The Winter Lodge (15 page)

“In this town? Hardly.” Jenny signed her name to the tenth page of a title-to-deed request.

“Trust me, people have bigger worries than that.” Nina held out her hand for the forms. “I’

ll file these with the city clerk for you.” They walked together through a hallway lined with municipal offices.

“What kind of worries?”

Nina waved a hand. “City-finance stuff. I won’t bore you with the details. I’d rather hear about you living with Rourke.”

“See?” Jenny snapped. “I shouldn’t be there. It’s crazy.”

“I’m teasing. Listen, we still don’t know what happened at your house,” Nina pointed out.

“You should stay with him at least until they figure that out.”

“Oh, God. A conspiracy theory?”

“No. I’m just being practical. And if it’s that big a deal, move into my place.”

“I might take you up on that.” Jenny knew she wouldn’t, though. Nina and Sonnet didn’t have room. “What I really need to do is figure out a permanent arrangement.”

“Don’t rush into anything. Remember what the adjuster said—don’t make any major decisions right away. And the most major of all is where you’re going to live, spend the rest of your life.”

Just hearing the words caused Jenny’s heart to kick into high gear, warning her that a panic attack was always lurking just beneath the surface. It was the strangest feeling to wake up in the morning and not know what your life was going to be.

Nina must have read the worry in her face. She gave Jenny a reassuring pat on the arm.

“The last thing you need to be worrying about is what people think. Just take your time, okay?”

Jenny nodded and bundled up for the cold, and headed back to Rourke’s house. Three grateful dogs burst from the mudroom into the yard, and Jenny headed inside with a sack of groceries and a stack of books from the library. Eventually, of course, she would need to buy new copies of all those precious volumes she’d lost in the fire. There were childhood favorites, mercifully still in print—
Charlotte’s Web, Harriet the Spy, The Borrowers.
Others, the town librarian had warned, might be out of print, but she promised to track down a copy of
You Were
Princess Last Time,
a tale of two sisters Jenny had wept over countless times when she was little. Then there were books she returned to again and again—a collection of essays on writing by Ray Bradbury. Tales of escape and reinvention, like
Under the Tuscan Sun,
and stories about food by Ruth Reichl. But those were the books Jenny remembered. One of her greatest regrets was that she had no record of the many books she
wouldn’t
remember.

Slowly peeling off her gloves and parka, she wandered to the living room and looked at the bookshelves there. She caught herself doing this often—searching Rourke’s house for evidence of who he was. Maybe, she admitted to herself, she was looking for who he used to be.

People’s books said a lot of about them, but Rourke’s choices were as impenetrable as he was

—police procedure, old textbooks, repair manuals. There was a big collection of well-thumbed action-adventure paperbacks with titles like
Assault on Precinct 17
and
Murder Street,
which probably depicted a very different style of police work than Rourke did in Avalon. Some books, probably gifts from frustrated ex-girlfriends, appeared to be pristine and unread—relationship manuals doubtless intended to show him the error of his ways. She counted at least three separate editions of
Relationship Rescue.
The
Relationship Rescue Workbook
was still in its shrink-wrap.

Dream on,
she silently told the women who had given him those books. She seriously doubted it was in any man’s nature to read a book like that and think it applied to him.

She went back into the kitchen to put away the groceries. She had never lived with a man before, so she didn’t know if Rourke was typical or not. She had been so used to taking care of her grandmother, rising early, getting her ready for the visiting nurse. It was a revelation to simply wake up on her own, to go through her day without planning it around Gram’s needs. After just a few days at Rourke’s house, a rhythm established itself. He got up early and fixed his amazing coffee. She would drink a cup while he showered, and then they switched. They had breakfast together—she quickly broke his habit of eating second-rate grocery-store pastries—and went off to work.

And at the end of the day, sounding hopelessly domestic, she found herself fixing tuna sandwiches and asking, “How was your day?”
How was your day, dear?

She couldn’t help it. It felt perfectly natural. As did the subtle lift of her heart when she heard him come through the back door, stamping the snow from his boots and whistling to the dogs before stepping into the warm kitchen.

“Hey,” she said, “how was—” oh, God, she was doing it again “—your day?”

“Busy.” He didn’t seem bothered by the familiar tone of the question. “We had thirteen traffic incidents, seven involving alcohol, all of them involving slippery road conditions. A domestic disturbance, a check-forging scam, kids defacing school property and a woman who left her small child home alone while she went to work.”

“How do you stand it?” Jenny asked. “You see people at their worst, every day. It must get depressing.”

“I suppose what makes it okay for me is that I try to make things better. Doesn’t always work, though.”

“You mean sometimes you have to let the bad guys go?”

“Yeah. Sometimes. If there isn’t enough evidence or somebody screwed up, or because we have bigger fish to fry and can’t spare the manpower. Lots of reasons.” Before she could ask another question, he waved a hand. “Some of the stuff I do during the day, it’s not good dinner conversation.”

Like everyone, he brought home an invisible burden from work every day. But for most people, the burden didn’t consist of the petty crimes and cruelties of small-town police work.

“Our lives are so different,” she said. “You go to work every day and see people behaving badly.”

He laughed. “No one’s ever put it quite that way.”

“And at the bakery, I see people who only need a cup of coffee and a fresh cruller, and they’re happy.”

“I should retire from the force and buy a hairnet,” he said. He gratefully ate half his sandwich, and she could see him visibly relaxing. Was it her, she wondered, or simply getting to the end of another day?

She suspected she had her answer when she glanced across the table and caught him staring at her with the most unsettling, smoldering look.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I didn’t say a word.”

“You’re staring.”

“I like looking at women. So shoot me.”

She ducked her head to hide a smile. They were taking tentative steps toward each other, yet proceeding with caution. By the time dinner ended—and bless him, he cleared the table and did the dishes—Jenny was ready to admit it. She was a goner.

Fortunately, he didn’t seem to notice this troubling new development. “I need to go out tonight,” he said.

And—fortunately again—he didn’t seem to hear the thud her heart made when it fell. “Oh.

Um, okay,” she said. What else was she supposed to say? She was a visitor here, someone passing through. He didn’t owe her any explanations.

He grabbed his cell phone and slipped on his shoulder holster. Jenny pretended not to watch, but she couldn’t help herself. It was intriguing—maybe even sexy—to contemplate the idea that he wore a concealed weapon.

He caught her staring and grinned. “Want to come?”

“Come where?”

“To the indoor range,” he said. “Shooting practice.” He was a stickler for training in his department, and he practiced what he preached, explaining that he went to the indoor range at least once a week.

Shooting practice? “Maybe I will,” she said. “I’ve never thought about what it would be like to shoot a gun.”

“I’ll teach you,” he said easily.

She hesitated a moment longer. Did she want to learn, or was it just something she’d said so he wouldn’t think she was as boring as she actually was? And did he want to teach her because he liked her, or because he thought she should learn self-defense? She told herself to quit looking for reasons to turn him down. “I’ll get my things.”

It was a short drive to the indoor shooting range. The facility had two buildings, one with the range and the other with a classroom. In the classroom, he helped her gear up and showed her the gun she would be firing.

“This is a .40-caliber Glock,” he explained, and guided her through the way it worked.

“Stance is the key to hitting what you aim at.” He lifted the gun two-handed in a movement that looked perfectly natural. “Now you try.”

All right, thought Jenny, feeling the powerful heft of the black, angular gun in her hands.

“Watch out for the slide when you hold it. How does this feel to you?”

“You’re going to think I’m one sick puppy—but it feels…sexy to me.”

He grinned. “That’s a good sign. It’s good for your confidence.”

In her Avalon P.D. sweatshirt, earmuffs and goggles, she didn’t look nearly as sexy as she felt.

“Close your eyes and raise the gun.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry, it’s not loaded. You need to raise the gun with your eyes shut so you’ll learn what your natural arm position points to.”

She lifted the gun, opened her eyes and found herself looking at a big X on the classroom wall. He was incredibly fussy about her posture and position, adjusting the level of her extended arms, the angle of her chin, the placement of her feet, her grip, until she nearly burst with frustration.

“I feel like a poseable Barbie doll.”

He chuckled as he adjusted her stance again. “Firing Range Barbie. The all-American doll.

I like it.”

He fussed some more, going over the trigger squeeze and the natural respiratory pause, which he said was the ideal time to squeeze the trigger, because she would be at her most relaxed. She tried to remember everything he was telling her. It seemed that shooting a gun required doing at least a dozen things simultaneously and well. “I’ve never had to work this hard to satisfy a man,” she said.

“It’s nice to know you’re willing to work at it. Now, quit flirting with me and concentrate.”

“I’m not flirting with you,” she objected.

“I feel flirted with.”

“Then it’s your imagination. I know better than to flirt with you. Now, show me how to shoot something.”

“Fine. Rule number one, you want to be a little more specific about what you’re going to shoot. ‘Something’ is too vague.”

“Whatever. I want to shoot one of those cutouts of a bad guy.”

“Then let’s go into the range.”

The place was divided into shooting stalls where people who didn’t need close supervision could practice. At the moment, only a couple of stalls were occupied. Other cops, Rourke told her, waving at them, and a few locals. She was surprised to see Zach Alger there with his father.

Matthew was a big, barrel-chested man whose Nordic features made him look younger than he actually was. Father and son were in adjacent lanes, oblivious to anything but the shooting. Each shot went off with a popping sound that made Jenny wince. Rourke explained that the walls could stop any handgun round at point-blank range. “A .40-caliber bullet can penetrate a dozen layers of regular Sheetrock,” he said.

“Good to know. I won’t hide behind a wall if someone’s shooting at me.”

“The best defense in almost any situation is to fight. To fight, and never give up. But you need to know what you’re doing.” He gestured at the silhouette at the end of the range. He used something called a smart pad to cause it to move, and positioned it at the end of the alley. She prepared herself exactly as he’d shown her—arms extended, feet planted to align the arm with the target, grip, sight alignment, target alignment, breathing, then trigger squeeze.
Don’t pull,
he’d said.
Squeeze.

She squeezed.

The gun recoiled violently in her hand, causing a reverberation down her arm.

“Follow through,” he reminded her, mouthing the words. “Don’t forget to follow through.”

After firing, you were supposed to align with the target again to improve the steadiness of your hand. She realigned, smelling the burnt cordite. But the target hung mockingly at the end of the range, unscathed.

“Hey,” she said, pushing aside one of her earmuffs. “That should have been a perfect shot.”

“Nah.” He waved his arm. “I knew you’d miss.”

“What?”

“You were excellent with your stance and grip. But you’ll never hit anything until you see it first.” He touched his temple.

“What?”

“See it. Then shoot it.”

Jenny didn’t quite get that, but she was determined. She took several more shots, each time amazed by the kick of the recoil. Finally she grazed the edge of the target.
See it, then shoot
it
became her mantra.

After too many rounds to count, she improved somewhat. There was so much to remember—the mechanics of the weapon and the stance. The fine adjustment of breathing and trigger squeeze. And Rourke was absolutely right. She learned to visualize where to put the bullet, and then she put it there. See it, then shoot it.

Once the target was riddled with holes in all its vital areas, she lowered the Glock and turned to Rourke, smiling more than she had since losing her grandmother.

He mouthed “good job” and gave her a thumbs-up.

Afterward, he showed her how to clean the gun “—a clean gun is a safe gun—” and stow the protective gear. “I’m proud of you,” he said.

It was a simple statement, yet it drew an unexpectedly emotional response from her. She glanced away, fluffing her hair where it had been mashed by the earmuffs.

“That was meant as a compliment,” he pointed out.

“I know and I…I’m grateful.” She took in a deep breath. How could she explain it? “I was thinking I’d outgrown the need for approval.”

“Everybody’s born with that,” he said. “God knows, I spent my whole childhood looking for it.”

Interesting, she thought. These glimpses into his past were rare. “And then you gave up trying to get along with your father and walked away,” she recalled.