The In-Between Hour

“You said this was temporary, but I prefer a six-month lease.” She gave a soft laugh, an easy laugh. No drama. “Is that a problem?”

Yeah, because if he thought he’d still be in Orange County in six days let alone six months, he’d kill himself and his dad. But he could easily pay out the lease. It was just money. The one thing he had plenty of.

“It’s not a problem if we can move in tomorrow.”

They discussed a price—or rather she suggested a figure and he agreed. Then Will hung up and cracked open the bathroom door. The old man snuffled from one of the twin beds with the psychedelic comforters. The giant map, stored away in its thick casing, lay on the floor next to him. Memories-to-go rolled up safe and sound. At some point they would have to return to Hawk’s Ridge—box up the rest of his mother’s knickknacks and arrange for a mover to haul the furniture, even though his dad had said it could stay for all he cared. Wasn’t his goddamn furniture, was it?

The old man had a point. Will had purchased it while his dad was at the rehabilitation center. New furniture for a fresh start, that had been the plan, but Will had given no thought to his dad’s taste. Problem was, he didn’t know if the old man had any taste. Always his mom set the tone; always his dad followed.

Even when his mom was going whacko and smashing crockery, his parents had a bond that excluded everyone. One of the reasons he’d been such a self-reliant kid. That and the fact of being a midlife oops baby, a bear cub—Little Moondi—according to his dad. But bear cubs were meant to follow and learn from their mothers, not run from them. When they were teenagers, Ally had pronounced him to be a coyote, and he’d believed her. Until he’d found out that coyotes often mated for life.

Eight

The pale green Prius from the day before crawled to the end of her driveway, and Will Shepard turned neatly to one side in a considerate act of parking.

His author photo had revealed nothing. Black-and-white, it was taken from a distance as he glanced over his shoulder. Headshots didn’t seem to be to his liking. Hannah had seen a partial of his face years ago in an out-of-date People magazine picked up in the dentist’s waiting room. At the time, she’d just finished the third Agent Dodds adventure, and her radar had been tuned to all things Will Shepard. If she remembered correctly, the photo had shown him escorting a young heiress to a gala.

Hannah fingered the key, and the dogs cowered around her. She could lavish ten more lifetimes of unconditional love on her babies, and still fear would stalk them. Daisy’s abuse had gone beyond neglect. The dog had been forced to fight. So many damaged creatures had passed through Hannah’s life in the past twenty years and most of them had come from Poppy. Now her friend had brought her a bestselling author and his grieving dad. A small happening that felt huge.

Hannah read Will’s bumper stickers: “I’d Rather Be Writing,” and “Love a Climber, They Use Protection.” Climbing—that made sense since Agent Dodds was an extreme sports freak. Was his creator an adrenaline junkie, too? Or a nocturnal reveler who dated beautiful socialites? The two of them hadn’t signed anything. If she had even a twinge of doubt, she would renege.

Will turned to talk with his father, and Hannah drummed her fingers on the porch railing. Impatience didn’t come often, but she had an appointment in... Unbelievable, she was wearing both her watch and her dad’s, and yet she had no memory of putting on either one. Focusing on life’s details was becoming impossible. She sighed.

Would it be inappropriate to ask Will to sign his books? Or would he be offended that she didn’t own anything beyond volume five? Galen was scathing about commercial fiction, especially the kind of thrillers Will had produced in recent years. Her MFA poet preferred incomprehensible allegories written by alcoholics and drug addicts who’d been dead for at least a century. And he would not be happy when he discovered she was renting out the cottage. Privacy was everything to Galen, and since the age of thirteen, he had proved himself worthy of trust, not surveillance. But during the previous night’s phone conversation with Will, she had realized it was time, once again, to adapt.

Coincidence spoke of connection, and renting the cottage to an aging widower was nothing short of symmetry. Her father would approve. No, he would applaud. After all, the cottage had been built as his refuge. And what if it went deeper than that? Her father’s last selfless act had been to protect Galen and Liam, to spare them from the moment of his death, to wander into the woods to die alone. What if some echo of that love reverberated across Saponi Mountain, telling her to contain Galen in his childhood room where she could keep him safe? Her mother had believed that the dead often remained tethered to the living—trapped either in their desire to right wrongs or in their refusal to leave loved ones. Hannah, too, was drawn to the idea that the dead never really moved on, although often it was the living who refused to let them go.

Kookiness aside, renting the cottage was a sound financial move. Galen had become a dropout in need of aid. Her father’s money was gone and she barely made a living, but Will hadn’t quibbled at her inflated price. Overcharging, not undercharging, was oddly liberating.

Will pulled himself from the car. She’d been right: he was small for a guy. His taupe knit shirt, however, revealed a muscular torso, and his thick, straight hair was only slightly less tousled than the day before. Obviously, he didn’t own a comb. He walked toward her, not with the swagger of someone whose name was a long internet search of awards, but as if he were a kid dragging his body to a reprimand. An unexpected blend of curiosity and recognition tightened in her gut. He was so familiar she almost said, “Oh. It’s you.”

His eyes were concealed behind funky green-tinted sunglasses, which wasn’t helpful. You could learn a great deal from a person by the way he held—or avoided—your gaze. He was also beautiful. A pretty boy young enough to be her son, if she’d gotten pregnant that first time.

Will paused in front of the cottage, squatted and waited. Rosie and Daisy sidled down the steps, their claws clacking on the wooden boards. He held out both hands, offering his palms, and a chunky silver sports watch slid down his wrist. He cooed something at the dogs, words Hannah couldn’t make sense of, but her girls clearly understood. Daisy flopped to the ground and exposed her belly; Rosie actually whimpered. Animal behavior rarely surprised her, but her dogs had just told Hannah all she needed to know about this man. Even if he hadn’t been polite enough to remove his sunglasses.

Hannah joined Will and the dogs. Up close, his face was a little too perfect, its bone structure a little too predictable. She preferred faces with wrinkles and scars, faces that spoke of struggles and triumphs. This guy looked no more than thirty.

“Will Shepard.” He rose slowly.

“Hannah Linden. I imagined you to be older.”

“I write fast.” Will extended his hand but flinched.

Now the sunglasses made sense. “Want something for that headache?”

“I thought Poppy said you were a vet.”

“A holistic vet. Treating pets often means treating owners. You’d be surprised how many clients ask for help with minor ailments. But if it makes you feel better, my father was a rural doctor. When I was a teenager, he let me help out with patients.”

“Is that legal?”

“Would it bother you if it wasn’t?”

He winced.

“Bad one?”

“Killer.”

“I have to visit a couple of clients this afternoon, but I’ll be back by early evening. I can pop over then with my acupuncture needles and a feverfew tincture. Should help you sleep, too.”

Will turned as his dad clambered out of the passenger seat. “I don’t sleep much.”

“Well, there’s your problem. Good sleep habits are the key to a healthy mind.”

“Really.”

She would excuse his snide tone, since her girls had given their approval. “By the way, we’re in a drought, so please be mindful of water usage.” Hannah handed over the key. “Short showers, minimal toilet flushing. And any water you’d like to recycle, please toss over there, for the garden.”

As she pointed at the huge galvanized tub under the outside shower, Jacob Shepard shuffled over. Hannah covered her mouth and swallowed. Jacob’s expression was identical to the one her father had worn in those final months of unbearable grief—his eyes, his mouth, even the skin on his cheeks appeared to be dragged down by sadness. The lines grooved between his eyebrows, the faint scowl, seemed to say, “I no longer understand the world in which I live.”

“Are we home, Willie?” Jacob said.

For a moment, she considered kissing Jacob’s cheek, whispering, You can be happy here. Instead, she strode to meet him with a smile.

“I certainly hope this will feel like home. You must be Jacob. I’m Hannah, a friend of Poppy’s. She’s promised to swing by this evening and see how you’re settling in.”

“Poppy?”

“My friend Poppy. The art teacher at Hawk’s Ridge.”

“Firecracker, that Poppy.” Jacob grinned, showing yellowed, higgledy-piggledy teeth. He was taller than Will—over six feet—and broad shouldered, despite a slight stoop. If she had to guess, she’d put him around eighty. Once again, Hannah glanced from father to son. These two couldn’t possibly share a gene pool.

“I—I’m not good with names, little lady,” Jacob said.

“That’s okay. I answer to anything. Call me Hey You if it’s easier.”

“Hannah,” Will said, his voice sluggish. “Her name is Hannah.”

“That’s a pretty name, name for an angel, but I like Hey You better.”

“Hey You, it is. I love your necklace.” Hannah nodded at the string of bear claws that hung on his chest. “Occaneechi?”

Jacob’s eyes crinkled.

“Yes,” Will answered. “My dad is Occaneechi.”

Will Shepard was Native American? Although, something about his square jaw and thick eyebrows... Yes, she could believe he had native ancestry.

“My mother—” Will pushed his sunglasses up into his hair, and Hannah gasped “—was not.”

* * *

“What do you mean you’ve seen his eyes before? Haunting as they are. Huge and icy blue.” Poppy swirled wine around her goblet and then drained the glass.

The sun disappeared behind the treetops, and Hannah brushed an oak leaf from one of the cushions under her arm. Dry and brittle, the leaf crumbled to ashes, then scattered into the air.

“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “They’re so distinctive, so familiar.”

Jacob was napping when Poppy had arrived, but she’d insisted on staying for a girls’ night. A feeble excuse, no doubt, to keep Will in her sights. And the overnight bag and large screw-top bottle of wine suggested Poppy intended to get snookered in the process.

Poppy had a proclivity for dating guys who were either married or inherently messed up, and Will Shepard clearly fell into at least one of those categories. The absence of a wedding ring meant nothing, but Will didn’t act like someone who was married. He did, however, act like a person in pain, pain that went beyond a mere headache. You didn’t have to be a holistic practitioner to understand that physical symptoms often hinted at emotional distress. Hannah chose not to think about the study she’d read that morning, the one linking depression with heart disease.

She and Poppy slid back and forth on the retro metal rocker, both of them watching Will retrieve a brown bag of groceries from the trunk of the Prius.

“Hubba-hubba,” Poppy said. “Look at the muscles on those forearms. Girl, I bet he gives new meaning to the term sexual endurance.”

“Maybe he spends his nights hanging from the rafters.”

“Think he’s dating right now?” Poppy fiddled with the array of elastic bands on her left wrist, none of which represented anything other than her love of bright colors.

“He has a son, Poppy. Kids tend to come with mothers.”

“It’s weird, there’s so little about his personal life on the web. It’s all work, work, work. Wikipedia doesn’t even mention that he’s a dad.”

So, they’d both checked him out.

“At one time he was linked briefly with that New York socialite who died a few months back,” Poppy continued.

“No idea what you’re talking about.”

“You should read the gossip mags, Han. She killed herself, her lover and their son. Smashed their car into a wall. Theory is her brakes went, which is pretty suspect. Smacks of a cover-up if you ask me. But nothing I found says he’s married. Used to be a player, these days he seems to be a monk. What a waste of that body.”

“I’m changing the subject. Tell me what you know about Jacob.”

“Not much to tell. Sundays were skeleton staff days at Hawk’s Ridge—the director told me sweet-shit-nothing about the residents. Jacob has short-term memory loss, adored his wife, worships his grandson. Figured all that out by myself.”

“And Will?”

“Didn’t know Jacob had a son until I butted into Will’s meeting. Bad blood between them, if I had to guess. What’s the Galen update?”

“He’s coming home next week. Inigo’s promised to pay for his ticket and give us a two-week pass before he visits. Until he can check his melodrama at the door, Inigo’s a problem I can’t handle. He was completely hysterical in California. It was like having a third child.” Hannah sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what my parents were thinking, allowing me to marry at nineteen.”

“Could they have stopped you?”

“No.” Hannah smiled. “He was hard to resist in those days—the exotic name, the Celtic heritage, that sexy smile.” Her in-laws had scheduled Inigo for greatness from inception, hoping he would become a famous architect like his namesake, Inigo Jones. And Inigo carried himself with a confidence that suggested he believed the family propaganda. But he alienated his parents in three easy steps: he married a high school classmate who wanted only to be a country vet, then he became an English professor, and for his pièce de résistance, he changed his sexual orientation.

“Of course, now my ex is a dick.”

Poppy snorted out a laugh. “Finally, after six years she trashes her ex. Proud of you, girl. So, it all worked out, then. With the cottage.”

Will balanced the bag on his hip as he tugged open the screen door.

“I guess,” Hannah replied, chewing the inside of her cheek.

* * *

The screen door slammed and Will turned to watch the two women on the porch drinking red wine.

Hannah and Poppy were clearly plotting, leaning toward each other in a female conspiracy. Maybe they were discussing him and his dad, trying to figure out their relationship. Good luck on that one. Thirty-four years of living the relationship and he couldn’t figure it out.

Will placed the last bag of groceries on the kitchen table and headed upstairs to check on the old man. Exhausted from the stress of food shopping, his dad had gone upstairs to lie down the moment they’d returned. Wise move. Normally, grocery shopping was heaven on earth: the smells, the tastes—grazing around the free samples, concocting recipes in his head. Before Freddie’s death, buying fresh produce was the closest Will came to a hobby. Today, with his dad, it had ranked on par with drug-free wisdom teeth removal. Next time, he’d hire a dad-sitter.

The stairs creaked as Will dragged himself up by the banister. The ceiling of the stairwell was midnight blue and covered with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars, the same ones he’d stuck all over Freddie’s bedroom. When the interior decorator had finished, Will had balanced on a stepladder for hours, creating a perfect constellation for his two-year-old. After the accident, he’d destroyed it in minutes—ripping down stars, paint and drywall. When he returned to New York, he would hire another decorator, a cheaper one, to erase the evidence of grief.

The upstairs hallway in the cottage was empty except for a large black-and-white photo framed and hung at the far end. The photographer had captured the woods at sunrise in early April. Dogwoods, in full bloom, rose like ghosts through a veil of early-morning fog.

Everything else in the hall was white like the edges of a dream. Interesting how different white could be. White in Hannah’s hands seemed to be warm and calming. White in his apartment was cold and sterile. And since all his furniture was crafted out of pale wood, the only color came from his lime leather sofa. One of his ex-lovers had referred to it as the bilious margarita.

Will ran his hand over the hall railing, reading the grain. Wood could reveal a thousand stories. He’d done some carving as a kid, inspired by his dad’s garden sculptures of downed tree limbs. He and Ally had once imagined them to be fantastical creatures. By the time he was a teenager, Will saw them for what they really were—talismans.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, pushing against the crouching headache, the throbbing pain. Nothing about this trip was turning out the way he’d planned. Not that he’d had a plan other than get in, get drunk, get out. He would never start a climb without a strategy for descent, and yet in this situation he was behaving like a frantic novice about to bomb.

His dad used to have a horde of cousins in the area. They’d spent their adolescent years together, toe-to-toe, as Uncle Darren used to say. Were they still alive? Should he reestablish contact with the tribe? Maybe his dad just needed to be part of a community again. Yeah, right. Whatever his dad needed went way beyond socializing and probably involved a retirement home upgrade from independent to assisted living. From stage one to stage two.

Will eased open the door to the larger of the two bedrooms. A twenty-four-hour crash course in the care of the elderly had taught him that the old man’s balance was seriously off-kilter when he woke up. The shortest possible distance to the nearest toilet had been the deciding factor in the bedroom allocation—unless he wanted to start cleaning up his dad’s shit. Literally.

The old man had collapsed onto the bed like a battery-operated toy run out of juice. A very large, very broken toy. Jacob Shepard used to have such presence—his height, his ability to say a great deal with a handful of words, his snippets of self-made philosophy.

Even now, Will could hear his dad’s voice teaching him to hunt rabbit. Got your bow, Willie? Don’t get excited now. That rabbit, he’s under the wheat straw, but he’s gonna zig and zag. Will didn’t believe him, and when the rabbit performed as predicted, Will fell on his butt. His dad had howled with laughter.

Will slid down the wall to the pale gray carpet and watched the man with his white hair tugged half out of its ponytail. The man who had taught him to hunt and fish, to whittle wood and identify animal bones. The man who had been a devoted husband and yet had failed to teach his son how to love a woman so she loved him back.

Uncle Darren had said, “Your daddy, he loved your mama his whole life. Like she cursed him. He waited for her to grow up. He waited through her mistakes with other men. He waited with nothing more than the faith that, one day, Angeline would love him. And one day she did.”

Once upon a time, Will had applied that philosophy to his feelings for Ally. For so many years, she was the only good part of his life. Such a fierce friend, Ally was the one person he trusted, the one person who—until the lie about Freddie’s Great European Adventure—knew Will’s every secret. But somewhere along the way he’d found hard cynicism. Or maybe he’d just been smart enough to realize she would never love him as more than her best friend. He’d dated other women, never seriously, but then Freddie had entered his life and filled the hole Ally had left in his heart. And now? Now it was as if he were slowly bleeding to death.

A small thought escaped: he should have brought Freddie’s ashes. Death had finally granted Will full parental rights, and he didn’t need a headstone. He carried Freddie in his heart. Maybe Freddie’s spirit could be happy here. The few times they’d visited, he’d loved the forest.

Will glanced around the sparsely decorated room that ran the width of the cottage. Two smaller windows on one wall looked directly into the main house; a huge pinnacle-shaped window at the back held a perfect view of Saponi Mountain. Through it, a wall of dark green was splattered with bursts of foliage the color of dried blood. The dogwoods were turning, which meant every morning his dad would wake to what was about to become a symphony of fall.

The headache tightened. Now that he’d brought the old man back to the forest, how would he ever persuade him to leave?

A small glass vase of horribly familiar greenery sat on the dresser. Hauling himself to his feet, Will reached out and ran his fingers up one of the stalks. Hesitating, he raised his palm to his nose and sniffed. Freshly cut sage and the memory that reeked of madness.

A herb renowned for its healing properties, sage had become a popular bedding plant. Will had seen beautiful sage flowers of red and purple in private gardens—had even admired them from a distance. But get too close, and sage could blister his mind the way poison ivy blistered his skin. Sage was the smell of powwows; sage was the barbed remembrance of his mother dancing half-naked and disgracing them all; sage was the symbol of Uncle Darren warding off evil.

Will staggered downstairs and out onto the porch swing. The headache was waiting to roar, waiting to tear him apart. Even the fading daylight burned his retinas. He closed his eyes and let his head droop to his chest. Blood pounded; pain pulsed through his brain in leaden waves.

The smell of sage clung to his nostrils, leached his brain with the slow-moving film playing in his head. It must have been winter, since he was in his footed pj’s, similar to the ones Freddie had owned. Will was supposed to be asleep, locked in his tiny bedroom off the porch. Uncle Darren was outside yelling, waving his bundle of dried sage, demanding to come in and smudge the shack to banish diabolical spirits. The old man refused and there was another blowup about his mom. Had she been laughing outside the bedroom door, or had Will invented that last part?

Pressure on his knees. Soft and gentle. Human touch.

“Will?”

Where had Hannah come from? He didn’t hear her approach. She smelled of hay and lavender. Mild country scents warped into sensory overload by his exploding brain.

He opened his eyes and tried to look at her, but he couldn’t raise his head. She had beautiful hands with long, healthy fingernails—surprising for a vet. No nail polish. One ring on her right index finger—silver, engraved. Native American.

“The headache still bad?” Hannah said.

He moaned.

“Give me your hands.” Her voice was low, soothing, the voice on the phone from the night before. “This won’t hurt.”

He obeyed, ignoring the intuition that murmured, Of course it’s going to hurt. You’re a woman.

“Do you trust me?”

“Why not?” What did he care if she stuck a thousand needles in his hand when ten times that many pierced his heart every minute of every day?

“Give me your right hand. Good, now splay your fingers.” She ripped open a small packet and took out a long, thin nail partially covered in copper coils. “I’m going to slide one needle into the webbing between your thumb and index finger,” she said, “into the LI4.”

“LI4?”

“Large Intestine 4. An acupuncture point for the head and the face.”

“In my hand?”

“In your hand.”

Will closed his eyes. This, he preferred not to watch. He felt a small amount of pressure but no pain.

She stroked his left hand, her fingers lingering.

“How did you get this scar?”

“Which one?”

“Oh,” she said. “You have several. Some nasty accident?”

“Ripped flesh. From rock climbing.”

“Interesting sport.”

“More like a religion.” He swallowed through the pain. “Are you going to do that hand, too?”