Three Little Words

Tess hesitated for another moment before hurrying after him. “Look,” she said, trotting to catch up to his long strides. “I’m not—I didn’t—”

He’d stopped at the door next to an outdoor aluminum ashtray overflowing with butts. “You know who I am,” he said without looking at her.

She let out a soft sigh. “Yes.”

“You can leave right now if you don’t want to be associated with me. I understand.”

“I wouldn’t do that!”

He threw a glance over his shoulder. “How come? I’m generally acknowledged to be a pretty despicable guy.”

She moved a little closer. “Maybe general knowledge isn’t what it’s cracked up to be?”

“Are you asking me a question?”

“I might be.”

“Well, now’s not the time.” He opened the door and stood aside to allow her through. “Your choice.”

She marched inside. She’d made a promise, after all.

They entered into a small reception area. An attempt had been made to improve on the sterile concrete-block look of the facility, with hunter-green paint, a couch, buffalo-plaid curtains and accessories that included duck decoys and wildlife prints. A predictable decor, but better than austerity.

A long hallway ran down the middle of the wing, with residents’ rooms on either side. There was an unstaffed reception desk near the lounge, and an empty wheelchair and a gurney parked outside one of the rooms. The place seemed deserted, except for a uniformed attendant turning a corner at the other end of the hall.

“This way,” Connor said. “Sonny’s three doors down on the left.”

An old woman with a walker poked her head into the hallway as they passed, looking both curious and eager for visitors. Tess would have stopped to chit-chat, but Connor was already disappearing into his grandfather’s room. She smiled at the woman and said hello before hurrying to catch up again.

She arrived in time to see Connor giving his grandfather a careful hug. “So you came back, eh?” the old man said.

“Told you I would. And I brought a visitor.”

A gnarled hand waved dismissal. “Bah. Visitors.”

“You might like this one.”

Tess stepped forward. “No, please, sit,” she said, when Connor’s grandfather saw her and started to rise from his chair by the window.

He didn’t listen, and straightened slowly with one hand clenched on the head of a cane. His forehead pleated with a deep scowl.

Connor steadied his grandfather’s stance. “Grandpa, this is Tess Bucek, from Alouette. Tess, my grandfather, Addison Mitchell.”

“Mr. Mitchell.” Tess offered her hand, hoping the lighthouse keeper wouldn’t bite it off.

The old man clasped it briefly, but with a strong pressure. He peered at her with eyes that were sharply blue beneath eyebrows like fuzzy caterpillars. “Bucek? Don’t recall any Buceks in Alouette.”

“Right now, I’m the only one left. My parents were Tony and Annabel Bucek. I doubt you’d remember either of them, sir.”

“Good people?”

She blinked. “Acceptable, sir.”

“Sir?” He snorted. “I s’pose you can call me Sonny. Take a seat if it suits you, there.” He lowered himself to the padded chair, letting out a rusty chuckle as Tess sat and crossed her legs. “Still a ladies’ man, eh, Connor?”

“Tess is—” Connor shrugged, looking to her for help.

“Just a visitor,” she said, smoothing her skirt. No need to embarrass the old man by baldly pointing out the reason for her visit. “I met Connor today in the library. I work there.”

Sonny grunted.

Connor excused himself and went out to the hall to find another chair. His grandfather stared out the window, ignoring Tess. She looked around the room. Besides a hospital bed, there was a TV bolted near the ceiling and a small desk with a few framed pictures on it and nothing else. No reading material.

She cleared her throat.

Sonny’s eyes swiveled to her.

“Connor asked me for help,” she confided, leaning toward the old man. He was probably the prideful type who’d need reassurance that she could be discreet. “Just between us.”

Sonny’s speckled bald head wavered with a nod. “Fine by me. The boy’s been on the rocks.”

“Oh. Actually, I didn’t mean his, um, dilemma.”

“Dilemma?” Connor said, coming back in the room carrying another chair. He set it down beside his grandfather’s.

“Nothing,” Tess said brightly.

Connor glowered.

“You look just like your grandfather,” she said, teasing him a bit. In his heyday as cantankerous Old Man Mitchell, she silently added, continuing to smile sweetly as Connor got settled.

“Thanks.” He slumped back in his chair and his knee touched hers.

She sat up even straighter, edging away slightly. And got another black glower. There was no decent way to explain that she wasn’t disgusted by him—she was magnetized. Disturbed, too, in every sense.

Sonny’s lips had folded inward into a secretive sort of smile. For being nearly ninety and on death’s door, he appeared to be in fairly good shape. A silvery fringe of white hair ran from ear to ear, his eyes were clear and active, and his posture was only slightly hunched even though he moved with the deliberation of old age and arthritis. He had a lean physique like his grandson, gone to scrawniness and skin and bone. Thin, age-spotted skin stretched taut over the knobs of his knuckles where he continued to grip the cane propped beside his chair.

Either he kept up with current events on his own via the television news or he’d been told about Connor’s troubles. Tess thought it was cute how the old man had presumed she was “comforting” his grandson.

Wrong, but cute.

Although, if ever a man had looked in need of comforting…

She shifted around in her chair. Connor gave her a glance, but he kept talking with his grandfather, telling him about the trip back to Alouette and checking in to Bay House.

Sonny shook his head over the idea that the once grand house had become a bed-and-breakfast inn. “Shame. The Whitakers still there?”

“Yes, they are,” Tess said. “Emmie and Toivo. Sister and brother,” she explained to Connor, in case he didn’t realize. She’d been halfway positive he’d back out of the decision to stay at Bay House once he’d been introduced to its homey comforts and familiar hosts. He didn’t seem like a homey and familiar guy.

“Bossy and goofy, them two,” said Sonny with a scowl that was mostly for show.

Tess smiled. “You make them sound like the eighth and ninth dwarfs.” She’d have called them energetic and endearing. But then she’d only had long-distance grandparents, so that was a soft spot for her. Soft, sore…same thing.

“What about the lighthouse?” Sonny asked.

Connor made an apologetic sound. “It’s not looking so good, Grandpa. Really run-down.”

Sonny huffed. “That’s the government for you. I’da stayed if they’d have let me. Instead, I’m wasting away, good for goddamn nothing.” He deliberately turned his head to stare out the window, exuding a deep dissatisfaction.

Tess was uneasy, even more so when suddenly the old man glared at her. “I ever run you off Gull Rock?” he accused.

She gritted her teeth. When she was a child, it had been a prank among the older kids to dare each other to sneak onto the lighthouse grounds. They would make bets of how far they’d get before the lighthouse keeper caught sight of them. One boy had been famous for getting swatted in the behind by the old man’s broom.

“No, sir,” she said.

Sonny squinted skeptically.

“When you were still the light keeper, I was only—” she calculated “—about six or seven.” And frightened silly by the other kids’ stories of the legendary lighthouse hermit. No one had ever mentioned that Old Man Mitchell’s grandson had been visiting only several years back. It was probably more fun to scare each other.

“Buncha brats,” Sonny said. “Always screaming like a pack of gulls.”

“They were just being kids, Grandpa,” Connor said. “I made friends with a few of them, my summers up here.”

“Hooligans, the lot of you,” the old man groused. “Came to no good, I betcha.”

Conner smiled, though his expression remained somber. “Yeah.” He sighed. “You could be right about that.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“HE LIKED YOU,” Connor said, glancing at Tess over the top of his menu.

“The whitefish is good—” She stopped and wrinkled her nose, giving a little laugh at Connor’s faulty assessment. “Sonny liked me? How could you tell?”

They’d spent less than a half hour in the elderly man’s room, with the conversation progressing in fits and starts. Sonny Mitchell had seemed bent on being disagreeable, although Tess had detected signs of grudging approval whenever she refused to be bullied by his gruff treatment.

He had a fighting spirit, she’d decided. Sonny sought out kindred souls, and very few passed muster. Tess wasn’t sure she qualified, having grown up with the example of a mother who had no fight in her at all, and leading the uneventful life that she did.

Connor set aside the menu. “He let you stay, right?”

“Yes…”

“And he didn’t object when you mentioned visiting again in a few days.”

“No…”

“So you got further with him than anyone else has. Sonny’s always been cantankerous. Even antisocial.”

“I can’t imagine what he’s going to say when I announce that I’m there to teach him to read.”

Connor made a face. “Uh, about that…”

“You’ve changed your mind?”

He grinned at her hopefulness. “Not so fast. It’s just that I want you to go slowly with the reading lessons. Ease into it. Because I haven’t exactly told him—”

“Terrific, Connor!” She tossed her menu on top of his. “I don’t see how I’m supposed to teach him to read without his knowing that’s what I’m there for.”

A waitress arrived with their drinks. Tess took a sip of her white wine while Connor ordered the whitefish for both of them. When they’d emerged from Three Pines to a dusky sky, he’d told her to be the leader. In their separate vehicles, he’d followed her to a restaurant in downtown Marquette, a cozy place in one of the historic sandstone-and-brick buildings that overlooked the Lake Superior harbor. The view was of the marina, a redbrick bell tower and a slope of lawn that led to the harbor park, nearly empty at this hour. A rusty ore dock loomed to one side, long abandoned. They faced east, so the sky was leached of light, layered in cobalt and indigo over the lake.

“I realize the subject will have to come up.” Connor’s voice was deep and soft, but slightly rough. Mesmerizing, especially when she shut out the sounds around them and focused only on him. “Let’s just take it slowly….”

Mmm, she thought, going soft herself before she realized what was happening. She sat up straighter, blinking her eyes back to alert.

He continued. “After Sonny has accepted you, I’ll explain to him exactly why you’re visiting.”

“I think he already knows.”

“Ah. Yes, perhaps. But he won’t admit it out loud.”

“Pride?”

“And independence. He doesn’t like to ask for help, even now.”

“Runs in the family,” she said.

Connor was looking out the tall arched window to the lake. “Why would you say that? You don’t know me—except what you’ve read in newspapers and magazines.”

She chuckled. “I can draw my own conclusions, thank you.”

He turned his intense gaze on her. It was a physical thing. She felt it on her skin, in her stomach, even deep in her bones.

Oh, but she was out of practice. There’d been no provocative strangers in her life for years, aside from the ones she invented. And it wasn’t easy turning a middle-aged library guest wearing flip-flops into an international man of mystery. Most of the time, it wasn’t even worth the attempt.

“Which conclusions?” Connor’s gaze held steady and she couldn’t tell if he was teasing. “That I’m a smuggler?”

Heat shot into her face. Her cheeks must be glowing like a neon bulb. “Pardon?” she croaked, not sure that she wanted the answer. There was no way Connor should know of her nutty mental meanderings. “How…?”

“I didn’t read your mind,” he said. “You muttered it as I was leaving.”

“Ohhh.”

He studied her face, awaiting an explanation. There was a glint in his eye. So he was teasing…but she was still on the spot.

“You have to admit you looked scruffy and suspect.” She shrugged. “I didn’t really believe you were a smuggler. That was just my…” She slid a finger along the stem of the wineglass. Might as well admit it. “My crazy imagination.”

“I guess you weren’t completely wrong. According to some, I am disreputable. But not a lawbreaker, I assure you.”

“Don’t mind me. I make up these stories in my head—” She tilted it. “Nothing to do with you.”

His lips compressed on a smile. “Stories?”

“Fancies. Pure silliness. It’s nothing.”

“And I starred as a smuggler?”

“It was the lighthouse books,” she explained, amazed she was doing so, but that was the effect he had on her. Her usual caution had come unhinged. “I made up a scenario where you were a bear-organ smuggler looking for a drop point.” She skipped the part about him also being a libidinous ex-professor. “You were meeting a Chinese man at midnight to transfer the illegal cargo.”

Connor laughed in disbelief. “Tess, you’ve been stuck in that library too long. The fiction has gone to your head.”

“I know. But it’s a chicken-or-the-egg question. I’ve been exercising a wild imagination for as long as I can remember. So did I immerse myself in books because they fed it or because they created it? You see?” She lifted a shoulder. “It’s a small town. Books and fantasy were always my outlet.”

He leaned forward. “An outlet would be having your own adventures, wouldn’t it?”

She threw up a hand. “Oh, no. Don’t give me that load of baloney. Just because I read doesn’t mean I don’t live. I have a full and satisfying life. I am not a pathetic weenie waiting for her real life to begin—”

“Okay, okay,” Connor said, chuckling.

She took a breath. “Sorry. I got a little heated.”

“I understand. I’m a writer—I’ve been treated to the same comments.”

Then he knew that there was some truth to them, she thought. Not that she didn’t live as thoroughly as the next person—which wasn’t saying much, as the average Alouettian was as content as a cow—but occasionally there was a sense of being an observer more than a doer. She wasn’t dissatisfied, exactly. Maybe expectant. And restless…especially today.

She looked at Connor as he lifted a pilsner glass of a golden brown ale that matched his eyes. Honestly, he was the most exciting person to walk into her life since the Alouette theater group had hired Geordie Graves to put on The Music Man and the ex-soap opera amnesiac had chosen her to play a lead role.

Oh, dear. She was a pathetic weenie.

Connor swallowed as he put down the glass. Around them, the crowded restaurant buzzed with conversation and laughter. To keep from staring at Connor, whose face fascinated her with its secrets and shadows, she let her gaze wander over other tables, the brick walls crowded with historic photos, a waitress passing by with an overflowing tray, hazel eyes with thick black lashes, the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar, a mouth that she wanted to kiss.

No, what she really wanted to do was ask Connor about his profession and how he had become involved in the Roderick Strange murder case. But he’d already exhibited reluctance, and she didn’t want him to think she was judging him. Even though a part of her was, despite her best intentions.

She sighed, wishing to be a better person.

“We’ve established that imagination was my escape,” she said. “What about you?”

He hesitated at the sound of silverware clinking and voices that rose and fell as if carried by waves. “Me? I was cursed with curiosity.”

“Cursed?”

His eyebrows lifted. “Or blessed. At the moment, I’m feeling it was a curse.” He brushed the comment away with a wry smile. “What were you escaping?”

She blinked. “There’s that curiosity of yours.”

“I can guess. Your parents.”

“Sure you can guess. I already gave you a clue, back in Sonny’s room.”

“Most people don’t call their parents ‘acceptable.’”

“What can I say? They weren’t ideal, but they weren’t terrible. No abuse or blatant dysfunction.” Did it count as abandonment if you still had your mother?

“But…?”

She gave in to his probing. The man was subtle and skilled; she wanted to talk. “Well, my dad was out of the picture.” She flicked a hand as if to shoo her father away even though their contact had been sporadic at best through her growing-up years and practically nil since then. He’d never pushed for a rapprochement in all this time, and she wasn’t willing to put herself forward for another rejection. As far as Tess knew, Tony Bucek had forgotten he even had a daughter.

“And my mother was barely functional, particularly when I was a child. She had frequent migraines—during her spells, she needed the house to be kept quiet and dark. We lived in the country, with only two neighbors. I was on my own a lot. So I developed an active imagination to keep myself amused.”

Connor gazed at her for a long, quiet moment. Even the other tables had a lull.

She thought he might use a platitude. Instead, he asked, “Did you have an imaginary friend?”

She was so surprised at his whimsy, she blurted, “Rosehip Fumblethumbs,” as the waitress arrived at their table with a basket of bread and plates of salad.

Connor asked for another beer. “There must be a reason for a name like that.”

Tess picked the onion out of her salad with the tines of her fork, moving it to the edge of her plate. “If there was, I can’t remember. I was about four.” Her father had left home; her mother was all doom and gloom. Tess had quickly learned to walk on eggshells.

Four years old and she’d begun to live small.

“Rosehip Fumblethumbs did everything I wasn’t supposed to. She scratched my mother’s records, she turned up the volume. She tore down the curtains and opened every window and door. She broke things. Bounced on the bed. Yelled out loud.” Tess stopped and laughed at her own reverie.

Connor dragged a curl of escarole through blue-cheese dressing. “Sounds like a typical kid, if you ask me.”

“I suppose so. But Rosey did have green hair, orange freckles and fairy wings. She slept outdoors, in a bed of roses. We had tea parties under the porch.”

“Vivid imaginings for a four year old.”

Tess tried to remember. “Rosey developed over the years.”

“Years?”

“She stayed around until I was at least ten.”

“That’s a long time. Most imaginary friends have shorter life spans.”

“You’re an authority, are you?”

Connor grinned. “You caught me. I’m talking out my ear.”

“No imaginary friends of your own?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Even at the lighthouse? It must have been lonely there.”

“Yeah, at times. But I considered it an adventure, even when the road was washed out and we had no electricity. My grandfather was a widower by then, so life at the lighthouse had become rather rough and undomesticated. Perfect for a ten-year-old boy.”

Growing up, Tess had longed for a normal life with fancy guest soaps, home-baked chocolate-chip cookies, seasonal holiday decorations and waxed floors scattered with rag rugs. The sort of domestication she observed at friends’ houses, when her own mother could barely summon the strength to climb out of bed and go to work. When she’d discovered the boisterous closeness and comfort at the Johnsons’, she’d believed that she had finally come home.

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