Mind Tricks (7 page)

“Because of your memory problem.
But what about after you find your memories again?” Her voice dropped into a
smoky, hypnotic tone. “Would you want someone looking inside you? Someone who
could tell what you were thinking…just by touching you?” And she reached out
toward him.

He flinched—he couldn’t help it.
The car veered over the double yellow line before he snapped it back into its
lane. Good thing she hadn’t pulled that trick when a car had been approaching.

She folded her arms across her
chest. “I rest my case.” But she didn’t sound victorious.

“All right—a point to you. But what
does it matter? You don’t claim to be psychic with people.”

She shrugged. “Solidarity among
sisters in weirdness, I guess. Just…well, just don’t call me psychic, okay?
Even with animals.”

“Deal.” An easy concession to make,
since he’d never thought she was one anyway.

“What about you?” she asked, neatly
deflecting the conversation from herself. “How long has your family been here?”

“My dad and Mickey grew up here. My
mom’s from Boston. I have a few generations of Mainers in my background.”
Something loosened inside him, and he found himself saying, “When I was growing
up, I always wanted to leave Maine, and after college I did for a while. But
the family business pulled me back. For years I resented it, but now I don’t
want to leave. This is my home.”

He sounded like a Hallmark card. A
corny one. “And you?” he asked quickly. “Where do you consider home?”

She cocked her head, as if thinking
about it for the first time. “I like it here,” she finally answered. “I’m not
sure it’s home yet, but it’s the closest I’ve come so far. I’d like to stick
around awhile, see if it works out.”

“I hope it does.”

She smiled. “Me too.”

He cleared his throat. “Yesterday,
when you asked if I was on any drugs, I should have said yes. Someone dropped Rohypnol
into my drink at the Waterview the night before, and it was probably still in
my system.”

“The date rape drug? Ah. That’s why
you can’t remember.”

“Right.”

He waited for her to say,
Well, do you believe in me now?
but she
didn’t, thankfully. He didn’t want to break this truce they had built between
them.

Instead she said in mock-outrage,
“You’re taking me to eat at a place where you know your drink was drugged?”

He shrugged. “Hey, the halibut and
the view can’t be beat.”

A few minutes later, they were
crawling through downtown Camden, the streets clogged with tourists. Jake
cursed under his breath and slammed on his brakes as a fat woman with a
Maine, My Vactionland
T-shirt leaped out
in front of his car, apparently more intent crossing the street
right now
than on preserving her life.
Hell, he appreciated the bounty brought by tourists—he got a lot of
out-of-state business from people who happened to see his boats in the
harbor—but even so, running down a few who thought Vacationland=Disneyland
would have been satisfying.

Great. He was daydreaming about
killing tourists for no reason except that they annoyed him and wore out his
brake pads. It was a good thing Emma really wasn’t psychic, or she might
rethink her apparent belief in his innocence.

That realization lifted his mood.
Emma thought him innocent. Why else would she be here? She wasn’t so hard up
that she’d risk her life for a free meal.

He turned in to the Waterview’s lot
and parked. At least there were spaces available today. The night he’d come
here with Ginny, the lot had been full, and he’d had to circle around nearby
side streets for almost fifteen minutes, looking for an empty spot. He clearly
remembered where he’d parked. But a half hour after he’d locked the car door
and run through the rain to the Waterview, all his memories had vanished.

“Jake?”

“What?”

“Are we going inside?”

“Sure.” He shook off his trance and
got out.

He’d built himself a life here. At
first he’d resented moving back, as he’d admitted, but now he wasn’t going to
let that life go, yanked away by the bull-headed police who refused to search
for other suspects. He needed an alibi, damn it, and he was going to do what he
had to do to find it.

He reached for the heavy brass knob
on the Waterview’s door. “Ready?” he asked. “Let’s go.”

Emma kept her attention on Jake as
they entered the hostess’s area. He projected an easy confidence that she
imagined had helped rebuild his family’s fortunes. Still, she thought she saw
tension around his eyes that belied his casual manner.

“Afternoon, Rosie,” he greeted the
hostess inside the door. “Can you squeeze in two for lunch?”

Emma glanced across the room. It
was a rhetorical question—at least a quarter of the tables were empty.

“Hmm, let me see.” The hostess
stared at her seating chart for a long moment. “It doesn’t look good….”

Jake nodded in the direction of the
nearest empty table. “It looks good to me.”

Rosie looked back, unblinking.

Jake gave Rosie a smile. “How about
that one by the window? Is it reserved?” Emma sensed a shift inside him, as if
he’d thrown up a defensive wall, but his charm was unwavering. Still, something
had changed.

Why did she recognize the signs?
She didn’t know him that well. Four encounters did not a close friendship make.
Maybe she’d simply spent too much time looking at him. She’d probably seemed
like an idiot during the drive over here, watching him out of the corner of her
eyes while she pretended to gaze at the road or the trees or whatever. He’d
caught her a few times and finally given her a smile she’d been unable to
resist answering.

He wasn’t acting like a jerk today.
And she couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing.

“That table’s free,” Rosie finally
answered, and then gestured to a waitress. Soon Emma and Jake were seated by
the windows, looking out over the harbor.

Emma glanced around the room. The
restaurant was popular with tourists for the view and with local businesspeople
for the food. She recognized a few faces: Joey Gilbert, the mayor; Mrs.
James—aka Mandy’s mom—who was lunching with art gallery owner Paula Jeffries;
and Bill Monroe, Cynthia’s father. Bill caught Emma’s gaze and gave her a wave
while continuing his conversation with the woman opposite him. Bill was also
the owner of Selkie, a local boat operation.

“What is this, the boatbuilders’
special?” Jake muttered, his eyes on a man Emma didn’t know. “That’s Roger
Fills,” he explained. “A competitor. He runs Seacastle. I don’t mind him
personally, but there’s lots of bad blood between him and my parents.”

Fills looked up, saw Jake, and sent
him a nod. The man appeared to be about sixty, and a nervous energy seemed to
throw sparks off his every gesture. His dining partner looked a little
overwhelmed, perhaps because Fills barely paused for breath between sentences.

Emma said, “I don’t recognize him,
but his name sounds familiar. Maybe I’ve read about him in the paper or
something.”

“Or maybe Mickey mentioned him.”
Jake’s mouth tightened. “Fills made a not-so-secret offer to buy Woodhaven last
week. It wasn’t a great offer, and I turned him down, but it sent my employees
into panic mode. And now with Ginny being killed…Well, Woodhaven isn’t going to
win a ‘Best Company to Work For’ award this month.”

Silence dropped between them.

Emma fiddled with her silverware.
Why, again, had she come here? Because she was a sucker for anyone in need of
her help? Because when Jake settled his dark eyes on her, all the reminders
pounding through her head that this guy was trouble were suddenly muted?

No. Of course not. Coming here was
a business decision. In fact, this was a business lunch, much like the other
lunches around them, if a little less conventional.

“How often do you eat here?” she
asked Jake.

“Twice a week, if not more. Almost
always for lunch. Dinner with Ginny was an exception.” He pointed with his chin
toward an adjacent corner. “We were over there.”

Interesting. That table was set
apart from the others and nestled in a bay window. Dozens of marriage proposals
had been made there, and locals had dubbed it the Engagement Nook. Of course,
you could sit there without getting engaged, but…

“Were you here on a business
dinner, or was it more personal?” No point in beating around the bush.

“It was business.” He hesitated.
“We’d dated before, when we were both going to business school in Boston. Not
long—we went out only a handful of times—but long enough for me to realize that
though we wouldn’t work as a couple, she was a whiz at marketing. I moved up
here to take over Woodhaven about eight years ago. When our ad and marketing
guy left for another job last year, I offered her a spot at Woodhaven.”

“It wasn’t weird to work with an
old girlfriend?”

“She was my employee far longer
than she was my girlfriend. And she had a guy in Boston—in the beginning, at
least. But they broke up recently, and she had been more…flirtatious.” He made
a face. “Frankly, it was getting to be too much. I like to be pursued as much
as the next guy, but not by an employee. Especially not one I wasn’t interested
in.”

“You brought her to Mickey’s
Christmas Eve party,” Emma pointed out. Her belly had curled up in
disappointment when Jake had walked through the door with a tall, gorgeous woman
who appeared to be his date.

“Yeah, she and her guy had just
broken up. I felt sorry for her, so I brought her, hoping to introduce her to
more people.”

“That’s why Mickey insisted I
come,” Emma said. “To meet more people.”

Jake smiled, and the tightness
around his eyes vanished for the first time since they’d walked through the
Waterview’s door. The smile invited her to smile back. “You met me.”

It would be rude to point out to
the guy buying her lunch that he hadn’t made a great impression, so she said,
“Huh.”

He winked. “And liked me.”

That startled her into laughing.
“Hardly! You weren’t very nice.”

“What?” He faked shock. “I was on
my best behavior. You were the first pet psych— pet healer I’d met. Maybe I was
out of my conversational depth.”

A typical male apology. Saying
sorry without actually saying sorry.

“Out of your intellectual depth,
too.” Apology accepted. But she had to add, “Yesterday, as well.”

All humor drained from his eyes.
“Yesterday was the worst day of my life.”

She nodded. She’d had some pretty
terrible days herself. Being polite—heck, being barely nice—hadn’t been at the
top of her priority list on those days, either. Emotional survival had been.

She turned the conversational rudder.
“So, was your dinner with Ginny about her flirtatiousness at work?”

“No, it was—” He broke off as the
waitress stopped by their table.

While she took their orders, the
waitress kept her smile in place, but she shifted from foot to foot, and she
twitched every time Jake spoke. As soon as she’d finished writing the order,
she grabbed their menus out of their hands as if there was a sudden shortage of
them and dashed off like a spooked greyhound.

“They must be busy today,” Emma
offered lamely.

He didn’t answer. He grabbed a roll
out of the basket on the table and started buttering it with quick, jerky
movements. More slowly, Emma followed his example.

Their iced teas arrived in record
time and were deposited on their table so hastily that liquid sloshed over the
glasses’ rims, staining the white tablecloth. The waitress didn’t notice—she
was busy running off.

Oh, for God’s sake. Emma tossed her
napkin on the table and stood. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

She strode across the room to the
hostess’s desk, where Rosie was chatting with a pair of customers on their way
out. The couple extolled the deliciousness of the halibut one last time and
then exited, the chime over the door giving a merry tinkle as they left. “Can I
help you with something?” Rosie asked Emma.

“Would it be possible for us to get
another waitperson or be moved to a different table? The lady serving us seems
rather distracted. I’m not sure if she’s being deliberately rude or if she’s
just extremely busy, but the end result is that we’re getting poor service.”

Rosie’s affable hostess smile
flattened. “I see. I’m sorry that you’re not happy with the service, but maybe
you can understand why Milly’s a bit skittish—”

Emma’s temper usually had a long
fuse, but someone must’ve lopped a good six feet off of it this morning. She
fisted her hands on her hips. “Skittish?
Skittish?
”
A few tables nearby began to watch this interchange, probably unable to hear
anything but aware that a drama was stirring. “If there’s anyone here who
should be
skittish
, it’s Jake, whose
drink was drugged the last time he was in your restaurant. But he insisted on
coming here today because he likes this place so much and trusts the people who
run it. Let me tell you, it’s looking to me like that trust is misplaced.”

She was getting a little carried
away—she’d always been oversensitive to people being ostracized for things
beyond their control. But it felt good. She glanced over her shoulder at Jake.
He was staring at her, his mouth hanging open.

She turned her attention back to
Rosie. “Please, give us a new waitress or a new table, or please speak with the
waitress we have and ask her to give us the same attention and respect she
gives her other customers.”

Rosie nodded tightly and then
twisted around to greet a group of four who had just entered, shining a smile
at them bright as a lighthouse beacon.

Emma threaded through the tables
and settled opposite Jake again. She snapped her napkin out, dropped it into
her lap, and sucked down a gulp of iced tea. God, that had felt good. Maybe she
should lose her temper more often.