Kiss the Moon (7 page)

“And?”

“Well, she thinks she’s one of you.”

Wyatt frowned. “You’re right. I don’t understand.”

Penelope bit her lower lip. “Harriet is convinced she’s Colt and Frannie’s long-lost daughter.”

Four

T
hat was all Wyatt could get out of her. The plain, sweet-souled woman at the inn thought she was Colt and Frannie’s daughter. It was a harmless fantasy, no one believed it, end of story. Just like the turn-of-the-century dump was the end of that story.

He was beginning to think Cold Spring was one weird little town.

He headed for his car. The temperature had dropped noticeably, the sun long gone. Penelope had driven him to the airport, given him a tight-lipped smile and charged off in her truck.

“Sinclair—wait a second.”

It was Lyman Chestnut. He crossed the rutted lot at an unhurried pace, wiping his thick fingers with a black rag. Wyatt waited for him. His patience was at a low ebb. Tea, scones, lies—and those green eyes and flushed cheeks, sexy, challenging.

“Harriet called,” Lyman said. “Says you’re staying a night or two.”

“I might.”

“Penelope tell you her story?”

Wyatt noticed the careful wording. He nodded.

“She was in rough shape when she came out of the woods Sunday night. She was lost most of the afternoon. It was dark—we’d organized a search party and were just about to get started after her. She has a way of losing track of what she’s doing and getting herself in trouble. She’s been doing it since she was a little kid.”

He wiped his fingers on the rag, pretending to concentrate on the task. Wyatt could see he was frustrated, preoccupied, awkward. Having the daughter he had would have its ups and downs. “Mr. Chestnut—”

“Lyman. I make my flying students call me Mr. Chestnut, but that’s about it. Look, Penelope’s been fantasizing about finding that plane since she could walk. Everyone around here has. I’m guessing once she realized she didn’t find anything up in the woods after all, she just tried to figure out a way to save face. She hates to be wrong.”

That Wyatt could believe. “What about this dump story?”

“There are plenty of old dumps around here.”

He wouldn’t counter his daughter, not to a Sinclair. Wyatt acknowledged his statement with a curt nod. “It’s hard to believe she can’t find her way back to whatever it is she found.”

Lyman shrugged. “Maybe she’s just embarrassed.”

“Excuse me, but your daughter doesn’t strike me as a woman who embarrasses easily.”

“That’s the God’s truth.” He almost managed a smile. “Here’s the deal. I don’t want any trouble. Penelope’s a good kid. Her mind hasn’t been on her work lately, but that’s got nothing to do with you Sinclairs.”

“What does it have to do with?”

Lyman inhaled, shaking his head. “Damned if I know. Boredom, I think. She needs—well, hell, I’ll just get myself into trouble if I start talking about what she needs. It’s getting around town, you being here. You know, I searched for your uncle’s plane myself. I walked up and down these hills for weeks, never saw a thing, not one sign a plane had gone down. We all did everything we could, but…” He broke off, shook his head. “What’s done is done.”

Wyatt finished Lyman’s thought for him. “But my family wasn’t satisfied. My grandfather didn’t think you’d done enough. The people of Cold Spring, I mean, not you individually.”

Lyman leveled his frank gaze on Wyatt and nodded. “I guess that’s right. I heard he died—your grandfather. He and my father used to go hunting and fishing together. Well, I guess old Willard thought of my father as a guide. But that’s not how my father saw it.”

He stopped, looking faintly embarrassed, as if he hadn’t strung that many sentences together at one time in years. Wyatt couldn’t tell if this little visit was a shot across the bow, a fishing expedition or just a father not knowing what to do about a daughter he feared was in over her head.

“By the way,” Lyman went on, “this Jack Dunning character’s decided to park his plane here. Mary’s renting him a car.” He paused, his gaze settling on Wyatt. “You’ll go easy on my daughter?”

Wyatt grinned. “I left my thumbscrews in New York.”

He chose not to mention the crazy cousin who thought she was a Sinclair or to stick around for Jack’s arrival. Instead he drove to town, hitting every damned frost heave and pothole in the road, mostly because he kept thinking about Penelope unzipping that flight suit in the heat of the Sunrise Inn. He hadn’t expected any attraction to her. But there it was, impossible to ignore.

Harriet Chestnut, still flustered, put him in something called the Morning Glory Room. She gave him his key—a real, old-fashioned key, not one of those card things—and told him his room rate included a continental breakfast. Nothing about her reminded him of either Colt or Frannie. Coloring, build, features. It wasn’t that it was impossible she was their daughter, just not readily apparent. He thanked her and headed upstairs.

Morning glories, indeed. They were on the wallpaper, a needlepoint pillow and a print above his four-poster bed. It was all tasteful, pretty, elegant, just the sort of room a husband tolerated on a weekend getaway with his wife. A side window looked out on snow-covered gardens, a front window on the lake. In addition to the bed, there was a marble-topped bureau, a writing desk and an antique washstand that served as a night table. Wyatt figured he’d gotten off easy, because he’d passed a rose room on his way down the hall.

He dumped his bag on the floor and tried not to think about what in hell he was doing, or why. He’d never known his uncle. His father hadn’t asked him to come here. Now he’d rented a room at a charming country inn for three nights.

But he knew he wasn’t staying because of Colt or Frannie—he was staying because of Penelope Chestnut. She intrigued him, and he had an odd, possibly unreasonable sense that she was in trouble, perhaps more than she knew. It was the sort of sixth sense he’d come to rely on before his ignominious return to New York and a desk on Wall Street. He could be dead, flat wrong, just as he had been when he and Hal Strong had embarked upon their most exciting and ultimately final adventure, no sixth sense telling him they never should have left Melbourne, that danger and death awaited them in the mountains of southwestern Tasmania.

“So, you could be full of shit,” he said aloud, breaking the spell.

He could. Penelope Chestnut’s only trouble might be him.

The energy required to weave her tale about the turn-of-the-century dump and the snow obliterating her tracks had probably led her to miss her fuel check in her preflight. She was distracted. The truth was seldom simple but at least it was easier to remember.

He wandered into the bathroom, where the morning glory theme continued. Thick, soft white towels and a big, gleaming tub beckoned. He settled for splashing cold water on his face. He noticed little blue soaps and bottles of locally made lotions. When he traveled, he was used to pitching a tent.

The phone rang. Grateful for the distraction, he returned to the bedroom and picked up.

“You’re in Cold Spring,” his father said. “Why?”

The abrupt tone didn’t offend Wyatt. His father prided himself on his self-control and would bury any strong negative emotion under an abrupt, even cold manner. “Jack must have arrived. Obviously he’s reported back to you.”

“I like to know where my son is.”

“Well, you’ve found me.”

His father inhaled sharply. He wouldn’t yell at his son the way Lyman Chestnut had at his daughter. Open confrontation wasn’t the Sinclair way. “How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know.” He decided, at that moment, not to tell his father about his dealings with Penelope Chestnut and his sense she was in over her head. “Father, Colt was your brother—”

“Yes, he was. I knew him, Wyatt. He was a person to me, not an adventure. This woman has withdrawn her story. Let Jack figure out why. He’ll tie up loose ends and make sure her story checks. That’s his job.”
Not yours,
was the unspoken rest of the sentence.

No more details were forthcoming for the meddling son. Wyatt said hello to his stepmother, and to Ellen and Beatrix, who begged him to fly down for the weekend and take them snorkeling. They were on school holiday, and he promised to see them when they got back to New York—he’d do whatever they wanted. The rascals were his soft spot, and they knew it.

When he hung up, he stood in front of the window and looked across the lake toward the mountains. It was dusk, quiet, still. His father and uncle had roamed this area as boys with their father, the imposing, exacting Willard Sinclair, who’d died when Wyatt was fourteen. They’d gone swimming, fishing, mountain climbing, camping. He knew from his father that, despite their age difference, the brothers had been close, relishing their time together.

After Colt ran off with Frannie Beaudine, Willard Sinclair refused to let his younger son return to the New Hampshire lakes region. Willard became increasingly difficult in his grief, his surviving son never able to make up for the loss of his firstborn, never able to be the bright spark in his father’s life that Colt had been.

Wyatt had sensed all this, pieced it together over the years through observation, overheard fights between his father and one wife or another, his own conversations with his dying grandfather. Always, always he came away with the unshakable conviction that his father and perhaps his grandfather were holding back on him—not just feelings, not just their private grief, but information, possibly even vital information.

As Penelope had said, forty-five years meant nothing. Colt was still real to his younger brother. The loss, the questions, the scandal still resonated in Brandon Sinclair’s life and the lives of his family. This wasn’t some damned lark. This was
real.

She had to understand the consequences of her lie. If she’d found Colt and Frannie’s Piper Cub in the woods on Sunday, she had to admit it and take Wyatt there.

No, he thought. Penelope Chestnut’s pretty eyes and whatever trouble she might be in weren’t what he was doing in New Hampshire, weren’t why he was staying. A missing brother, a lost son, an uncle never known—that was what he was doing here, why he was staying. He couldn’t let himself be distracted from what was a clear, uncomplicated mission.

But while he unpacked his bag, Wyatt wondered where Cold Spring’s green-eyed, hot-headed pilot lived, and when he finished, he headed downstairs to see if he could get directions out of her cousin.

Penelope was relieved to be home, a fire crackling in her wood stove, a robin investigating her deck. She’d changed into a soft fleece shirt and drawstring pants and sat at her kitchen table, watching the robin through her sliding-glass doors. The snow had melted off her deck, another sign spring was on its way.

She’d inherited her grandfather’s winterized, lakeside cabin when he’d died three years ago. It was on a narrow dirt road well-removed from the village, and her lake frontage was the bare minimum. The cabin sat atop a steep bank with stairs down to the water, a dock and the little shed where she kept her canoe and kayak. But she also inherited ten acres on the other side of the road. Her woods eventually bled into Sinclair woods, which was how she came to be hunting maples suitable for tapping there in the first place.

The cabin still had a seasonal feel to it. It consisted of a living room and kitchen across the front, overlooking the lake, and two small rooms and a bath across the back. She’d kept her grandfather’s mismatched dishes, his red-and-white checked vinyl tablecloth, his moose head on the wall above the fireplace. His ugly lamps and the vinyl recliner had had to go.

No one had expected her to move here. She’d had a nice apartment in town where she could walk to the Sunrise Inn and have tea and scones with her mother and cousin every afternoon. The idea, of course, was for her to get married before she moved into a real place of her own—at least, that was the idea of most of the women she knew. The men didn’t seem surprised at all by her choice of a home. They showed up to use her dock, invited her hunting and fishing, tossed trout on her grill, shared their six-packs with her on her deck. One of the guys. It wasn’t that she
looked
like a guy. She wore dresses and makeup and did her hair. She polished her nails.

“They don’t think of you as one of the guys,” Harriet had told her. “They think of you more as a surrogate sister.”

And you didn’t date your sister.

Not that Penelope wanted to date any of
them.
She shuddered. They were her friends. She couldn’t envision sleeping with them any more than they could her.

Her social life had taken a sharp downward turn in recent months. For a while there’d been a man in Bangor she’d see whenever she flew in that direction. Another pilot. Then she realized he never made the effort to get to New Hampshire to see
her,
and if she knew anything about herself it was that she didn’t want a one-way relationship. So, exit the pilot. Enter no one to replace him.

Well, she wasn’t pitiful. She had her place on the lake, her flying, her friends, her family. If this was it, this was it. She liked to fantasize about tearing down her grandfather’s cabin and building her own place, with lots of wood and glass. She’d hire an architect to design a house especially for this piece of land.

But that all seemed a long way off. Right now, she was grounded, and she had a Sinclair out to prove she’d lied about Colt and Frannie’s plane.

Which, of course, she had.

She shrugged off a sudden wave of uneasiness. She could almost feel the smooth leather of Wyatt Sinclair’s jacket as he’d sat next to her in her truck. She’d never touched him, but she might as well have.

This was just the sort of effect Colt must have had on Frannie Beaudine. And look where that weakness had led
her.
Right into the side of a hill.

At least Wyatt wouldn’t be on the loose in Cold Spring, not if he was staying at the Sunrise Inn. Her cousin had been madly curious about Sinclairs for as long as Penelope could remember. The two of them had even wandered through the Sinclair Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a trip to New York. Harriet would keep a close eye on the first Sinclair to step foot in Cold Spring in her lifetime.