Kiss the Moon (28 page)

Robby stuck a log on the fire, and it almost fell onto her foot. Penelope said, “Not that way, Mother, you’ll burn yourself,” and Wyatt left the two of them alone.

He found his father on the front porch, staring at Lake Winnipesaukee. He wore no coat, just a heavy Scottish knit sweater. Before Wyatt had come beside him, he said, “It looks remarkably the same up here. It’s more populated, of course, and this was just a dying, isolated little village in the fifties. Now it’s got an active, vital, year-round population, as well as a thriving tourist business. This inn—” He paused, glanced at the covered furniture, the wide, quiet porch. “It was just a crumbling old lake house when I was a boy.”

“You were so young when you were here last. It must be strange coming back.”

“I wanted to help find Colt. I remember—I was so desperate to find him. It was all I could think about for weeks, months. But my father forbade it. He didn’t even allow me up here. I stayed in New York with Mother, attended my classes. I did what was expected of me, but all I wanted to do was run away from home and find my brother.”

“Father—”

He shook his head, cutting Wyatt off. “I did run away. Three times. All in the first eighteen months after Colt left. Once I got as far as Massachusetts, the other two times I was picked up at Port Authority.” He inhaled sharply, containing his emotions. “I think, secretly, Father was pleased.”

“This must be very painful for you,” Wyatt said lamely, feeling helpless.

“I heard about the hermit on our land years ago. I suppose I suspected it might be Colt. I never could bring myself to make a serious effort to find out.” He looked at Wyatt, his gaze hardening. “He walked away from his family, not once, but twice. He ran off with Frannie Beaudine without saying goodbye. And he survived the plane crash and became this Bubba Johns character. He’s had forty-five years, Wyatt. If he’d wanted to see me, to know you, he knew where to find us.”

As much as Brandon thought he might be burying his emotions, coping with them, triumphing over them, his mix of anger, betrayal, loss and confusion was right there at the surface, raw and impossible to ignore. Wyatt felt no relief, no satisfaction. Inside this fifty-six-year-old man was a boy trying to come to terms with what his big brother had done, the choices he’d made that left his little brother alone.

It was so searingly simple. He’d loved his big brother, and it wasn’t enough.

“I’ve failed you in a thousand ways, Wyatt,” his father said. “I know that. But I’ve never abandoned you—I’ve always tried in my perhaps inadequate way to be there for you.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

His tone was almost harsh. Wyatt nodded. “You love all of us. Ellen, Beatrix, me. It’s all we could ask, and it’s enough.”

Colt Sinclair was alive.

Harriet stood at her bay window overlooking the lake. She was stricken, hardly able to breathe. Her chest hurt. Her heart raced. She thought she might collapse.

If Colt was alive, he couldn’t be her father. He would never have left his own child on a doorstep. He would have taken her and raised her.

He was only twenty-one. Not much more than a boy himself.

Still, she knew he wouldn’t have abandoned his own child.

She’d never figured out who’d done the leaving. Who’d wrapped her in a blanket and put her in an apple basket and tucked her onto the church doorstep that cold, dark April night. Now it looked as if it must have been Lyman. Her own cousin, a man she’d known all her life. He’d known their town hermit was really Colt Sinclair. What other secrets did he have?

She didn’t want to see him, speak to him. Not right now. Right now, she only wanted to breathe.

There was a quiet knock at her door. She shrieked and jumped, knocking over her needlework stand.

“Harriet? It’s me, Jack.”

Ridiculously, she pushed back her hair, checked her dresser mirror to see if she was at all presentable. She wasn’t. Hair dank and gray-looking, eyes wild, and so pale. She was too stunned to cry. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t considered Bubba Johns might be Colt. She hadn’t ever expected it to be
real.

“Harriet—”

“I’m here!”

She pulled open the door, inhaled at the shock of his sexiness. It was there every time she saw him, thought of him. “Jack—what can I do for you?”

“May I come in?”

“Of course.”

He shut the door behind him. Harriet felt a rush of excitement that did nothing to steady her breathing. Jack walked around, checking out her three rooms, and she bit the insides of her cheeks to keep from passing out. She was so self-conscious. She couldn’t remember when she’d had anyone besides Robby and Penelope to her rooms. Most of her friends she met downstairs in one of the common rooms. She’d never had a man up here. He looked so out of place amidst her laces and flowers and frills, and yet he didn’t seem to mind.

He smiled at her. “This is just what I pictured.”

“It’s especially nice in the summer, when there’s a breeze off the lake—” She stopped, stunned, when he pulled open one of her dresser drawers. “What are you doing?”

“I’m just wondering what you did with the diamonds.”

She didn’t speak. Couldn’t.

“Good,” he said. “At least you’re not going to pretend you don’t know.”

“Jack, don’t. Please.”

He sat on the edge of her bed, his flat eyes taking her in. She had on navy chinos and a white button-down shirt, just her watch for jewelry. She didn’t have Robby’s flair for clothes, Penelope’s natural good looks—she had to work at her appearance. And most often she didn’t. This morning she’d given up on makeup and washed it all off.

“Harriet—” He sighed audibly, shaking his head. “Hell, you’re my weakness. But I think you know that.” His gaze narrowed on her, the detective at work. “I figure you found the wreckage a long time ago. How long?”

Her mouth was parched, and she almost couldn’t get the words out. “I was sixteen.”

“Sixteen. A hell of an age to find the plane you believed your parents died in.”

“My birth parents,” she amended in a whisper.

“Birth parents. Right. Christ, what a quaint term. So, you’ve kept quiet for almost thirty years. That’s damned impressive, Harriet. Damned impressive.”

“I never—I never looked in the wreckage. I didn’t want to see the bodies. I stumbled on it by accident. A friend and I had gotten separated….” She shut her eyes, the door to that long-locked closet in the recesses of her mind popping open, a tornado ripping through everything she’d buried, denied even to herself. “I found the diamonds on the hill a few yards below the wreckage, lodged against a rock. They were in a small artist’s case. It must have tumbled down the hill during the crash.”

“Serendipity,” Jack said, amused, sarcastic.

Harriet looked at him, and for that split second she saw what he might have been—what they could have been together—and what he was. A gentle man with a dream of owning a Texas ranch, and a tough, competitive man who would burn anything in his path—including her—now that his dream was within his reach.

“I didn’t take them at first,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what they were—if they were real. I didn’t think I was supposed to find them. I left them with the wreckage. Later, after Bubba Johns built his shack, I got them.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone you’d found Colt and Frannie’s plane?”

She licked her lips, but there was no moisture left in her mouth, on her tongue. “I wasn’t ready to know the truth, whatever it was. I loved my parents. My real parents. And I just didn’t—”

“Where are the diamonds now?”

There was no point in lying. He would tear her room apart if he felt he had to. She was on the third floor. No one would hear. If she started to scream, he’d gag her. “They’re here.”

She showed him. She opened the antique trunk in her sitting room, and inside, down at the bottom, was the artist’s case filled with diamonds. She’d made a black velvet bag for them, with red ribbon ties. She opened it and gave the diamonds to Jack.

“Fuck, Harriet.” His voice was a hoarse whisper, his eyes pinned on her. “I wish things could be different.”

“I know.”

He touched her cheek, let his fingers drift into her hair. “You want me to be your knight in shining armor. I’d like to be, maybe more than you know. But I’m just a rough Brooklyn boy who’s getting his the only way he knows how—the only way he can. I want my ranch, Harriet. I wish I could explain—”

“You don’t have to explain, Jack. I understand. When Robby and I were transforming this falling-down old house into an inn, I could imagine it all done up with needlepoint pillows and pretty wallpapers and potpourri. There were days we’d be working, down on our hands and knees, so bone-tired and discouraged that we just wanted to give up, and I’d watch the sun glow orange on the lake—” She stopped herself, swallowed in her dry, tight throat. “I know what it is to have a dream.”

“I thought being a Sinclair was your dream.”

She smiled sadly. “No, that was just a silly fantasy. I’m a Chestnut. I belong right here where I am. It’s a little late to realize that….” She shrugged. “But it’s true.”

Jack tilted his head and appraised her. “Holy hell. Harriet, you’re the one who’s been trying to scare Penelope.”

She lowered her head. Another door popped open, another terrible truth fell out. She was so ashamed. She couldn’t cry. Tears were too easy.

“What the hell was your point?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “I just don’t know. I guess I wanted to be the only one who knew where Colt and Frannie’s plane went down. I was afraid of the truth, and Penelope—” She gulped for air, unable to stand the strain. “Penelope isn’t afraid of anything. I sent her the e-mail, the fax—but I never hurt her. That was you, Jack. I know it was.”

“Believe in me, Harriet.” Jack reached over, took her hand in his. “Come with me. We’ll make this work, you and me. I don’t know what it is about you. I never thought I’d fall for someone like you, but I have.”

She squeezed his hand. It was warm and strong, callused in the right places. “Did you leave Bubba out there to die?”

“Hell, no. I knew Wyatt and Penelope would find him. I followed the old bastard to the wreckage, but he knew I was there all along. He tried to get the drop on me. I hit him on the head, he dropped like a rock, and I checked out the plane wreck. No bodies, no booty.”

“Did you know there were diamonds?”

“I guessed it was something like diamonds that wouldn’t get ruined from exposure. I finally dragged it out of Brandon Sinclair. It’s taken me a while to put it together that it was you. Harriet, I’m not a murderer. I’ve worked hard my whole life. You don’t know how it is—I can’t slice honor and integrity and put it on my plate. I can’t buy a ranch with it. I can’t watch it from my front porch. I came back to New York for a fighting chance at the good life. I’ve spent three years saving Brandon Sinclair from his own paranoia. It’s my turn now. I
deserve
this chance.”

“And what do I deserve, Jack?” she asked quietly.

His expression was unreadable. He got to his feet. “I doubt even the hermit knows you took the diamonds. I only figured it out because I fell in love with you. If I hadn’t—” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

“It’s wrong.”

He didn’t look at her. “I just need time to clear out.”

“What about me?”

“You won’t talk.” His gaze fell to her, his eyes flat and dead, any warmth that had been there turned cold. “Your silence and what you’ve done to Penelope have already doomed you.”

Twenty

P
enelope hit every pothole and frost heave on the road to the airport. She knew her driving wasn’t safe, but she had to find Harriet and Jack Dunning, and she had to find them now. She didn’t trust Dunning, and she was worried about Harriet.

The story was out. On the wires, on CNN, in all the Boston and New Hampshire media. Every reporter in Cold Spring wanted a shot of the heir-turned-hermit. Bubba Johns—Colt Sinclair—and Lyman Chestnut, however, weren’t cooperating. When they emerged from Andy McNally’s office, they went to the Sunrise Inn.

Robby Chestnut brought them into the kitchen, warned the reporters it was off-limits per order of the board of health, and fed them sandwiches and coffee. Penelope had never been so proud of her mother. As enraged as Robby was at the secrets her husband had kept from her, she loved him, and she was going to let him eat lunch with his friend in peace. She did ask Bubba if she needed to spray after he’d sat in her kitchen.

No one offered to fetch his brother and nephew for him. That was for him to request, and he didn’t.

“So,” she said, pouring more coffee, “what happened to Frannie?”

“She died a few hours after the crash,” Colt Sinclair said. “There was nothing I could do. We were supposed to have flown to Canada, but she insisted we detour to Cold Spring. Lyman and his father were going to be waiting at the airfield. It wasn’t much in those days. But I…” His old gray eyes clouded. “Something went wrong, and we didn’t make it.”

Lyman took over from there. “My father started looking immediately. He had a pretty good idea of where they went down. He met up with Colt on the way—Frannie had dragged herself off, wouldn’t keep still. She was bleeding internally. Pop did everything he could. There was just no saving her.”

“All she wanted to do,” Colt said quietly, “was to get to her baby.”

“Jesus Christ in heaven,” Robby breathed.

“I had the baby up at Pop’s cabin on the lake,” Lyman said. “Pop and I took turns for weeks watching her. Mother got suspicious—and I caught Mary following me once or twice. Frannie had come home to have her baby. She didn’t realize I knew she was expecting. I guess you don’t realize what a teenager knows until it’s too late. We kept it our secret as long as we could.”

Penelope was stunned. “Did you help deliver her baby?”

He nodded. “My father arrived right in the middle of it. First thing, he figured I was the father. That was a rough moment, I can tell you. When we got that straightened out, he rolled up his sleeves, and we did our best.”

“Why, Pop? Why not take her to the hospital? I don’t get it.”

“In those days an illegitimate child wasn’t the same as it is now. And Frannie—Frannie had her own ideas about doing things. She didn’t want anyone to know about the baby. She was afraid.”

Colt, his sandwich untouched, clasped his big, scarred, bony hands on the table and shook his head. “I didn’t know. Not until that night in the plane. I never even guessed she was pregnant that whole winter. She was—” He shut his eyes, swallowed. “She was the most wonderful woman I’d ever known.”

“And his old man was the father of her baby,” Lyman said with brutal clarity.

Penelope gasped.

Her mother was horrified. “Willard Sinclair? That rotten son of a bitch!”

“He’d seduced her the previous summer,” Lyman went on painfully. “Frannie didn’t know what to do. She knew Willard would never admit to being the father. He was finished with her, acted like nothing had happened. And Frannie—Frannie wanted her cake and to eat it, too. When he offered her the job in New York, she took it. She hid her pregnancy from everyone, then came home and had the baby here, among friends.”

“Then went back to New York?” Penelope asked.

“She promised to be in touch when she figured out what to do. Pop and I took turns tending to the baby.”

“To Harriet,” Robby said stiffly.

Her husband nodded. “She was six weeks old when Frannie called to say she’d made arrangements to fly to Cold Spring. Only she didn’t make it.”

“How awful,” Penelope breathed. “To have been seduced by one man and then fall in love with his son—”

Colt shook his head. “Frannie was never in love with me. She needed me to help her start her new life. She was desperate. She stole the diamonds—my father owed her that much, she said—and planned to take her baby up to Canada and start fresh.”

“With you,” Penelope said.

“No. Before she died, she told me I belonged with my family—with my brother. She intended to send me back to New York.”

Robby scowled. “Frannie didn’t think that one through very well, did she?”

But Colt refused to speak ill of her. “She was desperate. She knew my father would never acknowledge their child.”

Robby was unmoved. “I don’t care. She used her child’s brother and a fifteen-year-old boy to save her skin.” She swung to her husband. “And your father, Lyman. What in God’s name was he thinking going along with this scheme?”

“He was thinking of the baby,” Lyman said simply. “He thought she should be with her mother, and he didn’t know any way of making that happen besides doing what Frannie asked. We didn’t know about the diamonds, of course. We assumed she’d just been saving her money.”

“So when Frannie died,” Penelope said, trying to sort it all out in her mind, “you and Granddad came up with the apple basket and left her on the church doorstep for Uncle George to find.”

Lyman nodded. “That’s right.”

Robby thrust a finger at him. “If Harriet wants to slice your heart out, by damn it, I’m not going to stop her. Keeping such a thing secret all these years!”

“It wasn’t my secret to tell. My father and I made a promise to Frannie, and to Colt. And we kept that promise. What else would you have had me do? Turn Harriet over to Willard Sinclair? He’d have tossed her back in a heartbeat.”

Robby snorted in disgust, but Penelope could tell her mother’s anger wouldn’t last. She wasn’t sure about her own. She turned to Colt, sitting quietly with his untouched coffee, his untouched sandwich. “What about your family? Why didn’t you go back?”

The gray eyes were so clear. “I couldn’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

He almost smiled. “Be glad you don’t. I buried Frannie under a mountain laurel. I struck off into the woods. I meant to go back to the plane and get the diamonds, but I just kept walking. I ended up on the Canadian border. I stayed there for a while, then came back down here and built my place near the spot where I’d buried Frannie. I guess I just started thinking about how I’d explain everything to my father and never could find a way.”

“But your brother—”

“I believed my brother would be better off without me. I thought of myself as an incompetent fool, a dupe. Because of me, Frannie was dead and her baby was being raised by someone else. I wanted Brandon to look up to me, but I knew my father would never let him—and I knew I didn’t deserve it.”

It was only then, and only because of Andy McNally’s arrival, that they realized Wyatt and Brandon Sinclair had been listening at the door behind them. Robby must have seen them but had said nothing. She tried to get Andy’s attention and stop him, but he said, “Why don’t you two pull up a chair?”

A white-faced Brandon Sinclair abruptly turned on his heels and walked out. Wyatt, clearly torn, went after him.

Penelope did nothing. She could feel her connection with Wyatt slipping away, and yet she wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything. Andy didn’t seem to understand what he’d done wrong. He’d come for Harriet, and that was all that was on his mind. He was still ashen over what he’d learned from Colt and Lyman, his scar the only color in his face.

“Someone needs to tell Harriet what’s going on.”

“I will,” Lyman said. “And I’ll call George and tell him and Rachel. They’ll want to come up here, I expect.”

“Do they know?”

Lyman shook his head.

Andy couldn’t contain his impatience. “I know you all are caught up with what happened forty-five years ago. But let’s not forget that just yesterday someone smacked the hell out of Penelope—and there’s still the matter of ten million in diamonds missing.”

“That could be anyone,” Robby said. “Colt says they’ve been missing for years. If I stumbled on a fortune in diamonds in a plane wreck, I’d keep my mouth shut about it.”

“I don’t think that’s what happened,” Andy said.

And everyone in the room knew. Penelope could feel the energy change.

Harriet.

Robby paled. “Andy, you can’t think—”

“It explains a lot of things, Robby. Think about it. I’m not saying she fenced them or anything like that—but they’ve been her little secret for a long, long time. I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“I’ll help you find her,” Penelope said quietly.

Someone had reported seeing Harriet with Jack Dunning. Someone else reported seeing Dunning driving to the airport. Penelope volunteered to check the airport, which her father had shut down for the day. No traffic in, no traffic out. It was truth-telling time in Cold Spring, New Hampshire.

She left without a word to Wyatt. Harriet was his aunt. Bubba Johns was his uncle. And Lyman had known it all for years. It was too much to expect Wyatt and his father to digest it over tea and scones.

Penelope bounced over the pits and ruts of the dirt parking lot. Jack Dunning’s rented car was there. Indulging in a small surge of hope, she jumped out of her truck and charged across the parking lot, breaking into a run when she saw his plane sitting on the runway. At least he hadn’t left.

But no one was in the cockpit. She climbed in and sat in the right pilot’s seat. It was a very nice plane. A custom interior, plush, state-of-the-art. She was used to planes she and her father kept together with duct tape and baling wire. Unless the Sinclairs owned his plane, Jack Dunning had expensive tastes.

If she were a New York private detective and wannabe Texan and had made off with ten million in diamonds, where would she put them?

“Christ, you’re like a bad penny.” Penelope jumped as Jack Dunning materialized in the open door and climbed into the left seat, shaking his head. “You keep turning up when I don’t want you.”

She kept her cool. This did not bode well. And she was without dogs, rifle or Wyatt. “You’re clearing out?”

“I have business in New York.”

“Kind of taking off in midstream, aren’t you? We’ve found Bubba but there’s still some nasty bastard on the loose.”

“I don’t think so.” He turned to her, and she realized his expressions had a very narrow range, from none to barely none. “I think everything will turn out to be Harriet and your hermit. Harriet sent you that cute little instant message and the fax, then shot over here and messed up your aunt’s machine to throw suspicion off herself.”

“That’s ridiculous—”

“Oh, no, it’s not. It’s quite true. And our hermit-heir Bubba—he did everything else.”

“Including hit himself over the head, I presume.”

“To draw attention away from himself. So, yes, you presume correctly.”

Penelope calculated her options, which were few. Scream, pray, make a run for it, brazen it out. “Where’s Harriet now?”

He averted his gaze. “I have no idea.”

“She fell for you, you know. But of course you know. You used her to get the diamonds from her.”

He didn’t look at her. “I know you people up here like life in black and white, but here’s the thing. I love your cousin. I didn’t make her do anything. She made her choice, that’s all.”

“She didn’t—” Penelope stopped herself, the thought like a white-hot knife in her stomach. “She’s not going to kill herself.”

“I don’t know what she’s going to do. It’s none of my business anymore. You, however, are.”

She saw what was coming. The gun, the flat eyes. She swore and reached madly for the door, but the blow came hard and fast to the side of her head. She could feel herself collapsing, and in the split second before unconsciousness claimed her, she knew she was in very serious trouble.

If he went over all his moves during the past week, Wyatt was fairly certain he could find alternative choices that would have prevented him from being in his current predicament. He could have stayed in New York with Pill. He could have thrown Jack Dunning out his office window. He could have believed Penelope’s story about the turn-of-the-century dump and decided to visit his father in the Bahamas.

Instead he’d done all the things he’d done, and now he was stuck in the back of a plane with the woman he was fast falling in love with tied and gagged and a larcenous, murderous son of a bitch at the controls.

They were in the air. Dunning had taken off seconds after dispatching Penelope, and Wyatt forced himself to stay cool and time his move. Jack was armed, and he was a professional. Wyatt had only the element of surprise at his disposal—and raw anger.

His father, in shock at what they’d overheard in the inn’s kitchen, had asked him to find Jack. Seeing Colt again had sucked everything out of Brandon, and he wanted to update Dunning and call him off. He’d said nothing, but Wyatt knew they both suspected the same thing—his private investigator was out of control, responsible for turning an emotional situation into a dangerous one.

When Wyatt arrived at the little airport, it was shut up tight. No Jack, not even a security guard. He drove to the hangar where his uncle had spent the past few nights, not knowing what to expect. Diamonds? Jack Dunning rustling through the old hermit’s stuff? But the place was locked. He’d left his car over by the third hangar and walked around in the cold, still air, checking out the other two hangars, trying to picture Penelope’s life before he’d stormed into it.

While he was investigating, Jack arrived. When Jack stepped out of his car, Wyatt decided he didn’t like the looks of things and slipped into the plane, climbing out of sight in back. He expected to give the handsome, custom plane a quick once-over and sneak out before Jack returned. But then Penelope jumped aboard, and Jack right after her, and Wyatt thought it best to duck. He scrunched down behind a cargo trunk and pulled a tarp over him. He would wait for Jack to hang himself, then announce his presence.