Stonebrook Cottage (18 page)

Sam shook his head. "You're not the nervous type, Counselor."

He'd spooked her. She scooped up her cleaning supplies and started for the back door, leaving the dishpan and the hibachi. "I'll let that sit a while and see if the grit loosens up." She paused on the bottom step. "Do you want me to check on flights for you?"

"I'm not going anywhere."

"I could throw you out," she said matter-of-factly.

He shrugged. "Jack said he could fly up here today. It's him or me. Take your pick."

She tore open the screen door. "Forget it. I give up. If I keep pushing, I'll just end up with both of you. Stay. You've got my gun, but if I end up needing it—" She dropped a sponge, swooped it up. "Never mind."

"Kara—"

She pretended not to hear him and slipped into the cottage, letting Sam sink back onto his chair in the shade and contemplate the mess that was her motives, loyalties, fears, desires and duties—and his own. Henry and Lillian Stockwell had released her from attorney-client privilege and let her tell him they'd forged a letter from their mother, but that was as far as they'd go.

Whatever was in the letter had precipitated Kara to depart Texas the way she had. But she refused to show it to him. He pushed. She pushed back, telling him he had no authority to compel her to turn the letter over.

He was thinking about searching her bags for it. Let her try and stop him. He didn't need a search warrant in damn Connecticut. He was the family friend from Texas who meant to find out what was going on, the one-night stand from the night the governor had drowned in his pool.

Except it wouldn't stay a one-night stand. That would change. Sam imagined a lot would change before he got Kara Galway back to Texas.

Lillian ran out the back door and plopped on the chair next to him, and it nearly swallowed her up, she was so slim. She looked every inch the fair-haired Yankee heiress, except for the scratches on her legs and the scowl on her face. "There are a lot of poisonous snakes in Texas, right?" she asked.

"I don't know about a lot, but, yes, ma'am, there are poisonous snakes in Texas."

She giggled. "Why do you call me ‘ma'am'?"

He smiled at her. "Would you like me to call you Miss Lillian instead?"

"Just Lillian is fine." She was very serious now, considering her answer. "Or Lil. Henry and Mom call me Lil. Aunt Kara does, too, sometimes, but not very much."

"What do your friends call you?"

"Lillian."

"It's a pretty name. Why're you interested in snakes?"

"I'm
not.
I don't like snakes at all. My friend Cicely likes to catch them. Once she caught three baby snakes, and I screamed my head off. It was
so gross.
They were all squirmy. She tried to get me to pet them." She wrinkled up her face dramatically and stuck out her tongue.

"Blech."

Sam settled back in his chair, noticing that it hadn't taken long for Miss Lillian to warm up to him. "You probably shouldn't be messing with snakes. You leave them alone, they'll likely leave you alone."

"That's what they said at the ranch. I kept asking and asking, but no one would tell me what kind of poisonous snakes there are in Texas. Will
you
tell me?"

"It depends where you are. It's a big state. We've got cottonmouths, copperheads, coral snakes, six or eight different kinds of rattlesnakes. I don't see too many snakes in the city."

She shuddered. "
Eight
different kinds of rattlesnakes? I
never
want to go back to Texas. Henry says there are poisonous snakes in Connecticut, but I don't believe him. I think he's stupid. Do
you
believe there are poisonous snakes in Connecticut?"

"I don't know much about Connecticut snakes." Sam didn't know what else to do but be honest with her. "I think timber rattlesnakes are up here, but I doubt they're common, and I seem to remember reading about a northern copperhead. I'm sure any poisonous snakes up here are rare."

Lillian didn't like his answer. She hung on to the arms of the Adirondack chair as if it were a spaceship about to take off. "Well, Connecticut doesn't have as many poisonous snakes as Texas does.
I've
never seen one."

Sam laughed. "That settles it, then, Miss Lillian."

Something caught her eye off in the distance, and Sam, instantly alert, got to his feet. She did, too, then gasped as a fair-haired woman waved from out in the small field, across a low stone wall. Lillian squealed.
"Mommy!"

The girl raced across the yard and scrambled over the stone wall to her mother. Sam watched Allyson Lourdes Stockwell scoop up her daughter, hugging her, swinging her so that the top of the tall grass tickled her bare feet.

Henry burst through the back door and got almost to the stone wall before he slowed suddenly, then stopped, waiting as his mother set down his sister and the two of them climbed over the wall. The boy shoved his hands into his pockets and yawned, as if nothing unusual had transpired in the past two days. "Hi, Mom."

"Hello, Henry." Allyson smiled at him and slung one arm over his thin shoulders, hugging him, kissing the top of his head. "I'm glad you're here. I've missed you."

Kara had come out onto the steps. If she was worried she was in as much trouble with her friend as she was with Sam and her brother, nothing in her demeanor showed it. All that courtroom experience had to be coming in handy right now, Sam thought, observing the scene with interest. His mother was an art teacher and loved kids, but if he'd pulled the kind of stunt Henry and Lillian had pulled on their mother, he'd have been skinned for supper.

"Mom, I'd like you to meet Sergeant Sam Temple of the Texas Rangers," Henry said, his tone Prince of Wales formal. "Sergeant Temple, this is my mother, Allyson Stockwell."

"Pleased to meet you, Governor," Sam said, shaking her hand. She was an attractive, naturally pale and elegant woman, he thought, but the strain of the past few days was evident.

"Thank you—thank you for everything." She turned to Kara, and Sam could see they were both tense, even awkward, as if neither wanted to say anything that would further upset the other. Allyson managed a weak smile. "I'm sorry about all this. I thought going to the ranch and then visiting you was what they wanted to do—they'd been looking forward to their trip to Texas all summer."

"I'm fine, Allyson. Don't worry about it," Kara said. "We're all here, and we're all okay. Nothing else matters. Why don't you and the kids go inside and visit? Sam and I were just cleaning the hibachi."

Allyson clenched Kara's wrist. "Kara…"

"It's okay, Allyson. Hey—we made up a can of frozen lemonade. There's ice."

"Lemonade would be wonderful." She seemed unaware even of what she'd said, and added, out of the blue, "I released a statement this morning basically saying the kids went to your place on their own, but all's well, we're handling it—I didn't lie, just let it be known this is a private family matter. The media'll still have a field day, but Hatch thinks they won't go too far, not with two young kids involved. I don't think any reporters will come out here to the cottage."

Henry tugged on his mother's hand. "Come on, Mom, let's go have lemonade."

"What?" She seemed to have forgotten the lemonade, then smiled, ruffling her son's blond hair. "Sure. Lemonade it is. I want to hear all about this ‘wild tale' you told Kara."

Kara frowned, staring after mother and children as they headed into the kitchen.

Sam understood her concern. "Something's not right with your friend the governor," he said. "Those kids know it, just like you do. Ten to one they clam up on her."

Kara clenched her hands into fists, her mouth shut tight, and he could see she wasn't saying anything, either.

"Maybe you should tell me this wild tale," he added quietly.

Instead of answering him, she fished the wet, shredded paper towels out of the dishpan and slapped the soaking mess on the hibachi. She breathed out. "Well, I think all that black gunk's set long enough, don't you?"

Allyson did as she'd promised and let Hatch know she'd arrived safely, then tried to make sense out of her children's behavior. Seeing her hadn't brought forth a rush of explanations—a rush of anything, for that matter. Henry and Lillian refused to go into any detail about their reasons for running away and conning Kara into sneaking them to Stonebrook Cottage. They weren't even subtle about it. They just wouldn't talk.

Allyson was stung. "Is it because you're afraid you'll get into trouble?" she asked.

"No." Henry had drained one glass of lemonade and was at the refrigerator pouring himself another. "Aunt Kara's our lawyer. She'll make sure we don't get into any trouble."

"Henry, Kara's not your lawyer—"

"She says everything we told her is privileged."

"If you thought you were confiding in her as your lawyer, yes, but—" Allyson tried to keep the hurt and impatience out of her tone; she'd hardly touched her lemonade. "You're my children. I need to know what's going on with you. I
want
to know. Lillian? What about you?"

Lillian, sitting across the table from her mother, didn't seem enthusiastic about her lemonade, either. "My stomach hurts."

Allyson reined in her frustration. Insisting on answers was getting her nowhere, and she'd been advised not to pressure them. She couldn't remember by whom. Her mother? Madeleine? The kids' counselors in Texas? She couldn't remember. "I'm just glad you're both okay. You can tell me the whys and wherefores when you're ready. If there's anything I absolutely needed to know, you'd tell me, wouldn't you? Or let Kara tell me?"

Henry sat at the table with his fresh glass of lemonade. "Sure, Mom."

"I can work here in Bluefield for a few days. We don't have to go back to Hartford right away, and you know your grandma would love to have you around."

"When are we moving into the governor's house?" Lillian asked.

"Soon. We're keeping our house in West Hartford, and your school won't change—"

"We know," Henry said.

She was getting nowhere. "I've had a lot to do in the past two weeks because of the sudden nature of what happened—but August tends to be a slow month for state government." God, she thought, she sounded like a stereotypical wire-walking politician instead of a mother who had a firm command of the situation. She smiled, feeling her tentativeness. She didn't know what was wrong with her children, and they wouldn't tell her. And she'd never ask Kara to violate their trust. "We'll work all this out in time. I promise, okay?"

Henry was concentrating on his lemonade. Lillian's eyes had glazed over. She stirred her lemonade, then frowned at her mother. "Mom, does Connecticut have poisonous snakes? Henry says it does, and so does Sam."

The nonsequitur caught Allyson by surprise, and she had to stop herself from making a sharp retort. "There are two species of venomous snakes found in Connecticut, the northern copperhead and the timber rattlesnake, but neither is common. Why were you talking about snakes?"

"Lillian wanted to know," Henry said. "She just likes to pretend she's worried about snakes."

"I know this hasn't been an easy summer." Allyson took her lemonade glass to the sink and dumped it out, her stomach burning. "A lot's happened that none of us planned. That means we all have to make adjustments."

Lillian raised her eyes to her mother. "Why can't someone else be governor?"

"Someone else can be. There'll be another election. For now, I'm the governor. That's part of the job of being lieutenant governor—it's the commitment I made when I was elected. If something happened to Big Mike, I had to step into his shoes. Unfortunately, something did happen."

"Are you glad?" Henry blurted.

Allyson jumped back against the sink, shocked. "No, of course not. He was my friend. He was your dad's friend even before either one of them knew me.
No.
I did not want anything to happen to him."

"I didn't mean it that way." Henry's voice was small, but his huge eyes were defiant, daring her to doubt him. "I meant are you glad you're governor. Do you
like
being governor?"

She was screwing this up on every level. "I don't know yet. It's too soon."

She answered honestly, her shoulders slumping as she realized how exhausted she was.

She didn't know what to say to her children, what to do to keep from making the situation any worse—to keep them from coming to hate her. They only had her. But she would be useless to them if she didn't have some kind of life apart from them. Still, serving as gov-ernor…maybe it was too much, especially on top of the shock of losing Big Mike.

Henry seemed somewhat satisfied by her answer. Lillian pretended not to be paying attention, a tactic she used, Allyson knew, when she wanted to avoid confrontation.

"I'll get better at being governor," Allyson said. "I'll be more efficient with my time. These past two weeks have been particularly intense, but it won't always be that way. We'll get used to being without Big Mike, all of us." She paused, but neither child spoke. "I didn't send you to Texas to get rid of you."

"We know that," Henry said, as if she were an idiot and had once again underestimated him and his sister.

Allyson felt a surprising tug of confidence. He was a tough little nugget, her Henry. "If I'm missing the point, tell me what it is."

He got to his feet with his lemonade. "Can we go outside? It's hot in here. I want to put my feet in the brook."

"Me, too," Lillian said.

Her first impulse was to make them stay and to keep at it until they told her everything, explained what possessed them to run away and say whatever they'd said to manipulate Kara into bringing them here. Instead, Allyson nodded. "Don't go far—and be careful."

"Can we stay here with Aunt Kara tonight?" Lillian asked.

"I don't know if she's able to stay—"

"She is," Henry said. "She said she was supposed to take a few days off from work."

Allyson seized on the idea. A few days with Kara might just do the trick, snap Henry and Lillian out of whatever funk they were in—and, Allyson admitted, that would give her a bit more time to settle into her new role and decide how to handle the anonymous calls, should they continue. Either they'd end, or she'd have to tell someone. She couldn't go on pretending they weren't happening.