Kiss the Moon (16 page)

Harriet paled. “They both strike me as professional and quite decent. I can’t imagine either would harass Penelope…” She stopped, aware of Andy’s sharp gaze on her. She added quickly, “That’s just my impression.”

“Don’t let what you want to be cloud your view of what is, Harriet.”

She noticed the girls studiously drinking their tea, pretending not to be listening. “Just you do the same, Andy.”

His easy grin caught her off guard. “I’m a cop. I’m always looking for the dark side.”

He turned to his daughters, and they changed the subject, luring Harriet into a discussion of their various teachers, many of whom she’d known since childhood.

After the McNally family left, Harriet did paperwork in front of the parlor fire. She found herself listening for the door, anticipating Jack Dunning or Wyatt Sinclair’s return. Finally, she gave up all pretense of concentrating and stared at the orange flames. Wyatt could be her cousin, her blood. He was so rich, so accomplished, so self-controlled—so much of what she wasn’t. It gave her hope, just thinking they might be related.

And Jack Dunning…she almost didn’t dare picture him. It had been years and years since she’d had such a blatant, intense crush on a man. Maybe never. He was good-looking, sexy, charming and surprisingly kind. They’d sat up last night, drinking wine and talking about the inn, Cold Spring, the lake. He hadn’t pried into her family or asked a single question about Penelope. Certainly he hadn’t mentioned the tantalizing coincidence of her arrival on her father’s church doorstep and the disappearance of Frannie Beaudine and Colt Sinclair. He had to know about it.

“Harriet—I thought I saw you in here.”

His voice. She jumped, papers flying off her lap. “Oh! Jack, hello. I was just doing some work.”

“Sorry to interrupt.”

“Oh, no—no, you’re not interrupting.”

He squatted, picked up the papers and returned them to her clipboard. He smiled, eased effortlessly up. “The snow’s stopped. I thought you might like to take a short walk, unless you’re busy.”

“I’m not busy. With the weather, it’ll be a slow night.”

She got to her feet, feeling a fat lock of hair fall loose from its bobby pin. She wished she’d tried again with her makeup. As she held her clipboard against her chest, she noticed the nicks and scars in her hands from years of remodeling the inn. She could feel the extra pounds around her middle, imagined the kind of women Jack would attract in New York. She was a plain, middle-aged New Englander without style or sex appeal.

Self-delusion, she thought, had never been one of her faults.

But she found herself tucking her hair behind her ear and smiling. “I’d love a walk, if we can be back in a half hour.”

“A half hour it is.”

“Did you see Penelope this morning?”

“Yep.” He grinned, shrugged. “I won’t mince words, Harriet. The woman’s a pain in the ass.”

She laughed. “Yes, but she’s
our
pain in the ass.”

“I love how you people think. When I was acting up, my daddy’d give me a cuff to the ear and that’d straighten me out. If it didn’t, there’d be more where that came from.”

“Oh, my. What a difficult way to grow up!”

He shook his head, grinning in amazement. “It was a great way to grow up. I knew my limits. Your cousin, in case you haven’t noticed, has no idea of hers.”

“But isn’t that to the good?”

“Everyone has limits, Harriet, even Penelope Chestnut.”

She bit back another laugh, feeling almost giddy at his openness, his irreverence. Nothing bothered him. “You won’t tell her, will you?”

“Not a chance. Shall we?”

Ten

P
enelope breathed in the clean, cold air. She could smell a hint of smoke from Bubba Johns’s wood stove. His shack was just ahead through the woods, around a bend and down a gently sloping hill. After finishing the syrup and shoveling her driveway, she’d strapped on her snowshoes and headed through the freshly fallen snow. Hers were traditional wooden bear-paw snowshoes, a gift from her grandfather when she was in college, and although the snow was wet and fairly compacted, the going was still tough. In hard, out easy. That was the old saying. She could follow her tracks on the way back.

There was no marker indicating she’d crossed onto Sinclair land, no thick black line, no No Trespassing signs. She knew only because she was familiar with the boundaries of her own land. When the old logging road went through a gap in a stone wall, she knew she had left her land. The road narrowed to a footpath, and the stone walls that had once marked off farmland, long overgrown, gradually disappeared. The forest thickened and darkened, the hills were steeper, and there was a greater sense that this was wild land, left to the deer and moose, the occasional bear and Bubba Johns.

Penelope spotted his crude, rustic one-room shack, nestled amid pine and hemlock on a hillside above a sparkling, winding brook. The winds from the storm had subsided and the only sound was the water rushing over the rocks. The landscape, even the sky, was a soft white, broken only by touches of evergreen and the gray branches and trunks of leafless trees. The heavy, wet snow clung to the trees, weighing them down. A stand of thin gray birches bent almost to the ground.

The trail twisted along the top of the hill, then wound to Bubba’s shack, a combination of logs, tar paper, plywood and tin. It had two small, mismatched windows he must have scavenged from cast-offs. He’d constructed a simple outhouse and a tiny garden shed, and he’d put up homemade bird feeders, dozens of them, in the trees, on poles, stuck to his windows. They were quiet, the birds waiting to make sure the storm was over.

On the opposite side of the shack was a small garden enclosed in chicken wire. Animals would be a major menace to gardens this far in the woods. Bubba Johns might not be entirely normal, but he’d fashioned a comfortable subsistence life for himself out here.

“Bubba?” The snow absorbed her voice, and she tried again, more loudly. “It’s me, Penelope Chestnut.”

No answer. Just the stillness, the steady flow of the brook.

She moved forward on the path. There were no other fresh tracks in the new snow. Her snowshoes had left clear, definite tracks that anyone could follow. She couldn’t turn around and sneak home—Bubba would know she’d been here. She peeled off her hat, damp and frozen, the ends of her hair glistening and stiff from an icy drizzle early in her trek. She didn’t have much time. It was already after four, a good hour’s hike back to her place in these conditions.

Why had she come, anyway? To ask Bubba if she could tell Wyatt Sinclair the truth? To get his permission?

He’d never asked her to lie in the first place. She was the one who’d decided to change her story. She didn’t even know Bubba. No one did. He was an old man who lived alone, nothing more—or less.

She stood in the silent, picturesque woods, imagined dozens of reporters and investigators, Colt and Frannie hobbyists, locals and sightseers rushing to the crash site to get the first pictures of the wreckage, the first trinkets from the famous, ill-fated flight. What if they photographed Colt and Frannie’s remains, looted the wreckage, brought back stuff for auctions and tabloids? It was voyeuristic. Wrong. She thought of the tangled heap of metal tucked among the rocks, trees and brush. Undisturbed. Quiet. Peaceful. A grave.

Her father had talked to her about doing the right thing for the right reasons. Well, she had. The possible consequences for Bubba and Harriet were only part of her reasoning. There were also the consequences to the two people who’d died in that crash forty-five years ago.

Two scruffy mutts charged from the shadows toward her, barking and snarling. Penelope stood still, heart pounding. Should have brought Granddad’s Winchester. But a voice from inside the shack hollered, “Back off!”

The dogs obeyed instantly, trotting to the shadows of the shack. Penelope felt her knees go out from under her, and if not for her steady, wide snowshoes, she’d have gone down. Dogs. She’d forgotten Bubba had dogs. They were old and didn’t always travel with him, and he never brought them on his rare trips to town.

The old hermit emerged from the shack, pulling stretchy suspenders over a frayed brown plaid flannel shirt. His gray and white hair stuck out, and his beard hung to his chest, untrimmed, not particularly clean. He wore black boots with buckles from her grandfather’s era. Maybe they’d even been her granddad’s boots. Bubba Johns wasn’t known for his vanity.

His gray eyes leveled on her. “What do you want?”

“I was just—I was out walking—” She took a breath, reminding herself she had no reason to fear this man. She was young, strong, fast. Even if he did go wild on her, she could defend herself. If she had to, she’d take a rock to the dogs. “I was lost on Sunday. I think you saw me. At the plane wreckage.”

He was silent, eyeing her. He was a tall, rail-thin man. His gray eyes seemed even frostier in the March landscape.

Penelope didn’t back down. “You know about the wreckage. You know I found it. You were out there—you came to my house yesterday.”

“What of it? Your business doesn’t concern me.”

“I wanted to tell you that I changed my mind and withdrew my story about finding the wreckage. I don’t know what you know about it, but it’s a famous wreck—it’s been missing for forty-five years. The two people who died in it—” She stopped mid-sentence, frowned at his obvious disinterest. “Well, I guess I decided to let them rest in peace. I realized what it’d be like for you, having people crawling through the woods.”

“There’s a plane out there?”

She sighed. Maybe this was how Wyatt and Dunning felt talking to her. “Yes. I saw it on Sunday when I was lost in the woods.”

No reaction. He stared at her without expression.

“If anything in the wreckage has been disturbed in any way—if dogs dragged off the bodies or someone looted their belongings and kept quiet about it—the media and the authorities would be all over you. You’d be their prime suspect, at least at first.”

“Is this what you came to tell me?”

She nodded. “I thought you might be worried.”

“I don’t care about any plane wreckage. I can leave here if people come.”

“Leave?”

He shrugged, matter-of-fact. “I don’t have much. The dogs and I can pack up and go anytime.”

“But you’ve lived out here for years. You shouldn’t have to—”

He cut her off. “Anything else you want to say?”

“Wyatt Sinclair’s in town. His family owns this land. I don’t think he’ll bother you. But I thought you should know.”

Bubba didn’t seem interested. “Okay.”

He turned and started toward his shack. Penelope felt dismissed. But she said to his retreating figure, “Bubba, that
was
you in the woods on Sunday, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t answer. She didn’t know if he hadn’t heard her—he was an old man—or if he was ignoring her. She pushed back a wave of queasiness and turned, suddenly eager for pancakes, ham and hot syrup. She’d eat salads tomorrow. Her second day of grounding, snow, a suspicious PI and a Sinclair in her kitchen—kissing a Sinclair. She deserved to indulge.

She waited for Bubba Johns to change his mind and come back and chat with her a while longer, explain when he’d found the plane, how, why he’d never mentioned it to anyone. But he said something to his dogs, and they all went inside his shack. He shut the door.

Dismissed.

Reminding herself their conversation had gone better than she’d expected, Penelope pulled her hat on and followed her packed tracks along the ridge, and down, then over a low rise, moving fast, getting her rhythm and more flotation than on the way in.

The path widened, and as she made her way down the last steep hill, she stopped and listened, uncertain what had put her on alert. A soft breeze stirred, whistling in the trees, bare branches clicking. She stood very still, aware of how alone she was. Twisting from her waist to one side and then the other, she managed to do a three-hundred-sixty-degree scan of her surroundings.

A distinct movement several yards behind her. A shuffling sound in the snow, detectable only because she’d held her breath. It wasn’t an animal. She couldn’t explain why, but she knew it was human. Someone was out there in the trees and freshly fallen snow, watching her. She glanced around for tracks but saw only her own.

Had someone followed her to Bubba’s shack?

Was Bubba spying on her?

She shuddered at the possibilities and used the jolt of fear to propel her through the snow.

She moved as quickly as she could on her snowshoes, careful not to lose her balance or go head-over-teakettle or run out of steam. When she got to her land, she broke into a trot, pushing herself hard and fast, sucking in the cold air, her lungs burning, her face numb, her legs dead.

She was running when she reached her dirt road, and Wyatt was there, standing in the shadows of a thick maple. She accosted him feeling wild, out of control. “Have you been following me? Damn you, Sinclair! I hate being spied on. I
hate
sneaky men. If you’ve got something you want from me, you say so. You don’t goddamned do an underhanded, slippery thing like that.”

“Penelope, stop.” His voice was calm, serious. “I just got here. I saw your tracks and thought I might catch up with you. Which I did.”

“You didn’t follow me?”

“No.”

“Then who—” She took in shallow breaths, panting from her mad race through the woods. “Do you see other tracks? Is Jack Dunning’s car here? Did you see it down the road anywhere?” She stopped herself, peeled off her hat and gloves and shoved them in her anorak pockets. God, she needed to get a decent breath! She could feel Wyatt’s dark gaze on her, probing, assessing. She had to calm down. “I suppose it could have been anyone. Someone else on snowshoes, enjoying the fresh snow.”

Wyatt watched her silently as she unstrapped her snowshoes, clogged with wet, icy snow. Her fingers, shaking and stiff, had turned red with the cold, and if she’d had her jackknife, she’d have hacked off the damned bindings.

She looked at Sinclair. “Well? Aren’t you going to demand answers?”

“There are no other tracks here. Just yours.”

“So you think I’m jumpy enough I made up someone following me?”

“I don’t know. Did you?”

She kicked off one snowshoe, then the other, and picked them up. She had to be a mess. Red face, runny nose, ice in her hair, wild-eyed. But she nodded, certain. “Yes. Someone was out there. I’m sure of it. But I’m not positive I was actually being followed.”

He tilted his head, no snow in his dark hair, no wildness in his dark eyes. He was steady, controlled, not even breathing hard. His mouth was straight, neither smiling nor unsmiling.

In two seconds, Penelope had had enough. “Okay, don’t believe me. I don’t give a damn. I’m sorry I ever let you get under my skin. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t know better. If you’ll excuse me—”

He bit off a sigh, took her snowshoes from her and tucked them under one arm. “Okay. I believe you. You have no idea who followed you?”

She shook her head. Her teeth started to chatter. It was humiliating, but she couldn’t stop them. She wasn’t that cold. It was nerves. Fear. Running through the snowy woods like the demons of hell were after her. “I suppose I could have imagined the whole thing. My imagination is running amok these days. It was probably Bubba.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

Everything about him—his narrowed black eyes, his rigid stance, his self-control—served as a warning. She needed to remember he was a man of determination and energy, that even his obvious physical attraction to her would not deter him from his mission.

Penelope attempted a smile, her heart rate slowly normalizing. “Right now I’d have to say I don’t know much of anything for sure, except that homemade maple syrup hot off the stove sounds good to me.”

Just the barest ghost of a smile. “Maybe it’s a truth serum.”

“Watch out. That’s a sword that cuts two ways.”

Wyatt might have gotten all kinds of things out of Penelope if her parents hadn’t descended on them within minutes of her turning on the heat under the syrup and dashing into her room to change. Nothing was going on, they said. They’d just stopped by to say hello. Wyatt didn’t try to explain his presence in their daughter’s house. When she emerged from her bedroom—in dry clothes and remarkably calm—she gave them a bright smile and invited them to stay for pancakes. “I’ll just double the recipe.”

Wyatt wasn’t fooled. Anything to avoid being alone with him. Robby Chestnut didn’t look keen on the idea of pancakes, but Lyman accepted immediately. Four people in the front room were at least two people too many. Wyatt could feel the walls closing in on him. The three Chestnuts hovered over the boiling syrup, debating its grade and quality, and Penelope got down dented measuring cups and spoons, a mixing bowl from the thirties, a chipped crockery of flour, and pretty soon she was spooning pancake batter onto an ancient griddle, and her father was frying ham in a cast-iron pan.

As she laid mismatched plates on the kitchen table, Robby gave Wyatt a tentative smile. “When Lyman’s father was alive, the three of them would spend a lot of time together up here. It felt more isolated in those days. It’s bad enough now—but Penelope seems to like it.”

“It must be beautiful here in the summer,” he said diplomatically.

“Oh, it’s gorgeous.”

Wyatt considered telling her that her daughter had just been followed in the woods—or thought she had—and that Robby should ask her to show her the mysterious fax and tell her about the instant message she’d received. He would guess neither parent had a clue what was going on in Penelope’s life. Then he reminded himself why he’d come to Cold Spring. He wanted to learn his uncle’s fate, not get caught up in the schemes, troubles and charms of a blond-haired pilot.