Long Shot (7 page)

Jen shook her head, but not in denial.

“If you’re so worried she’s still drunk all the time, if you hate her that much . . . why?”

Salty, stinging tears filled Jen’s eyes. The day had finally caught up with her—first facing Leith and his indifference, then clawing her way uphill with Sue, now this.

She calmly rose. “If you’re going to play the ‘that’s none of your business’ card, then here’s me, playing mine.”

Chapter

6

L
eith had his bare feet kicked up on the rickety coffee table with the angel inlays and the chipped legs, TV muted and tuned to the Red Sox game he wasn’t even watching. Ten o’clock at night and Jen still wasn’t back. He knew this because he’d positioned the pink velour recliner to perfectly view her driveway and side door.

The security light over 738’s porch flicked on as Jen appeared, walking slowly, head bent, that damned purse dragging one shoulder down. She carried a brown takeout bag from the Stone in the opposite hand.

He sank deeper into the recliner and nudged back a corner of the lace curtain. It could have been the harsh glare of the motion-sensor light, but there was a pale haggardness to her face. If he didn’t know that she always managed to hold herself together no matter the situation, he might have named it sadness.

No, never that on her. A trick of the light then. But it made him think of earlier that day, when he’d doubted how well he actually knew her.

She must have spent a long time with Aimee to have come back so late. He wondered if it was difficult for her, to have been called back to Gleann to work, only to spend so little time with her sister. But then, the two of them had never been all that close. Aimee had run with the partying crowd every summer, with Jen often having to rescue her from shit situations or drive her home after she’d drank too much. Jen and Leith’s jokes on the townspeople had been harmless, but Aimee’s antics—vandalism, a pot bust—rarely left people smiling, least of all Jen.

Being closer to Jen, Leith had always held Aimee at arm’s length. Then one summer, while Jen had been off at college, Aimee had reappeared in Gleann holding a baby. Bev Haverhurst took her in without question. Aimee mellowed, grew up. Gleann was a good mother that way; if anything, Leith knew that. Then Bev died, leaving the Thistle to her older niece.

Outside, Jen reached the side door.
Showtime
.

Leith sat back, hand over his grinning mouth. Maybe Jen refused to acknowledge their romantic past, but he would love for her to remember their friendship, how fun it used to be.

She struggled to take out her keys while balancing everything else, then finally managed to wiggle the key into the testy lock. Then she saw it. The takeout bag slid to the ground as she plucked the folded piece of paper taped to the door.

He shouldn’t be laughing. Really, he shouldn’t be. Except that it was too damn funny. Even when she pressed the piece of paper to her chest and crept around the front of 738 to peer over at the empty blue house she thought belonged to Mr. Lindsay, he was laughing.

The Jen he knew was getting ready to march over to that house and pound on the door, intending to shove the note in the old man’s face and tell him to back off. Then the jig would be up, Leith would head outside to meet her and reveal himself, and they’d have a good laugh. So when she turned to look over at Mildred’s house instead, he flattened himself against the back of the recliner, out of sight.

Seconds later, someone rattled his back metal screen door.
What the—

He pushed to his feet, checked to make sure his fly was up, that he didn’t reek. He stood in front of the foggy antique mirror hanging crookedly in the narrow hallway and ran a hand through his hair.

For the life of him, he couldn’t fully wipe the grin off his face. So when he opened the back door, one foot propped on the single step leading up into the kitchen, he was sure he looked like the proverbial cat who ate the canary.

Jen sighed when she saw him. Actually sighed.

Hello, canary.

“Holy crap, Leith. Look what that pervert left me now!”

She shoved the note in his face, and even though he didn’t have to read it to know what it said, he scanned his own chicken scratch anyway.

“Ms. Haverhurst,”
he read, unable to hide his smirk,
“Would you mind not hanging your clothing and unmentionables around the house in plain view of anyone walking along the sidewalk?”

Leith laughed as he lowered the paper, but Jen’s arms were clamped over her chest as though she were naked and he were Mr. Lindsay. Which he was, technically . . . and which she wasn’t, unfortunately.

“I’m a little freaked out,” she said. “You tell me. Should I be? Should I move? What’s this guy like?”

Leg still hiked up on the step, one arm braced on the railing, he asked, “So why’s your underwear hanging around the house?”

“Because I don’t trust that old dryer not to fry it! And that shouldn’t matter. Is he peeking in my windows?”

“Well, they’re actually
his
windows.”

She pressed fingers to her mouth. The law of fluorescent lightbulbs said her skin and eyes shouldn’t look so beautiful under their glare, but she’d never been one to follow those kinds of rules.

“Do you think he’s actually gone inside the house? Do you think he’s actually, you know,
touched
my stuff?” Her whole body did this exaggerated shiver as her hands dropped. “Why are you laughing? This isn’t funny at all.”

But he couldn’t stop. He just laughed and laughed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Relax, Jen.”

“Don’t tell me to relax—”

“I wrote those notes.”

“Don’t tell me—wait.
You?
”

His foot dropped off the step and he leaned a hip against the basement railing. “Yep.”

Body frozen in a midrant pose, only her eyes shifted back and forth. “You. You’re Mr. Lindsay?”

He recognized the start of Jen’s anger. The gathering of her lips, the careful swipe of her tongue between them as she ordered her words.

“Before you start”—he held up a hand—“I freaked out when you called me out of the blue the other day. I had no idea you’d come back here. I heard your voice on the phone, you thought I was Mr. Lindsay, I ran with it.” Her shoulders dropped, her giant purse sliding with a jerk to the crook of her elbow. His other hand came up, warding off the verbal blow he could feel coming. He was shoring up his house, nailing boards to the windows in preparation for the hurricane. “I’m sorry. I thought it would buy me some time to deal with you suddenly reappearing. Thought it’d be funny for a bit; you know, since we used to play all those tricks on people together back in the day. Didn’t know you’d get so bothered.”

“A strange man leaving notes on my door. You didn’t think it would bother me.”

He ran a hand around the back of his neck and looked at the linoleum floor with the decades-old line of wear leading from the door to the stairs. “I didn’t think. I’m sorry.” Chin down, he looked up at her.

She broke. Her smile was the sun lasering through the swirling clouds, dissipating the storm.

“Jesus Christ, Leith!” She breathed like she’d just sprinted across the fairgrounds. The takeout bag dropped to the floor. But she was smiling. And laughing. “There’s no one out here! The thought of some creepy old guy looking through my window?”

Hand to his chest, he said, “I’m sorry. I really am.” He let himself have another chuckle, but this one not at her expense. “Want me to walk you back to your place? You know, in case any old men are lurking about?”

“Well, no. There’s underwear strung all around.”

“Like I said, want me to walk you back to your place?”

He hadn’t meant to flirt. Really. It caught both of them by surprise, their smiles fading, the laughter petering out. In the crappy foyer light, their gazes caught and held. The house felt too small, her proximity too close and yet not nearly close enough.

“I, uh . . .” she began, then cleared her throat as her eyes drifted away, over his shoulder. The moment her expression changed, from awkward—but also eager?—attraction, to one of bewilderment, he knew she’d spotted Mildred’s kitchen. He shifted his body to try to block her view, but it was useless.

“Okay, I may have underwear hanging from a clothesline across the living room,” Jen said, “but at least I don’t have shelves of Precious Moments and painted wooden hearts on my kitchen wall.”

Dropping her purse to the linoleum, she pushed past him and jumped up the one step into the kitchen. He sighed, waiting for it.

“Leith.” She stood in the center of the pink braided rug and turned in a circle, amusement plastered all over her face as she took in the elderly horror. He deserved her laughter. “I never pegged you as a pink kitchen sort of guy.”

He had to run with it, though he was loathing where her next line of questioning was heading. “Isn’t it more of a mauve?”

She guffawed. “Did you just move in or something?”

“Or something.” He shut the back door and joined her in the small kitchen.

“Is this your
grandma’s
house?”

“No.” Strangely, he felt a little defensive, and reached out to straighten a faded and burned pot holder hanging from a hook above the stovetop. “It was Mildred’s.”

“Who’s Mildred?”

“Mildred Lindsay.”

Jen nodded slowly. “Ah, okay. I get it. I think.”

“Her husband died, oh, I don’t know, thirty years ago? She lived alone here, but Horace Lindsay’s name was still on three houses—this one, yours, and the
empty
one on the other side.”

She laughed low and graced him with a smile that said she’d forgiven him.

“May I?” She gestured down the darkened hall toward the front room. He shrugged. None of the stuff inside was his, and she wasn’t laughing at the house anymore.

Leith followed Jen deeper into Mildred’s home. She turned into the formal living room that looked out over the street. Leith leaned in the doorway, watching as she turned on a lamp with a fringed shade. The room was filled with knickknacks—porcelain figurines and blown glass vases in pale colors and framed Victorian prints—that meant absolutely nothing to him, and which he’d been viewing as a hindrance these past few months. But Jen spent time looking at each one, giving them a fragile, sad, forgotten meaning he’d been purposely avoiding.

She turned from a glass-enclosed bookcase near the window. “So why are
you
here?”

The lamplight hit her in a way that turned her dress into a translucent suggestion. She was still wearing that pale gray one from this morning, the one that seemed to wrap around the best parts of her body. Thanks to the fuzzy light from behind, he could see her shape: the subtle dent of her waist, the round curve of her hips, the slope of her inner thighs.

Though he’d seen her last night wearing a lot less, there was something terribly intimate about her appearance now—especially in the way she regarded him, head tilted, eyes gone soft.

He cleared his throat and angled his body to stare at a crack in the well-worn hardwood floor. “Mildred left all her stuff to me. The three houses. Everything inside. A bit of money.”

Jen trailed her fingers over a secretary desk. “Why to you?”

He shrugged.

“Did you know her well?”

“No. Not really.”

“But you must have made an impression.”

“I said I don’t really know why.”

“No, you didn’t. You just shrugged.” Her expression turned sly, teasing. “Did you buy her groceries or something?”

“No.”

“Date her granddaughter?”

“No grandkids.”

Jen came forward, moving out of the tormenting lamplight, thank God. He was momentarily blindsided by the memory of how she’d looked the night of their first kiss. Her face turned up to him, him towering over her, she’d looked delicate and beautiful and trusting. And also scared.

Much as she seemed just now.

Jen, true to character, somehow covered all that up with a hand on her hip and a playful squint. “So you must have cut her lawn.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling like he was ten. “Yeah, I did.”

She swallowed a smile and went to the window, leaning over to pull aside the curtain. That smooth, clingy, gray fabric settled into the crack of her ass, and he had to look away again.

“Wow,” she said, examining the plainest, smallest front yard on the block, “you must have done a
spectacular
job.”

“I also talked to her. I think I might have been the only person who did.”

She swiveled to him, green eyes giant, dark hair swishing around her shoulders. “Oh my God, she had a crush on you!”

There was the Jen he remembered, the Jen he’d once loved. The one who knew how to be fun and giggly and teasing when she stopped moving or working for a minute or two. That, more than anything, made him turn around and head back into the kitchen. There was beer in the fridge somewhere.

“You’re nuts,” he said, opening the door and hearing the satisfying clink of brown bottles along the side shelf.

Jen followed him. Of course she followed. She was laughing now and her voice hit all sorts of wonderful high notes. “I bet she watched you out that big picture window and just . . . pined.”

Thinking about Mildred spying on him while sitting in that rocking chair was plain weird, but he knew that’s exactly what she’d done. He’d caught her once. Maybe twice.

“She watched youuuuu,” Jen sang, “and she thought”—here’s where she adopted a really bad old lady’s voice—“‘That man is so fine. Maybe if I leave him everything I own he’ll sleep with me in the afterlife.’”