Moonlight Man (5 page)

“Wow!” Jason’s eyes were wide. “Did you make these?”

“I did. I hope you like them.”

“Love them!” Turning to his mother, he said, “Can I have one now?”

She nodded.

Roxy found cookies in her package as well, big thick ones, crescents filled with raspberry jam. Her eyes closed in bliss as she bit into one and chewed, a look of delight on her piquant face. “How come a daddy can make cookies?” she asked.

“I like baking cookies,” Marc said. Then he asked Sharon, “Aren’t you going to open yours?”

“Oh!” She had forgotten she held it in her hand. “Of course. But come in, sit down. You remember Harry McKenzie, I’m sure.”

“What a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Duval. Sharon mentioned that you’d be joining us. I’ve been delegated as bartender this evening. What can I get for you while we wait for dinner?”

“A cola would be fine, Mr. McKenzie. Thanks.”

“Harry.”

“Right. And I’m Marc.” He sat beside Sharon on the sofa and watched as eagerly as her children while she undid the wrapping, with care and revealed a beautiful, polished shell about three inches long. It was a delicate shade of pinkish gray, with deeper violet spots on the ribs of its whorls.

“Oh …” It was a small sound of pure pleasure, and it warmed Marc right through, as did the shine of the gaze she lifted to him. “Thank you. It’s the most beautiful shell I’ve ever seen. Where did you find it?” She couldn’t have said how she knew he hadn’t bought it in a store, but something about his manner told her that he had picked up this one himself in his travels and had kept it because he liked it. And now he had given it to her.

“I was diving off a little island near Oahu,” he said. “They live quite deep as a rule, so I was lucky to find this one in about sixty feet of water.”

She picked it up and cradled it in her hand, brushing one finger over the satin-smooth texture of its inner surface. “Thank you, Marc. You couldn’t have thought of anything I’d have liked better. Do you know what it’s called?”

He smiled, so delighted she liked his gift that he wanted to crush her in his arms and kiss her until they were both out of breath but not with an audience present. “I think it’s a harp shell.” He accepted a glass of iced cola from Harry without taking his eyes from Sharon’s glowing face. How long they might have sat there just looking at each other, saying potent and silent things, Sharon had no idea, but fortunately they were interrupted.

“Hello, Marc. How nice to see you.” Zinnie came from the kitchen, and he stood quickly, only sitting again when she’d perched on the arm of the sofa. “What’s that you have there, Sharon? My, my! What a rare specimen. Did you collect it yourself, Marc?”

“Merry Christmas, Mrs. McKenzie, and yes, I did. Are you a serious shell collector?”

She smiled and said, “I guess you could call me a serious shell collector. I’m a marine biologist and specialize in mollusks.”

“Oh.” He gave his little one-sided shrug and looked apologetic. “Then should I call you Dr. McKenzie?”

“You should call me Zinnie, unless you’re looking for a fat lip,” she said with a grin. “I came out to tell you that Freda says the gravy is at its peak of perfection, Sharon. There’s nothing modest about Freda, let me say. Do you want Harry to carve at the table or in the kitchen? Would one of you kids go and see if your uncle Rolph is coming out or if he wants his dinner served in there beside your video games.”

Both children took off down the hall toward the TV room, where Rolph had spent much of the afternoon with them playing with the new games, as happy as any ten-year-old.

Sharon laid her pretty shell carefully back into its nest of tissue and set the box with her other gifts. “I’d better get back on duty,” she said with a smile for everyone. She didn’t dare meet Marc’s gaze again.

“If you don’t mind having your talents on display, Harry, I’d love to have you carve at the table. It seems to do so much for the appetite.”

“You got it, baby doll,” he said. “Shall I uncork the wine now?”

“Yes, please. Excuse me, won’t you? Dinner will be just a few minutes.”

As she stood and walked past Marc, she caught a faint whiff of his aftershave and was sure her knees would buckle before she could get safely away. What a mistake it had been to invite the man for dinner! Clearly he had misinterpreted her neighborly gesture as an invitation to repeat their foolishness. But she wouldn’t. Somehow, she would keep up her firm resolve. All she had to do was quit looking at him.

“How did a marine biologist and a civil engineer manage two such disparate careers?” Marc asked, accepting his well-stocked plate back from Harry.

“While I was off in the brush building bridges, Zinnie was lounging on beaches, waiting for the waves to wash in a shell or two,” Harry said, earning an indignant look from his wife.

“What he means to say is that while I was diving into treacherous waters, risking my life and the bends to collect specimens of bivalve mollusks for the advancement of higher learning, he was lolling in hammocks strung between trees, bossing a crew of the real bridge builders.”

Everyone had turkey on their plates now, and the vegetable dishes had made their rounds. After a brief prayer, Sharon lifted her glass and said, “To Christmas, friends, and family.”

Everyone responded, lifting their glasses, and then Harry said, “To our hostess.”

“Our hostess,” came the response, and from somewhere to her left, Sharon distinctly heard the word “beautiful” added to the toast. Against her will, she glanced at Marc, meeting his gaze as he lifted his glass to his lips. To her surprise, he did not drink, but set the glass down again. With a smile, he picked up his fork as she had done.

“It must have been difficult to be away from your children,” she said quickly to Zinnie, taking the conversation back in the direction it had been going before the toasts.

“It was, but luckily we’ve always had Freda.”

“Yes,” said Freda. “While they were off on their little junkets to warm, exotic, and interesting places, I was at home tending their wicked sons, trying to turn them into decent human beings.” She reached across the table and patted Rolph’s hand. “And look what we ended up with!”

“But just think, Freda, if you hadn’t stayed home and looked after us, we might have grown up in some of those exotic and interesting places and become even more wicked. Think what your sacrifices have meant to the world.”

“I remind myself of it every day,” said the elderly lady, “and I know heaven will reward me. But speaking of warm and exotic places, Marc, I saw that shell you gave to Sharon. She tells me you’ve traveled much of the world. What do you do?”

Sharon’s ears pricked up at that. She had wondered more than once exactly what it was Marc did. Her imagination had suggested everything from drug importer to spy.

“A little of this, a little of that,” he said with an easy smile. “I learned how to bake cookies when I worked in a bakery in New Zealand.” He spoke directly to the children, then added, “I took up diving in Fiji and worked there leading snorkeling tours for a while before shipping out on a freighter to Japan, where I spent several months.”

“Wow!” Jason said, leaning forward eagerly. “Did you jump ship?”

“No.” Marc laughed. “I had only signed on that far. I wanted to see some of the Orient. I just bummed around for a few months in Japan, in Hong Kong, and in mainland China, then caught a ride on a sailboat that was coming back this way shorthanded. I wasn’t much value to the skipper for the first week, with my head hanging over the rail, but I enjoyed the rest of the trip and learned a lot about sailing. So much that I crewed again, all the way back across the Pacific.”

“Where else have you been? What else have you done? It sounds as if you’ve led a fascinating life,” said Zinnie.

“I’ve done so many things, I can’t remember them all. I tend to work at something until it’s not fun anymore, then go on to something else. Living that way, I’ve seen a good portion of the world. But here’s something I’ve been wondering about, and now that I’m at the same table as a marine biologist, maybe I can get an answer. I was wondering if you’d know about gray whales …”

Zinnie did know, and the conversation ranged then from the habits of the different species of whales to how stress factors have to be worked into bridges in high-risk earthquake regions, and what color upholstery fabric is most pleasing to the owners of ocean-going yachts, but it never managed to stay long on what Marc Duval had done with his life.

He was being deliberately evasive, Sharon concluded, the third or fourth time he deflected the conversation, and when he disappeared into the kitchen with Rolph and Harry, who claimed it was a tradition in the McKenzie household that the men clean up after the women had done the cooking, she told herself she was glad to see him go.

Freda and Zinnie were working on the jigsaw again, wanting to see it completed before they had to leave in the morning, and Sharon had just come down from getting the children into bed when the men returned. She was sitting staring idly into the fire, listening to the murmured conversation going on behind her at the card table. Marc sat beside her, as if it were his rightful place to be.

“Will you play for us?” he asked softly, and she flinched away from him.

“Not” It was a sharply whispered refusal.

“Why not?” He spoke in a normal conversational tone, drawing everyone’s attention their way: “I’d like to hear you play again.”

“Oh, Sharon, please. Hearing you yesterday was such a treat,” Zinnie said.

Yesterday? For a moment, she couldn’t remember what Zinnie meant. For some reason that whole day seemed far in the past. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t want to. I don’t play anymore.”

“You played at your sister’s wedding.”

“That was different. It was a promise I’d made. I had to.”

Marc looked at her intently, speaking as if the two of them were alone. “I know I’m only a guest in your home, Sharon, but we’ve enjoyed a traditional Leslie family dinner, done a traditional McKenzie family cleanup in the kitchen, and now I’d like to add a Duval tradition to this very wonderful Christmas you were so kind to share with me.” He smiled at her, and her stomach flipped over a few times before it settled down. Her heart, however, speeded up alarmingly.

“What tradition is that?”

“After dinner—which, by the way, we always had on Christmas Eve—we sang carols while my mother played the piano. That was what I was missing last night when I played my harmonica.”

Her throat tightened. “I see.”

“If I brought it over, could you all sing carols?”

“I … yes. Of course.” She looked at her harp in its corner. “But … “

He touched her cheek with one bent finger. “No one will insist. If you want to, do it. If you don’t, then …” The shrug he gave was entirely Gallic, as was the one-sided smile.

“It would be nice to sing carols together. I just wish the kids hadn’t both been so tired.”

“There’ll be other times for them. This time is for us.” He still held her gaze as he got to his feet. She knew that when he said “us” he was not including the McKenzies and Freda Coin.

He was back moments later with both guitar and harmonica, and began playing the latter softly, as if to set a mood. “Sing,” he urged them, and they did, tentatively at first, then with confidence as their voices blended nicely.

While he took a break and drank another glass of pop, Zinnie asked, “Do you come from a large family, Marc?”

He smiled. “Oh, yes. There are seven of us. I spoke to my parents and a couple of my brothers and sisters last night, but it was too hard to hear much with all the kids shouting in the background.”

Sharon stared at her hands in her lap. Why, she wondered, did a man with such a large and presumably close family, choose to spend Christmas alone in a camper?

Zinnie, bless her, was wondering, too, and not at all averse to asking, however tactfully. “So sad, you can’t be with them this year.”

“Yes,” was all he said as he picked up the guitar in place of the harmonica, and began strumming the strains of “White Christmas.”

“You sing too,” Zinnie said, but he shook his head.

“I learned to play instruments because I sound like a sick old crow when I sing. But I’m enjoying your voices.”

Presently, Rolph slipped away, giving Sharon a quick smile and a wave as he headed for the stairs, then Freda, too, retired. For another half hour, Harry and Zinnie sat and listened quietly to the guitar, then rose and excused themselves.

Sharon thought Marc would go, too, but he continued to play.

“I like sitting here with you, watching the fire die,” he said, still strumming a delicate chord. “I could spend a lot of evenings like this without getting tired of it.”

“But one day you would, and then you’d be gone. “

“Would that matter to you so very much?” She was silent, listening to the music, feeling it in her blood, filled with an almost uncontrollable need to go to her harp and play. She had once found such solace in music, and then it had become a punishment, a chore. She never wanted to feel with that kind of intensity again. “It … could. If I let it.”

He stood the guitar on its end, leaning against the arm of the couch. “Will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Let it matter. Let me matter.”

She shook her head. “Marc, I can’t. It would be too … dangerous.”

“Why do you say that? How am I a danger to you? What makes you so afraid?”

“Who you are. What you are.”

Again, he was startled, taken aback. Did she know who he was? There was no way it was possible, but he had to find out.

“All right then.” His mouth was dry. “Who am I? What am I?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know. You came out of nowhere, and out of everywhere. You have no visible means of support, yet you dress like this” —she reached out and brushed the back of her fingers down the sleeve of his well-cut, clearly expensive suit— “when the occasion warrants it. You come and go at will, living in a battered camper on the back of a rusty pickup, yet you buy a house that I’m sure didn’t sell for peanuts. And none of this is any of my business, but I like to know who I’m dealing with.”