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God, if her spine were any stiffer, her neck would break. “Forget it.”
He wasn’t forgetting anything. “You said you needed to talk.”
This time, they were interrupted by one of his cousins, Maureen, who’d bought a house from him a few weeks ago. “Hey, Mick. I’m so glad I ran into you. I need you to come over to my house and check out my pipes.”
This time, he was pretty sure heheardthe temperature drop even more. They’d passed the ice stage and moved right on to frozen carbon dioxide.
“Okay, I’ll call you Monday,” Mick replied.
“Gotta run, I’m going to be an extra!”
As Maureen walked away, Caroline swung around and stuck her index finger in his face. “If one more woman stops to talk to you, I’m pushing you in front of the next tractor-trailer.”
Without missing a beat, he replied, “The street’s closed to traffic.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. Then she let out a muffled groan like sound, planted both hands on his chest and shoved. He stumbled back off the sidewalk, into the street and stood there, looking at her because she’d turned into some kind of madwoman. A jealous madwoman. That wasn’t such a bad thing, was it? That proved something, didn’t it?
Proved that he’d gotten her interested the other night, that was sure. But it didn’t prove much else.
“I guess you don’t need me very much after all,” he called out, watching her start to walk away.
Caroline took three more steps, her shoulders square, her dark hair swinging and bouncing as she tried to march in righteous indignation. Then she stopped and slowly turned around. As if each word were dragged from her throat with a crowbar, she admitted, “I need Sophie’s house.”
He sucked in a shocked breath. She was leaving? He’d scared her off for good? That should have made him feel better, should have offered some relief. But the thought of going home to an empty house again, not hearing her stirring around in her bed or humming jingles from commercials in the shower, left him feeling empty inside.
“Your allergies…”
“I’ll take some Benadryl.”
“You gonna take it intravenously every hour for the next three weeks?” he asked, raising a skeptical brow as he stepped back up onto the sidewalk.
She shook her head, explaining, “I’m not going tolivethere.”
He wondered if she could read the expression of relief he couldn’t hide. “Oh.”
“I need to know if it’s available, and, if so, I need you to come over there with me.”
“Armed with Benadryl?”
“Yes. And a butcher knife. I’m about to kill someone in your sister’s house.”
Mick could only hope it wasn’t him.
CHAPTER TEN
HESTER HAD FRETTED and stewed most of the morning about the face she’d seen among the TV people. A face that instantly brought up long-buried memories of another life, another time. And made her quiver with the kind of fear she hadn’t felt in a few decades.
By late afternoon, however, she’d realized something. She was a different person now. A strong person. A clever one and certainly a more self-reliant one. Hadn’t she proved that, right here in town, fooling the world with one public face and successfully hiding her more private one? Even her own brother didn’treallyknow her. No one did.
At last she had reason to be thankful for packing on fifty pounds or so in the past thirty years. “I won’t be recognized. People see only what they want to see.”
That was true. People looked at her and saw the devoted first lady of the church. The one who looked after her poor, sweet, wonderful younger brother who was so beloved by the town. Miss Hester the miserable old spinster whose only role in life was to play the martyr, that’s what they saw. Only a few—the few whose secrets she’d learned and exploited since arriving in Derryville—knew what she wasreallylike.
And now the biggest, most profitable secret of all had landed here in her own backyard. “It might even be enough to get me out of here for good.”
Taking a nondescript piece of white paper and a standard black ink pen, she sat down at her small writing table, where she so often tweaked and edited her brother’s sermons.
She wrote down two words as she pictured a face from her past. Two simple, nearly forgotten, but very valuable words.
