The Truth About Tara (5 page)

“Look what I found!” Danny thudded toward her on heavy feet. “Chips!”

He put the bag in her cart, his face creased in a broad smile. Tara did not smile. The salty snack was a terrible choice for a little boy with a weight problem.

She reached inside the cart for the chips and held them out to Danny. “Please put those back, Danny.”

“I like chips!” Danny cried.

“I know you do,” Tara said. “But they’re not good for you.”

“They are good!” he protested, his voice rising.

“Not every food that tastes good is good for you.” Tara gave up trying to get Danny to reshelve the chips. “I’ll buy you a healthy snack.”

She headed for the spot where the chips had been with Danny following close behind.

“Want chips!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.

The other people in the aisle, Laura Thompson and her two young daughters, stopped and stared. Tara had taught the older girl, Shelly, in PE last year. She groaned inwardly. Tara was a teacher. She was supposed to be able to handle situations like this.

“Anything I can do to help?” Laura asked.

“Thanks, but no,” Tara said. “Please stop yelling, Danny.” She kept her voice as calm as possible, the way she did when one of the students at school misbehaved. She placed the potato chips back on the shelf. “Let’s go find you something else.”

“No-o-o-o-o!” Danny screamed, his face turning red. “Want chips!”

Although her mother had warned her about Danny’s tantrums, Tara had never seen one. Her calm voice hadn’t worked. Time to try something else.

“Quiet down this instant, Danny!” she said sharply.

“Want chips!” His cry was even more ferocious than the last one. With a defiant look, he snatched the chips from the shelf and took off down the aisle as fast as his short legs would carry him.

“Danny! Come back!” she yelled after him.

He didn’t even slow down. With the bag of chips slapping against his hip, he veered right when he reached the end of the aisle.

Tara got behind the cart and followed him. “Sorry about this,” she called to Laura and her two daughters as she passed by. She tried to speed up, but the rickety cart slowed her.

“Forget this,” she said aloud and abandoned the buggy.

At the end of the aisle she turned in the direction Danny had gone. She stopped in her tracks. The child was nowhere in sight. She couldn’t hear him, either.

Her heartbeat sped up and her throat closed. Hayley Cooper sprang to mind. Was this panic what Hayley’s mother had experienced when she first realized her little girl was gone?

Tara usually felt safe in Wawpaney, which encompassed a few square miles and had a population of about four hundred. Even during the height of summer, the small inland town didn’t get a lot of strangers. Hayley had reportedly been abducted from a small town in Kentucky, proof that bad things can happen anywhere.

Her heart thudded so hard it felt as if it was slamming against her chest. The store had dual exits and one of them was in the general direction Danny had headed. Tara set off again, checking each aisle for any sign of Danny. She spotted people she recognized as she went, but didn’t want to linger, asking them if they’d seen Danny. Her panic grew by the second until there was only one more aisle to go.

She was almost afraid to look for fear she wouldn’t see him. But, yes! There he was. Not alone, though. A man was crouched down so that he and Danny were at eye level.

Not just any man.

Jack DiMarco.

Her fear over losing Danny subsided, and her heart gave a little leap. If he’d been any other man, she would have attributed the reaction to excitement. But no good reason could exist for Jack to still be in Wawpaney. At the thought, adrenaline of another sort surged through her. She glanced back over her shoulder, battling the urge to flee. Retreat wasn’t an option, however, not without Danny.

Gathering her courage, she started forward.

CHAPTER THREE

“H
EY
,
BUDDY
,
WHERE
’
RE
you going in such a hurry?” Jack crouched so he was eye-to-eye with the boy he’d seen in the parking lot of the grocery store with Tara Greer, the one who’d plowed into him about five seconds ago. The boy
didn’t seem to be suffering any ill effects from the collision. Jack couldn’t say the same for the bag of chips he was clutching to his chest.

“She won’t let me have my chips!” the boy cried.

He was different from most other little boys, Jack realized instantly. From his almond-shaped eyes, somewhat flat nose and round face, Jack guessed he had Down syndrome. Like his first cousin’s son back in Kentucky.

From the corner of his eye, Jack spotted Tara approaching. Was she the boy’s mother? She hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring when he’d confronted her the other day, but plenty of women had children outside marriage. She might even be living with the boy’s father. Something inside him deflated at the thought.

The boy pointed to Tara. “She’s mean!”

It didn’t take much brainpower to figure out what was going on.

“She looks pretty nice to me,” Jack said. An understatement, he thought.

The boy gazed at him warily and held the chips tighter. He wasn’t surrendering them without a fight. Okay. Jack could deal with that.

“You want to see some gross magic?” Jack asked, using two words sure to appeal to any boy.

Just as Jack knew he would, the child nodded.

“I can separate my thumb from the rest of my hand,” Jack announced. “Watch.”

He placed his left hand palm down with the fingers together and stuck out his thumb. With his right hand, he covered his thumb with a fist and pretended he was trying to detach it. At the exact moment he tucked his left thumb into his palm and jerked his right fist forward, he snapped two of his hidden fingers together.

“Ow!” Jack cried.

“Gross!” the boy yelled, the bag of potato chips falling to the floor.

Just as quickly, Jack brought his hands together and pretended to screw his thumb back on. Then he opened both hands to show that all ten of his fingers were intact.

“Again!” the boy cried, all his attention focused on Jack’s hand.

Tara had almost reached them. Jack turned his head to look at her fully. In a sleeveless yellow shirt, sandals and tight-fitting khaki shorts that extended almost to her knees, she looked even better than she had the first time he’d seen her. Her skin had a healthy glow from her tan and her reddish-brown hair swung loose around her shoulders.

“Let’s make sure it’s okay with your mom first,” Jack said.

“I’m his foster sister,” she said shortly. She barely met his eyes, but relief hit him hard at her pronouncement. He checked her ring finger again. Still bare.

Tara stooped in front of the boy. “You shouldn’t have run from me, Danny. And you’re not supposed to talk to strangers.”

So that was how she thought of him. He shouldn’t have been surprised after he’d practically accosted her in the street. In retrospect, that probably hadn’t been the best way to approach her.

“He took off his thumb!” Danny said. “Do it again!”

“Is it okay with you?” Jack asked.

She didn’t answer immediately. Even unsmiling, she was pretty. About the only thing he didn’t like about her was the unfriendly gleam in her eyes. There had been nothing frosty about her when she was in the parking lot with her foster brother. She’d been laughing as she leaned over and gave him a warm hug, affection pouring off her. That women, he thought, was the real Tara.

“Use your manners, Danny,” she said. “You’re supposed to say please.”

“Please take off your thumb,” he cried.

“Everything okay, Tara?” One of her neighbors, a heavyset man in his sixties, called from the end of the aisle.

“Thanks for checking up on us, Mr. Ganz,” Tara called back, geniality radiating from her. “We’re fine now.”

Jack repeated the trick. It had been one of his younger brother’s favorites when they were kids. A wave of sadness hit Jack, as it always did when he thought of Mike. He thrust the melancholy feeling aside, concentrating instead on snapping his fingers to make it sound as though his thumb were breaking off. He winced and grimaced his way through the reattachment sequence until he was supposedly whole again.

Danny clapped his hands.

“Thanks,” Jack said. “How ’bout I introduce myself so we’re not strangers. I know your name is Danny. Mine’s Jack.”

“Will you be my friend, Jack?” Danny asked.

“Sure,” Jack said. “If that’s okay with Tara.”

She didn’t look as if she wanted to give her permission. “That depends on what you’re doing here.”

“Grocery shopping.” He held up his handbasket. Unfortunately, it was empty. Their aisle smelled of the ground coffee on the shelf behind him. He turned, picked one out at random and dropped it into the basket. Maybe not his smoothest move judging from the way her lips thinned.

“Here in Wawpaney?” she asked.

The skepticism that ran through her question was so heavy she could just as well have accused him of following her. It didn’t seem like a good idea to admit he’d decided to come into the store only after seeing her hug Danny in the parking lot.

“Shell Beach doesn’t have a grocery store,” he said, naming the Chesapeake Bay community about six or seven miles away where he was renting a house. “I’m pretty sure Wawpaney’s the closest town.”

Her mouth dropped open.

“C-can you take your thumb off again?” Danny interjected.

“Maybe later, buddy,” Jack said.

“My name’s not buddy,” the boy said. “It’s Danny.”

Jack smiled. “Sorry, Danny. I can’t take off my thumb right now. I need to talk to Tara.”

“How do you know my name?” she asked sharply.

“You told me,” he said. Hadn’t she? Suddenly he wasn’t so sure.

She shook her head. “I didn’t.”

That was right. The waitress at the diner had provided Tara’s name when she’d spotted the age progression of Hayley Cooper.

“I thought you were passing through town,” she said.

“I liked it here, so decided to stay awhile. What better place to hang out than the beach?” When she didn’t agree, he looked down at Danny. “You like the beach, right?”

“I like fish,” he said.

“Me, too,” Jack said. “I was thinking about getting a couple poles so I can fish off one of the piers.”

“Danny means he likes the schools of tiny fish you sometimes see in the tidal pools,” Tara said. “He gets a bucket and rescues them.”

“I’m their hero,” Danny said proudly. “Right, Tara?”

“If those fish don’t love you, they’re crazy,” she said, smiling down at him with all the warmth she wasn’t showing Jack.

“Crazy fish,” Danny echoed. “That’s funny.”

“Maybe you can show me how you rescue them sometime.” Jack nodded to Tara. “You can bring your foster sister with you.”

Again a mask seemed to cover the real Tara. “I don’t think so.”

“But I wanna—” Danny began.

“You’ve got a busy few weeks coming up, Dan the man,” Tara interrupted. “Camp starts Monday.”

Although the excuse seemed legitimate, it also sounded like a brush-off. Jack had expected as much, but he also subscribed to the school of thought that you can’t get what you want if you don’t try for it. He wanted to get to know Tara better and see if he could bring out the softness in her that so intrigued him.

“Jack can come to camp,” Danny announced.

“No, Jack can’t come,” Tara said quickly. “The camp is for kids.”

“You’re c-coming!” Danny said.

“That’s because I’m working there,” she said, her voice even. Jack admired her patience. Although Down syndrome children were known for their sweet and cheerful personalities, from firsthand experience Jack knew it wasn’t always easy to deal with them. “Now let’s say goodbye to Jack so he can get on with his
grocery shopping.
”

She put heavy emphasis on the last words. Yep. She didn’t trust him. Jack supposed he couldn’t blame her. She didn’t know anything about him except that he claimed to be the brother of a private investigator. Never mind that it was the truth.

“Say goodbye to Jack, Danny,” Tara said.

“But I don’t wanna—”

“Bye, Danny. It was nice taking my thumb off for you,” Jack interrupted, loath to cause any trouble between Tara and her brother. He was gratified when the boy giggled. “Bye, Tara.”

Her eyes flicked to his. “Goodbye.”

She took her brother securely by the hand and led him away, her carriage almost regal. They’d almost reached the end of the aisle when Danny wrenched his hand from hers and ran back to Jack with pounding feet.

“Danny!” Tara called after him.

He ignored his foster sister, not stopping until he reached Jack. His chest heaved up and down.

“Come see me at c-camp,” he said somewhat breathlessly. “You can take off your thumb again.”

Before Jack could reply, Danny turned and headed back for his foster sister at a slower pace. Over his head, Tara’s gaze met Jack’s.

He shrugged, trying to convey his apology, not so much over Danny but about the way they’d met. He wished she didn’t have reason to be so suspicious of him.

She broke eye contact and in moments she and Danny turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

The big bag of potato chips lay forgotten on the floor.

* * *

W
AS
J
ACK
D
I
M
ARCO
following her?

The question ate at Tara for the rest of the afternoon and night. She briefly forgot about Jack while helping out at a friend’s pub in Cape Charles on Saturday night, but not until she’d visually scoured the vicinity for any sign of him.

Her paranoia was still on full alert Sunday night on the short drive to Cape Charles where she taught spinning classes. The town, founded along the bay as a planned community to serve the railroad and ferry trades, boasted late-Victorian architecture and a sandy beachfront park. It had become home in recent years to a resort retirement community with waterfront homes and championship golf courses, making it feel like a tourist town, albeit a sleepy one.

Tara expected to see Jack’s pickup rolling along behind her. It was little consolation that she didn’t. If he wanted to find her, he could.

She parked and started up the sidewalk to the fitness club, mentally reviewing the reasons Jack could still be in the Eastern Shore. She supposed it was possible that the beauty of the area had tugged at him, as it had many others. Or maybe he was interested in getting to know Tara better. He certainly acted as though he were attracted to her.

She dismissed the notion, dismayed that it held some appeal. It was far more likely he still thought she might be Hayley Cooper.

“Hey, Tara! Wait up!”

Kiki Sommers, one of the youngest members of her class, rushed to catch up with her. The nineteen-year-old was wearing another of the colorful outfits that were her trademark. This one featured bright pink yoga pants and a sleeveless black-and-white sports top. Kiki’s long blond hair was tied back in a high ponytail that swung as she moved.

“Hey, Kiki.” Tara opened the door to let the other woman precede her into the brick building that had once housed a YMCA. The fitness club that had taken over the space was prospering, but summers were slow despite the regulars who used the weight room and the diehards in Tara’s classes. “Love the outfit.”

“Thanks,” Kiki said. “I knew it was cute, no matter what JoJo said.”

“JoJo?”

“My brother. He moved back home from Virginia Beach a couple weeks ago after he lost his job.” Kiki snapped her fingers and turned to regard Tara as she walked through the door. “Hey, I heard you want to get fixed up with him.”

“Who does Tara want to get fixed up with?” Dustin Jeffries, an employee not much older than Kiki, asked from behind the front desk. The place was so small, nothing anybody said was sacred. A lounge area consisting of a TV and single sofa was on one side of the desk. Across an aisle on the other side was the all-purpose room where Tara taught her exercise class.

“My brother JoJo,” Kiki answered.

“Give me a break,” Tara said. “I didn’t know your brother existed until a few moments ago. Who told you I wanted to date him?”

“Mary Dee,” Kiki said. “She saw JoJo picking me up last week. I thought you did, too.”

Tara was going to let Mary Dee have it when she next saw her. Unfortunately that wouldn’t be today. Mary Dee was missing class to take her husband out to dinner for his birthday.

“No, I didn’t see him.” Something occurred to Tara. “How old is he, anyway?”

“Twenty-three,” Kiki said.

“Too young for me,” Tara said.

“JoJo looks older,” Kiki said. Tara thought it was telling that she didn’t say anything about her brother’s maturity level. So far about the only details she’d provided were that he was unemployed and lived at home.

“Kiki’s right,” Dustin said. “I’ve seen her brother. All that facial hair does make him look older. You should go out with him, Tara.”

She shook her head. “Is everyone around here trying to fix me up?”

“Yeah,” Kiki said. “Pretty much.”

“I can find my own man, thank you very much,” Tara said, a mental image of Jack DiMarco flashing in her brain.

Kiki clapped. “You’ve got a man?”

Tara thrust Jack from her mind. “Maybe,” she said, which was the quickest way to get Kiki to stop suggesting a date with her brother.

“Ooooh,” Kiki said. “Tell me more.”

“Can’t,” Tara said. “Class is starting in a few minutes. I need to stretch.”

She ducked into the all-purpose room, where nine women awaited her, about two-thirds the number that usually showed up. Summer didn’t officially start for another week or so but vacation season had begun.

She changed the CD in the sound system to a mix she’d made the night before of songs with fast tempos. She climbed on the bike at the front of the room and started to pedal.

“Okay, class,” Tara called above the noise of the gears turning. “Who’s ready to work hard?”