about last night.”

Maggie grinned slowly. “I’m all ears. Don’t spare the details.”

“Someone broke into Jessi’s house, and we don’t have any details,” Hold said mildly. “That’s the problem.”

“And I’m taking it seriously, believe me,” Maggie said. “So let’s talk.”

When they both stared at her, Jessi said, “Is this the part where you both gang up on me?”

“No ganging up. I’m staying at your place from now on,” Hold said in the kind of tone he probably thought settled the matter.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Jessi said, refusing to be steamrolled.

“Hold is right,” Maggie said. “And I’m sure the two of you will work that out. In the meanwhile, we ought to let Dex know what happened.”

Much as she wanted to disagree, to just pretend nothing had happened, Jessi knew Maggie was right. Since the phone on her desk was ancient, Maggie dialed Dex on her cell phone so they could put him on speaker. It only took Hold a couple of minutes to fill Dex in on recent events.

Dex’s first question surprised them all. “Is there anything out of place in the office?”

Hold, Maggie, and Jessi all froze, staring at one another.

“You think it was a diversion?” Hold finally said.

“It would make sense.”

Jessi took a quick visual inventory of her desk, then the rest of the office. “I don’t see anything out of place.”

“Check the locks.”

Hold took a step back and ran his fingers over the doorknob to his office. “Damn,” he said, bending to get a closer look. “There are a couple of scratches here.” He ducked through the doorway, doing the same kind of quick once-over with his space, Jessi figured, that she’d done with hers.

“If someone did monkey with the lock they didn’t get it open,” Hold concluded when he came back out. “Trust me, I know where every scrap of paper is, and nothing was out of place, on the desk or on the chart.”

“My guess is someone tried,” Dex said. “I would have expected both break-ins to occur on the same night.”

“You think the culprit creeped my house to get Maggie away from the airport?” Jessi asked.

“That’s exactly what I think.”

“If it was a diversion, it worked,” Maggie put in. “I was gone from here for at least an hour and a half. Should have been plenty of time to get in here and get out.”

“For a pro who didn’t want us to know he’d gotten in,” Dex said. “You have some pretty shady characters on the island, but no one that good. Which worries me. You could have stumbled across him before he was finished, Maggie.”

“There was no one here when I got back.”

“I don’t like it,” Dex shot back. “Hold can hang out with Jessi and Benji, but you’re all alone at night.”

Maggie jerked to her feet. “And we’re women, so we need to be taken care of?”

“You know what I mean. Any one of us is a target when there’s no one to watch our backs.”

Maggie calmed a little. Not enough to lean against Jessi’s desk again, though. “I’m perfectly safe,” she said. “And I think we’re overlooking the obvious here. There’s no proof anyone tried to get into the little office, and the break-in at Jessi’s may not be about Eugenia at all.”

“You think it could be Lance,” Jessi said into the resulting silence.

“And you don’t?”

“It crossed my mind,” Jessi said, “especially when Lance showed up at the house this morning—early this morning. Apparently George interrogated him, and Lance was in his best dramatic always-the-victim form.”

Maggie made a sympathetic face. “How is Benji?”

“At school. Taking on the world.” Jessi sent Hold a look. “Probably hoping someone will make a comment so he can go Rambo on them.”

“You’re not going to let me off the hook on that, are you?” Hold appealed to Maggie. “I told him he could hit back, but only if someone pops him first.”

“There are one or two people on this island who could use a right to the jaw,” Maggie said. “If you want my opinion.”

Jessi rolled her eyes. “Aside from his sudden thirst for blood, Benji seems to be taking this in stride.”

“He’s not too attached to Lance yet.”

“He wants to be,” Jessi murmured, trying not to feel relieved by Maggie’s observation. No matter what she felt about Lance, Benji deserved a father; it was selfish of her not to want to share Benji with Lance.

But then, she had no problem sharing him with Hold.

“So what lame alibi did Lance toss out?” Maggie wanted to know.

“He claimed he spent the day at Meeker’s with his mother. He wouldn’t use that alibi if it wasn’t airtight.”

“No,” Maggie said. “Joyce Proctor would slaughter everyone on Windfall to protect her son, but Meeker wouldn’t put his ass on the line for anyone unless they were paying him. And Lance doesn’t have two nickels to rub together.”

“So it wasn’t Lance,” Hold said, although he didn’t sound completely convinced. “That leaves everyone else.”

“I think it’s time for me to come back,” Dex said.

Maggie lit up, bouncing up to her toes a couple of times. And along with the wistfulness Jessi felt came a little hit of envy. What would it be like, she wondered, to feel so much joy your body couldn’t contain it?

Although she could feel Hold watching her, she didn’t so much as glance at him. Being with Hold made her happy, but it was a careful kind of happy, the kind she held inside herself like a nugget of gold she didn’t dare show to the world for fear it would be stolen away.

“I can come for you this afternoon,” Maggie was saying. “Just name the time.”

“The sooner the better,” Dex said, sounding weary and discouraged. “I’m not accomplishing anything here anyway. Although I have some thoughts on how to change that.”

“Care to enlighten us?” Hold asked.

“I’ve got to meet with Alec first, make sure it can be pulled off. We’ll talk when I get back to Windfall.”

“Which will be today,” Maggie said. “I’ll be in Boston by noon.”