Flirting With Pete: A Novel (15 page)

“What’s to do out here in winter?”

“Not much,” he said, “but the plants inside still need tending.”

She nodded again and smiled. Absently, she held the neck of her robe together. “They’re all beautiful. He must have liked plants.”

“Yes.”

“They’re in every room.”

“Except the office. He didn’t want to risk my barging in there when he was with a client.”

Neither would Casey. She would lose her concentration entirely.

“So tell me when I shouldn’t go in the house,” Jordan said.

“Oh, it isn’t a problem. I can work around you.”

“Then you’re not seeing clients here?”

“I am.” She paused. Apparently, he knew more about her than just the fact of her inheriting the townhouse from Connie. “Did the lawyer say I was a therapist?”

Again, the gardener held her gaze without blinking. “Your father mentioned it once.”

“He did?” That was interesting. “Did he say anything else?”

“No. Should he have?”

She smiled. “Of course not.” She didn’t say anything more about Connie. It would have been inappropriate to involve the gardener in personal issues. Not that he looked like a gardener, with those wise eyes, and he also didn’t talk like a local. Despite the roughness of his looks, he was nothing like the hired hands her mother had used around the barn.

She rocked back on her heels and hitched her chin toward the carpet of green leaves under the chestnut tree. “What’re those plants?”

“Pachysandra.”

“And the ones climbing the shed here?”

“Clematis. Another couple weeks, and it’ll bloom. The flowers are pink.”

“Ah.” She shifted her gaze to the shrubs near the hemlocks. “What’re those?”

“The broad ones are junipers. The taller ones are yews.”

Looking down a tier, she focused on pretty white flowers nestling among green leaves under the oak. “And those?”

“Trillium. It’s a spring blooming bulb. Does well under deciduous trees.”

Lips pressed together, she nodded and glanced at the house. Seconds later, she looked back at Jordan, who was still— disconcertingly— looking at her. “Do you have the time?” she inquired politely.

He checked his watch. It was a sports watch on a ratty black band. “Seven thirty-five.”

She was impressed. He had picked up flats of impatiens, along with who knew what else for other clients, and was already at work. “You’re an early riser.”

“There’s nothing keeping me in bed.” He held her gaze for a final few seconds before returning to the impatiens.

Not so much dismissed as simply finding herself without a comeback, Casey headed off, back down the path. The stones were cool against her feet. She walked faster the closer she got to the house, trotting the last few steps. Once inside the office, she pulled the screen closed.

She did not look back at the gardener. Intending to go upstairs for more coffee and then to dress, she crossed the office. At the door, though, she did an about-face and returned to the desk. If the gardener had free rein of the house— and it was an alluring idea— a measure of prudence was in order. Gathering the typed sheets of the journal, she replaced the binder clip and was in the process of slipping them into their manila envelope when something stopped her. Pulling them back out, she set them on the desk, facedown this time so that what had stopped her could be seen. On the back of the last sheet, written in pencil, almost light enough to be missed, was Connie’s scrawled note. It was brief but pointed:
How to help? She’s kin
.

That changed everything. If Jenny was “kin,” it didn’t matter whether C was for Connie or for Casey. Anyone who was kin to Connie was kin to Casey.

That changed
everything
.

Stepping back from the desk, she faced the shelves of books again. There was more to the journal. There had to be. But where?

She went shelf by shelf, book by book, but there was nothing that remotely resembled an envelope like the one on the desk. Meg had dusted here, but if she had found something, she would surely have left it. Casey didn’t think she was bold enough to clean things out and dispose of random papers.

She moved to the side shelves and studied those with the same care. When she found nothing, she went into the den. There were bookshelves here, too. Again, she stood before each, raising her eyes higher and higher, moving from one shelf to the next. Realizing that she needed to push books aside, pull some out, and look behind, she glanced around for a chair to stand on, but everything here was large and too heavy to move.

Not so in the office. The desk chair was on casters.

She was returning for it when something she had seen earlier registered. It took her a minute, standing with her hands on her hips in front of the side shelves, before she spotted what she wanted. Without the protrusion of cabinets to stand on, she pulled the chair over and stepped up with care. Holding the edge of a shelf for balance, she reached as high as she could and grasped several books. She felt the desk chair slide out a smidgen and shifted her weight accordingly. She was in the process of lowering both the books and herself when the screen door opened fast.

“You’re going to fall,” Jordan warned.

She could hear him approaching. “No. Don’t touch. I’m fine.” Seconds later, she managed to get a hand on the arm of the chair and lower herself the rest of the way. It wasn’t a particularly graceful move, certainly not ladylike, but she did it herself. That was important to her.

Smoothly, holding the books in one hand and her robe closed with the other, she got her feet out from under her, lowered them to the ground, and stood. Jordan was taller than she, so much that she had to look up. Her smile was broad enough— triumphant enough— to compensate for it.

“There,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad.” She held up the books. “And I got what I wanted. This must be my day.” Mustering as much dignity as she could under the circumstances, she slipped around the gardener and headed up the stairs.

Little Falls was in the atlas all right— once in Minnesota, once in New York, and once in New Jersey.

Sitting at the kitchen table, where Jordan wouldn’t see her, Casey located each on the map. She immediately ruled out New Jersey; the Little Falls there was too close to metropolitan areas to be as rural as Jenny Clyde’s Little Falls. The ones in Minnesota and New York were possibilities, since they were more remote. She guessed there were others as well, places where the population of the town was so small that it didn’t appear on the map, and then there were hamlets that weren’t quite towns. Little Falls could be a pocket of South Hadley Falls in Massachusetts, River Falls in Wisconsin, or Idaho Falls in Idaho. It could be a corner of Great Falls in either Montana or South Carolina. Or it could be a name that was made up by the author of the journal for the sake of privacy.

The Sierra Club publications that she’d taken down with the atlas focused on northern New England, but she checked the index anyway. When she came up with a blank, she refilled her coffee and went to the window.

Jordan was still down there, visible between the boughs of the trees, planting impatiens. He was working between the flats and a bag of loam, alternately sitting back on his heels and leaning forward. For a tall man, he seemed perfectly comfortable on the ground. He seemed perfectly comfortable with his plants, period.

She admired that. Gardeners, carpenters, outdoorsmen— she appreciated people who could use their bodies that way. They didn’t have to run for the sake of exercise or do yoga to relieve stress. She envied them the simplicity of their lives.

He glanced up in her direction. She might have shrunk back to keep from being seen. Instead, she raised the mug in a small salute, and sipped the hot brew. She could look if she wanted. She was the boss.

She was still watching Jordan when the garden door opened again and Meg came through. She talked with him for a minute, shot a surprised look at the house, then hurried in, but not through the office. Casey watched her disappear into a corner of the garden. Seconds later, there was the slam of a door, then footsteps running up the stairs.

Casey waited at the top until Meg was in sight. “How did you get in?” she called down.

“The service entrance,” Meg said as she ran up the rest of the way. “It’s on the side. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were staying over. I’d have come earlier. I picked up fresh bread. Can I make you something for breakfast?”

Casey shook her head. When Meg’s face fell, she turned the headshake into a nod. “I would adore the following: one egg over easy, cooked with very little fat; one slice of toast, dry; and more coffee. How’s that?”

Meg beamed. “Easy as pie,” she said and set off.

Casey went up to the bedroom for her clothes, fully planning to wait to shower when she got back to her condo. But the bathroom was too tempting— everything new, everything clean, everything just begging to be used. She found soap. She found shampoo. She found body lotion. She even found a toothbrush and toothpaste in its own little travel pack.

Twenty minutes later, all scrubbed and clean, albeit in yesterday’s clothes, she left the bedroom. She was about to go downstairs when she heard a low murmur coming from Connie’s bedroom. She paused, listened. She crept to the door and was trying to make out words when the murmuring stopped.

Seconds later, Meg emerged and smiled. “Just cleaning up after the night. You look beautiful. I have breakfast ready for you. Would you like to eat in the kitchen? Or on the patio? Dr. Unger always had breakfast outside in weather like this. Jordan certainly doesn’t mind. He’ll just work right along. You can sit there and read the newspaper. It was out front. I brought it in with me.”

“I have a better idea,” Casey said. “I need to check something on the Web. Can you bring breakfast down to the office?”

While she ate, Casey searched for information on Little Falls. She found references to those she had already discovered, but none of them felt right to her. Connie was from Maine; he claimed Jenny Clyde was kin. Casey searched through information on Maine, but found no reference to a Little Falls. She found Island Falls, Lisbon Falls, Kezar Falls, and Livermore Falls. In theory, Little Falls could be a hamlet of any one of them. She tried a second search engine, then a third, but came up with nothing definitive, and by then she was out of time.

Back at her condo, she put on makeup, secured her hair in a marginally professional twist, and changed into a pair of linen slacks and a silk blouse. She was halfway out the door again when she returned for running gear. As an afterthought, she dropped makeup and a change of clothes into the gym bag. Then she returned to her car.

Jordan’s Jeep was gone when she drove down the narrow alley and pulled in at the back garden door. She didn’t have time to feel disappointment, though, because as soon as she was down through the garden and into the house, her first client arrived.

There was no dwelling on thoughts of Little Falls then. Nor could she dwell on the oddness of seeing clients in what had been her father’s office. There was a flicker of thought from time to time— the image of a little girl playing grown-up sitting behind this very big desk— but the truth was, she was with her clients mostly in the sitting area, a far more relaxed place to be.

She saw clients at eleven, twelve, and one— spending fifty minutes with each and ten minutes entering notes. Between two and two-thirty, she nibbled on a sandwich while she made phone calls. Then came another four clients.

The first of those was Joyce Lewellen. Casey had always liked Joyce. She was a precise woman, and while she did make a tailored appearance and liked her life neatly shaped, she fell far short of being obsessive-compulsive. She communicated well and was insightful enough to easily identify a problem. Casey had always suspected that Joyce used their sessions simply to air her thoughts to an unbiased ear.

Joyce was in her early forties. Eighteen months before, her husband had died of complications from what should have been a routine hernia operation. Unable to accept his death, much less explain it to their children, Joyce had needed to find someone at fault. She had gone the route of a medical malpractice suit. Her case wasn’t strong; she’d had to talk with three lawyers before finding one who would represent her.

Casey had seen her weekly for several months at one stretch. Joyce’s major issue was anger. It was keeping her up at night, distracting her during the day, making her a one-issue woman. Her therapy had been focused on letting go of the anger.

“It’s been a while,” Casey said when they were seated opposite each other, Joyce on the sofa, Casey in a chair.

“Four months,” Joyce acknowledged. She was outwardly composed; the only sign of tension was her hands, which were tightly clenched in her lap. “I’ve been okay. So have the girls. They’re back doing their usual stuff— soccer, scouts, ballet. They’ll be starting summer camp in another week.”

“And you? Are you working?”

Joyce had designed store windows prior to her marriage. She had done some freelancing after the girls started school, but had let that go when Norman died. Casey and she had discussed her returning to work if not for the money, which she could use, then for its therapeutic value.

Now she wrinkled her nose. “No. I’ve wanted to be available for anything the lawyer needed. I know, I know. You said that was only keeping the anger alive, but I can’t help myself. I need to do this for Norman. But I’ve been okay with it, really I have. The lawyer’s working. My anger’s under control.”

“Are you going out with friends again?”

“Well, for lunch. Not evenings yet.”

“You’re still wearing black.”

“It seemed appropriate while the lawsuit went on. Last month, there was a hearing before a judge. Both sides presented affidavits and legal briefs. The other side filed for a summary judgment, claiming that we could not prove the case to a jury. The judge’s decision is due at the end of the week.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I’m a basket case,” Joyce said in a high voice. “That’s why I’m here. Yes, I need the money, but it’s more than that. It’s the principle of the thing. Norman shouldn’t have died. He has two little girls who miss him. He’ll never see them become teenagers or get married or have kids. And me, I depended on him. We were supposed to grow old together. Now we can’t. Someone ought to pay for that.”